Chapo Trap House - 454 - November Rain (9/14/20)

Episode Date: September 15, 2020

We discuss Biden’s attempt to court the youth vote by assembling the Adventures and fighting the Hungry Games, then read a truly demonic piece on corporate spiritual advisors. Also, of course, Guns N’ Roses 1992 monster power balled hit “November Rain”. Thanks to YouTube user sonnymcs for the joe biden vapor wave track “S C R A N T O N R O O T S”.

Okay, boys. Let's roll. Hey friends, we're back at ya. It's Chapo coming to ya. It's me, Matt and Felix, the original crew. Got my two cousins here. Sort of cousin uncles. You know, like I consider Matt and Felix both cousin and uncle. You know, I sometimes I view them as sort of like wise elder statesmen and other times I view them as sort of like a peer that I can riff and have fun with and just, you know, go to the ball game, play catch, play video games, you know, it's the best of both worlds. They're cousins from a different uncle. The two most sacred relationships you can have. Some days you're the cousin, some days you're the nephew, and some days you're the uncle. You cannot send a nephew

to do an uncle's job. And I was gonna say on days when it's us three together, it's just I feel like we're sort of the holy trinity, cousin, nephew, and uncle together, the triune god. Yes. We are the eastern communion. A trinity like Migos or LMFAO. LMFAO people think it was only two guys, but Barry Gordy was the occulted uncle of that group. Well anyway guys, things are going good. Shout out, well not if you're listening to the show on the west coast. Yeah, tough break there. I'm gonna shake off the show's blatant east coast Midwest bias by just saying to all our friends in California, Oregon, and Washington, please stay safe. I hear rain is coming. But until then, just good luck breathing. And

I hope that the blood sky doesn't envelop you all. Yeah, I've heard it's good news. I've heard it's gonna rain. Bad news. Nickelback tickets. It's gonna be raining. I am a little buried tells me that the fire is going to be put out soon because Gavin Newsom is engaged in a tryst with Smoky the Bear. Another political figure, Gavin Newsom, has stuck his slimy dick into his pubic hairs that have slick back hair similar to him. Do you imagine that he's like his pubes have sort of like a very crisp center part? Yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, they're completely straight. Comed back. I just love that. He's the ex-husband of the insane lady who got gacked up at the RNC and channeled Goebbels for 20 minutes. Just take

a look at California. The Democrats turned it into a land of discarded heroin needles, riots and streets and blackouts and homes. Love it. No, yeah. Like we always say about Governor Gavin. He's fucked the whole team and it's really fucked up that the guy in charge of the fifth biggest economy in the world is named Gavin. Don't like it. We always talk about the bad things that are coming into the future and California is always an insight to that. I mean, you have the ecological disasters, mass homelessness and misery, but also the future is presidents and governors and senators named Gavin, Garrett, shit like that. Jaden. Yeah, Jaden, Taylor. Taylor's of every gender. Oh yeah, California Governor

President Taylor Gender, reigning with an iron fist. Taylor Gender was the sequel to the Taylor Gang. Well, I got a couple of quick hits to kick things off here. Beginning with courtesy of Newsweek, November Rain plays at Trump-Michigan rally despite Axl Rose's quote, disdain for president. Guns N' Roses classic hit November Rain was played at a Trump rally this week and it's apparently a song the president has always wanted on his rally playlist. The 1991 rock anthem was likely played at the packed Donald Trump campaign event in Michigan Thursday without permission from the band as is a common occurrence of music used at such rallies. The president has a track record with using songs without

permission prompting complaints from several artists over the years. Here's where it gets interesting. According to Sarah Huckabee Sanders book, the song, 1991 rock anthem and its famous music video is a favorite of the president's who's asked for it to be played in his rally playlist back in 2018. The former White House press secretary wrote in her book, speaking for myself, faith, freedom and the fight for our lives inside the Trump White House, that Trump told her that the video for November Rain was quote, the greatest music video of all time and made her watch it with him in the Oval Office to prove his point, though she didn't disagree. So there you go. Trump is a fan of the classic song and music video,

November Rain by Guns N' Roses. And as it happens, you know, fairly at least once a day with this thought clock, Trump is right about this. November Rain is possibly the greatest music video of all time. And it's a hell of a song. It's a great song. It's a great video. A lot of our listeners were born, in fact, in 2014 and will not be familiar with this work or the other works of Guns N' Roses. But November Rain is what music videos used to be. Music videos now are, you know, an over sexualized display, a woman dancing in front of a giant sort of prop piece of a pussy or like a guy licking a anthropomorphized penis, things like this, things that have destroyed the

culture that Pap you can and tried to warn us about. But what they used to be is the dumbest people in the world, musicians, trying to make movies. And November Rain is the greatest example about that. November Rain, it's sweeping in its scope. It's like a David Lean emotion picture. You know, you've got the opera house. You've got the little church in the desert. You've got a wedding that goes terribly wrong. And here's my little secret that I'll confess now. I think I was probably 30 before I realized that the concept of the November Rain video and song was not about acid rain. Because I just, for some reason, watching that music video as a kid at the end, when like, okay, like, axle and his

girl get married. And then you see like slash and everybody they're at their wedding reception. And then what happens? The sky opens up and it starts raining. And then there's this scene of people like, you know, like knocking over a cake and like rushing to get under a table and like just like diving back inside. And then the next cut is his wife at an open casket funeral and she's dead. And like I said, I was probably 30 when I realized like the song was not about rain that kills you. You thought it was wait, but you thought it was the movie from Bowfinger that they're trying to make you thought it was chubby rain. Is that what you thought? It's so weird. It was like, okay, like there's a shot at the end

of the video where axle is looking into the open casket at his beautiful bride now dead. And like, I just never realized that like, it looked like half of her face was gone, but I just never picked up on the fact that it was just the shadow being cast by the open casket. And I thought that literally half of her face and body had been melted off by the cold November rain. Well, you know what? You're still learning. And that's true of all of us. Yeah. Yeah, we're all growing. But how good is the is just thinking about Trump in the oval office of the White House

just being like, Sarah, come here, I've got to show you something. And then showing her a nine minute music video and then being like, aren't I right? It's so good. It's great. See, that's the part I don't buy that he would be able to hold his attention for nine minutes on one thing. I mean, he fast forward through blood support for the groin kicks. I don't know if he can make it through an entire music video of that. He's just fast forwarding to the guitar solo where Slash walks out of the opera house and you're like, Oh my God, it's the tiny church in the desert. That's the coolest thing. That's the coolest part of the video because he's so disgusted

by this ceremony. Like, November 8 is great because it doesn't. It's not married to any specific plot or plot point. Like you're generally supposed to believe it's like a bad marriage in some way. And that's evidenced by the fact that his wife dies. You don't want a wife that dies on you. That's a defective wife. And maybe that's what Slash is mourning about. Yeah. You got a bum wife. She died like a month after your marriage. Good work, pal. You always got to always got it. It's like buying fruit at the supermarket. Always got to check that you got the right one. But being so disgusted by your friend's wedding that you're like,

I'm leaving to go play guitar. That was, I always thought that part was fucking sick. But is it implied that Axel or yeah, Axel kills her because there's a part where he's wandering around. There's like a, he, he, you see like a neon sign flash up that is selling guns. Does he kill her because he's cheating on him or like, See, I always assumed that she got killed by the meatloaf Dracula from the anything for love video. That was it. That was not a meatloaf Dracula. That was a meatloaf beast from beauty and the beast. See now there you go. I assumed he was a fucking vampire. There's a line

about holy water in that song. She goes, would you host me down with holy water? If you, I get too hot Dracula folks, she's a drag. I mean, I could be, I could be wrong too. I could have been totally misinterpreting the meatloaf. Yeah. Yeah. I know Mr. Mr. Chubby Rain over here is going to tell me that that's the beast and not a Dracula foe out of here. I just remember that video being very horny. I remember getting. Oh, it was wildly horny. I got very, I got very turnt up watching that as a kid. Yeah. No, I was feeling some kind of way. They, there could never be another meatloaf now. Oh, no. Just like a fat 45 year old white guy who sings like sort of like white guy soul. That was what America was actually

more accepting back then. It was. And think about like that song. That's the song Paradise by the dashboard light. That is a staple, right? That's not every jukebox. It's if they play it like every week at every, at least once a day, like classic rock stations. It's like a 10 minute long song that starts with a, like a Phil Rizzuto play by play. It's an insane thing. And it's, and we, we would say, yeah, this is cool. The fat, the fat yelling, a hillbilly guy. We love him. Did you know that Phil Rizzuto got very angry at his inclusion in that song because he was too risque? Yeah. It was like falsely advertised to him where he was, they were just like, Hey, could you just do a play by play to open

this song? And that's clearly about fucking in the back of a car. And he was, I'm sorry. I did that guy hang out with Mickey Mantle and shit. Get out of here. Yeah. Mickey Mantle, Mickey Mantle. That's what a pussy gatherer used to be like. He used to be a guy, a guy with like a head of hair that kind of looked like a casserole, like the pastry part of a casserole, just one big brown mass to represent the brown meals he ate. His face that was shiny at all times, but not because he moisturized a solemn pill head who was just. What happened to men? What happened to men? Girls used to go. Girls used to go for the guy with the biggest liver. You could see Mickey Mantle's liver through his torso, through

his upper body. You could see that's how big it was. You could see his liver throbbing underneath the front panel of the fucking twill pants that he has pulled up to his nipples. Yeah. Pants used to be way higher. Men used to be way shinier. A lot used to be like athletes used to be fatter and weaker. It was a better time. And crucially, music videos used to be like sort of like a really high effort, high budget mini, mini motion pictures. And I think we need to go back to that. Yeah. The WAP of its day was Paula Abdul's. Oh, the MC Scatcat. Yeah. Oh, man. That was the Who Framed Roger Rabbit of videos, you know, and like it probably made it made a

whole generation of women horny for animated cats. Well, that is actually what sounded sort of a lot of the downfall of the West. If you look at declining birth rates, women started to believe that they could cohabitate with cats as romantic partners after seeing just one exceptional cat who could not just speak English, but also perform hip hop ballads. But that was the most technologically interesting thing you could do at the time was combine animation in real life. I would just really like it. If I remember getting insanely horny for obviously Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but let us not forget Cool World. Oh, Cool World. Oh my God. That was a very

early sexual experience for me. Animated Kim Basinger. Yes. Yeah. I had cartoon steam coming out of my collar watching that. See, so like, so this Newsweek article would seem to suggest that Trump is a music video fan. He, you know, he liked, he, he, he pines for the days of total request live, you know, and that he's incorporating these into his big, you know, campaign COVID rallies and his super spreader events. And I'm just, I'm hoping that he is just like he's like Jared Kamiro. I have to show you this. It's a music video. It's for virtual insanity by Jamira Kwai. Look at him. He's dancing and the, it's like the floor is moving. How does it do it?

And then they could make some sort of like, um, like moving floor apparatus for Trump at one of his rallies where he can, he can get out and sort of strut his stuff a little bit. Like, or it's just rather, so it'll prevent him from, from walking to a podium or up and down stairs. It'll just be some sort of moving floor, like at an airport that just sort of shuffles him around a stage full of people. I feel like he would have the same criticism of the Jamira Kwai system that he has, the curious criticism he has of like showers and dishwashers, where he talks about how like now, now rooms have a problem where everything moves around too much.

Room needs to be stationary. I'm trying to stand there and all of a sudden the table, it's over there. What's going on? I guess if you showed him that Jamira Kwai video, he would be genuinely stunned by it. He would be very stunned, petrified and maybe angry. He would be mad about it. He'd be like, well, what, who's doing this? Yeah. He would, he would act like someone is purposely playing a trick on him to make him seem like a fool. Yeah. All right. Well, here's a, it's another quick Trump hit. This is, this is just another one of his brilliant tweets. And this one, he is a, this is just courtesy of the hill, the

headline, Trump, Drudge no longer quote, hot. And you know, we like, this harkens back to like the, the, the, one of our favorite tweets of all time, the, the, the, the, the great and Carter's Oscar parties are no longer hot. But you know, Trump is, is, is taken over from us weekly in terms of delineating, you know, what is hot and not in American culture. And unfortunately for Matt Drudge, he is no longer hot. He, he quotes, we did a, someone saying that in case you missed it, Drudge's historic crash hits rock bottom numbers from turbulent August tank. And Trump replies to that, such an honor, Drudge is down by 40% since he became fake news. Most importantly, he's bleeding profusely and is no longer hot,

but others are lost all Trumpers. So I just like the idea of Matt Drudge actually physically profusely bleeding on the street and Trump just stepping over him and going, no longer hot Matt, sorry. He loves doing that. Well, I feel like with that one, he's consciously playing the hits because he just doesn't have the same swag anymore. Like after, after that horribly boring RNC that was entirely about like tax credits and stupid bullshit like that, that like Mitt Romney RNCs were about, he's, I think he's self-conscious. Like he's not the guy who was in 2016. He's also experiencing

mental decline and he's doing the part of the president job he hates right now. I think he knows how much people love that no longer hot tweet. And he's just, he's trying, he's, he's sort of, hey, remember that? Remember when I was cool like that? And I wasn't just like the bad president. Pretty fun. Well, I think like the, Drudge has sort of backed away from Trump and I'm sure that accounts for a lot of his slide because there are just so many other more deranged news sources than Matt Drudge since he first started. And you know, it's like, like I said, people need, people need a harder dose to fucking lift off and Matt Drudge just isn't doing it anymore.

But the recent thing was that Drudge is playing up the Woodward tapes and revelations about Trump's, you know, lying about coronavirus. And I like, that's what he's, that's what he's getting angry about. And like, and that's why people are abandoning Drudge. And that's why he's fake news now. And you know, we talked the last time about the Atlantic piece about Trump calling the soldiers losers and suckers. And then just like this week, it was like, you know, the next big sort of like bombshell reporting is that, you know, Woodward, Bob Woodward has Trump on tape saying in what in January or February that the coronavirus is five times deadlier than the common flu. And it's like a serious thing. And then he's

all, but he's also self consciously downplaying it. And then like, you know, just straight up lying about, you know, this pandemic that's killed 200,000 people. I mean, I'm wondering, I mean, like the, the loser sucker gate as we correctly predicted has gone nowhere. That's people have already forgotten about that. I feel like the Woodward tape thing may have a little bit more purchase because it does deal with things that like directly affect people's lives. And just in terms of speaking about like, you know, directly contradicting himself about the severity of this pandemic. But like, when I say it has more purchase, I don't think that that'll mean it'll, you know, it'll be like any kind of game changer

or anything like that. No, no, it's, it's, I think the main thing that will stop after happening is that most people who aren't totally wrapped up in some Democratic Party fantasy don't really think that there's any alternative to what we got. And that's a realistic analysis, you know, like there's no, there's no turn we could have taken to end up not where we are because we don't have the capacity. Well, moving on, as we, as we often do, I'd like to, I'd like to turn now to the Biden side of this presidential election. And I have a, I have two news articles here that

both deal with the same subject. And that is the Biden campaigns attempts to reach out to youth voters and how to court that elusive youth vote. And the first article comes courtesy of the Washington Post. The headline is, Biden campaign pulls out all the stops to woo young voters. The campaign is positioning Biden as the empathetic candidate who can help generation Z and millennial voters struggling amid the pandemic and racial reckoning. It begins like this, Joe Biden upon first meeting his current campaign pollster, John De La Volpe at a gala dinner in 2018, started taking notes from their conversation about the student debt crisis and gun violence on the back of a name placard at a table between

speeches honoring former Secretary of State Colin Powell. That's just the, that's the first paragraph of this piece about Biden and his attempt to woo Gen Z and millennial voters. And it begins with like the, the, the moment of Genesis is him writing notes on the back of a name placard at a gala event honoring Colin Powell. So you can take a guess at the rest of this fucking piece goes, I mean, yeah, I guess, uh, I'm the only one who's familiar with the Colin Powell challenge. Currently sweeping TikTok. Okay. So it says here, Biden made it clear that the issues facing young people were deeply

personal to him well before he announced his run for president. Now, I'm sorry, didn't Biden famously say that he thinks young people are entitled winers before he went for president? With quote, no empathy for them. And so the younger generation now tells me how tough things are. Give me a break. No, no, I have no empathy for it. Give me a break because here's the deal guys. We decided we were going to change the world and we did. Oh yeah. No, he literally said they didn't have to deal with maybe getting polio as a child.

Yeah. They never had to deal with bike chain gangs at the, the local swimming hall. Um, but yeah, no, he, yeah, that was his quote. I quote, no empathy for them. And let's see where this, this article goes. So he says here, um, well before he announced his run for president said Della Volpe, who last month took leave as director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics to start officially advising the Biden campaign on the youth vote. Biden spoke about helping pay off student loans taken on by his youngest daughter, Ashley, now 39 as quote, the kinds of things you do for your kids. Della Volpe said,

Okay, first, okay. Here's my main takeaway. We're burying the lead here. Joe Biden did more for the insurance and financial industry than almost any single senator and his daughter still had to take out student loans. Like you are a cock. Yeah. He did. He did it for like a fucking toaster oven with the bank logo on it. Yeah. Yeah. I may have, I may have like ruined everyone's lives, but I got this windbreaker. Yeah. My daughter's still in debt. Yeah. What's up, man? When I, when I hear shit like that, Felix, I remember reading an article about Gerard de Pardeux where he brags about how Vladimir Putin gave him an oil well in Cuba as a gift.

Yeah. No. Like, I, yeah, think, think about just your average, like your average, like Cook County politician, like an older man or someone, if they're corrupt in the right way, their grandkids aren't taking at student loans. They're set for life. And this motherfucker was one of the most powerful men in America for like 40 years. And he's like, Oh yeah. Um, what do I have to show for it? Uh, I, I'm, I'm known at every Hertz rent a car. They keep a Ford escape for me on wherever I go in America. I have a, I have a reserved seat at the dining car on the Wilmington to DC Amtrak. Yeah. Think about what the average Bush guy got away with. They just, yeah. Like, God

damn, I mean, I guess you can really say he's just in it for the love of the game. Yeah. I know he just loves deregulating shit. He loves having guys in way more expensive suits than him. Clap him on the back and tell him he did a good job. You know what he is? He's the sons of anarchy of new liberal. Yes. He is like, he is the guy who gets 10 million people. Yeah. 10 million people killed so he could get like, yeah, a currig. Oh God. Um, all right. So it goes here. Uh, yeah. Keep in mind that the earlier Joe Biden quote about how he has quote, no empathy for young people. So it says here, um, as the

candidates of compassion, they seek to woo socially conscious millennials and Gen Z voters amid dual crises, the coronavirus pandemic and the national reckoning on race. The empathy these generations have for other often voiceless Americans. That's the same empathy Biden has said Della Volpe who jumped on Biden's polling team as it expands in the final months. The campaign is betting that young voters hit hardest by the economic crisis as the novel coronavirus derails life on college campuses and job prospects for many recent graduates will identify with Biden's personal story once they get to know him. It's powerful when young voters understand his story, his empathy and how the challenges and trauma in his life

have shaped his political views. All of that makes him a genuinely kind person, but it has much more meaning in a political context, especially with younger people who remind me that they are living through two recessions and in a dystopia at the same time. So yeah, if it's just if young people get to know the Joe we do, I mean, I remember like, I mean, this is, this is a big fixture of the DNC was playing up. Um, yeah, this guy's had tragedy in his life and that makes him a nicer, better person. But this reminds me more of the tone at the RNC where they were just like, yeah, forget everything you see on TV or his past record of, you know, 40 years in public policy. If you were just in the room with Joe Biden,

you know, you would connect with him. You would connect your story with the power of his story. And, you know, that's great. That's really wonderful. If you get to have him show up at the funeral for one of your dead relatives, but most of us won't have that ability. Although who knows, we'll see how fucking Corona takes, uh, takes hold in the second term, in his term. This is your Biden who at 77 would be the oldest American president ever elected has boosted his standing among millennials and Gen Z voters since he clinched the Democratic

nomination and was embraced by his more liberal rivals, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Uh, though a recent CNN poll showed Biden leading Trump by over 20 points with voters younger than 34, his campaign is still struggling to excite the youngest Americans. Uh, they're also less certain to vote for Biden than older supporters. The same poll found 61% of Biden supporters and under 40 saying that they were absolutely certain to vote compared with 85% of those over 65. The campaign has worked hard to boost Biden's favorability among young voters. The August Washington Post ABC poll from just the party, just before the party convention found Biden at a split 49% favorable to 49% unfavorable

among adults age 18 to 29. Campaign advisors point to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which ignited mass protests and police brutality and racism across the country as an inflection point for the candidate. Biden's plan to address racial profiling and law enforcement still far fall short for some young activists who have been critical of the candidate for not supporting key demands from the black lives matter movement. But Trump's pro law enforcement positions seem to have sharpened Biden's standing as the lesser of two evils, even among the more ardent young leftists who have resisted supporting a candidate whose decades long career includes working closely with police groups to craft the 1994 crime bill. This

is a, this is, there is a global pandemic that has disproportionately affected young people, but George Floyd was really American voters specifically saying enough said Simone Sanders, a top Biden advisor who worked for Bernie Sanders in 2016. Um, it's just going on here. It says Biden needs to do a better job of reaching these voters where they are and connect the most progressive parts of the campaign platform to Generation Z said Colton Hess, the founder of talk, the vote, a tick tock creator led coalition to mobilize young voters. Hell yeah, because he's all over a show. Yeah, no one, no one votes like 15 year olds because they don't have a clear picture of Biden and who he is and what he

stands for. They were young during the Obama presidency and don't know a lot about him, but they are missing a lot of pieces of the puzzle about how Biden does have one of the most progressive platforms of all time. Uh, you will go on in this article and they don't actually state any of the reasons he does have the most progressive platform of all time. And I just love this idea that like, yeah, they were too young during the Obama administration, but if they only knew he was part of it, they would warmly embrace Joe Biden like that. There's, there's still some missing pieces out there that are leading young people to have some sort of incomplete picture of Joe Biden. But it's this idea that

like once his story is more widely known and that we connect them through, you know, tick tock or whatever, that like all these pieces will just fall into the place and it's never just like, oh, maybe younger voters do actually have a very accurate perception of who Joe Biden is and what he represents and it's just not doing it for them. Because again, nowhere in this article are something like, nowhere in this article are the words Medicare for all green new deal or like total student debt relief ever mentioned. There is no policy in here whatsoever. But you're forgetting three more words. Four words, Harry. Joe Biden, Fortnite skin.

That would be pretty tight. He can't equip weapons and he just kind of bumps into trees over and over again. There should be, um, there should actually be like a Joe Biden telltale games, like a point and click adventure where it should be like a Cthulhu game where you have a sanity meter, but it's like a sundown meter and the closer you get to eight o'clock, the less coherent you are and your screen gets dimmer and everyone's faces, which like you're talking, you're talking to Samantha Power, but her face like starts morphing into Tip O'Neill and you think you're in 1987 again. That would be a cool game.

Yeah. Just total disorientation, just time and space become completely liquid. Well, that's okay. Like again, like the Republicans are lucky. We're not them strategists because Joe Biden could be the greatest candidate for young people because young people love dissociating. That's true. Young people love ketamine and depersonalizing and totally dissociating and having mental breakdowns. And if Joe Biden, like instead of being like, uh, I can do an IQ test with you right now, or like, I dare you to take a cocaine test, like respond to it with anger

and not even dignifying if he was like, yeah, I'm bisexual and I'm mentally ill. I'm a bisexual woman with mental health issues. I'm dissociating right now. Like every, like the TikTok demographic would actually vote for him, but because like the guys, all the guys that are working for him that are like, I know what young people like because I am one and they're all 39, like this is going to be, yeah, Joe Biden's going to eat the Travis Scott burger. You need paper wave Joe Biden. This is clearly the root. Yeah, exactly. He's a bisexual one with mental mental illness.

Just Joe Biden pulling up to Burger King and campaign stuff. Like, uh, I'm told the cactus fella sent me here. Give me one of them. Give me one of those cactus burgers. Listen, man. Listen, man, I remember those summers in Delaware. I got bangs cause I had a mental breakdown. Uh, yeah, no, the, uh, the founder of talk the votes says that teens today are all about that slime life and being with their slimes. We just got to get Joe Biden. He's got, he's got to slime some kids. Yeah. Come on, man. Chris Dodd's one of my oldest slimes.

Who are you kidding? Well, I mean, yeah, you, you get, I mean, I don't need to read anymore from that Washington post article. I mean, it's just like, it's, they're running up, they're running straight into the fact that like just like in 2016, like young people are thoroughly ambivalent about Joe Biden versus Donald Trump, or it's like basically split evenly between favorability and unfavorability. And you know, like you would think as Democrats, they just view anyone under the age of 40 as they're like their natural province or like they're, they have a right to their vote so that they, and you know, they're running into the fact that, I mean, as we said, ad nauseam on this show, there is nothing there.

They're not offering people anything. They're not even pretending to lie about the shit that young people actually want. They're just saying, oh, we're going to get some, some celebrities to Joe on Tik Tok or we're going to tell his story better. The generation now tells me how tough things are. Give me a break. No. I have no epithet. Went to the big guys for the money. I need to prostitute myself and the man, the man in which I talk about it. But what happened was they said, come back when you're 40, son. So I had to go out. This next article brings it even to, even into starker relief. It says, this is courtesy of the Atlantic. The headline is, is this

the secret to selling Joe Biden? And it profiles a lot of the same guy, Ben Wessel, who's also in the Washington Post article. It says here, Ben Wessel was nervous. Joe Biden had just won the Democratic nomination and the youth focused super PAC Wessel runs next gen America had to figure out how to persuade the generation of Tik Tok and trigger warnings to turn out to vote for a 77 year old man best known for record players and malarkey's. They're doing these focus groups to, to pull Biden's enthusiasm problem among young people. In the words of one Hispanic Gen Z participant, I honestly don't know enough about Biden to really form an opinion. Some of the messages Bowman tried on the group didn't perform

very well. For instance, participants didn't like being told that Trump is so bad, they simply must vote for Biden, even if they don't particularly want to. They needed positive reasons to do it, Bowman told me. The you must stop Trump strategy didn't work. Gee, I wonder if that message, I mean, I'm sure they paid this next gen consulting morons to come up with a ship. But like, do you think there's any chance that that message will fucking saturate any of these morons who like are doubling down on just that exact strategy for hectoring young people? No, because it's like, I mean, the point of that really isn't to get people to vote.

I mean, it works well enough on like Xers and shit like that and people who already don't have to be sold it. But that is more just to, it's more just to like, preach to the choir and make it and sort of paint non voters as a broad brush that they're privileged and that they themselves won't bear the brunt of the Trump administration's excesses, even though like, you know, non voters are usually people who rightfully feel checked out and ignored by the political process. I don't think that's ever been like a cudgel to get people to do things as much as it is is cope for Democrats themselves. That's it. It's what I told themselves. But the thing is, they're already bought in. They've

already made the devil's bargain that they're going to vote for Democrats because they've decided that being realistic means that they have sacrificed any hope to break out of this. And that's this is the best we can ever hope for. And so the way that they can imbue that with any kind of meaning beyond, you know, just a grim pragmatism that then eventually turns into nihilism when you see how insufficient the Democratic Party is to doing anything to deal with any of the manifold fucking disasters were currently in the middle of the only way to stave off total nihilism is to convince yourself that the alternative is so horrifying that you have to do what you're doing. But that only works if you're already on board.

If you're an on voter who does not have that kind of weird ritualized visceral association with voting as like as a expression of their personal virtue, like liberals do, they don't fucking care. And also, I think I think a lot of these guys, these sort of Democrat consultant types, I mean, it's just sort of they're filtering as these people do, you know, as human beings tend to do, they're filtering these responses and the things that they're looking for through their own perception. And I think the thing that they haven't really grappled with is they're like, oh, they just don't remember the Obama presidency enough. And they need

to know that Joe was there too. And I don't think these people have grappled with the fact that if you're talking about like young people turning off from politics and like in large numbers or just not really seeing any hope and voting or any difference between the two parties, I mean, the Obama presidency was probably like the biggest driver of that like that level of disillusionment and alienation imaginable. And it's like, hey kids, remember when your mom woke you up in the middle of the night and she had to take all your stuff and put it in a couple of trash bags because the sheriff was coming to kick you out of your house? That was Joe Biden.

Yeah, what did yeah, what is, do they ever say the thing that Joe Biden supposedly did during Obama that young people are supposed to like? Or is it just onion articles where he was epic? Yeah, exactly, exactly. All right, well, here's what they get into with the strategy that does work. And this is pretty exceptional. The message that did work would spring from Wessel's mind, but he doesn't remember exactly how it came to him. Wessel had been talking to Gretchen Barton, a researcher at Olsen Zaltman, a firm that studies what makes consumers and voters tick. Barton told him about a study she did of young voters. These voters she

found had a rebellious hope in the face of overwhelming odds. When asked to describe what voting felt like. Oh God, take care of that. Yeah, get rid of that. Pressing against the Simpsons, pressing the independent thought alarm. When asked to describe what voting felt like, one participant imagined Katniss Everdeen from the Hunger Games franchise. I feel like we're living in this kind of dystopia where elites are using us as pawns for their own benefit and people at the bottom are suffering, the participant told Barton and her colleagues. I identify with Katniss trying to give the people in my community a little more dignity and love and trying to make the world a better

place. I feel like voting is an expression of this. Wessel thought back to the image of Katniss, a heroic underdog trying to defeat evil. I mean, the evil that she's trying to defeat is you, Ben Wessel. It's the residents of Central City that she's trying to put an arrow through. Yes. He thought about how millennials had been kicked in the butt by 9-11, Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq War, the Great Recession, and the pandemic and current economic collapse. I mean, like four of those six things are like directly attributable to Joe Biden in one way or another. He thought about how though many of the young people he knew liked Sanders

better than Biden, others preferred Andrew Yang or Warren or Beto O'Rourke. It was pretty all over the place, he said. There wasn't just one person they expected to swoop in and save them. Ah, but here he came up with what next gen calls the Democratic Avengers after the Marvel movie featuring an ensemble of superheroes. The idea is that by voting for Biden, you're voting not just for him, you're voting for all of the Democrats. Many of them cool and hip that Biden will have in his orbit. Biden might borrow policies from Warren, for example, or have Sanders as an advisor. If he's elected, it won't just be Joe Biden, this message reads, Biden has pledged to build an administration filled

with progressive leaders, experts, and activists from inside and outside the world of politics. I mean, they're not going to bother lying about supporting even the Green New Deal, even in principle, but what they will lie about is like, oh yeah, we're going to have AOC in the Biden administration. I guess they're not going to lie about it outright, but they're willing to, the message that they're crafting to young people is to heavily imply that hey, you know all those cool dope politicians that you like? Biden's bringing them along. The Biden administration is going to be fucking like the cops that Rahm Emanuel helped get away with murder. They'll be filling out some positions. Henry Kissinger and Cass Sustene.

John DePont. They're going to get him on the trail. Bring it back for life with Eldridge Magics. What are you in charge of the U.S. Olympic team? The dopest activists and politicians that you love, Ed Buck, your favorite guy. Millennials love him. He has swag. Look at his bow ties. Take part in the Ed Buck challenge to take a crystal bath until your heart explodes. Can you survive a night at his house? This idea went over really well according to Wessel and Bowman. In the focus groups, one white millennial said, the saving grace of this potential presidency would be his crew. If he actually chooses true progressives and activists, I will be surprised but happy

to admit I misjudged him. Look, if you seriously wanted me to get me to say that I was wrong about Joe Biden and I'm going to fucking eat my words and vote for him and encourage other people to vote for him, it would be him just announcing right now that Bernie Sanders will have a major secretary of commerce, secretary of state, something like that, some big choice plumb in his administration. I would probably get on board the Biden train if that was his own offer, but it's not. This is an illusion. In their head, they're thinking actually the Avengers are going to be in the Biden administration. We're going to get Black Widow and Hawkeye. They're going to be there in the administration. That's the sick crew of activists he's going

to bring along with him. Considering that Hawkeye and Black Widow are essentially gladiooperatives, I would say that's accurate. The Democratic Avengers has since become one of the group's most popular messages about Biden. According to its surveys and the idea has made its way into ads. One features action movie music, a comic book font, and various Democrats stylized as cartoon characters. Bernie Sanders, it reads, supports a $15 minimum wage. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is champion of the Green New Deal. Joe Biden, meanwhile, is building the team that we want to run things. A similar theme has also made its way into an ad by students for Ed Markey, another old

guy who recently triumphed someone unexpectedly. Recently, the late show is Stephen Colbert made a loving send-up with a similar Avengers theme. I pointed out to Wessel that this message is exactly what conservative pundits say about a potential Biden presidency, that the aging moderate will be easily manipulated by more radical Democrats such as Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders. He didn't seem concerned. The Republican Party is saying it's the Biden-Bernie agenda. Yeah, that's totally motivating for our young voters. Keep it up. I can't wait for this Avengers, this team of progressive superheroes to be announced

the day after Biden wins and it's like fucking Erskine Bowles in a mech suit. Erskine Bowles will be there. Chris Coons, fucking, yeah, Erskine Bowles, Erskine Smokin' Bowles, man, dude, that guy's cool. So there we go. If the Avengers model works beyond focus groups in the occasional YouTube video, it could suggest that young people, or at least Democrats, or at least young Democrats, are actually more interested in liberal policies than they are in charismatic candidates. Rather than get fired up about Biden's personality, 20-somethings might thrill to a coterie of technocrats who have concrete proposals to change the way the country works. Brent Cohen, the executive director of Generation Progress

Action, another youth advocacy group, told me that he's not worried about the Biden enthusiasm gap because young people vote based on policy and he and the other Democratic strategist believes that when it comes to policy, the choice for young voters is clear. Yeah, just huff free on until you suffocate your brain. That's the choice if you're a young person in this country. Okay, so they're saying that it's not really about personality. Joe Barnes, he's an old guy, but it's not about that. It's not about his story. It's about policy. But neither of these articles mentioned a single policy that he would be spearheading as part of

his administration. Yeezys for all. That's it. If anything, the indications that they're giving about what their administration will look like should they win the election is that they're already saying, right now, look, folks, the coverage bear. There's just no more money. We're not going to be able to do anything big. Time to tighten those belts. I mean, it's going to be fucking austerity and it's going to be like, yeah, like they're going to do a version. If they do anything at all about global warming, I think like as Chris has said, it's just going to be like Obamacare for the environment. Yeah, like

that's it. Cap and trade, baby. Can't wait for a fucking giant speculative bubble to burst on people selling fake cap and trade waivers. Well, the entire state of California burst into flames simultaneously. I mean, it's just once again, just so fucking depressing. I mean, it's just like when you read shit about this, about like, hey, like the light bulb went off in my head when a voter said, I feel like Katniss Everdeen because I'm an oppressed subject of a tyrannical centralized state. And they're like, oh, the bubble, the little light bulb went off in my head when

I just thought, hey, what if Joe Biden was also like Katniss Everdeen? And it's just like, no, like the thing, the thing the young person is connecting with there is like the fact that our government randomly selects children from her community to be offered up as some kind of ritual sacrifice for this God of the marketplace. And she'd like to fight that in some info way possible. And that's what voting means to her. And they're like, no, Joe Biden's like, he's like the, he's both, he's both the rugged, handsome guy, but he's also kind of like the cute sensitive one that she ends up with at the end.

He's going to take off his glasses and reveal how hot he was. He's going to take, he's going to put in his dentures and be like, damn Joe looking hot. Didn't know how fine he was. Well, there you go. I mean, I just like, you know, no need to linger too much on this. It's just, it's, it's everything we've said before, but I just once again, I feel like that these people are, are, they're taking ideas from our show that we said as jokes, but you know, like, I feel like we could have said months ago that Biden's youth outreach strategy would be like, yo, I'm like the adventurers, y'all. I'm like, I'm like Tony Stark and you know, lo and behold, that's exactly what they're

doing. They're eating all over us. All right. I'd like to, I'd like to move on. I, this, this was one that was a, I was going to do this a couple of weeks ago, but we didn't have time for it. But this one is so good that I held it for a while because it is kind of timeless. This is a, this is, this is an article courtesy of the New York Times titled God is Dead. So is the office. These people want to save both. Divinity consultants are designing sacred rituals for corporations and they're spiritually depleted employees. This article courtesy of the Times is quite

honestly one of the most satanic things I think I've ever read. Like this, this is straight from the bowels of Moac himself, just, just the, the gaping maw of, of Satan opening up to basically eat our souls through a zoom screen, but there's some truly astonishing things in this article. So I'm just going to dive in here. It says, in simpler times, Divinity schools sent their graduates out to lead congregations or conduct academic research. Now there is a more office bound calling the spiritual consultant. Those who have chosen this path have founded similar agencies, some for profit, some not with similar sounding names, sacred design lab, ritual design lab and ritualists. They blend the obscure language

of the sacred with the also obscure language of management consulting to provide clients with a range of spiritually inflected services from architecture to employee training to ritual design. Their larger goal is to soften cruel capitalism, making space for the soul and to encourage employees to ask what it is that they're doing good in a higher sense. Having watched social justice get readily absorbed into corporate culture, they want to see if more American businesses are ready for faith. We've seen brands enter the political space, said Casper Ter Kyle, a co-founder of sacred design lab. Citing a vice report, he added, the next white space in advertising and brands is spirituality.

So, oh, here we go here, children down my spine. Where'd that come from? Ezra Bookman founded Ritualist, which describes itself as a boutique consultancy transforming companies and communities through the art of ritual last year in Brooklyn. He has come up with rituals for small firms or for events like the successful completion of a project or if one fails a funeral. Time to rend our garments and pull our hair out because the latest quarterly report filings were late this week. Yeah, I can't wait to do corporate ashura after our sensitivity training. We just got to flatch a lady each other in front of the fucking copying machine.

I'm covering myself with Ash and sackcloth because Barbara from HR couldn't make the softball game. Messages on the startup's Instagram feed, read like a menu for companies who want to buy operational rights a la carte. A ritual for purchasing your domain name, a.k.a. your little plot of virtual land up in the clouds. A ritual for when you get the email from LegalZoom that you've been officially registered as an LLC. We should have done this. Absolutely. I feel like our whole podcasting endeavor has been tainted. It doesn't have a sacred heart to it now.

It was Christopher seeing the crow on the window sill when he got made. It says here, the sacred consultant trend might be led by the co-founders of Sacred Design Lab, Mr. Ter Kyle, Angie Thurston, and Sue Phillips. They met at Harvard. Mr. Lewis, the cipher. They remain affiliated. Here's a little ritual. When you get your employees in for a meeting, start the meeting by eating an egg that represents their soul. Carefully peel a hard-boiled egg and place it in your mouth in a single gulp, representing their souls that you are consuming to continue

your evil work in this world. So it says here, their backgrounds vary. Mr. Ter Kyle, who lives in Brooklyn and co-hosts a very popular Harry Potter podcast, wrote a book on how to transform common. Demon. Demon from hell. Actually, these are fucking demagogical archons. Yeah. Yeah. This is, man, I wasn't kidding. This is like looking into Satan's asshole reading this. Yeah, though.

Yikes. These are Taheen from the fucking Dark Tower universe. So he wrote... Low man in... Low man in Patagonia vests. So because here, he hosted Harry Potter podcast and he wrote a book on how to transform common everyday practices, such as yoga, reading, walking the dog into sacred rituals. Ms. Thurston, who lives in Alexandria, Virginia, had worked at finding spiritual connection between people from different faiths. Ms. Phillips of Tacoma, Washington is an ordained minister in the

Unitarian Universalist tradition. Oh, ouch. Gonna be the strike three of the Unitarians there. Unitarians is like, Jesus Christ. I mean, it's somebody, yeah, you know, Unitarian is someone who got all creeped out by the seriousness of Episcopalianism. It is just a nilla wafer of a religion. Oh my God. Just start a book club. Yeah. It's like, I don't want any... I don't want to... Hi. I would like some of the spiritual and existential soothing associated with religious belief, but none of the restrictions on my behavior or like duties to my fellow people on this planet that I could just keep doing

what I was doing anyway. Can I have some of that, please? I want it all in one bag, but I don't want the bag to be heavy. Unitarianism and Baha'i, they're like when you're a kid and you're on the playground, you're like, I'm Dark Vader, but I'm also Superman and I'm good. Just grab that, yeah, grab that religions with nothing. The Sacred Design Lab trio use the language of faith and church to talk about their efforts. They talk about organized religion as a technology for delivering meaning. The question we ask is, how do you translate the ancient traditions that have given people access to meaning-making

practices, but in a context that is not centered around the congregation, Mr. Ter Kyle said? So, yeah, how do we make the technology of religious meaning-making into an office? And it's just like, yeah, how do we transform a community of belief and faith into a community of employment, of tenuous employment? Yeah, we want all of the meaning associated with deep reciprocal social bonds without none of the deep reciprocal social bonds. If you could do that possible, we'd like that. If you could amplify that, we'd really love it. It would really help our earnings in the fourth quarter.

So, it says here, the nonprofit says it has been thinking of sacred designs for companies like Pinterest, IDEO, and of course, the Obama Foundation. Ms. Phillips doesn't see corporations replacing organized religion, but she said she does see an opportunity for companies to bring people some of the meaning they used to derive from churches, temples, mosques, and the like. Demon! Demon! This is so dark.

This is so dark. I'm not even religious. I'm not even religious. This is Arshan shit, because, yeah, a real consequence of capitalism is you squeeze the sacredest out of life as people lose the social dimension that gives meaning to their day-to-day existence and replace it with transactions between strangers and alienating encounters with employers and employees, and there has to be an answer to that. And the seeking for that answer is one of the things that leads people towards a realization that the way

that we fucking live has to change. And these people are just like, no, no, no, no, no. We just tell them that this shitty fucking Stygian nightmare of their labor place, that's where you find the meaning. That's it. It's like boarding up the fucking opening of Plato's Cave and letting everybody asphyxiate from carbon monoxide poisoning. I mean, I don't know, because I'm not a religious person, I don't really have much of a spiritual life myself, but there's something about this that is still so evil and terrifying

to me. It's just the ease with which these people can take a concept like the sacred and apply it to a fucking office. They said earlier in this piece, they're like, the problem with offices is that they're a bit soulless, and the thing about offices or work in general is that it is soul crush. But to a certain degree, that's good because we should never forget that that's exactly what it is. It's coercive. No one is there because they want to be there. They've convinced themselves

that they need to be there for one reason or another, but they don't want to be there and they're there to serve someone else's ends more than their own, or else they wouldn't be getting paid to be there. Or if they're in charge, they're there to preside over people whose labor they're fucking vampirically sucking from. Those relationships are not ones that have this sort of trust that allows for deep spiritual communion, which is the same problem as corporate race training, is the idea that you're going to make people realize racism is bad at mandatory group meetings where what you say can get

you fucking canned if they decide that they don't need your salary line in the next quarter. So going on here, it says, Evan Sharp, co-founder of Pinterest, hired Sacred Design Lab to categorize all major religious practices and think of ways to apply them to the office. Am I supposed to talk about shit like the Philippines where they do real crucifixions? Yeah. I'm not interested. Let's get real here. Here's a religious practice that I think corporations should employ.

It's called confession. You have to go once a week and confess your innermost thoughts and sins to your manager, and they'll give you little tasks to do to atone for the fact that you did five minutes of time theft checking fantasy football last week. Yes. That means you'll stay 10 hours. You'll stay here all Saturday collating, thinking about what you did and redeeming yourself. We pulled together hundreds of practices from all these different religions and cultural

practices and put them in a spreadsheet and just tried to categorize them by emotional state. Which ones are relevant when you're happy? Which ones are relevant when you're angry? And a couple other pieces of metadata, Mr. Sharp said. If God wasn't dead before this, he's certainly gone now. He's abandoned us completely. We have profaned his holy creation so thoroughly with this shit that, yeah, this is Sodom

and Gomorrah shit. Yeah. God is clearly in heaven because he is afraid of what he has created. So it says here, the mixture of corporate and religious language can be odd. For example, here is how Mr. Ter Kyle described his work for a tech company he declined to name. We researched and authored a concept paper on the soul of work to stimulate bold ideas about how soul centeredness will continue to grow as a core element of the future of

work. Think about how fucking chilling that sentence is. How soul centeredness will continue to grow as a core element of the future of work. It's not so much that they have your soul and you're leasing it out to them and ending your life a little bit every day as you just a little bit of that joy and connection to the world at large is drained out of you bit by bit going into an office every day. They're like, no, no, no. Our goal here is to make your job and office life a part of your soul so that visiting

that this office will be like visiting a temple or a mosque. It will nourish your soul, your being, your spiritual life by giving yourself over to these fucking corporations. Yeah. That's why the best place to do money changing is at temples traditionally. I mean, it's great. Everyone loves it. Here's another great little sentence here.

It says, another challenge is that many workers are already devout on their own terms on their own time and are not at all hungry for soul based activities between nine and five. Yeah. See, the problem is a number of our employees are already wedded to a concept of God, the spirit and religion that they sort of identify with or as part of a family tradition. How can we break that inside them and get them to bow down before this golden calf in the fucking office break room? Mr. Burns decided to be the new God.

No, actually what it is, it's like when Apple took the jack off of the iPhone so that you couldn't use non-proprietary technology without using like gik dongle or something. Like, oh, no, no, your soul, that's our business as well. You know what? Mr. Burns referenced this brings to mind in the Homer's triple bypass where like the night before his surgery, he's like, hey, God, if you're there, I know I haven't been the best. Then like a nurse comes in and just taps a sign that says no praying.

And it's hard to exhort workers to give their professional activities transcendental meaning when at the same time those workers can be terminated. It can be done badly and when done badly, it can cause harm, Ms. Thurston said. For example, how can we be in deep community if I can fire you? Good question. Good question, Ms. Phillips, but I'm sure they'll find a way to paper all that. Yeah, I would like to know. It's like, you know, it's like firing is like being excommunicated.

It says companies hiring ritual consultants may think that they're bringing workers a small perk, but those behind the movement are hoping for a bigger revolution. Workers have achieved measured success recently in pressuring employees to address systemic racism. Some companies are making Juneteenth a paid holiday, for example, and investing in black and minority-owned ventures. And the sacred design consultants are wondering if employees might also begin to demand spiritual goodness.

Are employees demanding any of this shit? Well, no, they would like to not be living in misery, but there's nothing to be done about that. The misery is built in. The misery is structural. We have to, the beatings will continue regardless of what happens to morale, but you've got a bunch of people in these offices who have to feel like they're not slave drivers. And so these guys are essentially there to arbitrage their sense of like liberal arts

graduate guilt over having to be in this environment in the first place. So it says your... It's indulgences. They're the... Like there is an actual religious element to this. This is a corporate purchasing of indulgences, but also a great way to, at the same time, further alienate your employees away from their own... Anything that is not under your direct purview.

Anything that is not framed by their relationship to you. Like replacing the level of like a medieval lord, the role rather. Speaking of medieval times, here's another great idea that I think would work to help soul center a lot of these companies. You know how like all businesses of a certain size have to have like OSHA regulations in the break room and like labor regulations? Those from now on can only be written in Latin and you can be executed for translating them into the vulgar tongue.

So here's another guy. Kersat Anzenk has been in the corporate ritual game for a while. As a product designer at the software giant SAP, he wrote rituals for work last year and in January will publish a follow-up of sorts, rituals for virtual meetings. I called him for recommendations on how to deepen my Zoom practice. Mr. Anzenk advised incorporating thoughtful interruptions. He suggested beginning conference calls with a moment of silence. He recently heard about a smelling ritual where everyone in the meeting receives a common

kitchen spice, maybe cinnamon, and smells it at the same time to get a co-sensory experience. He is hoping to incorporate this into his guidance as a way to bind people together. Ms. Phillips, the minister, had a few other ideas. She suggested using a repetitive meeting structure which can be calming for participants. This might take the form of starting each team meeting with the same words, a sort of corporate incantation. Others suggested workers each let a candle at the start of a meeting or pick up a common object that everyone is likely to have in their homes.

Say to the group, during this part of the conversation, everybody is going to turn off our video, Mr. Farajo said, or while we're doing this activity, I want you to look at your notebook. So this is getting even deeper into sort of disciplining the mind and body of your employees. Everyone grab your sacred object and hold and gaze at it for this part of the marketing meeting. Who's telling them to do it? They're not doing it.

They're not participating in it. They're being told to do it. It's just a new age bullshit version of the Walmart dance that they make people do at the beginning of every shift because Sam Walton is a sick fuck. Matt, do you have your vape pen handy? Why? Because I'm going to do a ritual now because this is a Zoom meeting and I think I'd like to center our souls a little bit more.

I know Felix and I, we have our jewels or we have our vapeing devices at hand right here. Okay, I got mine. Okay, this is the point in the chapeau marketing meeting in which we all, we inhale certain vapors to center ourselves. Okay, here we go. Inhale the good, exhale the bad. Yeah, if these guys aren't going to be doing at least animal sacrifices, there's no way

this is going to be imprinting on anyone beyond the level of one more bullshit thing that you immediately turn into an annoying chore that the boss makes you do. If we start our own religion here, I mean, the deep state has a religion so we should be able to too and these guys, we would be able to buy flavored vape products in New York under First Amendment grounds even though the tyrant Cuomo has banned them. If this is our incense. Yeah, this is like the Rastafarians and weed or Native Americans with peyote. Yeah, think about all...

Mango jewel is from the earth. Yeah. Well, think about all the stuff religious people can get away with in this state specifically. You're telling me this is the most dangerous thing? Yes, yes, yes. Jeffrey D. Lee, the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago, helped organize a three-day retreat last year with Mr. Turcile and others. The purpose of the retreat was to allow spiritual entrepreneurs.

Hold on, I'm just going to say that phrase again. Spiritual entrepreneurs. I love spiritual entrepreneurs. Jim Jones, Shoko Ashahara, Elephant Levi, these guys are my favorites. Spiritual entrepreneurs to connect and brainstorm with traditional religious leaders. He described one participant as an experienced designer creating potent rituals for executives. He's just talking about Jeffrey Epstein's island right now, right? The potent rituals for executives, I mean, hey, you know children's blood is actually

a lot more powerful when it comes to magic. Bishop Lee said he was happy to find the religious impulse at play, even if it was in places where the ultimate calling was profit. We are really aware of being on the shadow side of religious observance, a truly historic decline, he said. So there's some good news here in how people are hungry for ritual. And this is coming from the guy that's from the traditional religious end, where he's like, yeah, I know participation in traditional religious institutions are plummeting.

But you know what? People still want ritual, and they want it at their job. That's where they want it most of all. No, people are recreating ritual like TikToks. That's ritual. But nobody wants to do that at work unless they're stealing time. And they're in the army, apparently, or the police. Those freaks love doing that.

There you go. That was just a sample from, like I said, probably one of the most demonic things I've ever read. No, those people need to be at the very least exercised, like we'll go easy on them and assume that they are just the earthly vessels for some trans-dimensional demon that must be drawn out and cast off. So you remember last week where it was like the sort of Twitter character of the day was that the Warren surrogate who rented the Airbnb that had satanic stuff in it, and then was

adding Airbnb and had this whole fucking several-day meltdown over it? That was great. The items that sort of denoted satanic ritual were like, it was a little Baphomet statue and like a couple sort of cheeky, sort of a hot topic type religious kitsch and memorabilia. And also a photo of Bernie Sanders, which I thought was pretty funny. He was trying to say that the ground was marked up with sort of like ritual circles and shit like that. I mean, it was all bullshit for the most part.

But I would just like to say, like, you know, like his conception of what Satan worshipers are like is just basically kind of like sex nerds. Yeah. Like, I think those are the people that have Baphomet shit around their house. It's just for some sort of cheeky shock value or something. But like, if you talk about, like, what I imagine people who literally worship and serve demons are like, it's the people at Sacred Design Space Incorporated and Ritualist. Yeah.

Like that is what actual, like the actual worship of the demons folks in the 21st century is demons. They got flies all over. Well there we go for that week's episode. This week's episode is in the can. Time to plug or say before we go check out for today. Oh, I'll just, I'll boost again. I did an interview with Jessica Skrain yesterday, a little bonus interview.

Her primary is tomorrow. So I mean, there's not a lot of time left. If you're in Delaware, definitely get out and vote for Jessica Skrain. Send Chris Coons packing. He's terrible. Jessica's a real one. And just donate money or try to phone bank if you still have some time. Absolutely.

Yeah. That's my plug. So until next time, guys. Bye. Bye. All right. Bye. Bye.

Bye.