Exiled Professor WARNS: “They’re Funding a NEW Matrix and it’s Not What You Think!” | Neema Parvini

(upbeat music) - Neema, I feel like we just did half a podcast out in the kitchen before starting. - Yeah. - Listen, I'm sure we got a lot to talk about today, but I gotta be honest, my friend Harry Miller is the one who put me on or put you on our radar. That was like a month ago, we were talking with him and he's like, you gotta check out this guy's Neema's videos, like it's so philosophical. But what we were talking about in the kitchen, is obviously no one heard that, is how we're in this strange time where the paradigm of left and right has really flipped to like, hey, this is really up down in a lot of what we're fighting over on the political spectrum is nothing but a distraction. Is that fair to say that's about where you're at? - Yeah, I think so, and I think that the, it always seems like they keep the positions that you want separated on different sides, like for example, if you're on the left, you can be against capitalism and you can be against wars, right, it could be like pro-Palestine or something like that. But it has to come package with a whole bunch of, whether they have woke and LGBT stuff. And so it's kind of like package in such a way that, you know, if it's going to put a lot of people off, I'll just just throw that away because you may agree on couple of these things and then, and then if you find yourself over on the right, you know, you may, for example, be have a conservative social values or be against mass immigration, something like this. But then it has to come package with, you know, war stuff forever wars, pro-market kind of capitalist stuff, talking points. And I often find, I often think that if left to their own, like if we had an actual democracy, which we don't, and when I say we, I mean, basically any country that calls itself liberal democracy, we can get into that soon. I think that the public, certainly in Britain, but also probably here, would default to something that broadly speaking would be left economically and right on social issues, something like that. But for some reason, that option is never really put on the menu. It's almost net, in fact, it's, they always keep. And when I say they, I mean, the, let's just say the, the kind of permanent power structure that we all find ourselves living under, for some reason that option is seldom if ever put on the menu. And if it is, it's not one that's gonna get massive media play, funding, billionaire backers, et cetera, et cetera. - Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge help. Thank you. And when you get into the mechanisms of, you know, like, let's just take one issue. Immigrate, everybody talks about immigration all the time now. Think, well, how can you really talk about mass immigration without talking about the incentives of, you know, big multinational corporations? Okay. But the people who, let's just say on the right, frequently then find themselves in bed with, oh, tech, billionaire hairs, or people who's natural incentives are never gonna lead you to a situation where you're going to a truly opposed legal mass immigration. So, you know, and that's a pretty, that's a pretty good example of how democracy does not reflect the taste of the people in Britain, for example, since the early 1960s, the public has always been against, in the majority, against mass immigration and yet. Government, after government, left or right, tore your labor, persist in. How has that been allowed to go on for so long, if that's the case? Well, and this is really where you get to some of the principles of elite theory, or you're talking about the up versus the down, or the ruling class, you could say, and the quote unquote people, or as I like to say, the organized minority in the disorganized mass. And the, I mean, if we just stick with that issue on mass immigration, well, you'd think then, the people who should find themselves in opposition to all of this sort of stuff would be the anti-capitalist side, which is meant to be the political left. And historically, they were, the unions for obvious reasons had incentives to be against mass immigration 'cause they were for the workers and for workers' jobs and workers' rights. So, historically, they always oppose them. You can actually see Milton Friedman arguing with the union bosses in the 1980s over this. But somehow, over time, the left became obsessed with, and I don't think it was an accident, to be honest, they came obsessed with what people call identity politics and what people call woke now. And suddenly, if you had an issue with mass immigration, well, that means you're a racist, that means you're. So, in a strange way, they end up doing the bidding of the very people they're meant to be against, in a nice, in a sense, 'cause who actually benefits from cheap labor is the forces of capital, right? I mean, this much should just be obvious to anyone who knows anything about economics. So, I feel like there's a. People are always kind of kept in a permanent state of being slightly confused, right? They may know what they, you know, think about certain issues, but then they're pretty quickly shunted on to a whole set of propositions or things that they have to believe to be on a side. And then, sooner or later, you end up finding yourself, you know, people find themselves well, because they've done the Magicalt, now you have to kind of back Trump over this unrelated thing, or that unrelated thing, or this other thing, and all of a sudden you're just a kind of cheap, you're just a kind of cheerleader for a side, as opposed to someone who's, you know, trying to make genuine political change in a direction that you want. - What's the difference between that and a cult? - And a cult. - And a cult? Well, I mean, I would say it has cult-like aspects. One of the mechanisms, you know, people are ruled by emotion more than anything else. And, you know, years ago I was into a book called Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Carlin, I don't know if you're, and also Jonathan Height, right just mine, great book, great thinker as well. And people tend to find themselves, you know, they feel emotion first, they feel the intuition first, and then they confirm what they already think. And then they tell themselves, well, I've reasoned myself into this position, whereas in fact, it's almost always a post-hoc justification for, you know, a position that you've felt. When you've already kind of made your bed, you know, let's say you've picked the side, let's say you've backed Trump, okay? Rather than admit, well, you tricked me or I fell for it, people, you know, 'cause that would cause cognitive dissonance, that would cause you to have to, you know, admit that you've got it wrong, or so people tend to double down or triple down, rather than face that kind of cognitive dissonance. And I saw it happen to lots of people. I mean, obviously I'm over in London, so I was watching America from afar, but I thought it was obvious pretty quickly that, for example, this second Trump presidency was not going to deliver what people thought it was going to be. - When you say pretty quickly, like, right after you got in, or when are you talking? - Just straight away. When Matt Gates didn't get that, you know, which was pretty much like on day one, I was like, well, okay. - Attorney General, thank you. - Yeah, you can kind of, okay, they said he'd done some sex thing or whatever, whatever. I mean, the reasons are never important. What's important is, you're looking at the map who, which faction in the coalition that was behind Trump is the one that seems to have functional power. And this was a kind of live question. I think it's now, I mean, I thought it was obvious, even in the run-up, I was telling people, look, there's a lot of people who switch sides here. uh, since certain things happen in the world, uh, what, like, Mark Zuckerberg's, I'm aware of, I'm gonna wear a MAGA hat now, or, uh, I mean, I could tell, like, little subtle things, like, um, Bill Ma, for example, was having little digs of Kamala Harris, and I felt that the media was setting up. I was telling people, uh, you know, I often say that politics is very much like pro wrestling, you know, pro wrestling's got K-fave, it's got faces and heels, it's got, you know, kind of predetermined outcomes. And I was, I spent most of the election telling people, listen, uh, this is in the bag for Trump already, Kamala Harris is a, is a job, she's there to lose, uh, and this is being set up by the media, if you know where to look, if you know how to pass the media, they kind of have a habit of priming the audience, let's just throw that way of giving a tell, um, and there were all sorts of other things, you know, what are, what are some of those tells though? Like, what were, I, I'd love to, for you to take us back to March, April, June, even like pre-buttler, 2024. What were some of those tells where you're like, ah, I see the wind shift in the media. Yeah, oh, it, well, I mean, one of the things is, what are they focusing on? What are they giving prominence to, um, one of the strange little media tricks is they ask questions in a headline. And the, the answer to the question in the headline is almost always no. So let's say you add a headline saying, is Kamala Harris going to be the president? The answer is almost always no. There's a law for this. Okay. And then you have a look at the Trump headlines, and it's, you know, they're not asking that question. It's more of like a statement or it's more of a, you know, is this Georgia mug shock going to, you know, it's just the way they frame certain things. You could tell that, or I could certainly tell, it's something had changed here. Um, all the way through Biden's presidency, the media didn't criticize him at all. And then all of a sudden, it was like, Oh, now he's fallible. Now, now he's got cognitive problems. Well, Georgia, you said it was okay. Oh, you're right. Right. Or sort of something. So there tends to, there tends to be that they're never subtle. You know, I always say that, um, you know, they don't play 4D chess. They're just blatant. They just really quite blatant about about it. You know, um, and, you know, just little things like Bill, Bill Mar, kind of having little digs and doing his usual thing. You kind of tell where it was going. Um, and then, you know, when the, the assassination attempt happened, it was, it was like, yeah, it's okay. It's in, it's in the bag. But you, you could also tell that the Democrat party were like, yeah, we're probably taking the animal on this one. So they were kind of half acid, like all sorts of people, you know, Josh Shapiro remember, I was like, I'm not going to be the, I'm not going to be the VP. And they were lukewarm. So you could, I think, I think it could tell. Um, and I, I think the media in general, um, it is a, is a large part of where people kind of, you know, I said people are emotional. And therefore, when you're in a heightened emotional state or a constant low level of anxiety, um, you're easily manipulated. You know what the wildest part about Brent work, where is deep? What? They actually let you wear their boots to work before deciding whether or not you want them. Wow, that's pretty useful. You damn right it is Joey Deaf. And if the boots aren't right for you, you can send them back for a full refund. That's a 100% risk-free trial. This is a terrible business model. So take advantage of it, people. I've been wearing some brunt boots for the last couple of years, way back when they were first sponsoring us actually. Oh, yeah, nice. They're marine boots in particular are incredibly comfortable and they fit like a glove right out of the box. And by the way, with that 100% risk-free trial is talking about at the top, that extends to a lot of things. Like you can actually wear these boots to work on the job site. And if you don't like them, you can send them back and get your money back. Choosing work boots used to mean sacrificing comfort or durability. If they felt good, they didn't last. And if they lasted, they wrecked your feet. Brunt thought this was bullsh*t, so they built tough boots to feel great from day one, because people out there doing hard work shouldn't have to choose between comfort and durability. Right now for a limited time, our listeners are going to get $10 off at Brunt when you use Code Julian at checkout. Just head to bruntworkwear.com, link in my description below. Use Code Julian, and you're good to go. After you order, they're going to ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them I say it. Now, nobody likes to think that they're using manipulated, but if you're in a heightened state of a motion, people can kind of push your buttons in all sorts of different ways. And also when you're in that state, you want hope, you want something to fight for, you want to believe that there's a leader coming to save you, which is really what Trump was for a lot of people. In a lot of the stuff I've read on media, they talk about the pseudo reality that is created. There's a guy called Walter Litman, writer in the 1920s and 30s, who said, look, the average person basically doesn't know, I mean, if they were just going to go on the fact of their own life, they're not going to know much about anything. Almost everything he knows about what's happening in the world comes from an newspaper or comes from something he's seen on TV, like the pseudo reality. There was a French thinker, many years later, called Bobo Dread, who talked about hyper reality, that we live in a constant state of kind of thinking we care about stuff that we know, but then the only thing, the only reason that we know that is because we've seen it. One of the things I always go back to is, in the 90s, when I was a teenager, Princess Diana died. Okay, I don't know if you, any of you-- The first thing I can remember fully in my life, well, there we go, okay. Literally, her life is one that I've really studied because of that, because it's like, now it feels like dying a million in a strange way. So, if you weren't there, it will be hard to understand just how much people cared about this, okay. I mean, it was people were going out and buying literal armfuls of Elton John CDs, crying, you know, because they believe that the princess of her heart has turned black, called her, has, you know, was no longer with us, okay. I mean, this is someone who, just like a year before, was being like trashed in the time-bloid press about her affairs and all the rest of it, but now-- Kendall and the wind. Right, it was Kendall in the wind and this kind of weird hysteria that kind of swept over people. And this, you could say, is a great example of hyper-reality, stuff that people think they care about mainly because it's been media-generated. And you could say with her, this was an entire media story from start to finish. In fact, her life and the way she died, you could even argue that, you know, this was just as a result of media, the whole thing. Sure. So, that went an easy one to see. What's more difficult to get people to see is that through really much a lot of the things you think you care about have this quality. If you really start to think about, well, how do you know certain things happened? What's the root of it most of the time? And you trace it back and it'll be, well, you saw it on TV or you kind of read it in a newspaper. You know, one of the things I've often found, and I don't want to--I'm not like having a go at boomers here, okay? But you have a free space to do that. We love our boomers, listen up. Yeah, I'm not specifically having a go at boomers, but in my experience, people talk about like red-pilling or people talk about, you know, getting people to see some aspect of the truth. I'm sure a lot of people have had this experience with that generation who were really the first generation who lived completely plugged into TV, okay? Yes. And you think you've made progress and they're kind of with you and you've kind of got through to them and then you see them a week later and it's almost like they don't affect me reset because they've seen something on TV or they were describing my dad, right? Or there were some people who won't believe it until they've seen it on TV. In our country, it would be a BBC report. It's not real until the BBC says it's real, okay? Here would be CNN or Fox depending on who you're talking to. So you can kind of understand it with that generation, their reality is basically dictated by media and a lot of things are downstream from that. Now when the internet came along and when social media came along, it was like for the first time ever there was a counten, there was a space to have a countervailing narrative, a way of saying things that weren't typically in the media approved narratives. And you know, 10 years ago that was exciting and that was, you know, a space for free thinkers and it felt like things were going to change as a result of it. And you know, I mentioned the Red Pill, everybody thought they were leaving the mate tracks they'd seen through. it and they take in the red bill. What I think has happened over the past decade is that it's like, again, the power is the B, whatever you want to call them, kind of got wise to that game and the space, the social media space is not as free as it once was. It's now got a lot more money in it. It's got a lot more interest in it. It's got a lot more people who are, you know, have backing and funding. So that's one side of it. Quick question on that, because I just don't want to lose this point. It's interesting that you're saying that in 2026 where I agree we have a lot of problems on social media. I'm not discounting that and certainly there's a lot of odd money there in political affiliations. However, it felt like it was way worse in 2022 2021, 2023 and it's like, we want way down and if you started pure here, you went down to here and now maybe at least it's here. Is that fair to say or would you disagree with that? Well, it depends what you're looking for. So I mean, these are, I'm feel free to disagree, by the way, because obviously these are just just my kind of take on things, but I think at a certain point, social media companies and possibly even these security services thought this whole strategy of just banning people from social media or censoring or has kind of backfired on us. Because what happened is that when people were banned from Twitter or when they were banned from YouTube, they kind of went underground. They went on to more difficult platforms to monitor and what difficult platforms for, you know, the intelligence services to have a look at what people were saying or what they were up to. And also people felt like they were being denied a voice. So I think at some point a decision was made that actually the better thing to do is to have everybody on social media. That way we can see what they're saying. That way we can actually, it's data. It's just, let's face it, it's data. We can, do we want people off the grid or do we want people on the grid? And I think that it's better for them to have everybody on the grid. Also, you know, we were talking about containment. One of the great mechanisms of containment. Did we talk about the definition of for camera? Maybe we haven't actually. So on camera, we haven't talked about it. So you were just to find that and then we'll go through. So typically if you're up against a big power structure, there are all sorts of ways to try to fight back against that. You want to have a resistance, which ironically is the great boom in narrative. You know, we're all, we all want to be hand solo or lose guy walker fight in the empire, okay? And we all think of ourselves as rebels, which is also paradoxically the official ideology of our time is to be a rebel. Actually, in a strange way, in a strange way, in a strange way, how we've all been conditioned to think by the very media we're talking about. So, you know, if you think historically, you think of revolution, you think of like Lenin and the Bolsheviks overthrowing the desire, or you think of various other revolution that have happened, Shagavara, something like this. And these are the ways that people imagine they're going to fight back. Or you think of mass protest movement, you know, Martin Luther King or Gandhi or something like this, where we're going to do peaceful protests and we're going to make change from the bottom up. And this is how we're going to fight back. So, containment is basically where you give people the feeling that they're part of some sort of resistance that some they're a dissident, they're a, they're a subversive, something like this. But actually, the effort is contained by power. IE, it's really being controlled by power as either at least release mechanism, or well, this is not really going to go anywhere. It's not, because ultimately people in power want to stay in power. So, the end game for them is just maintaining themselves as a ruling class. So, what they don't want is a genuine move one that is going to overthrow them. So, what better way to facilitate that by giving people these vents? Probably the best example of containment I can ever think of is, you know, I mentioned Tony Blair. In 2003, the Iraq war was very, very unpopular in the UK. Even at the very beginning. At the very beginning. And there was a march, a protest in London, which is still the largest protest over a million people marched against the Iraq war. Can we pull that up, Dave? That's crazy. A million people. A million people. It's the largest protest in British history. Wow. And it was, you know, people like Jeremy Corbyn and they could see the largest protestable time. It's like a fucking Super Bowl parade for anti-war. Wow. Now, here's the question. What did that achieve? Not a goddamn thing, unfortunately. What did it achieve? Nothing. Tony Blair still went to war. And not only did he still go to war, he got reelected in 2005, which people seem to forget these days. And he got reelected easily and comfortably. Now, imagine if Tony Blair, rather than letting that all play out, had just been like, right, roll out the tanks, fire on the crowd. That, I mean, then he would have had a problem on his hands. Then it'd be like, okay, it's the people of it. But he just let it play out. This is going to pass. It's like letting a child tire themselves. Exactly. They had their vent. And if you went on that war, if you went on that march, sorry, the anti-war march, you would have felt good about yourself. I got to virtue signal for a while. I've done something. Right? I've done something. Okay. And therefore, you kind of, you get to have that warm fuzzy feeling. And the powers that be are like, okay, well, that was nothing. We're still basically going to do what we're going to do. We're not going to do anything about it. Sayonara. And a lot of containment takes that kind of form where it's just like, and I think if you think about it, if somebody just vents and their anger on Twitter or an ex as it's known now, that's basically what's happening. They, well, okay, you've run your mouth on there. If you go a bit too far, well, you know, in Britain, you can get arrested by the police. I forgot to say that earlier. You guys do have a different reality with that over there than here, as far as what your government can do on social media. So that does need, that's a huge asterisk on my point I was making earlier. Yeah. But, but you can, you can still see why. I mean, even here in America, they still are kind of, you know, deep state, who are going to be keeping an eye on. And if you think about it, their eyes and ears, if they're what, if you, if you, everybody just broadcast and what they think on social media, then one, it's not going to, it's really not going to go anywhere further, just like that big march, because it's venting. And if you're online, you're disparate, you're not actually organizing, political, because this is another one of the great things that I think needs to be understood is that podcasts and videos and tweets aren't politics. They are the similar kind of politics. It is, right, it's not, it's not actually doing politics, even though it, even though you may be talking about political stuff, actual politics is very different. Everyone always involves on the ground organization. So, can you define for people out there who are unfamiliar with the simulacra term? Can you define what you mean by that? Right. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's basically the hyper reality that we were talking about already. It's, it's all the pseudo reality. It's this, it's your, you're basically, you're basically simulating the form of something without actually doing the thing itself. Okay, so your tweet, okay, I mean a few months ago, we had a prime minister in the Britain court, Kia Starmer. Okay, you may remember him. You rest in here. He's no longer the prime minister. But every time he tweeted, he was ratioed on, on, on Twitter and people felt really good telling the prime minister that he'd, you know, what they think of him and all the rest of it. And I said, look, Kia Starmer doesn't care about being ratioed. But you feel kind of good that you've had your say. Okay. So you feel like you're doing politics. but you're not actually Like no part of that is actual real politics. It is literally just you Saying something, you know in a digital form If ratios like that even though I do agree with your point that it seems to be no matter what we get we always get the same meal Mm-hmm. If a ratio does Things like that symbols like that do eventually lead to someone Resigning from office. I'm not saying the ratios are what did it? But if it's one, you know pebble in the pond that helps that the ripple effect happened then Is that at least something or it's still nothing to you? No, I think there's nothing to be honest I mean the real reasons why Keastan was ousted from office have basically nothing to do with him being ratioed it was to do within, you know, really quite boring internal labor party politics and the fact that The fact that he had displeased the wrong people and had lost Backing of pretty much everyone. I mean in the case of Starm he is an inept Politician and not a people person just not didn't have the right tools for it. So, you know, they kind of switched him out for somebody else to change to change the script because otherwise labor were going to You know, lose any election now they've got this other guy in who's a friend of the friend of the working man and all the rest of it You know and that's Change the momentum. So it was obvious that they've had to make some sort of change Listen up fellas fall is here football is back and that means game day meals Sunday hosting and a lot more time in the kitchen whether you're making burgers before kickoff wings for the guys or Breakfast before a full day of games your cookware matters. 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But I would say it's got nothing to do with anything that happened on Twitter or social media And yeah, this is one of the strange elements of social media Because I think that now everybody who's caught in that hyperreality has entered into a new matrix like I was saying in Iran It's almost like I don't know if you remember the matrix that remember that guy cypheroetes the tasty steak It's like they've left one and now they've gone into this other one where they believe something's happening They believe like, so I mean over here in America it'll be like the Patriots, it'll be like Manga They really believe something's happening or they really believe one version of events Often if you have a memory and you track all the stuff they're talking about Let's say you took a time machine and went back to a year ago or six months ago See what people were talking about on their Twitter feeds They've probably all forgotten about it, whatever was important then is not important now But it was to them at the time In Britain, the British Patriots, okay, which is a weird thing in itself because British people don't usually use that sort of language But they've started to know which itself tells me something But I, it's come over from. I was going to say you guys were on the wrong side of that one, right? It's kind of come over from America, that's my language But you know like last year there was this movement to put flags on, put the Union flag on lamppost I don't know if you saw that story Did not see that So people were kind of all around the country, they were going climbing up lamppost and putting Union jacks on Because it made them feel good, made them feel like we're going to win our country back guys And I remember at the time I said, "Sir, this is not just not going to do anything." People said, "Oh no, don't understand it's going to retargetize the country." And there's going to be a civil war and it's going to, you know, it's going to. None of this stuff is going to happen at all You are living in a kind of a imaginary world Yeah, now I can go back and tell those same people a year later See what I told you guys and all they'll do is get angry Because people don't like you pointing out that they're caught up in these narratives all the time Because they, of course, they've moved on to the next thing On the next thing and the next thing So I feel like one of the great challenges at the moment Is to get people who are caught up in these political bubbles It's almost like they've made their political identity Which is a pseudo, it is fake Because it's all this stuff we're talking about, it's just stuff that's online, it's not even real They've made it their whole thing They made it their whole identity And it's become kind quasi-religious in nature That's why I was asking you a little bit ago What's the difference between what you were describing and a cult I've talked with people in that chair who got sucked into the worst kind of cults ever And I have tremendous empathy for it because I don't think any human being you and me included are infallible to that I think if the right buttons were pushed in our environment and in our life just in the right direction We could do that And sometimes when I look at politics in democracies around the world and then I'll go compare it to cults that I've studied through people I've talked to I'm like very similar Every party has their one fiery leader at a given time They all have one or two major doorways that they creak open that most people are really pissed about And then they slowly introduce all the other rooms in the house that most people have no idea what the fuck they're talking about And yet they follow them to the gates of hell with it Because of those psychological reasons you just laid out about being afraid to say I was wrong or going back off strong opinions and stuff It's just unfortunately, I don't mean to be cynical about it It appears to be human nature when you study history Absolutely I mean one of the dark thoughts I've had is that you know to go back to the matrix and energy We all thought it was a good thing to take the red pill to see the truth When I say we I mean people on the internet Ten years ago all thought it was great we're going to see the truth We're going to deprogram our mind and all this sort of stuff I've often thought you know what for a lot of people it may not be a good idea And I've seen you know all sorts I mean there's one reaction like I told you The boomer who snaps back the week a week later because they've happened to watch Fox again or whatever There's another reaction that people have to quote and quote taking the red pill Which is basically to just completely go off the deep end And I've seen many people do that especially boomers but also younger people as well When I say go off the deep end I mean okay so there's a kind of sliding scale You start to see the truth of things But then there's only a couple of short steps to I guess what you call like kind of a Cooke's conspiracy stuff. Now what I mean by that is so basically when you start to see through these things You start to realise there are a lot of things that you were taught growing up Like your school, by the media weren't true And that we've been fed a lot of lies And some people when that happens have what you might call epistemological break A kind of cognitive shattering and it's like their truth that they believe is all Shattered in a million pieces on the you know on the floor something like that And because of that they come to question absolutely everything Yes And this is how you end up with people who are like well you know like dinosaurs aren't real Or flat earth or whatever What are out? wherever rabbit holes you want to get to, I feel like that's one trajectory people take, which in itself is kind of, so I always think, well, you kind of want to stay sane. Okay, when you quote unquote, take the red pill, you want to stay sane. And so how do you like, how do you stop yourself going there? Because if you question one thing or this thing's not true, this thing's not, you can see how it happens. It's like a domino effect. But then another way that people stay sane is what we've been talking about, IE, to go into essentially a new golf fish bowl, a new matrix, a new cult, a new way of, and in exactly the same way that you're 50 year TV watchers snaps back in a week. You can explain a lot of these things to, let's say, a patriot or, I mean, these people that we've picked on, I've picked on the right today because they're kind of visible, but all of these people are on the left as well. They're, they're, they're equally, there's a, there's an exact parallel to this on, on the left, on the left, politics, there's two. But in the exact same way, you could, you could sit down with someone, you can get them to agree to this, that, and the other, and then a week later, they've, they've snapped back because their, hyper-reality, their matrix is reinforcing a kind of different, that's right, truth. So, so, so to me, one of the challenges at the moment is like, well, what can we do about this? Because it's, you know, if anybody's familiar with my work, populist illusion, religion, and so on, I think people underestimate kind of what they're up against, you know, that you, you, you read narratives of the past, you think, well, people will rise up, there's going to be a revolution, the people are waking up, all this sort of stuff, and I'm like, you underestimate just how many levers the people empower can pull, and you also underestimate just how many layers of containment they are in, in the system, and the, the containment can go very far in both directions to the point where, you know, like, just thinking about the absurdity of this. Right, imagine this from the perspective of 2015, that in 2026, I'd be sitting here, and there'd be this kind of like communist guy running New York, this Mam, Mam, Mam, Danny guy, and at the same time, the Prime Minister of Italy was sold in the media as being a literally a fascist, right, George and Maloney, and these two things now, but also these two figures, Mam, Danny and Maloney are not in any way a threat to the system, they are like, they have not, they are not going to change the fundamentals of the structure of things, and that's kind of why they're all right with it. So what I'm saying is, the layer of containment can run the entire gamut from Mam, Danny to Maloney, and it still doesn't really care, and it still carries on. Okay, there's, there's a noise point, I want to ask about there, but while you're on like this containment and using actual examples of leaders, I think this is a good place to ask who, you know, in the words of Vito Corleone, "Control, who controls the peasant avante on a string?" Because that's what you're describing, you're describing. Right, right. You, me, everyone out there listening as the peasant avante, and there is, you know, some sort of small group that says cinema. Right, yes. Well, that's a very good question. The first thing to say is that you, I think there is an identifiable ruling class. Identifiable. An identifiable ruling class, but this ruling class is actually much larger than you, than you might imagine, and it is managerial in nature. So at some point, historically, societies became so complex, they call it mass and scale, they became so big that in necessitated management, serious management, and since about, let's say the 1930s and 1940s, the United States, you know, since FDR, essentially, the United States has been recognisably a managerial, managerial regime. It's a soft managerial regime, okay, which I'll explain in a second, but it means basically that there's a rather large bureaucratic, permanent, what people today call the deep state, but it has to have these things to function. Okay, I mean, imagine trying to run a country the size of America with something like a kind of a 17th century absolute monarchy. It would be very difficult. For a start, one man, the king, would just not be able to, like he'd need to have a massive team behind him, or something that approaches what people currently call him. We can't already fight a war over that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Mike and Dancers. So, but the point is, is that if you think about that moment, let's say of the Second World War, where it was America versus Germany, and also the Soviet Union, there was a writer called James Burnham, who I'm sure you've heard of, he wrote a book called "Managerial Revolution," and he also wrote a book called "The Mackey of Aliens," and he was my route into getting into elite, into elite theory. He's one of the elite theorists. James Burnham. Now, James Burnham pointed out in those books, in the 40s, that we can recognize the USSR as a kind of totalitarian state. It's got a large bureaucracy, it's got a large identifiable ruling class, who at that time was, like he was Stalin and the kind of communist party, right? And it was a hard managerial state, that if you did something that displeased them, you'd probably have a machine gun in the back of your head, okay? And also Nazi Germany at that time had a different type of managerial state, but it's still recognizably bureaucratic, and we call it totalitarian, because in both of those states, or Nazi Germany, you could only get somewhere if you were an Nazi. And in communist Russia, you could only get somewhere if you were communist. That's right. Well, in the USA, on the face of it, it's not like that, you know, kind of freedom, and you have kind of a plurality, a plurality of opinions, but in actuality, and it's real functioning, in exactly the same way that they're not going to let a non-communist run the USSR, or a non-Nazi-Run-Nazi Germany, in exactly the same way, the people who run the US are only going to allow them to set, like, yes, you have to be a liberal Democrat, quote unquote, in order to see power. This is, I mean, and no, I think people understand this more, because we have cancel culture, you have, you know, a much more visible kind of selecting out of people who aren't allowed in the various, various different reasons. So, and the managerial class have identifiable characteristics. They are kind of have mobile, they kind of don't have a connection to specific places, such that you could kind of, they could operate in New York, or London, or Tokyo, or LA, and it wouldn't make any difference, because they are defined by their skill set, by their education, and by their background, by their professional background, because the key thing that they are looking to do is manage. And so, if you're part of this managerial class, that also goes with the whole set of assumptions about the world, and a whole kind of a world view, you know, people by which I mean the people who are not part of, you know, the people who are to be managed are not, so in the days of old, you could have had a king, you could have had, you know, feudal aristocracy. The relationship between the rulers and the people was one of obligations. So, if you're a king, you had to protect the people, because that was your part of the bargain. Okay, and it was kind of, they pay you taxes, they work for you, they work your land, and in exchange, you give them protection both from extra threats and you provide law and order. That was the basic bargain, but almost all of history. And if you think about it, the, you know, saying about mass and scale, in the feudal times, if you're a feudal lord, let's say you had a, you know, barren of the manor, something like this, lord of the manor, you had a big estate, you had peasants working for you and so on and so forth. Those sorts of, even though it's not in our imagination, because there've been great strains, I would say, to demonize the past in, in our era. If you were running one of those feudal estates, you had to be able to have a drink with the men in the local tavern. You had to look the people that you were ruling over in, in the eyes, face to face. As, as me and you were talking now, you, they would have been that close. And in the extreme cases, they would have had to lead these men into war. So you can see that the connection between the feudal lord and even the peasant in that particular estate was close. Whereas the managerial class are separated from the people they rule over by rolling stones. They don't have a right exactly by distance, by, you know, now by compute by kind of computers and big structures that kind of mean that that drink that the feudal lord of how with his men in the tavern just doesn't really happen. And in fact, the managerial class often sees the people, rather than, you know, my men who I have obligations to, who may fight for me, instead the relationship is these people are a problem to be managed. They're a problem to be managed. Okay, um, they're in my way. Well, but also their preferences, their tastes, their, you know, I mean, it was pretty much some summed up when Hillary Clinton said the basket of deplorables, right? I mean, it kind of did this, you know, she was like a pantsuited woman in a managerial outfit as basically saying that the people of America are a problem, right? And that, you know, whatever their preferences are, we need to, we need to find a way of managing that out. 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That's UNDRDOG.com link about a description below for up to 30% off. After you purchased, they're going to ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them I sent you. Well, the managerial class is quite big. If you think about, you know, that is that is basically everyone from, you know, people who are in Washington and identifiable politicians and all of the people with clipboards behind them to at the kind of lowest wrong, it could be the person in the land yard running the local library. Because they have a, if you think about it, they have allegiance to that structure, to that to that class of that makes any sense. Now, we also mentioned billionaires earlier on. And this is where things get a little bit more complicated because one of James Burnham's insights was that the difference between classic capitalism as we would think of it with the tycoon with his big top hat and the cigar and, you know, the guy you own the factories. So someone like Henry Ford, okay, they had a lot of autonomy and power. Someone like Henry Ford was basically like a little dictator of his own empire. I always think of JP Morgan, all these kind of classic tycoons. They had a lot of power. When the advent of what we're calling managerialism came about, there was a severance of ownership and control. So if you think about shares, if you think about floating a company on the stock market and selling shares, so what do they call it an IPO IPO? When you become an IPO, if you think about it, the ownership of that company is now diffuse. Okay, there could be millions of shareholders. And even though, I mean, there could be people who own a 5% stake, a 10% stake, whatever, but they're still basically, you know, spread around a whole bunch of owners. So what happens? Henry Ford, like the Ford family, let's say now, do not have the same functional power over Ford Motor Company now as he would have enjoyed at the time. Right, I mean, I'm going to example, like Henry Ford is a good example because he famously just refused to hire accountants. He just didn't trust them. He never knew. So the Ford Motor Company just didn't have accountants until right. Now, can you imagine the Ford company to embrace saying like, oh, right, we're we're not going to hire any MBAs or we're not. So I think there was another component down for him. I mean, he's a special case, but the point is is that when you become an IPO, there's a whole set of governance oversight that comes in. And this is really the mechanism by which the managers can come in and take over. And so, you know, probably another, you know, to choose another guy who may have had edge interviews from the age of 20th century Walt Disney. Okay, the difference between the Walt Disney company, when it was Walt, and when it was like Michael Eisner CEO, right, one of them is a visionary is an entrepreneur, he's a tycoon, the other one is is a manager. So you have to answer stakeholders, shareholders. Right. Yeah. So so the the severance of ownership and control and control is who has control in this moment where is it the share? Is it the shareholders who have control? Well, on the face of it, they have the ownership. But actually, the functional control is with the manager of the shares, the account manager. And in our current in our current system, a lot of account management is done as you'll know by companies like BlackRock. Okay. Yes. So they pay into the system and they decide they manage what like 10 trillion dollars of assets. And then they, but I'm saying they also then use their massive economies of scale to, you know, at the top layers of BlackRock, I think the CEOs and stuff like that to then wield power in the political system and decide, be the king makers. This is who's running against who? Absolutely. So you can see how even so this is all around about way of saying that when we're talking about like guys sitting around the table in a smokey room, the ruling class is more diffuse than that. And it does have facts, it does also have factions within it. But then within that, there are people who wield significant power. And I would say BlackRock is a pretty good like one of the things I got obsessed with doing was reading Larry thinks letter to the CEOs every year he writes a letter to all the CEOs of all companies. Now imagine BlackRock is a 5% shareholder in pretty much every company. Okay. Which is doesn't sound like a lot, But if it's up again, you know. Generally, they'll be in the top bracket for most companies, and if it's not BlackRock, it'll be State Street or Vanguard, if you've looked at this. Now, if the market starts seeing movement, let's say BlackRock just had it in Coca-Cola and really started selling their Coca-Cola shares, they could cause a lot of problems with Coca-Cola. So, the point is, when Larry Fink sends his letter to the CEOs, if he says something, you can bet all those CEOs can better take notice of what he's saying. And so, it's not like he's a commissar in the USSR, but it is like you can kind of, you can kind of see where things might go by taking note of what somebody like him says. That's right. For example, back in 2022, 2023, what he said in his letter to the CEOs is, look, this politics stuff, we better dial it down a little bit. People have had enough of, like, woke and they're on to us on the, what's it called? - ESG. - Yeah, the people have kind of taken note of this sort of stuff, and it's causing a problem for us. - The prisoners are revolting. - Right. And so, he said, like, we better just get back to just making stuff for people. So, I mean, I read this and said, look, in the next couple of years, they're going to put the woke away for a while, because I read the letter, and I thought, well, you know, we're going to see a bit of a shift, a bit of a change in strategy from these people. Now, what's interesting to me is, it doesn't really matter how the messaging changes, okay? So, let's say it's Bud Light sold by, transexual, what was it like? - Yeah, it wasn't like, didn't they have it deep? It was like, homoistase or something during June? - That was Chipotle. - That was Chipotle. - Right. - I mean, and then, or it could be, where the patriotic be with the stars and stripes, and you know, or we're doing it for the veterans or whatever, but it doesn't, the point is, it doesn't matter what path you put on it or what messaging is, everything's still sitting there. - Yes. - And he's kind of, like, he doesn't really care which way it goes, because functionally, there's still a lot of power with somebody like that, okay? So, I would say that these, you know, these are some of the nodes, you could say, or some of the factions in the identifiable ruling class that you can look towards. Now they don't all agree on the same stuff, all the different factions in the ruling. I would say there are genuinely disagreements they have, overall sorts of things. I mean, affairs in the Middle East is a pretty easy example every week and identify special interests in these, in these sorts of areas. So what's the, the interesting thing is the, well, what's the stuff they all agree on? Not the stuff they disagree on, what's the stuff they all agree on? - And what is that in your estimation? - Well, I would say that regardless of which faction it is, they all see the people as a problem to be managed. I kind of, it doesn't really matter which way they're coming from. They kind of, I get the impression they kind of don't like me and you, or they don't like, by, by me and you, I mean, the people absolutely, the people at large. And this is to get back to your very original question, the high versus, the high versus the low. - Right. Up, down, battle. - Yeah. So then the question is, well, if this is the case, how can we put up with this, what can we do to fight back, you know, what can we do to, and this is where I don't really have a very, a very optimistic message, because I don't think that we're going to find any salvation from all of this through politics, through the normal means of politics. So how will we find it if we do? - Well, I honestly think people have to start unplugging a little bit. I mean, one of the things I did a while back is that I delete, I, I add a Twitter feed, or to X, I was on X, I was on there all the time. And I was finding that it was making me miserable, making me angry about everything. I was on there. It was keeping me from sleeping. It was, no, I had over 60,000 followers. I was getting my Elon Bucks, like everybody else, and all the rest of it. But I thought, you know what, I don't need this. So I deleted it. - No, I thought you were going to say you went to Blue Sky. - No, no, no, no, no, no, I deleted it and I was like, I'm going to, we have to find a way to step out of this hyper reality that we're, that we've been talking about. And I also think that people may need to scale down their expectations of what is possible to do. So we're so used to trying to think of, trying to change things on a national scale, right? Or even, I mean, even here on like a state level scale, even, okay? I would say we have to start really quite smart. You're going to start with your own life, first and foremost, okay? And I was finding like little, like little kind of little wellbeing things I was doing. One of the things I started doing was when you eat, can you just concentrate on your food? - Yeah. - Okay? Before you start reaching for your phone to check something, and I, and that was actually what led me to quit Twitter was that I was, I was like, pathetic. I was like, couldn't go like 10, couldn't go like 60 seconds without pulling, pulling the phone out. So in the end, I was like, well, no, no, I've, no, I've got all these kind of time locks on my phone. Be like, look, you're, you're running out of time today, you can't do any more, because it just takes up all you bandwidth. And so just being able to, first and foremost, to be present, be aware of your immediate surroundings, and you can only do that if, to some extent, by learning to kind of come back into the world from this hyper-reality that we've all been part of. But then beyond that, I, I honestly think that the, the system as we've been talking about, rather than getting involved in these mass protests or kind of performative, kind of political stunts that people like to do or getting involved in this group and that group. And posting on Twitter 24/7 and all of these sorts of things, I honestly think they'd be more concerned if everybody just suddenly switched off and started meeting up in the real world. You know what? I think the reason I agree with you is the thing I put a pin in a few minutes ago. So let me bring this up right now and see what you think. I think a lot of the, that whole idea of, well, now they have nodes. When they have you on social media and they're not censoring you, they can see you, they can watch you, they can know what's going on. And when there's more cattle, it's easier to get them all going into one area and focused on one thing, which is something we always have to pay attention to back here like, all right, what are the narratives they're pushing? When you do that, let's say you also drip in things that are objectively terrible, Epstein files, right? That's like taking you behind the candelabra to some extent and be like, oh shit, look what we've been doing. Right on Gmail too, you know? And then they throw a Ron war in your face. And they throw a missing scientist in your face. And they'll throw a Lindsay Clancy thing in your face. Get everyone fighting over things to find ideological differences so that we other people from behind keyboards and say, fuck you, die. And then we also look at the moment where we're like, okay, with things like the Epstein files and political corruption, oh my god, there's an elite class that rules over us. You would think that they'd be trying to get you to not see that. My theory is that in getting everyone back onto social media, they're trying to create so much noise that there's too many things for the human brain to possibly focus on and coalesce around changing one core thing. So let's start with this. The people in the Epstein files, getting investigated and actually having people get charges. If you're worried about 45 other things in the next week, enough people are going to forget about that, that it doesn't get to the mass percentage of society pushing it for it to actually happen. You're absolutely right, absolutely right, yeah. And the focus is one of the real asymmetries between, let's just say those people who rule over us and most normal people that you do have 101 things to be concerned about and keep on throwing them at you. So you're not focused on the one thing. And even if you stay focused on the one thing, everybody else is moved on. Meanwhile, I mean, one of my favorite examples is Tony Blair, who is the former British Prime Minister. You're a big fan of his. Well, I mean, he has this thing called the. Tony Blair Institute. He has like a thousand people working for him. He's got a bigger team than the prime minister. They're like, why, like, what? The Tony Blair Institute. The Tony Blair Institute for global change. Oh, oh, global change. They're just hitting every keyword. This is the key while you're sleeping or while, you know, you're worried about Epstein this minute and now you're worried about the Iran War and now you're worried about this thing. His team 24/7 is focused on his thing. Right. Oh, my God. This is real. Working with leaders to deliver change. There was a Ukraine flag. There we go. Let's talk about, we were talking about the ruling class, right? And we talked about Larry Fink and we talked about, and now we're talking about Tony Blair. He's hitting every race too. Good for him. Now, what does he want to do, Tony Blair? What, what is this institute? What is its key agenda? Well, it wants an AI revolution, which is already happening. And his big thing, the thing he's been obsessed with ever since we were, ever since he was the prime minister is bringing in digital ID cards or basically everybody, a surveillance control grid. That's Carol. No. Tony Blair, you'd think, well, he's a man on the left. He's a labor guy. But the number one funder of the Tony Blair Institute that we're looking at here is a man called Larry Ellison, right? The oracle boss. Okay. He's a huge fan of the show. He's a below Larry to see again. Larry Ellison a big, big, big, big internet. I can hate that guy. So Larry Ellison, he also wants this massive digital surveillance grid for everybody. Can we pull up that clip, Dave, for Neema as well? Because you're, you're cooking on it right now. The clip, I don't know if we can find it, but Larry Ellison talking about AI surveillance and you keep talking. Right. Yeah. Well, okay. So on this, that Larry Ellison and Tony Blair are completely, completely at one. They both want the same thing. He's working 24/7 to get it by meeting world leaders and speaking to governments and writing white papers and interfacing with every government around the world trying to make it happen on making public private partnerships between, you know, Oracle and Microsoft and the British government and the American government and so on and so forth. Meanwhile, who does Larry Ellison also fund Donald Trump? Yeah. Right. So this is what I'm talking about where they don't really get like culture war, woke, anti-woke, patriotic. It doesn't matter to these people. How are you going to sell digital ID to Americans? Just do it in a Magerha. That's right. How do you do it? So they've even got like a localized strategy for each different market, you know, and this is the thing that it's so difficult to get because they're so caught up in all these other things and these partisan issues that they don't also have their eye on the on the prize, which is exactly these, and this is just one kind of set of ideas. Sure. There will be plenty of other Tony Blair's and Larry Ellison's each trying to do their own thing, but it's kind of, yeah, it's all happening right there in the open. Right in the open. That's what's getting me these days. They're doing it more blatantly than ever before. They're doing it on video. Let's play this clip so you can see it real quick. I think it's just going to be the beginning of it, right? But the citizens on their bus. Yeah. I got it right at that point. All right. Beautiful. Let's run it. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on. And it's unimpeachable, but the cars, the cars have camera, you know, cameras on. All right. I think we have a squad car here someplace, but those kinds of applications using AI, we can use AI, and we're using AI to monitor the video. So if that altercation had occurred, the occurred in Memphis, the chief of police would be immediately notified. It's not people that are looking at those cameras. It's AI that's looking at the camera. No, no, no. You can't do this. It would be like a shooting. That's going to be immediately. That's going to be an event that's immediately an alarm is going to go off. It's going to be and we're going to we're going to have supervision. And there was every police officer is going to be supervised at all times. That's good right there. Super good for enough. Well, hey, I didn't do his plastic surgery because he looks like fucking king cut. But, you know, they say it. So what's that down below? Perhaps the only one who can beat with Teo for the title of most reptilian overlord. That's good. Shout out to whoever said that. But like they're saying it so out in the open. Yeah, exactly. That is what throws me off. And this is the thing where I was saying, like, you don't need to go down, kind of cook, conspiracy, rabbit holes, or say it's the illuminati. Because they're literally just there doing it in broad daylight. You know, and then they meet like, Tony Blair is a very interesting one to watch. So one of one of my favorite games to play was if ever a new story came up or a country came up, just type into Google that country in Tony Blair, the sea feed being there or to see if he'd kind of one of the things I discovered about him is that, you know, they have that big meeting Davos, where all the sea. Well, he has a meeting two weeks before that to discuss what they're going to discuss at Davos. He has a meeting in Davos. No, he has a meeting at his Tony Blair Institute to discuss what the world leaders are going to discuss. Now, what is really fascinating here is if you follow various different money like how money is funneled this and that, the same people who, you know, could be funding someone like Tony Blair or, you know, also funding Donald Trump, they could also be funding various so-called Patriot groups. That's right. Okay. Now, when these Patriot groups do things like, you know, shut down ports or go out in Balaclava's or, you know, do other things that I think are like transparently and nakedly data harvesting exercises. Okay. When they do those things, they also are pushing exactly like the Cassus Belli, if you want, the justification for these sorts of measures that Larry Ellison was talking about to be expeditated, to be brought about. So, when I was talking earlier on about containment, one of the things that power has always done is they develop something called a countergang. Are you familiar with this phrase countergang? A countergang. You're talking about control opposition, if you will. So, yeah, so it's control opposition, but at the street level. Yeah. Okay. This phrase countergang comes from a guy called Frank Kitson, who was a British special kind of special services agent, essentially, who did a lot of work around the kind of last days of the empire and in Northern Ireland as well. You know, he was so good at doing his job that at one point, there were more British feds in the IRA than actual IRA members. Okay. So, but a countergang to explain is basically a street level gang who looked like they're against the government or they look like they are doing armed resistance or something like this, but actually it's being run by feds, being run by this sort of character. That's right. Where it gets complicated is that the people involved in it don't even need to know necessarily that this is happening. They could be just like an informant or they could be structurally used in this sort of way. Again, to almost occupy the ground before a genuine insurgency could get going. If that makes sense, they already control it. They make the, if I'm understanding you correctly, they make the app the Truman Show. Exactly. Yeah. Right. And then, so then if you have like a young man who has, you know, maybe he's upset by all the stuff he's seen on social media and he feels like he wants to do something, now he's like, well, where can I be part of the resistance? Oh, well, I'll sign up here. And now you're kind of actually what that thing is doing is it is kind of acting as the eyes and ears and almost as the, through those mechanisms, they can make things happen. And then as the reaction to, so they provide the problem and then there's the solution that is, that is brought about through bringing in various legislation to be like, well, look, this group has caused a real problem. We need to do something about this. Now, Patriot Act. Exactly. Patriot Act or, or many other, many other examples in history. So, this is a very, this, what I'm driving towards though is when you think about, well, how can we do something about it. It's very, for, when you actually get into actual politics, it starts getting very fraught and then you start to see, well, they've thought of this already. They've thought of that already. Yes. This avenue is closed off. This is sewn up. If you get into this, you're all of a sudden you're in trouble with the feds or, you know, they make it incredibly difficult. So it's like, well, unless you're prepared to be, you know, like the Bolsheviks in and out of jail, you know, and even then, jail is exactly the sort of place where they're going to turn someone or exactly the sort of place where someone's vulnerable, you know, you could have a nice life barbell about, you know, all that sort of stuff. So that is a very fraught path for, and most people, frankly, just are not going to be cut out for that. So when I said about seeing people in real life, I wasn't even thinking about meeting up to organize politically. First of all, this organization is really difficult. I think people underestimate just how hard it is to to organize. So rather than kind of trying to come up with a party manifesto or trying to come up with some sort of political movement, I would like people just to start like, can you organize a chess club? Can you organize like a local, you know, whatever it is, D&D meeting, whatever, and you've got set up almost a network of people who know each other, I can support each other, who kind of, you know, you have a social life, because I honestly think that as well as all these problems we've been talking about, political problems, people are lonely, they're atomized, they're glued to their phone all the time, they don't know anyone, and if you think about the organized minority against the disorganized mass, well, I mean, you're almost the perfect disorganized mass, you're completely atomized, you don't know anyone, you have no chance of organizing at all. I mean, I don't say all these things have been done by design, but that is where we find ourselves now. And that I think would be a healthy thing. Oh, I so agree. Anybody watching this show, you know, how many people do you know in your local time? That's right. Can you, if you wanted to, could you organize something as small as a chess club or as a matter of what it, and I honestly think if everybody simultaneously unplugged and started, you know, doing stuff like that at a local level, they'd be happier, but also I think that the powers that be that we've been talking about probably wouldn't like it. They wouldn't like it. There's even a second layer here that you're hitting on. I assume you know you are, but I'm picturing it in my head, so I want to make sure we're on the same page too. Like when you talk about a chess club, for example, that chess is something that appeals to people of all different ages, all different backgrounds, all different political beliefs and stuff like that. But when we see group organizations that occur in the real world that usually start on social media to be able to then meet up in the real world, what is so often either cloaked and stamped right on the top of it or at least the underlying message? It's that these are like-minded people. And let's say you're meeting up because I'll pick a really stereotypical one. A bunch of artists want to meet up to, you know, talk about art in the modern age. You know where that's going. You know where that's going politically. You know there's an undertone there. And that's certain people, certain beliefs, they're not going to be welcome in that kind of space. But your ideas are the kinds of things where that's not even on the table. And then what might happen perhaps as a nice output of that is that as people do come together around something else, they end up socializing and then they end up talking about things and realizing, wow, he thinks different than she does. And you know what, that's actually okay. It's healthy for humanity. Yeah, nope. And if enough people did that, also, I mean, think about some of the things we've been saying. If everybody, if every town in America did that, if people in every town in America were doing that, the, let's say, deep state, permanent intelligence, they wouldn't be able to monitor all of that. They wouldn't be able to infiltrate all of that. They wouldn't be able to. And in this way, once people then know each other, something like, let's just pretend they want to do something in your local town. They want to, I don't know, demolish a church or something. It would be then you'd kind of know people. So it might be easier then to organize for something small to, I don't know, stop that happening or, that's one of the sorts of places it could, you know, could go if it happened on scale. How realistic is this, though, to have a full effect when we do all still go everywhere with one of these, which is the ultimate location tracker. And now we have things that are even fully, fully out of our, this is kind of out of our control, but fully out of our control, like, I don't know, flat camera is going up everywhere and whatever companies are going to come after them. How do we check out of a system that's already, unfortunately, in a lot of ways so far gone seemingly? Yeah, that's a good, that's a good question. I mean, I don't know if you'd have to make a, like, a rule, if you don't bring a mobile phone to this thing or you'd have like, I can't remember what they call it now, but like, unplug events where it's like, you don't bring devices to this thing. Now, this is something that is kind of getting more and more difficult. Like, for example, to get here, I had to use a lift, right? Well, that means I needed to have my phone in order to come here. That's right. It would be possible for me to get here without that, because you can't just kind of hail down a cab and give them cash. We don't take pounds here. Right. Exactly. So yeah, that is a good, that is a good question that you'd have to kind of, but I still, I still think that even if you had your phone with you, it would be happening on such a, if it was happening at the scale that I'm talking about, it would still be too much realistically for, you know, power to do anything about. And also, let's face it, if people are just playing chess, what they got to worry about. Why would they be worried about people, you know, meeting and talking in the pub? They did it for years. And this is one of the things I've often thought about, which, you know, we started talking about mass immigration. And if you think about what's happened is that people have been scattered, you've got people living miles away from where they're from or you've got, you know, people used to live in right next to their, right next to the place that they work. And I was reading a Marxist once who said, well, look, the reason that they brought about the idea of the commute and or getting people into suburbs or getting to IE spreading them out. If all the people, if all the workers are spread out, they can't get together. Well, they don't know each other or they, and so it's that much harder to have something like what we're talking about here, or it's that much harder to kind of union eyes or collect devise. And these are all strategies of power, kind of dividing conquerable. Yeah. Yeah, I'm thinking of your managerial class explanation, though, too. And if what you're laying out there is how it is, meaning these things have happened in patterns over time, very deliberately across generations, even across centuries, in some cases, that would have to mean hypothetically, maybe it doesn't. But in my head, it's like if you're looking at, you know, the meme of the guy is about to flick down the domino, and there's all the dominoes behind him, there has to be some group doing the flick that creates the incentive structure for these things to happen. And it's all downstream of money, meaning for things like the suburbs to get invented, so the people would spread out. It had to start with an economic incentive for builders to want to go and build up the suburbs, and then for people to want to move out of the city. And in addition to the commute, they may have to do for work back into there, they're making up for that by spending less in the suburbs, right? So there's this, meaning there's a system that's set up. So is it like Larry Ellison doing it? Or is it, is it a bigger, is it a separate conference room of the managerial class, if you will? Right. Well, I mean, back then, it would have been different people, obviously, than Larry Ellison and Larry, the people we've been talking about, but they're, they're, believe it or not, there are books written on this exact topic. The suburbs is a whole rabbit hole that people can go down. Some books naughty, other than, you know, there are some very naughty books you've read, like 50 shades of grain. No, I mean, like, I mean, like, you can't buy them on Amazon, sort of, or see, you know, like mine comps naughty. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Although I think, I think you probably can get these days, you're probably can get mine. But I'm pretty sure this book I'm thinking of you can't, but yeah, there's a whole literature on exactly what you're talking about, who, the ideas, the planning, why it was brought about, you know, car companies being involved, because of course you need a car to drive in, and, yeah, I mean, kind of, that's a very interesting thing. It's also one of the differences, I would say, between Europe and America, the suburbs are a very American thing, a big advent to happen. Europe just doesn't have, in some ways, life is still on a, on a slightly smaller scale, just because we, we can't, I mean, in Britain, if you look at the size of Britain, you can't just have, you know, I did route to 66 ones, I drove from Chicago to Twel A, a few years ago. On the right side of the road. Yeah, yeah, well, it's got to be terrific. It was, it was interesting. I tell you what, we almost crashed first thing, because I can't believe we let like Americans drive in Britain and British drive in America, like right when you drop in. It's kind of crazy. But, but also we, we have, we generally have manual cars. So we were used to driving automatics. So, you know, when you press, press the brake and the clutch at the same time, it comes to emergency stop. We, we were on the big interstate coming out of Chicago and did an emergency stop right there. And there was one of those big truck, you know, there's big American trucks behind us. We were, we almost had a kind of, luckily, we were unscathed. But where, where, where I was going with this story is that on, on Rooces 6, there are tons of ghost towns. There are kind of like towns that existed for a period. No, they don't really have a reason to exist anymore. And, no, they're gone. Which is just doesn't really happen. It like in Britain, we don't have the option to just like leave a town. So, so former, so, so they're a town like, for example, where my mother was from in Wales, she grew up in a town that was built around a coal mine. That coal mine has gone now. So really, think logically, that town doesn't really have a reason to exist. But the people did not just leave. Right. Because they don't have the, like, there is just no option to pick up and leave and leave a ghost town like that. And in the same way, there's not the space to have developed all of the suburbs that we were talking about. Although there is, there is a kind of suburbia in Britain. It still hasn't led to people like, you know, in, like a two hour drive in Britain is like a trek. Whereas here, I feel like people are used to travel in fairly long distances or not think anything of it, you know, having a long commute to work or something like that. Yes. You guys do have better trains though. And I'm, I'm, it's, well, we have trains, I'll just say that we have, I mean, it's a little bar here, but, you know, so yeah, there are some, there are some differences about the suburbs is an interesting area. Yeah. So that was a giant sigh out that I need to study basically and go find videos of Dave's over here, like where, where you've been, brother. You know what about that? All right. That's what I mean. You keep finding things. And you were talking earlier and making a very valid point about how once the facade is removed on core tenets that you were taught or that we're just accepted growing up. And then you get older and you're like, wow, that's not the way it was. This is the danger I always look out for because it's never enough that people, we realize things are a hundred percent or aren't a hundred percent. Because we then realize it's not a hundred percent, our inclination is to say, therefore it's zero on everything. And the cognitive dissonance or cognitive, I don't think that's the term I'm looking for. Like our anchoring goes to the direct opposite side. And that is, to me, another key means of containment. It is not enough to say, hey, some things we heard in World War II weren't exactly like it was because, you know, every, every victory is written by the victors. Instead, yo, people are out there like Hitler was actually the good guy. And it's like, okay, all right. Can we back up for a second and just look at things case by case, situation by situation and where we got to relearn something, relearn it without throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Yeah, no, exactly. And it's the reason it's difficult is because, you know, we've been talking about containment. I am convinced that a lot of conspiracy theories are put out there by, you know, probably at the FBI or CIA. I think you're right. Yes. And I've always been interested in what I call kind of like allowable targets. Now, I don't want to defend Scientology. I notice you did a show on Scientology recently, right? But I've noticed that there's always documentaries having a go at site that there's like, it's a kind of thing that you get, like in the mainstream media, isn't it weird what those Scientologists are up to? It seems to be like an allowable target of the system. Or it's like a rabbit hole that you're encouraged to go down. Look at Scientology. Or I don't know that there are very, there are various other ones. You know, I mentioned flat earth earlier on. I'm pretty sure that is, like, what, what's that doing there? I'm not suggesting that Scientology has been put there by whoever. I'm saying that you're kind of direct, you're kind of encouraged to ask questions about these sorts of things. Whereas you're not encouraged to ask questions about certain other topics. And what I'm always interested in is, you know, I was saying earlier on about things to look out for in the media. The media focusing on something, this is not focusing on something, is probably one of the biggest things that always raises an eyebrow for me. I'll just give you, let's be open, let's give an example. Why do the media give so much coverage neck for enters last year? I don't want to have a go, I don't know neck and I know you two are to me and so on, but I'm not like close with him or anything and I don't want to have a go at him. But it's almost irrelevant as to what his intentions are. What is relevant is the structural role that's carved out in media narratives. They talk in media about the family of faces. Are you familiar with this term? The family of faces? The family of faces. So, you know, on television at any one time, there's a family of faces that you're meant to recognise, that are part of, you know, let's say if it's a news channel, you know, they're part of the CNN crew or something like that, this is a face. It's everything from the presenters to the guests they have on. Okay, but it's also people who become part of media discourse such that they are part of the right, they are part of this pseudo reality, this narrative, this pro-resting storyline that they want to tell. Now, it was very interesting to me that there was this whole period where you were getting pieces on for enters in the New York Times in, you know, the Atlantic magazine, you know, they're like James Dean with Shades on and like, this is somebody who they want me to know. The message I'm getting is they want me to know this guy's name. Okay. In fact, I also remember that there's a guy called Louis Thru. I'm sure you're aware of. He made a documentary a few years back where he went and went and met him. He did like a whole documentary on for me. The Manus fear one? No one for me. It was just on for instance. I did maybe, he maybe met a few different people, but again, the point is this guy's name is out there and millions of people who watch that BBC documentary know his name. He has entered into the discourse. He's in the country, yeah. Okay. He is there in the discourse. There are other people that you'll never hear of who never enter into the media writ large. They're just not a name. Now, what's very interesting to me is when you come up against someone who let's just say the system is just hostile to and the difference in treatment between that person and the one who gets entered into the media narrative in all sorts of different ways. Do you understand what do you want? So I'm going there. Now, I'm not, you have to understand, I am not suggesting any great conspiracy between Fuentes and the system. I'm saying that when somebody has entered into the discourse, they become someone who they can use to tell stories with. Now, maybe the story they want to tell is in, you know, lonely young man who are in cells are watching this sort of edgy material. Okay. But there could also be other things that they can do with that. You know, like I talked about prerestling There are baby faces and heels, you can have face turns and heel turns, you can have, you can just tell stories. And once somebody's established in that family of faces, it almost doesn't matter what they say or do. They can tell, they can kind of use that person to tell a particular story. Driver narrative. Okay, now I, I mean, maybe the story that was being told with the Fuentes thing is, look, people are turning against Donald Trump, like his own supporters are against him for X, Y and Z. Maybe that was the story, maybe it was innocent as that, or it could be something else, but it's still something to, something noticeable, something to look for. And in the same way, to go back to Scientology, why does the media focus, why does the media, like Louis through also made an entire documentary about Scientology? My question on that one is, why does nothing ever happen? Why they continue to be totally tax exempt, they buy up more and more real estate, they have political control that goes completely untapped, because I agree, you're allowed to talk about that one. And as far as I know, you've always been allowed to talk about it. But it's a very weird one, because it's not a big organization, it's got very suspicious ties, a hilarious history, and a very dark one too, yet nothing changes, whether it doesn't cease to be a buggy man, and something else has to take its place. I don't know why that is, that's the one that confuses me there. It's cute. I mean, I don't know the answer, but I just, these are the sorts of things that I kind of notice, because they're, it's also when you know, when you get to know things in a little bit more depth, it's like, well, the media never, the media never kind of, you know, we talked a lot about the Tony Blair Institute, right? The media, like Louis through has never made a documentary being like, what's Tony being up to? And he was the, like, why is he got, why is he meeting, why is he meeting world leaders if he's still in power when he hasn't been the Prime Minister for, like, what business does he have? He's just a, in theory, he's just a man, right? And yet he's going around the world kind of, making deals and doing all sorts of things. This really doesn't have a lot of focus put on him. So, yeah, I do think, I mean, for your listeners or whatnot, always if the media keeps on going on about someone, they want, they make, no mistake, they, they are introducing that person to you as a face. Yeah, as a, yeah. I, I think there is a scale that every single person with any kind of audience, whatsoever, you, me, anyone else out there is some sort of page. There's a scale we are all on. And it operates from zero to 100. And I think people can get to 100 on it. And I think no one is ever fully at zero. Maybe there's people at point one or point two, but no one's ever fully at zero. And the scale is called the useful idiot scale. The second scale to it is winning or unwitting. And that's where I really judge if someone's winning means they're a part of it. They're in on it. They're doing it. They know what's happening. If they're unwitting and they're really high on the useful idiot scale, then they're really retarded. But if they're unwitting and they're lower on it, maybe they're paying attention more to it or the system hasn't tried to actually bring them into the forefront for reasons that they can't explain. It's a very weird dance because it requires you to be self-aware of your audience and why it's happening and where it's coming from and who may be wanting it to happen on certain topics. It's a little bit of a meta way of saying it. But like who may want you to drive certain topics that you are able to draw attention to for something that you can't see? That is a thought like you can ask Danny Jones. He and I have talked about that we've been friends for five years. He's got a big show down in Florida. He and I have talked about that almost since the day we met and we had way smaller shows at the time because it's like you are constantly fighting that battle. And sometimes you can't see the answer until you've made a mistake on something. The trick is trying not to make that mistake twice, but it's difficult when you have levers that you can't see pulling them. No, absolutely. Very interesting. And this goes back to something I was talking about earlier on, where you know I was saying how is the view of kind of got wise to social media. And now they're looking at how they can use it for various different ends. What you were talking about is the exact kind of work, the example of that. And there's a lot of kind of great zone because somebody can be promoted without realizing it, for example, or they can be like you said unwitting. I mean, maybe this is what happened with Fuentes. They just decided we're going to make this guy the face of whatever story they want to tell. And you know, I mean, people can make up their own minds about whether he's witting or unwitting, but it's a very interesting thing to watch play out. In Britain, there's this guy called Tommy Robinson, if you're aware of it. I've heard of him. It's got some interesting funding. Yeah, I mean, he is the selected face of like the unacceptable, unacceptable quote-unquote far right and so on and so forth, but he's very much used in the British media ecosystem to demarcate the boundaries of where the conversation can go. And it's always his name and not some other, not some other nationalist that you've never heard of. And I think there are, I think there are real reasons for that. Recently, something that interested me, you know, I mentioned the guys who stopped those, the guys who stopped those boats in Portsmouth, or the guy who did that was a guy called Danny Tomo. Danny Tomo. Danny Tomo, who is good friends with Tommy Robinson. In fact, like best mates with him. And it's almost like, do you remember when, I don't know if you're a pro wrestling fan, but at one point, Hulk Hogan wasn't getting the reactions that they wanted anymore. So they kind of replaced him with Ultimate Warrior for a while. This guy, Ultimate Warrior came in and there was a kind of changing of the, there was a kind of changing of the guards. And now that this Ultimate Warrior guy was pushing, it wasn't Hulk Hogan anymore, it was this guy. And the way in which this Danny Tomo guy has come to the fore now, because again, the media talked incessantly about him in the way, the same way they do with Robinson. It's like, is this what's happening here? Are we getting a new, we're getting a new hero to, you know, people on that side of politics get behind, find it very interesting the way these things play out. Now, where it's, where it's difficult, pro wrestling is scripted, right? I mean, sorry, sorry guys, this is a predetermined. You just ruined it for so many people. What I say about mainstream politics and what plays out in the media is that it is not scripted, but it might as well be. Does that make sense to you? It makes sense to me. I might take it a step further though and say there's a lot of scripting. Right. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there is a lot of scripting. What I'm saying is that even those things that are not because you get to set the frame and you get to set the narrative around those frames, this is what I mean by it might as well be because regardless of what happens, they can reframe it to tell whatever story they want. That's right. And then to come back to what we've been talking about with social media and breaking those things, so often the people, the influencers on social media, whether they're truly independent or not are still getting their information, ultimately, from the legacy media. How do they know anything? Well, they know about it because they read it in the newspaper or they saw it on the news. So it's part, yeah, for the sake of your argument, yes. But what I'm saying is the new cycle, that new cycle you were talking about keeping you distracted with this, that, and the other, your social media feed, the algorithm, the algorithm is still ultimately being dictated by APM writers. Exactly. I've likened it in the past to Optimus Prime, from the Star Wars, right? Well, if you have a look at how modern newsrooms work, a lot of journalists, journalists, don't actually like do any journalism. What happens is that the newswire comes through from APM writers, comes through to the editor's desk and the editor's got all the stories of the day, which come through from APM writers, and then they allocate, oh, well, you, John, you go off and do this story and you you're allocated to that story and you're allocated to that story. And every news desk kind of functions in the same way. So if you think about it, even that even if these people aren't all clued in with each other, which they don't need, they don't even need to because the system in itself is centralized. Now, if you think about the social media influencer, they are downstream of that journalist who sent out on that AP writer story, goes out, does their thing, then you see it, then you make your video reacting to it. You're still basically just reacting to it. So the news agenda is still being set by that. So this is another one of those things to be aware of. Because I don't think many people truly understand what I've just outlined there. I think if people do, there's something in a lot of people that just kind of files that get away because they think, "What am I going to do about it?" Unfortunately, I understand that. That sucks. It's a horrible way to think about it. But there is so much to deal with on a day to day that it becomes a job to try to figure out how you are seeing the world and where you are getting truth. You think about the guy who works a nine to six job. He's got three kids at home, which is the equivalent of having 15 kids like 25 years ago. And when he comes home, he wants to spend time with his wife and his kids. And he does that five days a week. And on the weekends, he'd like to be able to blow off some steam. At what point in that guy's schedule while he's trying to save up for colleges for all these kids, pay his bills, put food on the table, have a family life, be able to do some things that are fun once in a while. At what point can he make it a part of his daily job routine to make sure he is siphoning truth from fiction on his phone, on the TV, wherever it is on his laptop, you know, when that's not paying the bills for him, you know? Well, what I would say is, I mean, it's been one of the themes of this chat, really. When I say I'm plug, do you really need to have an opinion on this? Was it Lindsay? Who's this woman who's been in the news recently? Lindsay Clancy. I mean, do you need to have a view on this? Do you need to have an opinion on Sydney Sweeney? Do you need to have an opinion on any of the 101 things that comes down your own? You know, there's this kind of like take economy. And I know, because I mean, I've been part of it for years at this point. And I'm trying slowly, but surely to not have a take on it. Because it's kind of addictive as well. It's kind of dopamine loops and all these sort of things. But this I think is the next thing that I would like to happen is that people really just say, because all of these things would be a problem. Let's face it, if everybody just says, look, we just don't care. Whatever the story is, I'm not going to play, I'm not going to have an opinion on it. I'm not going to play the game. I'm not going to get into camps, shouting on each other as a result of it. I mean, maybe I'm asking for too much from people, but how many, the question I ask is, if you've been doing this for any amount of time, you see news cycles come and go over and over and over again. I mean, it's been like a decade now. And once you've seen the go around enough times, you then start to think, well, what's the point of any of this? What is like nothing ever, nothing ever changes, nothing really ever happens. I mean, I've joked before that, you know, somebody could drop a nuke. And if the result is Piers Morgan and Candy, so in shouting at each other, nothing's really happened. Yes, yes, a nuke was dropped, but also, also, it hasn't really changed anything. You want to say what I'm saying? 100%. And that is where I think people's frustration, people are kind of, I do get the sense that after all this time, people are starting to get a bit fed up. But the actionable point would be, do you need to have an opinion on it? Yes. What would happen if you didn't have an opinion? What would happen if you didn't make the tweet about Sydney's we need today? I think it's an evolutionary void. And what I mean by that is because we're so separated from each other by technology and geolocation as a result these days and because, you know, there is in first world areas, a level of just enough unprecedented comfort. People can go home to their Netflix and they have a roof over the head and they know their food from, you know, wherever the fuck is on the table. You know, there, there is a, there's this malaise that sets in. And so you don't handle things like they did back in the day where you went men went on the battlefield. I'm not saying like this was a great idea or anything. I'm just saying evolutionarily men went on the battlefield to either kill dinner or, you know, run from prey and kill it or run from predator and kill it or battle other men over ground, right? And so now the equivalent, and this is a really sad reality, but in some ways people create the equivalent in my opinion of like, you know, beating the shit out of your enemy or the guy you disagree with in the bar to two people fighting on Pierce Morgan and who destroyed who more. Yes. And it's really, you know, if you were going to look at the masculine and feminine of nature, that would be more towards the feminine right there. And by the way, I'm not, listen, I do intellectual discourse and stuff. Sometimes we, we do argue over points. I'm not saying it's useless. There was always a lane for that. There was always great thinkers that would talk things out, but things got backed up in the real world. Yeah. And now they're, it's just there. It doesn't get backed up in the real world. And that's disappointing. The, the perfect phrase for this was actually outlined by Ted Gisinski. Obviously, I, the unibarmor. Obviously, I disagree with action and all of that. But I think it's a very useful concept, which is surrogate, surrogate activities. What you're talking about, it's a surrogate activity. And politics, I think, has become a surrogate activity for a lot of people where they, where it stands in for all those things that you were just talking about. And also, I mean, and this is ultimately why I'm trying to encourage people to do more stuff locally and in the real world because the closer you can get to that, the closer you can get to activities that are not, are not surrogate. Because it's, you know, I mean, yeah, it's on a much smaller scale. And yes, you're not going to like overthrow the system or, you know, dismantle the military industrial complex or something. But these things are on a scale that are far beyond most of us. So therefore, I mean, I tell you what, I tell you the thing that really made me unplug a little bit more, which was it's actually the Iran war. Okay, now I actually, my, my dad is Iranian. So I have family, I have family over there. So I've probably got most more reason to care about that than most other people. But after I saw the president save for the 10th week in a row, we're going to bomb them back to the stone age. And it's going to, oh, they're losing so much. I mean, after there was 10 cycles of that. And then the other side was saying, oh, well, we've dealt a real blow to this. And that I was like, you know, I kind of, I can't do this anymore. Just like because I felt myself getting sucked back into it all. And I just thought, look, there's nothing anybody can do about this. So let's just kind of, you know, getting dragged into that is for us. Not for the people who've been bombed, don't get me wrong. It's real for them. Yes. But for us, it's a Saraga activity. It's a, it's a, and this is, I mean, I mentioned Bodhury. He wrote a famous book called The Gulf War did not take place, right? Now, what, what he means by that is not that the Gulf War did not really take place. Yes, real people were killed. It, the war actually happened. But it only really happened for those guys who were there and for the people who were involved in it. For us, we were just watching a TV show. He's making, yeah. Right. I remember that film, Wagged the Dog, Dustin Hoffman and Robert Nero, where they kind of, they basically make a war that didn't actually take place. And it was just like a thing. But for all intents and purposes for most of us, we're just kind of, we're just, I mean, it sounds awful to say. Do you remember Q, like the Q and on thing? Yes. That, their whole catch phrase was just sit back and enjoy the show and eat the popcorn, right? Eat the popcorn and enjoy this because the patriots are in control. The white hats are going to save America. You just enjoy the show. Now, programming. Right. In a strange way, though, that messaging was more honest than most because at least they were actually in the right position of, actually, we're just passive consumers of all of this. And that's all we are. Where I think a lot of people have become confused is that because they become aware of thing, because they watch people like me and you on YouTube, that they're part of something, that we're a movement, that we're that we're making a difference, that it's a change that we're involved in real politics or something. But it's not you, you're kind of living in an imagined space that's all up here in exactly the same way that getting caught up in, you know, supporting aside in these big geopolitical battles or whatever else. It's like, it's real, but also you know, I mean, even I hesitate to get into this area, but there's been this big story with Ed Sheeran, right in the past in the past. Oh, we've met or more and all that. Right, now, okay, yeah, there are bad things happening and you can add views on it and all the rest of it. But if you watch the way it all plays out to many of those people, it's not a million miles away from that march we were looking at earlier on. It makes them feel good. It's a surrogate activity, really, that is done as a kind of as a kind of virtue signal. It's not saving lives and it's not and it's not really tangibly doing anything. Okay, other than registering, yeah, look, we see you when we don't approve of what's happening. And I'm not saying, I mean, I don't like what's happened over there either, but it's still this kind of hyper, hyper reality where it's just like, well, yeah, but this, this is kind of, there's nothing to do with anything really, you know, and I mean, I don't really know how on mass we are ever going to get out of what we're talking about. But I do think that those of us who are switched on can do something to pull ourselves out of it. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. You know, you have that Marcus Aurelius thing on the wall out there, that meditation you said, you know, we remind that outside of it. That first line, I think is probably the most empowering thing that anybody can do right now is just to know like, well, you know, it's going to sound bad to say that you're not going to be able to save everyone. Okay. And trust me, I try to get through to people and, you know, eventually there's a point where it's like, well, you just don't want to. You kind of want to stay eating your tasty steak. So it's like, well, that being the case, you then, the next best thing is to like, well, at least I can pull myself out of it. At least you can pull yourself out of it. And, you know, maybe we can have like a society that you wake people or something like that, you know. Yeah. You can't, you can't help others until you have your own house in order for sure. And to your point, you can't help everyone, especially those who don't want to be helped. It's a really shitty thing. But, you know, you put in the efforts you can. And if someone doesn't want to, doesn't want to change or doesn't want to see things one way, that's, that's just kind of what it is. There's, there's a great fake Keanu Reeves quote. I really wish he'd just say it one time. So I could say it's a real quote where he said, I'm at a point in, and by fake, I mean, you know, it's like a meme where they said, Keanu Reeves said this, but he did not. So Keanu said, I'm at a point in my life where someone tells me the two plus two equals five. That sounds awesome. Have a great day. I just don't care. You know what I mean? Like I'm not going to sit here and fight it with you. And there's sometimes where I have to step back, especially when I'm doing this every day and whatever it were, you know, something might be so clear and like you got all the evidence on your side. And there is just still a large subset of people. Maybe it's not 40%. But, you know, 20% of people, whatever it is, who no matter what you tell them, they're not going to see it that way. And you just got to accept that and be like, all right, so what I got to say, moving on. And it's hard sometimes, but it's the truth. Yeah, I think acceptance is a great word. If you can not just not just in that, but in every in every bit of life, if you can be accepting of, you know, it's just easy. Like because there's a limit to what you personally can do, the limit to your sphere of power, if you want, if you want to throw that way. Because the only real thing that you've got power over is, gives yourself your thoughts. So, yeah. How did you get into being a philosopher and thinking all these things and breaking things down? What was the pathway here? Well, first of all, I would like to, I would not like to think I'm a philosopher. Philosopher would be too, too grandiose, I think. I think about politics and power and I think about culture and things like that. I started off as a Shakespeare scholar. In fact, I wrote five books on Shakespeare. But if you know anything about modern Shakespeare studies, it's been somewhat obsessed with politics and power since about the early 80s. So, I wrote my. Why is that? Well, there was a whole period where literature kind of literary studies became very politically quite quite. It became quite artistic, as they call it, became politically disengaged and studied formalism and structure and language and things like that. Mainly during the Cold War, obviously, if you were in Russia, it's kind of a limit on what you could say if you're in the Soviet Union. So, they were like, well, we'll look at structure and form for a while. And if you're in the West, a lot of. I mean, frankly, a lot of literary scholars as Marxists and always have been, but during the Cold War, it kind of didn't want to get into too much stuff. It could get into trouble, especially during, you know, 50s and 60s and red scaring, all that sort of stuff. So, it's like, well, let's talk about structure and form for a while as well with language. That stopped being the case in the late 70s and they started reading people like Michel Foucault and Marx is called Louis Altersere and Antonio Gramsci and all these sorts of people. And Shakespeare became, because he's the most bread writer, because he tends to become the site on which you get these kind of big battlegrounds playing out in literary studies. And Shakespeare's plays became the site of kind of these studies on power and containment and subversion and all of these. Many of the topics we've been talking about that first of all, it was like, well, what Shakespeare really up to in these plays is he on the side of power or is he on the side of us, the people, all this sort of stuff. But really, they were also, if you can imagine, they're talking about a Shakespeare play, but also they're secretly talking about now as well. They're talking about early modern Britain, but they're also talking about Britain now or America now, right? And my first two books were about this movement, the Historicism, Culture, Materials and that were very interesting in these questions of power. But I was really interested in the ideas first and foremost and in the literature second. I mean, I love. Don't get me wrong, I love Shakespeare, I think he's a great writer and all the rest of it, you should reach Shakespeare. But I was always much more interested in how is it that these things work? And also, is it true? Which is a question that not many people in the Academy like to ask, because a lot of the time they just regurgitate, they never stop and all, is this actually a true description of reality? Is this actually how power functions, for example? So I was always kind of inquisitive like that and curious. And if you think about it, it's only really a short step from those sorts of questions to things like elite theory and. Sure. Various other topics that I got into as well. Am I understanding this correctly, though, that when you first said, I'm going to go look at this more because I'm interested in it, you were interested in it, maybe from like an art form. And then as you actually learned about it, you realized all the lower depths, the layers to it and the application. One of the things that really interested me was all of these kind of French Marxists and postmodernists, they were great at breaking down how power functioned and they were great at explaining how kind of ideology works to brainwash people and all the rest of it. But they basically just. I mean, because of the time they were writing, the thing they were breaking down was, you know, like 1950s conservative America, for example, or, you know, Britain as it was back then or France as it was back then, okay, which is a very different world to the world that we now know. What interest in me is that so many of my colleagues and whatnot didn't carry the theory forward. So it's like it was frozen, always going, well, we're going to deconstruct the patriarchy again. We're going to give 1950s America a kicking again. We're going to take it to the man, the man being the man from 1950 again. So when I was teaching this stuff, I was always interested in, well, okay, then 1950s, what about power now? So when I used to when I used to teach this material to students, I would say, I wouldn't give them like a parenting guide from 1950, I'd say let's look at Vogue magazine now. And I could tell that they weren't comfortable. I could tell that the students were like, shit, we're actually coming up against actual part weekends. And what was interesting is that obviously Vogue magazine comes after all this stuff has already been done. It's already been decolonized. It's already kind of woke. It's already has all this sort of stuff. But those things, I mean, at that point, had become like the official ideology that this was the power. Yes. So this is really something that puzzled me at the time and still puzzled me now. You know, I mentioned Michel Foucault. Michel Foucault was somebody who questioned everything. And he was very interested in how science was used. The intersection of science and power and the intersections of things like the medical establishment or the clinic or the mental asylum. And how power uses those things to demarcate what's normal and what's not and uses it to manage the people. Now, I watched people who are literally Foucault scholars, literally have spent their whole life studying this stuff. During COVID-19, the most beautiful, the most-- I mean, how is this happening? They're like, how can you have this set of tools and not apply them to now, or this power structure, or to Tony Blair, or to anything? And this is one of the great-- I mean, I don't know if it's cowardice, or I don't know if it's just a lack of intelligence or what, but-- Could be both. They so often don't carry it forward and ask all these sorts of questions. So one of the tragedies, in my opinion, is that all of these interesting thinkers, so like then, if you're on the right side of politics, you then like, well, Michel Foucault. And then he'll be like, well, he's one of the horrible leftists. He was a pedophile. He was this. He was that. Or, oh, that's a Marxist. That's dirty, or whatever. So they just kind of write that they're just like-- they write off those things entirely. When the tools that they provide are actually very useful for uncovering what's happened-- Yes. In society now, like I mentioned, for example, the intersection of the psychiatry or mental health and power. I mean, we live in an age of therapy of where everybody's encouraged to go to therapy. There's this book called the DSM-5 that literally demarcates between neurotypical people and neuroquote and quote-unquote divergent people. I mean, all this stuff is happening in broad daylight. And the people who should be drawing attention to these things, are its biggest cheerleaders. So I find it really sinister, but also baffling. So one of the things that motivated me and also got me into trouble, I should say, is my willingness to turn these tools back on society as it is now, rather than being safely back in the 1950s or 1960s, which you'd hope that the modern left-- I mean, not all, I should say, the left. The vast majority of them don't. But there are honest people on every side of the political spectrum, I would say, who do good work regardless of where they're coming from. But in general, they tend to be as people fall into orthodoxies. So these thinkers I'm talking about, what kind of inherited as a kind of new orthodoxy. And their analysis remained frozen in a particular period of time. So yeah, that basically explains how I'm sitting here, essentially. And there's one thing in there you and I talked before, where some people did you really wrong, and then you were able to get a very nice legal settlement. So we're going to stay away from that. But it's a good story. I wish you guys could hear that. But it makes sense. It's clocking what you're saying. And I think you're also getting towards another concept that I've seen this talked about as a pattern before. And then I've seen it kind of play out, and it makes sense. What I don't want to do is over generalize and say it's all of them or anything. But a common pattern that was pointed out to me maybe like six, seven years ago is that very often times great historians, like people who are objectively really good on digging up the past and giving you as best they can what happened. They fall into this intellectual trap where because they study the history so well, they make themselves believe that they can predict the future perfectly. And you know, some people say like history doesn't repeat it rhymes. You know, how does it work? But very often what ends up happening without them realizing it is they get so cognitively confident that they end up changing patterns to predict the future. And that's not what it is. So your point about making your students look at things that are happening now to then compare to the past and try to find where things are different and the same. That seems like a way better approach because it almost it puts sunlight as a disinfectant right away. So you can just judge something now before you try to actually make that make that leap, if you will. The guys who really famously did a great job on not on just lifting it and not changing anything where the guys wrote the fourth turning. Right. Yeah. I write that book. Yeah. You know, they just say, okay, this is a pattern. We are not going to inject our opinions into this. We're just going to be like, this pattern has happened put it right there. That means this could happen. Take it or leave it. I wish more historians would do that. Yeah, very, very interesting. Yeah, I mean, the thing you meant, you know, we were talking about countergangs that you're on. You know, one of the interesting things I'm thinking back to that little episode that you were talking about is a BLM. Do you remember that was I remember a while, right, some of the summer of love, but I was I was I was not. I mean, all of that stuff happened really because I wasn't I wasn't. Oh, you weren't afraid. I wasn't a fan. I wasn't willing to go along with what was happening at the time, which is that shocking. Right. But I now think that the BLM, and in fact, I thought it, I thought it briefly after the time as well. Everybody was freaking out. I think it's going to be a revolution here. Looking back, I think they were countergang as well. I think that they were I think that they were kind of laid on in a way. And one of the things I would do differently now is I now know better than to have been caught up in reacting to that. Because in a way, it was kind of a little trap. It was a kind of a little, a little kind of and in the same way that they are countergang. Some of the opposition to them also, I mean, remember the proud boys remember that. They were, they're also probably a countergang. Some of them worked at the FBI. They still had deaths there. And so it's like, I mean, we were talking about theater and pro wrestling and so on. It's like, wait, one of the question is, why is like, how are, why are they setting these countervailing for? Like, how is, why are these things being set in motion, right? Now, everybody back there was saying there's going to be a civil war, it's going to be a civil war. People are polarizing so much. This is currently a narrative in Britain. But I don't, I really don't think there's going to be a civil war. Or I've, I've come to the point where I think many of these things just aren't even real to when you say these things. Like, like, I mean, all of the fuss around that, looking back on it now, I mean, what was six years removed? Did it result in all the things that we were told? I mean, I remember talking to a guy when I was saying that, you know, the regime wants Trump and the Kamala Harris. She's there to lose. She's a jobber. I like that, a jobber. A jobber is that. Is your jobers? I don't, but I think I get it and it's great. Back in the, back in the day in pro wrestling, on TV, they'd never have starvices star. It'd be like, you know, the Legion of Doom, Robo warriors would come out and there'd be two wimpy guys in there. It'd be like, or it'd be like, it's, uh, ultimate warrior versus Chan Jones. And he'd just get his ass kicked and that was his job to just the job, the job. Yeah, he was a jobber. So, and that's what Kamala Harris, I think, was. She was there to, well, she was definitely related, lay on the mat and take the three current. Yeah, but when I was saying all of that stuff, many of my mega friends were like, look, you don't get it, man. When Trump wins, they're going to be out on the streets. It's going to be like the summer of love times 20. You're going to see cities burning. There's going to be a riot. It's going to be, and I'm like, I don't know, anything. None of that stuff happens. - No, no, that stuff happened. - Yeah. - Right? Which tells you, right, that what happened in 2020 was some sort of, like, where were they? Where did, like, what happened to all that? Why were they just cool with, you know, what happened to it all? - They locked everyone inside in 2020 and gave nothing to do, and then they gave them something to man about the reason to go outside. I completely agree. I think it's, I think it's set up. I remember I've told this story before, but it was the Saturday after the election in 2024. So whatever that was, November 8th, 9th, 10th, something like that. And deep, Maddie Farah and me went into the Lower East Side, went out, and we're thinking, like, you know, all right, are people, are they gonna be, like, upset New Yorkers that this guy won? We, I remember it was warm enough that we sat outside. You didn't even see one person walk down the street, like a fentatic, you know, with, like, some random sign. Not one thing. It was calm, peaceful, collected. And we all remember 2016, when he won, that was not the case. Or like, damn, maybe people woke up and don't care that, like, their life depends on one election. Or maybe it's really looking at what you're saying, just a part of the production. - If you, if you understand the principle of the organized minority and the disorganized mass, the way anything happens, anything at all comes down to that organized minority. People do not spontaneously rise up. People do not spontaneously protest. People do not spontaneously do anything. It has to be, it has to be kind of made to happen by organization. And that is true of everything, from something like BLM or PC, PC hat march to, you know, whatever else. It is also, and this is, so people are kind of willing to go with you when you say this about politics, or you say this about a process, or you say this about the army, say, right? I mean, you know, what I say is, imagine you have 100 military men well-trained organized against a thousand random members of the public who wins the military 10 times out of 10 will, you know, the organized minority will beat that disorganized, right? 10 times out of 10, because they know what they're doing. So they're willing to go along with those sorts of things, but then they still want to hold on to every area of life secretly being bottom up. Mass culture, for example, or, you know, what you have to understand is, I mean, the way I've put it before, like, let's say Greta Thunberg. It's Greta Thunberg, an organic kind of figure who's just like spontaneously and heard, okay? I mean, we know because she messed up one time and we kind of saw the, we kind of like, do you remember when she was, I don't know if you remember this episode, but there was like a tweet template that she accidentally posted, so you could kind of see the strings for a little bit. I don't know if you can pull that up. - Yeah, do you find it? - Like this actually happened. - I don't know you. - One of my little catch phrases is, okay, so you accept that with Greta Thunberg. What you don't yet realize is that, it's Greta Thunberg's all the way down. - Yes. - Right, by which I mean, some of you all like sacred cows, let's say, I mean, I talked about the boomers, I talked about the boomer truth regime. Let's say civil rights movement, or Martin Luther King, or that March they had on Washington, where Bob Dylan played blowing in the wind or whatever else, all that stuff, or even the 1960s in general, where you know, when I say the 1960s, most people watching this and probably you yourself are probably thinking Beatles, you know, hippies, flower power, so on and so forth. - JFK. - Right. But how can I put this? All of those things that we think about, when we think about the 1960s, were the massive people making those happen organically? Or did they all start with, oh, there you go, there you go. There's the accident. - I'll come to that one sec, you found it. But did they all start with what? - They all start ultimately with organized minorities. And in the case of civil rights, we actually know now, because they published it in a book and told us that there was a kind of, like a kind of spook adjacent department called the Community Relations Act, with this, sorry, the Community Relations Service, who basically were on hand to man-mayors the way that went. Okay, in other words, there's a reason why it was MLK and not Malcolm X, for example. Right, because, I mean, let's just say there was a chance it was gonna be Malcolm X. Just in case, somebody was there to put their foot on the scales to make sure it went a certain way. - Malcolm X wasn't. This isn't a shot in MLK. - Yeah. - A Malcolm X from an attitude perspective was not controllable. - Right. - Yeah. - So you wouldn't, so if you understand this mechanism, what I'm saying is, what we're told is that the 1960s happened because people kind of on mass revolted against 1950s, conservative America, or they'd had enough of the man, man, or whatever. But in fact, all of that stuff was started with small organized carderas, some of whom had links to the actual government because they wanted it to go a certain way. Right, you can show us how they didn't want it to go to the Malcolm X way. And it also wasn't gonna go the way of, let's just say, you know, old southern Devon Kharats, you know, what do you, racists, et cetera. It wasn't gonna go that way either. It was on a trajectory that was gonna lead to desegregation, which we're encouraged to think of as being a good thing. In fact, if you think about it, people like literary kids at gunpoint being marched into different schools, kind of a weird thing that happened. Right, you're saying that the way that it had to happen was also quite dangerous and odd. But what I'm saying is that this, everything that I'm telling you here, was not a bottom-up people led project. It was an elite project that was led top-down. One of the people I'm very interested in is Edward Benese, so I'm sure you're familiar with, you know, he's famous for making women kind of selling cigarettes to women by calling them freedom sticks. Well, one of the very interesting things in Edward Benese is, you know, they talk about public opinion. Well, public opinion does not really exist. It's basically like a kind of blank canvas for someone like Benese to paint on. Yes. So let's just say there's some change that Edward Benese wants to see. That is not very popular. Now, for most people, you say, well, you're not gonna be able to do this 'cause not enough people agree with you. He wouldn't see that as a barrier. He'd say, well, I'll change your opinion. They will be, in fact, I won't just change their opinion. I'll change their dreams. I'll change the entire incentive structure. And this is, I mean, this is so interesting to me that you can have a look at many case studies. Jazz, for example, was not popular with most Americans when it first entered into. It wasn't like there were loads and millions of jazz fans who there was this massive market demand and therefore the market had to supply it. That's actually quite a lot of resistance to it. But in a very Benese-like manner, the people who had an interest in selling jazz, let's just say, we're not gonna take that as an answer there. We're like, right, well, what are the barriers here for getting people to like this thing? Well, in 1910s, New York, it would have been a guy who was like, well, well, that's in very poor taste. I would rather go and watch a Mozart concert or Carnegie Hall or something like this. Okay, well, it's like, okay, well, how can we change, how can we change that guy's perception of this? So rather than jazz, you put the jazz in Carnegie Hall, you make it aspirational, you make it. And this, so every Benese talks about how people's lives have a lot of invisible dictators Who? and make their tastes, for example, a style of hat comes in or a particular style of clothing or, you know, it's very visible in the fashion world. And somebody might think, oh, well, I really like this particular style and this really defines who I am and so on, but you know, if you know anything about that industry, you know that that idea has been put there and it has been, they have been kind of led. To believe themselves that they've made the decision and that it's their own opinion, but in fact all of those things have been, that's right, put there. So if you can see it in these couple of little areas, you can see how it works overall. To get back to the 1960s, I remember watching a documentary once of people of grumpy old man basically complaining about the 60s, he was called, I hate the 60s. And one of the, one of the guys said, look, you have to understand that the 1960s only took place in one square mile of London in and around Soho in San Francisco and perhaps in New York and LA. We think of Beatles and Summer of Love and Jimmy Hendrix and, you know, Woodstock and all this sort of stuff. How many people was that really? But subsequently, the media has repeated certain iconography, certain meme, certain kind of certain image of what the 1960s were. So often that our memory of that now is that the 1960s was defined by all of those things, whereas the actual reality for most people in the 1960s probably was not that. So I've always been fascinated by the way in which the past is created for us. And then the myths told about that time dictate what we do now and what we think now. You can also do a lot like they didn't have these the iPhones back then in the 60s, but they have cameras, right? And it's the rise to TV. You can do a lot right there instead of right here, you know what I mean? When you get to decide what the what the 1920 by 1080 looks like or 1080 by 1920 looks like. You can pick the piece of the room or the piece of the space that you want people to zone in on like a bullseye whereas when you are actually standing somewhere and peripherally being able to take in 360 degree view, at least if you're facing forward 180 degree view. You can notice more nuance so the power of me and we're seeing that play out in wars now around the world to where the power of media and I'm not getting to the AI and stuff to is dictating reality. In any direction of what you see and the narrative wins the day and it's really just the same thing they've done in the past is have more tools to do it now. So one of the reasons I keep on going back to the 60s is that is that I believe that we have lived our whole lives in what I like to call the boomer truth regime you hear to this phrase. I have heard of this right so I made I mean I made a kind of film six six years ago now it was like a series of short videos I made that I put them together. The boomer truth regime really means that the ultimate the ultimate evil ever in history is Hitler. Okay, and I'm I don't mean to say he was a good guy or anything I'm just saying that in the kind of moral vision that we are. It's the ultimate it's the ultimate bad and the ultimate good is something like individual self expression. So the way I've liked to conceptualize the boomer truth regime is the two figures of Winston Churchill and John Lennon side by side doing doing this. Obviously Churchill was saying a victory and Lennon was saying it the piece and the role of the Winston Churchill in this system basically is to fight Hitler wherever he appears. This is why every enemy of the West since World War II has been Hitler or standing Hitler Stalin was Hitler. Stalin was saying was Hitler now Vladimir Putin is Hitler Iran is Hitler etc makes it binary. Okay, so this is this is the one side of it but the other side of it which is potentially more interesting is the John Lennon side. The in the unlimited individual self expression whereby anything that in any way risks limiting your individual self expression is one step like any let's say I don't know you are. Let's say I want to be a woman okay and I say well look my name Sally now and you all you all have to call me Sally okay and you say I'm not sure about that you kind of look like a man to me okay well you trying to put a limit on my end of my unlimited individual self expression basically means that you're Hitler okay do not go directly to jail do not collect. $200 basically means you're a fascist in because you want to put some limit on what I want to say or do that's right now this Buma truth regime is very interesting when you start to unpick the mechanics of it I mentioned that we all like to think of ourselves as a resistance like Star Wars or all hand solo Luke Skywalker fight fighting the Empire. And if you have a think about 1960s media and every all the media since 1960s it always wants to cast you as the rebel fighting the man. We talked today about containment but to me almost the ultimate containment is the fact that is the fact that everybody kind of buys into this notion that they are a rebel whereas in fact really if you have a look at their lives they are the they are the machine they are just regurgitating what they've been given. The use for the over and over again there was a good in fact I did lecture recently on a guy called Thomas Frank wrote a book in the 90s called the conquest of cool which I reckon I recommend everybody have a look at. And he said look if you have a look at most people from that generation the generation of like who were the hippies who were doing all this doing all this rebellion. They did actually live the 9 to 5 existence they did actually have the 2.4 family and they kind of they actually did become company men in many cases. But it's like well a day I'm a good worker drone but at night I'm a rebel why am I a rebel because I listen to Pink Floyd why am I a rebel because I am you know I listen to rage against the machine or whatever it is okay or rage for the machine as the many people call them now. And this dynamic which is obviously capitalistic in nature is very good at doing kind of foreclosing the possibility because you feel you always feel like you're rebelling because you've expressed yourself. Because you bought a shade of our t-shirt or something like this but in fact all it is is the system selling like modifying and selling back to you your own descend. I think this happened with the left I think the left were. Woke and all this stuff I think that they basically first of all were kind of shunted into. Wokeery from things like was that thing occupied occupied wall street or you know being against the billionaires or whatnot like first of all I think they were kind of nudged that way. And then I think there was more for a lot of corporate pandering to those beliefs because what better way to contain it all because then then you had the absurd scenario of you know like left wingers for Disney or left wingers for. Microsoft or whatever and that process has been easy to watch play out. I think it's now happening on the other side I think that the it's the kind of right the right turn to have their thing commodified and sold back to them. Now what complicates is that the right is just stacked full of grifters from the start so it was like you know Donald Trump was flogging them hats from the very start. But now it's like at the parts of the of the overall thing and you're going to start seeing pandering in that direction as well it's a pendulum. You know, just go to World War II, just start there, you can go. farther, but you get Truman, Eisenhower. JFK, they whack him. Lyndon's in there. You get Nixon. Nixon, they got rid of him. You get Carter. Carter inflated away the whole fucking country. You get eight years of Reagan. And then on the way out the door, he buys four extra years for his intel body, George Bush senior. Then you get eight years of Clinton. Then you get eight years of Bush. Then you get eight years of Obama. Then you get four years of Trump. Then you get four years of, it's just a pencil. They play ping-pong with you over and over again in society. Runs from one side to the other. And that's why the overall 30,000 foot in the view, in the air view of your opinions about the media and containment today. It's, it's actual, it's actually quite literally provable that even if all your individual points aren't provable, your overall point is provable again and again across the decades of how the system works. Because these people, we've also learned that we thought were the top layer, your presidents, your world leaders of, of major countries. They're really, you know, at best the second layer, we're probably the third layer of power. And the structures of power exist above them where they work for the people who work for the people that really say how things go. And that's a really cynical way to look at it. It also happens, I think, to be true. So, you know, I don't know, I don't know where we go from here. But the one thing that could be different, and maybe it's not, but the one thing that could be different now about actually being the rage for the machine people, right? Is that the boomer, what do you call it? The boomer truth regime? Tim Dillon has a great rant on this. They really nailed where he talked about how, and it's hilarious too, why the boomers bought all the propaganda, signing that they bought it. They passively accepted it because they could get the house. They could have the family and not worry where the bills were coming. College was affordable. Yes, they worked a 9 to 5, but it actually was paying into a system that was going to let them retire even if it's fucked the generations below them who are demographically fucked as well, taking care of a way bigger generation than the younger generations for the first time. And so yeah, and they'd hear that, you know, maybe this corruption happened and that, yeah, whatever, they could ignore it because they had the luxury to ignore it. Now, people don't ignore it. The problem is the basic sustenance people are given. I referred to this earlier, but this is where it's kind of coming full circle. Yeah, they can't pay their bills. Yeah, they're miserable because, you know, dating's fucked and less people are getting married. Yeah, they're mad that they can't have kids and they don't feel purpose in life. Yeah, they don't like their job and their fucking gender studies degree. Sure, shit isn't getting them somewhere into some door that could be a better opportunity. Yeah, they're mad that like they're constantly renting and not owning anything. But they go home and they have the roof over their head and they have Netflix. And maybe they jerk themselves off to sleep, right? It's like enough that someone won't go out in the streets over it. What I want, and I don't advocate for like revolution in the streets or whatever, but what I wonder if is if there will actually be a breaking point where people do put this down, put the phone down for 10 minutes and all be like, what the fuck is my life? And there is no hope here. And you know what, that guy's left wing, that guy's right wing, but we can all agree on this and therefore let's do something about it. I don't know if that'll happen, but it's a different, there is a different push than there was in the boomer generation where they had the ultimate get in on the ground floor. Last one's left opportunity. Do you think that there's something there to where it could be different this time? Yeah, it's interesting, very interesting. I don't really know what happens down the line. We joke online about the day of the so-called Day of the Pillow. That's the day that the last boomer leaves us. But it's a kind of interesting question because as much stick as we give them the boomers, they were also able to keep the lights on. Or they have skills and knowledge and expertise of being able to do stuff. But wanted to have a shelf put up or something like that. They're pretty good or fix the engine of my car or something. I sometimes joke that those YouTubers who make how to fix your boiler at home, they're probably keeping the country going. I can't do anything. It's stereotypical, useless academic where I just don't have those basic skills of how to do stuff. I have to hire someone or watch a YouTube video of how to do it. That's one thing that could be a different proposition where, when all those people have gone, will the people who were left be able to keep the show on the road, keep it all running? Genuine question. Yes. I don't really know the answer to that. That's one practical thing. I think you're right that if enough people unplugged and really stopped to think about how they were living and how many things they were addicted to. You mentioned porn. We talk about the media, talk about something that can poison and warp your brain. In a way we're in a system that wants to poison you in many different ways. Stuff they're putting in food, stuff that you can see online. All of it is the same thing. It's a dopamine loop that stops you doing what you were saying there. Coming to waking up. I kind of joke dearly around about the society the week before, but one of the things I think people need to do is put that phone down and then take stock of where they are and what they're able to achieve in their own life. You're so right. I started something when I moved up here. I had a lot of health problems the first four years I was doing this. When I was addressing that, I got some treatment for that and started to get better. I was able to go into a gym again for the first time. I used to live in a gym and I lost everything. I was slowly getting myself back and I was so deep in doing this as I have been for six and a half years, seven days a week that I realized early on and coming back to the gym that I was completely overstimulated. I mean, it was the least self-aware thing ever. I should have known that before I went in there. But what I started doing is in 2024 early on, I said, "I'm going to turn my music down. I'm going to listen with one ear button when I lift every day." By the end of the year, I was lifting without any music in my ears. Furthermore, my phone in the gym is like that. Now it's really like that because I don't even play music when I'm lifting. I play it when I'm on doing cardio and when I'm boxing. But what I started to realize is because I do that literally six days a week. Every time I'm in there and I'm in between sets or in between kettlebells or whatever. I'm looking around and everyone is like this, which is so bad for you, like for your workout and everything. And it honestly as dumb as this sounds and it really is kind of dumb, it took me having one part of my day where I completely step away from this totally for me to notice just how bad it is in society. And so I think it's great advice, but it's hard for people because we are all addicted to this thing. We created that addiction and we've brought into it. Like I was telling you, we were on about the focusing on just eating your food without that was the thing for me. And one of the things I made a point of doing is that when I'm out and about walking, not having that and just looking up, right? Now, even though I drugged about the society, the aware people, I did notice that, okay, most people are just walking along like glutes or bumping into things and things like that. But there are other people who are kind of like looking up as well and you kind of start to like clock each other, you know? And this, I mean, that could be the start of something, you know? Yes. So, you know, and I'd look, I'm not afraid to admit that I am also like a recovering addict to all this stuff and I've been, you know, knee deep in it, for ages as well as anybody who's got a YouTube channel with, you know, certain amount of followers, you know, inevitably, you're going to be enmeshed in it some way. But, yeah, I, if there's one thing I want people to take away from this whole conversation is to the best way to wake up is to start being aware of your immediate surroundings. Yes. Yeah. There's one thing I haven't asked you today that I'm curious. about what do you think of so much of Western society's movement over however many years, the past decades? What do you think the effect of Western society's movement away from God has done to get us to where we are today? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I do think where a lot of this will end up is people finding some sort of spirituality, some sort of spiritual practice. And I, whether it's kind of Christianity or not, I don't know, maybe it will be for lots of people, but for other people, there may be some issues with that. But, you know, I just talked about looking up for centuries, society was oriented around looking up by which I mean the transcendent or the divine or whatever you want to call it. And not just Western society, every different society, you know, whatever they call there, their God or God's, they had some sense of that there was something bigger than us. That's right. Something bigger than us. And in so many respects, a lot of these maladies we've been talking about today are stand-ins for that big hole that has been left, you know, in everyone. So, yeah, I do, and so I do think that, I mean, it will start with waking up, being aware of your surroundings and improving your life and getting the gym and getting fit and all the rest of it. But eventually, I think you do need something, whatever it is and, you know, it could be personal to you. That's one thing I think that may not be able to put, I mean, I've got a lot of friends who are like hardcore Christians or whatever we think that, well, it's going to be, it's going to be that or it's going to be this. So, I've got a friend who are like pagan revivalists. I'm not sure if it's going to be any one particular thing. I think that the individualism part may be kind of a genie that's impossible to put back. But I do think everybody, I say everybody, those of us who are on a certain kind of journey will need something, whatever you call it, to get a sense of, you know, that we're not only is there something bigger than you out there, but also that we're all connected in some ways, you know. Yeah, and however I love how you put that, however you do it personally. That's how I look at it, too. I think a lot of people use organized religion for good and there's a subset percentage that ruins it for everybody. But, you know, most of the people I know use it for a lot of good and gives them peace and whatever that is, go for it. Because I think it also gives you that humbleness you refer to as well. For me, I may not be an organized religion guy myself, but I fully believe this came from something way above me, right? Some sort of creator, maybe it's a mix of the religions, maybe it's something different, but like I don't have a lot of peace in my life, like being very busy, but the one thing I think as a North Star that does help a lot is like, I'm humble in the face of the fact that I better try to do a lot more good than bad while I'm down here, because in some way, I'm going to have to answer for that. And I feel like if more people just did that, just started there, even before all this great advice you gave today on things people should do, there might be a bigger downstream effect in society to where things get a little clear. You know, I do think on that front, I mean, it's almost like a parallel track, but I do notice that there's something happening there as well. I think there is a kind of spiritual thing happening across the board where more people are coming to these sorts of conclusions. It's a slightly different like bit of YouTube, if that makes any sense, but I've seen enough of it to see that they end up seeing a lot of the thing, saying and seeing a lot of the same sort of stuff that we've been talking about today. And there could be some hope there, because it's one of the, I mean, we talked about Marcus Arabia earlier on. One of my favorite films that I watched over and over and over again as a kid was a labyrinth. I used to love David Bowie, I was obsessed with him, but at the end of the labyrinth, Sarah played by Jennifer Conley, probably the Hottest actress all the time, but that's a slightly different topic, but I kind of love her, but at the end of that, she has this moment where she just says you have no power over me, you have no power over me, and that is the thing that breaks the spell in that in that movie. It's just like her. All the things that you, all the grip that she thought she had over her was just up here. And in a way, if people are able to free themselves up here, it kind of almost doesn't matter all the machinations of plans and power structures and all the rest of it. It's like the guy who goes to jail, but he can still meditate and he's still free up here. And in a way, if you see our modern society, like one giant prison, there's nothing to stop you being that guy you still free. And the more people who do that, I think the less power they will have over us all, so. Oh yeah, well Nima, this has been awesome, man. Thank you so much for coming out to America to do this. You have a really, I like the way you look at things. You look at things very deeply and I think pragmatically as well, which is a big help. So we will, as long as you're good with it, we'll collab this on YouTube so people can literally hit the title and you'll see Nima's channel right there and you can subscribe and go see a lot of videos where you're breaking down all different thought leaders from the present in the past. It's really, really good stuff. Thanks for having me. All right. And thanks to Harry Miller for putting you on my radar. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace.