Chapo Trap House - 566 - Dopeness Report (10/12/21)

Episode Date: October 12, 2021

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🎵 🎵 All I gotta do is give it to you, show me 🎵 🎵 All I gotta do is give it to you, show me 🎵 🎵 I'm gonna play some great shows 🎵 🎵 All I gotta do is give it to you, show me 🎵 Hello friends, it's Monday, October 11th. It's me, Matt and Felix, coming through with your choppo. Uh, boys, how's it going?

Um, not bad. I'm in the midst of a social experiment. Hmm. Go on. Uh, earlier this month, in conjunction with the Halloween fun I've been having. Oh boy, do I have a fucking doozy tomorrow. Do you have something disgusting tomorrow? Uh, it can't be much worse than the one you did the other week. I mean, I was like, okay, could you explain the, I mean, for those who picked up on it, could you explain, I mean, last year it was the vote face guide,

and you maintained that for like a whole month. Yeah, that was fun. And then this year, you did, I mean, this one will take a little bit more explanation. It's a little bit more of a boutique internet character, but I was like, how could you possibly do this for a month? This is horrible. This is disgusting. Um, because you explained your previous, uh, the one you just most recently did,

and maybe give a preview of things to come for the, the spook season. The previous one is based on a, um, I wouldn't say famous, but like niche, popular, just repulsive man. Uh, he's like a very horny, like conservative guy who takes pictures that like, it doesn't even look like there's Vaseline on his lines. It looks like he's like in an aquarium that's filled with grease from a griddle. Like it's so like fucked up looking. I don't know how he does it.

And he posts these like, like he has this perfect rhythm down. It's like his own iambic pentameter where it'll be five posts in a row where it's like, she was in her, she was in my DMs touching her wet thing. I worked her clit until she went insane. Like like five of those in a row or like bitching about how his like wife wouldn't suck him off before work. And then the sixth one will always be something like Obama is ashamed of being white. So he hates white people.

And then like back to like just the grossest sex stuff you've ever seen and like sort of like self taken Boudoir Android phone shots of like his, his like naked body. And then like six posts again. Drive buys, drive buys are ruining American cities. Thugs are everywhere because of Joe Biden. I just just just just just for the, for the listener here, if I could sort of paint and paint a mental portrait for you of what these sort of erotic Boudoir shots look like. Yeah, like Felix said, like it's like, it's like, it's like being taken in an aquarium

or something, but that aquarium is Buffalo Bill's basement. And the body is like a very furry man who's wearing a beanie, but like it's very obscured and blurry, but like, but he's like sort of like laying in bed naked. He's awesome. Except for a beanie. He's so sick. But I just like, I didn't want to do him for a month because it is like too gross. And I actually had to like do more work that like vote face is easy because it's like, I

like literally would have been that if I had been prescribed Adderall as a kid. Like that just like would have just been me. Like I would have like gone to Tufts and like work for Elizabeth Warren. Tom Cruise is right. Yeah. No, like it's you should take Adderall when you're like 23 my age. And according to the math was born in 1998. You know, when you work at the computer all day, not when you're a kid.

But it's like just being a version of myself. That's I grew up around both places quite easy. But like that guy, there was all this work I had to do. Like I was literally like putting Vaseline on my phone to take like the pictures. I have this like container of beans and I was like, oh, this is perfect. And I like smeared Vaseline on my lens and like took a photo of it with the fork sticking out diagonally. And I was like, it was like, it was like very fun.

And it did, you know, the thing that I always want to do, which is people are saying, like, why do I follow you? Like I hate you. Like my followers are dropping. Like that does make me happy. But it was just like, it was getting to the point where I would like have to like not do other stuff. Like I would have to like not get work done to keep doing that.

And I wanted to do a bunch of other things. And then the next thing's more upsetting. But that's okay. Like spiritually upsetting. It's not like as physically gross as this, but it is like bad. So like, I mean, so you're going from a guy who takes erotic Boudoir photos of himself in Joseph Fritzel's basement on a lens smeared with chicken fat. Like Frank, the tank had just been like handling his phone or something.

And you're going to come out and then he's like replying to a fucking, I don't know, a Christy Gnome or something going, you're a heck of a lady. That was my favorite thing was like sending like horny replies to like the Christy Gnome or like Lauren Boebert. You're a firecracker. I'd love to lick your clit until you're insane. So you got some coming up worse than that. I would say so.

I would say it's like more upsetting. But there's another layer to this social experiment though, right? Oh yeah, no. The other thing I did this month for Halloween, I like, I didn't think it's fair that I'm like always scaring people. I decided to scare myself. Oh, okay. And I opened my DMs.

And getting good ones. Most of this stuff is like what you would expect. It's like, I'd say like 60% of it's fine. It's like people asking about like a Sable video and like just like weirdly specific like hangout things, you know, shit that's like good natured. But like, when would I be there? You know, stuff that's ever like, you know, if you're ever in Newfoundland or Newfoundland or Newfoundland or Newfoundland soon to be announced.

Newfoundland is dropping. Yeah, I work at like a black squirrel conservatory and it's like, okay, well, I like don't think I'm going to be there, but I do appreciate that. Like I would like to meet those squirrels. And you know, it's like you get like, you know, scam attempts and stuff and like, you know, just like people sending you like news stories you saw like 12 hours ago. It's like whatever. You don't have to.

You don't have to. You saw it. Yeah, we're talking about the original account. We're talking about the guy you're making fun of again. Yeah, I'd love to see his DMs. But I was like, well, this isn't like that interesting. And it's not like really painting off in the way I hoped. I mean, obviously I'm going to keep it open because it's like, most importantly, it's

a way for girls to contact me. But I got something better than a girl contacting me. I got two schizo DMs. Okay, let's go. Lay off N word, but with two Bs instead of Gs. Thank you. Goodbye. It's over.

Period. And then he blocks me and then seven hours later, he unblocks me. Seriously, can you fuck off you goddamn freak? That'd be a huge favor. And then blocks me again. And this is like, this is the best one I saw. And this is directed at all of us, I think. So you guys should.

Okay, excellent. All right. I'm here. FR, what is wrong with you fucking freaks? The Middle East isn't the only place on the map, brother. Fucking learn or perish. Mirror. So like paying off now, but we'll see, we'll see where this goes.

We'll see, we'll see where the experiment goes. And I hope I see nothing but death threats there after tomorrow. So, yeah. No, this is, you're ringing the dinner bell here. They're going to come running. They're going to come running to your DMs, Felix. Yeah. We'll see how the social experiment continues.

And by the way, I was, I was joking. If you're a woman, do not contact me. Fuck off. Unless you, unless you want your clit driven insane. Exactly. Well, if you want the best greasy beans you've ever had, that's not an unhondra. I literally just need some gross beans. They've been on my desk.

Well, we will, we will see how this develops throughout. Yeah. The, the spooky season, Halloween. Do you guys have anything planned? Not really. Sort of. I'm, you know, I'm watching, watching horror movies. Oh, I guess.

Actually, something, something planned, but it hasn't been officially announced yet, but it should be something cool day before Halloween. Anyway, so, you know how like over the last, like since, since, since the beginning of this year now, we've been documenting something, you're sort of filing news items away and something I like to call the feral files. And, you know, if you guys remember, like this is just a sort of ongoing sense that because of COVID and like Donald Trump and all these like knock on like effects of natural disasters and just like people, people are really losing their minds and they're forgetting

how to like behave and act in public. And, you know, we see evidence of this like on things like flights, supermarkets. I mean, I'm sure you could think of some examples, right? Now, when we were discussing these are sort of ongoing social, the ongoing fraying of our social bonds. I think I, you know, our conclusion to this is that, yes, like, like people are turning feral, but as far as any like true societal breakdown goes, don't expect anything too dramatic unless the treat delivery system begins to break down.

Yeah, that's been the main pacifier. That's the thing that keeps the average person from completely wigging out in a given social situation is the promise of treats. Gentlemen, the treat delivery system is breaking down. Oh boy. That is like that's the doomsday event. When like when like when you like Amazon stop showing those things that are like, do you want this in three minutes?

That's like the do the clock is two minutes to midnight. Watch out. I am referring to an article in today's New York Times about breakdown in global shipping and supply chains. I've never seen anything like this. The pandemic is disrupting international trade, driving up the cost of shipping goods and adding a fresh challenge to the global economic recovery. The article begins on the coast of Los Angeles, more than two dozen container ships filled

with exercise bikes, electronics and other highly sought imports have been idling for as long as two weeks. In Kansas City, farmers are struggling to ship soybeans to buyers in Asia. See, that's good though. We don't want less soy. So that's another thing that people will refuse to be pacified by soy because the soybeans are not being shipped around. They are having their T levels secretly depleted without their knowledge.

This is why you have to read Financial Times because they told the same story, but they actually included a graph that showed cock shame going down. Cock confidence is getting into dangerous territory. There are more email lists or skyrocketing. It says here, yes, in Kansas City, farmers are struggling to ship soybeans to buyers in Asia. In China, furniture destined for North America piles up on factory floors. Around the planet, the pandemic has disrupted trade to an extraordinary degree, driving

up the cost of shipping goods and adding a fresh challenge to the global economic recovery. The virus has thrown off the choreography of moving cargo from one continent to another. At the center of the storm is the shipping container, the workhorse of globalization. Americans stuck in their homes have set off a surge of orders from factories in China, much of it carried across the Pacific in containers, the metal boxes that move goods and towering stacks atop enormous vessels. As households in the United States have filled bedrooms with office furniture and basements with treadmills, the demand for shipping has outstripped the availability of containers

in Asia, yielding shortages there just as the boxes pile up at American ports. What's going on right now, just like dozens of containerships are idling off the coast of California unable because there aren't enough truckers to deliver this stuff. There's just labor shortages, pandemic shit. We're beginning to see these knock-on effects pile up into one big cascading disaster. A big question though, how will it affect Christmas this year, though? I asked this on Twitter and I still don't know the answer. What is the over-under on Black Friday deaths this year?

It's got to be higher than in the past. Really, you have to look at Black Friday as the Stalingrad of Christmas. No one's happy with the human life that was lost at Stalingrad, right? But it's like, we have to do this. This is important. We need to go to the depths of humanity to beat back fascism. And Christmas magic is the same fucking thing. If you don't think we're in a Stalingrad every fucking year to win back Christmas magic from the forces of evil,

you're not living in the same reality as me. The Walmart managers are telling all their new hires for the season. If we don't issue you a pricing gun, someone else will drop theirs and pick it up for them. And like Stalingrad, if this goes on much longer, could cannibalism be far off? People are feral, but they have treats. And without the treats, you're going to be walking around out there. You're going to start looking like a treat. You're going to be looking like a nice big turkey leg on an abandoned island.

We're going to get new and exotic attempts to top the spicy chicken sandwich. For the percent of people who are above the invisible class, people who have to wipe down shells at CVS and work for one of those slave-servant companies, the thing that keeps you going is the treat dangling over you while you're running on the treadmill. This is not looking good if we don't have those. I still think Christmas is resilient. We've seen Christmas go through a lot. We had Christmas during World War II.

We had Christmas during the war on Christmas. We had Christmas during the war on Christmas. There was even this awful man, more of a monster, who stole everyone's presents. And Christmas was actually one of the best Christmases they had. Christmas magic always finds a way, is my point. But everything else around Christmas will be terrible. Matt, we were talking about this not too long ago. We all feel it.

This is mostly the margins, especially if you have an already pretty solidly middle-class life. On the serious end, there's hospitals that can't treat car accident victims, because the ICU is filled with people dying of COVID. But at the periphery, I think we all sense that things just aren't working as well as they used to, or it's beginning to break down. I think everyone has this vague... For the most part now, these are minor annoyances I'm talking about. But the systems that govern our way of life, decadent and selfish as it may be,

do seem to be sputtering a bit. Yeah, you can feel the wheels coming off a little bit. You can't really trust anything. The conveniences that lubricate all of our social alienation. But the real question is, what happens with that? Because we do not have anything like a politicized response. We can't channel that kind of anger into a effective resistance to it. Mostly what we can do is find someone close to us to vent it on,

which is why you see people just going insane on airplanes and trying to chew flight attendants' ears off. Yeah, most things, this is something where it's like, man, it would be great to have a functional, institutional left in this country. But the result is going to be more public freakouts. There is going to be at least one guy who does a mass shooting, because he can't get a burger fast enough. I'm seeing a lot of that. There are no political institutions,

there's no center of gravity of which people's feelings of dissatisfaction and that life is getting shittier can be directed in a productive way. What can be directed at is people's rage at the people who are on the hook or bringing them their treats in customer service or just anyone who is front facing to customers. I think we'll receive more of this wrath as time goes on. One other thing from this New York Times article says, at the Twin Ports of Los Angeles in nearby Long Beach, unloading has been slowed by a dearth of dock workers and truck drivers

as the virus has sickened some while forcing others to quarantine. It is anticipated that the backlog and volume will remain until mid-summer, the director of the Los Angeles Port, Gene Soroka said at a recent board meeting. This is part and parcel of this other thing. Eviction moratorium is up. All the benefits are no longer being distributed. People thought that this would juice the labor market. What we're seeing right now is that it really hasn't.

Making people just more desperate does not somehow make jobs appear out of thin air. It's weird. There's a certain level of a capital strike going on right now. You see it in restaurant windows, like a small version of it where they're just like, please apologize for the minor inconvenience, but nobody wants to work. What's left unsaid there is, it's not like there aren't people seeking employment. Now that employers are desperate for employees and you have a little bit of bargaining power, no one wants to work for the shitty wages and conditions that are being offered.

By not hiring or giving a higher wage, it amounts to a capital strike. If they really want to do it without raising wages, if they want people to come back into, especially service industry jobs, and you don't want to raise wages, give them a gun. That might get some people to go behind a counter. Just the knowledge that they are strapped. They know that if somebody comes in and starts freaking out because they're fucking their toy that they got with their Happy Meal wasn't the right eternal that they were looking for.

They can just raise the front of their shirt and show the fucking handle of the gun. That might get them behind the counter. I think we may see as a mainstream Republican position in the next year or year or two is taking prisoners and making them work at Best Buy. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. That's definitely coming. Or to go back to some sort of the gang press system where we're just shanghying people

into working service industry jobs or making sure people get their treats. I mean, I guess we started out half joking with this, but it is true. If these conveniences that paper over all of the disillusionment and violence and terror of a contemporary American life go away, then what people are left with is just the fear and terror. That's not a pleasant thing to contemplate. You need to keep this bitch going. I was talking with my friend about the PS5 the other day,

and I don't know how much- You're your friend who owns Sony. Yeah. Your uncle. Yeah. Yeah. He said, out of everyone who has it, I'm the nicest one. So with PS5, no one can get one really. If you really want one, you can get one in eBay for $800,

which is $300 above MSRP, what it should retail at. But there are multiple reasons why they can't get them out there. Part of it is supply chain, microchip stuff. Another part of it kind of is crypto mining. They just fucked up the market for graphics cards, someone was telling me. We were talking about Bitcoin and how it's like, if you would describe that exact scenario 10 or 20 years ago, one of the biggest electronics and entertainment companies in the world

can't make its huge new product fast enough because of this weird internet speculative thing. It would be like, oh, they're going to crush that. They're just going to absolutely destroy that thing. And now it's just like, man, they couldn't even knock over Bitcoin mining. They couldn't even knock over crypto mining. Just like a bunch of computer guys buying radions. That's not the main thing crippling them, but it's certainly not helping.

Well, this is actually a perfect segue into the next item I have to discuss. And the first one filed that under Feral Files. The second one filed under our economic system is super rational and getting more rational every day. I'm referring to, of course, NFTs. Do you guys own any NFTs? Yeah, no, I own a Juicy Mike. I own a Wet Jerry.

And then the sort of crown jewel of my collection. This is the thing that's going to help me retire and just really establish like a dynasty. And that's my Melvis. Whoa, I did not know you're a Melvis holder. Yeah, it's like really the most valuable thing in my life over my friends and family. This is an article about something happened in the world of NFTs.

Investors spent millions on evolved apes, NFTs. Then they got scammed. What? That can't be right. No. It says here, cryptocurrencies are riddled with a dazzling array of scams. Rug polls, a term for when developers take the money and run, are common. And NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, aren't immune to that old trick

that thousands of investors of a project called Evolved Apes found out on Friday. Evolved Apes is described on NFT Marketplace OpenSea as a collection of 10,000 unique NFTs trapped inside a lawless land. They are fighting for survival. Only the strongest ape will prevail, it says, referring to the project's much-typed fighting game which hasn't materialized.

A week after the project launched, a famous developer known as Evil Ape who promised that game vanished along with the project's official Twitter account and website. But they left traces on the blockchain that shows they siphoned 798 Ether, which is $2.7 million, out of the project's funds in multiple transfers. The funds derived from the initial public sale of NFTs and commissions on the secondary market were meant for project-related expenses like marketing. It is not a good sign for the economy when people's confidence

in what used to be a reliable, something like Treasury bonds, the Evil Ape, if people are losing faith in the Evil Ape, then again, we got another big problem on our hands, fellas. I do think this is really awesome in the face of just supply chains collapsing and our shitty infrastructure not being able to keep up with the demand. The one thing we're supposed to be able to do, just falling apart, and then you have this, which is the only thing we still do, which is just a scam, but not even one you can really figure out

or is even really that interesting. When someone explains NFTs to me, I literally don't understand it. My brain turns off. Excuse me, it is a non-fungible token. What about those words? Does it make sense? As I understand them, they are JPEGs. They are images on your computer that the blockchain, whatever the fuck that is, certifies as you owning.

You now own that JPEG, whereas if you had just simply done a screenshot of the JPEG, this is my favorite thing now, because I've gone down something of a rabbit hole into this corner of Twitter, into the lazy lions, the sleepy tigers, the Evil Apes. These people, they make it their avi, and they're just all talking about the various investment assets that they own. They're talking about spending, I don't know, five to ten to make sometimes $20,000 on a JPEG of probably the most wretched looking drawing I've ever seen in my life. And look, whenever I talk shit about cryptocurrencies or NFTs or whatever,

I always get a couple of people who are ostensibly on the left bitching at me about it. And look, I don't know or care about how crypto can destabilize state-backed currencies and liberate the planet. I don't fucking care. I'm not even going to talk about the environmental toll taken, but to essentially verify that you own a fucking picture of a monkey smoking a cigarette or something like that. I will limit my loathing for this phenomenon to purely aesthetic grounds and that if you look at any of these assets being traded, they are the ugliest shit I've ever seen in my life.

Submental, cretinous drawings by and for morons. And the fact that this Evil Ape person ripped all these people off, I say good. Yeah, I mean, like you can talk a lot of shit about this, but the left should actually be using three card Monty to destabilize international finance. Think about it. If we got all the military industrial complex, the top five commercial banks in the United States and every all the heads of NATO, like in front of our table, and we put like $100 under a shell and we got really good at moving our hands and it costs $5 to play. Like by my calculations of doing that for a year straight, like they could they'd be out of money and we'd have all of it. Just like something that I earlier in the paragraph here where it says,

it's described as a collection of 10,000 unique NFTs trapped in a lawless land. They're fighting for survival and only the strongest ape will survive. I mean, they're talking about just once again, just JPEGs of like just like I said, the scrawlings of just the most juvenile mind imaginable. But like there's this like there's this like narrative about it. There's like a there's some sort of like, I don't know, like lower invested in this that you're buying part of the story or something. It makes no fucking sense to me. None. Did you see the Walter Benjamin at NFT? No, now someone made like an NFT where it's like a highly like pixelated like that shitty pixel art that was very popular like 10 years ago of Walter Benjamin smoking.

That's about right. That's fucking dope. Part of the age of mechanicality. I mean, yeah, I think he would have honestly because you know, yeah, when he was that this is why he killed himself for Christ's sake to avoid this. So if you brought him back and showed him and be like, yep, made the right choice. And now in my research to this, like, you know, like the thing people are doing is just once again, you just the people like the NFT owners, the blockchain certified owners of these just the dog shit. Just you've paid $3,000 for dog shit. They will share images of the NFT that they own on Twitter and be like, here's my investment assets.

And then, you know, like wise acres, jokers will then just drag and just just right click, save image as and then reply to them being like, I now own this too. And the line that I have seen about this idea about like, oh, I own this JPEG, whereas you just have a copy of it, even know that the one I own is in fact not an original piece of art either. It's just something that like, I don't know, a computer has said is real. They say, taking the screenshot of someone's NFT and passing it off as your own is the equivalent of taking a selfie with someone else's Lamborghini and passing it off as your own. Or just like, they're saying like that is equivalent of like screenshotting someone's NFT is like posing, you know, let's just say at a Dallas area car dealership or hospital or pretending that you own it. Would you say it's like, you know, being like an X-ray technician and saying that you're a surgeon who owns four hospitals? Yes, they would say that. Yeah, no, yeah.

I would say that by their weird, I don't know, the weird metaphysics that governs all this, I would say by their own definition, me screenshotting an NFT and saving it on my hard job is the equivalent of me stealing your Lamborghini. Well, yeah, it's, yeah, I mean, the point of like getting a Lamborghini anyway is like, so you can drive really fast and mostly so people can see you do it because it's cool, like it's a cool car. But like the only people impressed by like seeing that you own like a Melvis are like other NFT losers. Like, no, like, yeah, no one, no, like, no, like Instagram model is going to be like, oh my God, you, oh, you, you, you have a slimy guy. Oh my God, this pussy is yours. Make my clit insane. But that's the thing is that it doesn't, it doesn't do anything and it isn't really any different. If you own the thing or if somebody clicks on it, the difference is, is that it is a speculative asset.

It could hypothetically be sold to somebody else for more than you paid for it. That's the point of the thing. It is, it is because there is no more places to profitably invest money in the economy. We have to invent fake speculative markets where we do all of the negative part of economic productivity. We pump things into the atmosphere, but you don't actually create anything because there's nothing to create. There's no value to be made doing that. There is only value to be made in people speculating that if they get in at X time, they can get out with Y amount of money. That's it.

Yeah. No, there's nothing like really, I was, when this first started happening, I was like, well, like, I think this is stupid, but like, I want to keep an open mind because it sort of reminds me of like skins in video games. There is actually an interesting study of people creating their own speculative markets with Counter-Strike global offensive skins because once Chinese players were allowed to enter the market, the skin market exploded. It is sort of interesting that they created this speculative bubble and that there are guys who have lockers that are worth millions of dollars. And like, that is fucking stupid, but I would have to argue it's less stupid because it's like, well, like, none of this should be worth more than like five dollars. Like, really?

But if you had, like, you can use that thing in the game. Like, what is your, what is the enjoyment of that, of the NFT beyond just speculation? Well, just, I mean, the joy you get when you look at a photo of a lion with sunglasses and like sipping a beer. Yeah. No. Yeah. There's no like, there's no like utility of it. They're not like really backed by anything.

It's just like whatever like YouTube guy says that like this is like, this one's dope. And you're like, oh, I beat the market today. But they're so transparently not dope. And they suck. They suck so bad. They're they're lower than Pogs. Like Pogs had better art. You could play with Pogs.

Yeah, no, it doesn't matter. Like, it should look like shit. It should literally be pictures of shit. That would be the ideal NFT because we have stripped any fantasy of value being part of any of these transactions. The artistic value, use value, it is purely a speculative asset. I'm betting that some idiot is going to pay more for this than I did or somebody is going to want to launder money for like a buying fentanyl or something by using one of these things. That's it. That's probably it. Like everyone, whenever you make one of these and people are like, actually, these are dope or like the left should use those.

You could probably trace that back to like a server farm run by the Sinola cartel. They're like, no, we'd like these are cool. This is a cool place to put money and then later legally extract that money. Before anyone squeals at me or whatever, to the extent to which otherwise rightly mentally ordered people have, because look, everyone's struggling these days. Everyone wants to liberate themselves from their shitty job. Everyone could use a little bit more money to just have a little leisure time, to just buy something nice, to just do something for themselves or their loved ones.

I'm not begrudging how anyone gets their bag to a certain degree. If you hit big on an evil ape or a sleepy tiger and you bought it for $3,000 and sold it for like, I don't know, twice that, or you made a couple grand off of it or whatever. Look, I'm not mad at that. Any more than I would be mad at someone who won big gambling on sports or at a casino. It's just like, but gambling is not a good investment strategy for your future. Hold up, hold up, hold up. Let's not go crazy here.

I mean, most of the time you are going to lose money, most of the time. It can be fun, it can be a risk that if you have a certain amount of money that you can play around with, it could be worthwhile taking, but it is not a way to improve your future or to count on anything. But more than that, it is also not a means to liberate humanity or make the world a better place. That's really where I have an issue with crypto and NFTs and things like that. Because the working class got together, pulled all their money and got one giant NFT and then sold it to rich people. And then all the money would be redistributed downward. Have you thought of that?

No, you didn't. You know, when the Trump Taj Mahal failed, that was working class gamblers organizing to beat the house. And Donald Trump killed himself in shame after that. I mean, you have to understand that you're the mark here. Yeah, but that's true like everything. Everyone knows the shit's a scam. They just think that the fact that they're aware that it's a scam will ensure that they are one of the ones who gets out before they get screwed. The awareness of the fraudulence of it is what gets in marks.

Because that's what makes them feel like they're in on it. That's literally what elected Donald Trump. My favorite argument that they have is when you sort of bitch about the environmental impact. They're like, oh, well, what about computers? What about cars? And it's like, yeah, but this is like a new thing that doesn't do anything for anybody. This is a pointless new thing. You might as well just be like burning coal in your backyard for no reason. Operating a coal power plant in your backyard and running it 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, so that it will one day send you an email saying that you own a wet Melvis.

I mean, even if you were running a power plant, at least you could like power, this is just like nothing. This is like, yeah, this is like, yeah, you like took, yeah, if you like took a shit in the middle of the store and you're like, well, people like fart every day. It's like, yeah, but you like made a new shit. There's like a new puddle of diarrhea there. All the women left, I can't make their clits insane. I mean, every time the debt ceiling comes up and apparently it's been averted this time, but like every time it comes up, there's always this question about like, can they just mint a trillion dollar coin?

I mean, this is in my opinion, what Joe Biden should have done immediately, like on the, instead of negotiating at this at all, mint a trillion dollar coin, but they should mint a trillion dollar NFT, a wet Jerry, and use that to fund, you know, or make sure we don't go bankrupt. That would be pretty sick. If you like made an NFT based on like Joe Biden's memories. It's a lion that looks like Joe Biden. Yeah, or like, yeah, like a milkshake.

They could make the first gift NFT. They could make like a milkshake that's rotating 360 degrees. A line of a line of NFTs all related to the flickering images that fill Joe Biden's dying brain every day. Yeah, yeah, like, you know, that would be all life. Yeah, those would be the first good NFTs. It would be like, you would just sit in a room with Joe Biden and like get him to like, like give flawless memories from like 1939. And he was like, yeah, African American man riding a donkey with one eye and you're like,

but to draw it, like get a police sketch artist draw it super quick. Boom sold. I got, I got the, I got the razor blade that got put in the rain barrel to make it rusty. NFT. Yeah. Trillion dollars. Was walking to Sunday school. Woman in a red dress opened her legs in front of her living room window at all of us. Later we found out they put her on the pills. Whatever that is, draw it.

Look like a tennis ball, Jack. When Chinese guy caught in a molasses barrel, draw it. Just a few more items from the article here. It says, according to Mike Crypto Ball, who did not share their real name due to their standing in the community, the Evolved Apes community discovered that the social media competition winners, a marketing activity to create buzz, hadn't received their NFT prizes from the project and the artist hadn't been paid either. I mean, once again, there's some good news in the world today, but it says here, even

with the money gone, the Evolved Apes community plans to carry on. Unlike with cryptocurrencies, NFT rugpoles leave behind JPEGs and a narrative surrounding them. Mike Crypto Ball explained in the report that he and others would build a new project called Fight Back Apes out of the ashes of Evolved Apes. Evolved Apes holders would be automatically approved for a Fight Back Apes token linked with the art from the old project. This is what I'm talking about, this idea that unlike when cryptocurrency scams, which just literally just leave you destitute, this will, the rugpoles here will leave you destitute,

but it will leave you with a JPEG with a story behind it. Yeah, a story about, here is a group of rubes. We're starting to market to and be pretty sure that you're going to get like a critical mass of them to just give you more money. Hey guys, I know everyone is really mad at Enron. Well, we're starting Enron too. Oh man, that says here, there are more lessons from this bitter experience. Trust your gut if something doesn't feel right, Josh Crypto Ball said.

If there is a mistake which happens, how it has dealt with will tell you a lot. He added, there were multiple red flags and Evolved Apes early on, but 99% of us were just blinded by the art and the promise and the potential of profits we assumed would come. I love the idea that we were willing to overlook all of the red flags because the art was so good. Oh my god, if you say that, you should be sentenced to Montessori school. It's like you did not, there was not enough liberal art stuff growing up for you, damn. Well, like I said, our economic system, super rational, getting more rational with every day. It's going to be sick when like this is like crypto and it's like so baked in this system

that we're never going to get rid of it. Like when you get to the point that like JP Morgan is making money off of it, it's like, okay, this, it's like never going to go away. Even if it does like destroy everything, like credit default swaps art, like they're still going to be there. People are still going to go back to them. But like I am excited for when like the chairman of the Federal Reserve has to make speeches where he's like, the new like epic sloth art is really dope. And we're really excited for the dope-ness in the community and what this means for the U.S. economy.

I mean, that's the other, that word community comes up over and over again because they're like, it's not just about money, it's about a community. It's about a community of dope-ass art and artists. And I just, I don't know, it sickens me. It really, it looks to me like the death of civilization. The death of like all aesthetic concern about art, just like the stripping of any like meaning out of everything and to just purely, to a purely totally useless speculative asset, that like all of these things will enrich a tiny, tiny fraction of the most reprehensible people on the planet.

Is that something about art? Yeah, but you have the art's dope. I can't wait until like the next global economic crash is caused by something called stoner hippo. Yeah, no. Yeah, they have to get bailed out with the trillion dollar Biden coin. I saw someone's like, some like, like loser postings. You know, like the thing where you pretend you heard a kid say something. Yeah.

And they're like, I just heard a kid say, I'm so beyond equities. His parents are awesome. And it's like, no, like all of them and you for hearing it, if you're not lying, should be killed. Because like the kid was like talking about NFTs. And it's like, that's proof that it's stupid. Like that's because this just is like Pokemon cards, but you can't even play a card game. Like a 10 year old shouldn't be able to like talk about a financial instrument with fluency. Yeah.

If you were under the age of 30, you shouldn't even know what the word equity means. Get a life. Yeah. All right. Moving on from NFTs. I thought we'd close out today by taking a little bit of a test. You guys, you guys down for that little pop quiz hot shot. What do you think?

Oh, no, I love tests. I got one question. Is it a non fungible test? No, this is very fun. Because if it's fungible, I'm walking. This is very fun. That's what the ACT should be. It should be like you have two hours to draw like a dope ape.

Sink or swim. Okay. I would have gotten into fucking Harvard if that was the case. That sounds pretty dope. All right. Let's see here. I said, so this, this is a quiz by David Beiler and Jan Wu. Will you fall into the conspiracy theory rabbit hole?

No. Take our quiz and find out. Yeah. This is a, this is a quiz according to, according to the Watanian post that can be used to gauge how far down the conspiracy, how conspiracy brand are you? Do you have the correct thoughts? I mean, do you have the correct understanding of history? Or do you have a weird conspiratorial view of history?

So let's just, let's just dive into this quiz here. There's a little preface to it and it says, who believes in conspiracy theories? Statistically speaking, almost everyone. A team of researchers recently showed several thousand Americans a list of 20 common conspiracy theories and asked if they believe them. These included false conspiracy theories about the John F. Kennedy assassination, 5G cellular wireless technology, Barack Obama's birth certificate, COVID-19 and climate change. The result, nine in 10 Americans believed in at least one conspiracy theory.

Conspiracy police are coming to arrest me right now. The study led by Adam Enders of the University of Louisville and Joseph Oshinsky of the University of Miami surveyed a representative sample of 2,023 Americans in March, 2020 and 2015 more in October, 2020. This article uses questions from their surveys to test your knowledge and your credulity. So, so can you tell facts from fiction or will you fall down the rabbit hole? Scroll down to find out. So, first question here.

Let's get started. Which of the statements below is true? Statement one. Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire accused of running an elite sex trafficking ring, was murdered to cover up the activities of his criminal network. True. Would you say that is true or false? That's definitely true.

Yeah, that's 1000% true. I'm clicking, I'm clicking. Oh, oh no, actually no, we're wrong. What? We're wrong. Sorry, sorry. You guys are so fucking stupid. Let me just go to the other, the other statements.

I can't believe I'm going to fail this quiz because I agreed to take it with all of you. This is the same thing. That's the parallel group projects. Yeah, this is the thing that sunk me on the ACTs as well. So, the other statements to determine their veracity are, President John F. Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy rather than by a lone gunman. Yeah. That's also absolutely true.

Definitely true. Okay. Oh no, we're seeing that that's, okay, apparently. What? Okay, second, third one, the FBI kept tabs on civil rights leaders such as the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. attempting to find compromising information and damage his reputation. They also killed him. Yeah, they did murder him.

That is the one correct answer according to this. Oh, you mean the most like anodyne? Like we all know this, like an actionable part of it. The thing where like it's the only one on here where like it's the agency that did it, like being like, oh yeah, we did it, but we're done doing bad stuff. Yeah. The one they admitted to doing. This is shit as such like how are you doing fellow conspiracy theorists?

And then when I say, right, look, we're not total squares. Like we know that the FBI bugged Martin Luther King, right? Yeah. Like in 40 years, like there's going to be another one like this and like Epstein will still be on there because it will like replace JFK. Just how like time cycles things in and out. But then like the one like true answer, they'll give you the true thing. Like the limited hangout one for that one will be like the FBI, like, you know, just set up

like mentally disabled people to like try to commit mass shootings because like in 30 years, they'll finally admit to that. And then that will be the thing we're like, oh yeah, but we don't. That was like when we were bad in 2019. But we're not like that anymore. We don't do that anymore. Even though there's never ever been any real negative consequences for any of these agencies doing anything, and there's never been any actual uncovering of any of them while they

were happening, we all just decided to stop doing that shit. And, you know, this is a pattern that will be that will continue throughout the rest of this quiz. But in the correct answer about the FBI, keep quote kept tabs on civil rights leaders. Okay. He says attempting to find compromising information and damage his reputation. I mean, that's one way to put it. You could also put it that they attempted to get him to commit suicide.

And when that failed, you fill in the rest. Also, like kept tabs, even the one they're willing to admit is like made ridiculously at it. I kept tabs on illegally wire tapped, you could say. Yeah. Keeping tabs is like you do that. It's like when my cat's in the living room, I'm like, what are they up to? Well, they can't say like illegally wire tapped because then that would like make you feel

like, oh, the thing that they're doing to like everyone now. But then their answer to that would be like, no, but the FISA court. Now, the last statement in the first question is, regardless of who is officially in charge of the government and other organizations, there is a single group of people who secretly control events and roll the world together. I mean, that's obviously false. I mean, there's probably two or three secret organizations. And they have conflicting and overlapping agendas.

And they're not all the same page all the time. That's ridiculous. Now, the interesting part about this quiz is the answer is that they give you that are supposed to correct you. So obviously the first one, if you believe that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, like I just don't understand like how you can justify that in your head. So Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire accused of running an elite sex trafficking ring, was murdered to cover up the activities of his criminal network.

Absolutely true. According to the Washington Post, wrong. Here's how they justify it. New York City's chief medical examiner concluded Epstein killed himself. And there's little credible evidence of an alternative explanation. Still, half of Americans think there's more to this story. Gee, I wonder why. There's little credible evidence to suggest otherwise.

I mean, like, how many in Washington Post? You got to read the Post, folks. Are you sure? Can I just say how funny it is like this is the thing that's supposed to draw you back from conspiracies is like the thing that might as well be like the internal newsletter at the CIA. Yeah. To being like, you're being unreasonable.

Yeah. But of course that's not the point. There is absolutely no, I don't think anyone involved in this has any belief that they're going to turn anybody from conspiracy theories. This is pandering to their audience. Yes. Of linear dickheads who can click on the right answers and then pat themselves on the back that they're not like those crazy people.

Yeah. Just for the JFK one, President John F. Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy rather than a lone gunman. It says wrong. The evidence is clear. Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone to assassinate President Kennedy. But 44% of Americans believe this theory and half of Americans think Epstein was murdered. A third of Americans think a secret football controls the world.

The evidence is clear. It takes you to a hyperlink and it goes to a Slate.com article by Fred Kaplan. I'm surprised they didn't just link to Gerald Posner's shitty book. Yeah. So there is no credible evidence to suggest that Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself. The Manhattan Coroner's report, it's all there. I mean, the thing about his hynoid bone being fractured or just like how physically he could have hung himself in that cell and just like leaving all of that aside just the fact that

he literally was a sex trafficker connected at the highest levels. And all the fucking cameras just malfunctioned because the guards who had Victorian sleeping caps on. Connected intimately to one former president, one current president and the royal family of England. How do they like, how do these people like rationalize when Acosta said like, oh, I was told not to really go that far because he belongs to intelligence. He belongs to intelligence.

That's part of the public record. Okay. The next question that we are, we're going to be truth hunters for. Partisanship plays a role in what people believe. Both Republicans and Democrats are prone to believe conspiracy theories that make the other party look bad. Can you pick the true statement or will you be blinded by party loyalty? Okay.

First, first statement. Republicans cheated their way to the 2000, 2004 and 2016 presidential elections. I love the wording of this. See if you can spot what they're doing here. It's all three or none. That's it. It's all three or none. Oh my God.

You could, like, I think 2016 is the least credible of those, but you could pick either one of them and have a pretty okay case. But like, certainly 2000 is bulletproof, out in the open, out in the open. They fucking, they sent a bunch of hooting psychos to stop counting and then they used their control of the courts to stop a recount that would have, would have changed the result. By every conceivable, by every metric, if the recount was allowed to continue, Al Gore would have won Florida and been the president. It was just, what was so funny about everyone freaking out about Trump or like future Republicans

nullifying an election. It's like, they already did that and you did nothing about it. It's not going to be the triumph of fascism. It's going to be business as usual. And look, I mean, like, you know, like, I don't know like how bulletproof it is or not, but 2004 there were some, you know, you could look at Ohio as Secretary of State Ken Blackwell and his role in it. John Conyers tried to open hearings into it.

He was just about the only one. Ohio was a little wacky. It was like one place where they just kicked everybody out while they were counting the ballots because of an unspecified terror threat that was never followed up on. It was a little eyebrow-raising. No, but like, and that one is great because it's all three or nothing. You can't just say, oh, well, definitely at least two of them, at least two of them Republican cheated.

And then if you're someone who is, who spent the Trump years rolling their eyes at the fucking conspiracy liberals freaking out about Russia, you have to accept that if you think 2000 was in any way illegitimate, then that makes you the same as a person who thinks that Putin made everybody vote for Trump with Facebook. Now, their answer to this, if you said Republicans did cheat their way to those three presidential election, it says wrong. Republicans won fairly in 2000, 2004 and 2016. Okay, like 2004 and 2016, I can understand, how can you possibly say they won fairly in

the 2000? I mean, the answer is for the Washington Post to say otherwise. Because they won. If it went through the process, it was legitimate by definition. All right. Next conspiracy question, Hillary Clinton conspired to provide Russia with nuclear materials. I don't even know. I'm not even familiar with this.

Oh, God. I know, that's pure Fox News, like Hannity talked about that for like four straight years. If you're like a Nelly Orr head, you're like, you like broke your mouse clicking yes on this one. This is like, all the people who are like, Glenn Simpson knew Nelly Orr and there's nothing about it in the news. It's like, they love this one. This is the kind of one where like, even if it's true, I don't care, like if Ukraine

has fucking uranium or if Clinton did it, not anything to do with anything. This one is purely just as a gotcha because they brought this one up, Hannity turned this one into a story because they were talking, the Democrats were talking about Trump's relationship to Ukraine and he was doing a jiu-jitsu deal. Okay. Okay. I'm going to skip the limited hangout answer and I'm going to go like, the last one is Barack Obama faked his citizenship to become president.

Easy. No one cares. Once again, another one where if he did, who gives a shit? Yeah. I don't care. I hope he did. Honestly, I hope he did. That would have required some initiative and been pretty wily and interesting.

It's like the people who are obsessed with this idea that like, Ilan Omar married her brother to get citizenship in the country. I'm like, I don't know if it's true or not, but I hope it is. As far as I know, for Barack Obama, Barack Obama is like one of the paramount villains of the 21st century helped doom this fucking country and his Machiavelli and Frank Underwood plan to do it was get A's, that was his entire, that was it, get A's on tests. It's like, if he's like fucking, like as a kid, falsifying birth certificates and stuff, it's like, okay, there's somebody worthy of the position.

Or maybe it wasn't him, maybe it was his mom who was probably agency connected. Right. Either way, just something less banal than I'm going to just go to school and be good at it. I'm going to do a lot of homework. Listen to the true answer, the one that they want you to pick, because the way it's worded is so fucking telling. All right.

During Ronald Reagan's presidency, government officials secretly and illegally sold weapons to Iran and use the money to fund Nicaraguan revolutionaries. Can you spot the huge fucking lie there? You know what the Contra in Contra is in front of? Revolutionaries. Yes. Okay, so this is the Washington Post, they're like, okay, like, what was the previous one? The wiretapping Martin Luther King.

Now that this is now just like, they've admitted this, everybody knows this case, books have been written about it. It's like, no one can argue the opposite. It's the way they admit it that is still shading the truth to such an insane degree. Because they're like, oh, this is safe. Every sensible person knows Reagan illegally funded revolutionaries in Nicaragua. Okay, leaving aside the part that they were not revolutionaries, they were counter, they were Contras, more like illegally funded death squads, like illegally funded the extermination

of like the rural populations of like large parts of Central America. And also another way to put that with cocaine sales that the United States abetted and covered up and participated in. Major thing they're leaving out. Major thing. It's like the FBI keeping tabs on Martin Luther King and other secret civil rights leaders. It's just like, you could read that now and be like, oh, well, you know, I know bad things happen in the past, but, you know, keep tabs.

And then with Reagan, it's just like, okay, like, yeah, he didn't fill out the right forms, but look, he was funding revolutionaries. Yeah, the freedom fighters, the moral equivalent of our founding fathers. Yes. As Ronnie Reagan said, okay, it says here, real world events sometimes follow this formula as well. For example, the Reagan administration acted secretly and illegal in the Iran Contraffil. The FBI did spy on King, but the key difference is that these real incidents are backed up

by evidence, facts and witnesses. Conspiracy theories are different. They're just theories. I mean, also just a theory is gravity and evolution. Most have no evidence to support them. I mean, like, there's a lot of evidence. There's a lot of evidence. It's like you get to pick, it's almost like you get to pick which evidence counts when

you work for the Washington Post. They often connect unrelated facts to create an impression of plausibility, yet almost everyone believes at least one. According to Enders, one thing I noticed a lot in talking to colleagues, journalists and students, people don't realize that a lot of people just believe weird stuff. A lot of this commotion about conspiracy theories, especially in the last four or five years, is fueled by this complete misunderstanding of the basic contours of public opinion, which brings us to our third fact-finding mission.

Conspiracy theorists commonly seize on subjects that most people have little expertise in, such as health and science, and therefore cannot be easily debunked. Half of Americans believe one of the claims in the list below, but only one is backed by evidence. Which of these is true? Number one, the dangers of genetically modified foods are being hidden from the public. I mean, personally, I don't really give a shit about GMO. It's not really my thing, but at the same time, if you don't think that Conagra and

Monsanto are covering up really heinous shit about the food supply in this country. If a company finds out, oh, this stuff we make is bad, do they ever go, well, shit, we better stop making it then, when has that ever happened? We have a pretty comprehensive list of other times when we know the opposite occurred. When they said, oh yeah, tough shit. I think it's short-sighted to just say GMOs. I think it's like, the amount of obese Americans doesn't triple in 30 years because the food's great.

Yeah, I know. It's not necessarily brainwashing us or whatever, but it's clearly the shit that they're feeding us is bad. Yeah, and I don't know enough to tell you that that's because it's GMO. It's a ton of reasons. But it's another one of the things where it's like, oh yeah, no, in the 50s, they told everyone char-grilled meat and white bread was the healthiest thing to eat, and then they were like, oh yeah, we're wrong, but they would never do that again.

It's cigarette commercials done by doctors talking about how it enhances your Q-zone. GMOs are not really an issue that I'm really into. Personally, I think whether something is genetically modified isn't necessarily good or bad. It's just because something's a GMO doesn't necessarily mean it's bad for you or evil or poison or whatever. It's sort of similar to Jordan Peterson was just like, I've noticed that there's been no skepticism of big pharmaceutical companies by the left and their vaccine or whatever.

My skepticism of Pfizer is not that it comes from the fact that their drugs don't work. It comes from the fact that they do work and they're hoarding it and people die because they're price gouging on it. That's the conspiracy about Pfizer that I think is relevant to, it's not whether insulin works or not or whether chemotherapy can save your life. Talk about someone who does not distrust anything that they make, and I mean anything. He'll try all of it. One very specific brand of their wonder drugs.

Next up is, yeah, the dangers of our food supply are absolutely being hidden from the public. GMOs there is the distraction that you'd be like, well, I'm reasonable. I'm not some sort of new agey nut who only eats organic or whatever, but so many of the ingredients that are in candy, food preservatives, not just junk food, but almost everything that you eat or buy in a supermarket or gas station in this country contains chemicals, preservatives. It contains things in it that in any European country, it is illegal to feed those same

chemicals to animals, to livestock. It is just simply because they've determined that it is detrimental to human life. The food supply system in this country views Americans as slightly lower than cattle in terms of what it is legal to knowingly expose people to without their consent largely. It's not like this is an informed consent thing, you just buy some ding-dongs, you're like, oh, delicious. Next up, the US government secretly dosed Americans with LSD in an attempt to develop the mind control technology.

This is the correct answer. It says correct. The operation was called MKUltra, and it ended in the 70s. They would never do anything like that ever again. They just got bored. They got bored with it. It was like, oh, another guy freaking out thinking that he's Jesus that shoots the president. Man, this is boring.

I think this is like, I have to call this like the family guy view of the intelligence community, where it's like every horrible thing they've done is like they do it for a week, and then they're like, that was crazy, but we like learned our lesson. Yeah. Let's not do it again. Hey, Lois, remember when we had a bunch of hookers give people LSD and a bordello? And one of them killed himself? All right.

Next up is the AIDS virus was created and spread around the world on purpose by a secret organization. I mean, you know, I don't think so. Probably not. I don't. Yeah. I don't really think so. I never really saw the angle on that one, honestly.

Yeah. It's like incomplete. And then finally, the coronavirus was purposely created and released by powerful people as part of a conspiracy. Released, I don't know, but created. That's absolutely on the table. I'm sorry. Yeah.

It's up for grabs there. Yeah. I mean, that one, you know, yeah, it's just, I have some problems with the overall narrative fitting it in. I mean, like certainly the result of it being rampaging across the planet, you could look at it and say like the consolidation of wealth among the like tiny, tiny elite of the global capitalist class has been rather staggering, but that doesn't necessarily mean they did it on purpose.

It's rather, you know, capitalism, every disaster is an opportunity. Exactly. Like that's the thing that doesn't move me about any of the intentional release ideas is that they don't need to do that. The great reset already fucking happened 40 years ago. Like we are depoliticized and scattered enough that we are at basically their will able to be reorganized as crises accumulate, which they're just going to keep doing. And you know, I mean, I think like the most, I mean, like, like whether it's AIDS or coronavirus,

I think like the most, I think the most credible explanation for the, you know, the, these novel viruses that, you know, become these plagues upon humanity, or is like, at some point, it just crosses over from animals into people. And this is again, once again, largely a product of industrial agriculture on a certain level. And when you come to things like, you know, the SARS or in COVID and, you know, I think like it's the animal to human crossovers. I think like whether it happens organically or whether you think of fucking, you know, someone did it on purpose.

Right. I mean, well, and if they're, I mean, if it did get out of a lab, like they're doing that game of function shit, because we're constantly just spitting in God's face every day, daring the natural world to spit one of these things back at us. Yep. And believe me, they're going to be spitting back a lot in the decades to come. Yeah. All right.

So next conspiracy question. Some conspiracy theories are like astrology, entertaining nonsense that ultimately doesn't hurt anyone. You see, you see the disrespect they have for women in the Washington Post here. Honestly, you see the sexism on display here. Oh, it's, astrology is entertaining nonsense. I'd love to see your fucking moon sign, buddy. I'm getting an idea about what it is.

I'm getting word that the Washington Post now has fewer female subscribers than we do. It says, okay, but some are entertaining, but ultimately don't hurt anyone. But some are bizarre sinister or downright offensive. Which of these statements, if any, is correct? School shootings, such as those in Newtown, Connecticut and Parkland, Florida are false flag attacks perpetrated by the government. Now, I personally, I personally do not believe that school shootings are false flag attacks

perpetrated by the government. However, I do believe many other mass shootings are. Absolutely. It's interesting. Like, oh, the one where all the kids got killed, and of course, the one where psychos attached to Alex Jones, like harassed family members, the one, the most repulsive thing you're like, oh, no, of course not. Meanwhile, the FBI, every other day has a string of dudes whose job is just to be constantly

texting the most unstable people they can find on Facebook and tell them, hey, dude, you should definitely shoot some people today. They literally had like a neat, and we're like, we're like, here's a hot girl telling you to do a terrorist attack. And hey, remember when Stephen Paddock's brother went on the news the day after he killed, like shot like 700 people and was like, yeah, there's no reason he would do this. None of it makes sense. And like the next day his house burned down and the FBI was like, he had a billion files

of child pornography on his computer. Yeah. Matt, I know you don't like, you put me on that story about that QAnon dad whose kid was at Parkland and he's like at a war with his kid and he thinks his kid is a crisis actor. Like, god damn, that is being on the computer too much. That's taken the pill. Next question, satanic sex traffickers control the government.

I mean, in fact, yeah, yeah, I was saying, I'm seeing in the first question. I don't know if they're satanic or not. I mean, it's just like a term of art, like the theater kids amongst them are. The ones who like the robes and the pageantry are, but like most of them are like Nixon. They're like, get that shit out of here. I just want to have sex with some children. Yeah. And none of the above.

That's clearly the correct answer. I'm interested to like what their response is to satanic sex traffickers control the government. Wrong. This theory might seem ridiculous, but Americans have long blamed Satanists for the country's problems. One in seven Americans believe this theory in October, 2020. All right.

Question five, let's try another one. Which of these three statements below is true? The US government knew hundreds of black men in Alabama had syphilis, but told them they had bad blood and withheld treatment as part of a medical experiment. Obviously, true. That's the Tuskegee experiment. I think everyone pretty much knows about that. Next one, President Donald Trump faked having COVID in order to help his chances at reelection.

I mean, once again, I don't care if it's true or not. Once again, it's like more initiative than he generally showed at any part of the job. That one, it feels fake because like that's not, he wouldn't do like the bulk. If he was like faking having COVID, like he would have like walked around in a bathrobe and stuff. For me, it's the thing about him is asking if he's going out like Stan Shara. That proves he really has. That is a truthful existential appeal from a terrifying, a terrifying, a terrifying,

terrified soul. When I was like talking about the Stan Shara thing once, this like, you know, one of those like based like young conservatives was like, oh, you're a lib if you believe that. And it's like, I think I know way more about the guy you supposedly love. Yeah, exactly. Do you really like this guy at all? You don't know any of his like, no, this is the first guy he would bring up. You think some fucking dork from like the Washington Post or one of the leaking aides

knows who fucking Stan Shara is? That's like, that's like how I knew it was true. Because it's like, that's of course he would bring up Stan Shara. Like no, that's yeah, a guy he ate like a cumulative of like three million pounds of hamburgers with. And then it also means that if he faked it, he would have had to think, okay, well, if I was dying of coronavirus, what would I think, uh, uh, do am I going out with Stan Shara?

No, it would never occur to him that he would think that he would, he would think he was going to say something cool and not about a round old real estate man. We saw it. I mean, we saw like him like trying to like lie that directly after the Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and he did the, the funniest video of all time when he's like, this is the first time hearing what an amazing lady it's like, yeah, no, he's like that type of lying. He's not a pretty good liar. Yeah.

Okay, last one, he's like, he's like, he's like not like quite like self aware enough to be a good liar. He's not like the type of person who's like, oh, okay, I'm like a, like kind of a bad guy. Like what would I say here if I was in this situation? I mean, he lies constantly, but he lies like a child does not with any sort of preconceived like no, it's just reflex. Yeah, exactly. Reflective without any kind of plan or contemplation.

Yeah, there's no premeditation. It's just, he's just in the moment. He's like, I'll just, yeah, I'll get out of this. Last one here. Donald Trump colluded with Russians to steal the presidency in 2016 again, don't give a shit one way or the other. Yeah, honestly. Yeah.

We had a coming if they, if they, if that guy and that country stole an election for the presidency, then fucking take a bow. Yeah. Losing, losing one to like, yeah, losing one to James Baker and like that whole cabal is like understandable. It's like, yeah, those guys have been fucking everything. Both teams played hard. Yeah, those guys have been fucking everyone forever.

Like of course they won. But like if like Russia does it, it's like you sock. Yeah. Like fuck with that. We just shouldn't, like, no. We shouldn't have a country. Yeah. Russia and the stupidest idiot on earth.

I think it should be like, like, like soccer in Europe. Like if that were true of America, we need to get derelegated to like from the Premier League to like Champions League or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But like the correct answer here, again, is telling because they're like, yeah, everybody knows about the Tuskegee experiment started in 1932, lasted 40 years and involved hundreds

of black men in Macon County, Alabama. I just love the things that they like, just breezily admit that we all know are true. But then they're just like, yeah, there's no way Jeffrey Epstein was murdered. Yeah. I mean, yes, the government didn't knowingly in fact knowingly allow hundreds of black men to like suffer the effects of syphilis as part of a human guinea pig medical experiment that carried over decades. Yes, Reagan absolutely broke the law funding illegal revolutionaries and selling arms to

Iran. They're like, oh, yeah, we all know that's true. But like, oh, like these other things are just like, oh, that, you know, like, oh, that we'd be lied to about how poisonous our food food is. No, no way. Well, like that's the so the most sober minded thing to think is that like every bad thing stopped happening 40 years ago. Like on the.

The important thing is like, you have to be enough of a realist to say, yes, the government has done bad things, corporations have done bad things. But you can't take that to the conclusion that they because these entities are completely unchecked. And the bad stuff they did back then was because there was no oversight, which continues to be the case. You can't bring it now because what does that mean then what if that's true, then you can't care about the stupid pageantry politics bullshit that they insist you have to care about.

I mean, like, yeah, like their answer for the MK ultra one where they're like, yes, the US government did conduct mind control experiments using LSD. It was called MK ultra. It ended in 1970. All right. Last, last conspiracy question. Conspiracy theories often help powerful people, sometimes by putting other powerful people in the crosshairs or by playing on prejudices, which of these statements is correct?

Number one, a powerful family, the Rothschilds, through their wealth controls governments, wars, and many countries economies. I mean, I love this question because it's like, OK, it's clear what's going on right now. They're like, oh, it's playing on bigotries like the Rothschilds is like, this is a long staple of like, you know, anti-Semitic conspiracy theory lore. But like, just take out the name Rothschilds and just read this question, a powerful family is through their wealth control governments, wars, and many countries economies like unassailably

true. Yeah. And you could like, whether it's George Soros or the Cokes or fucking like whoever you want to slot in there, that even the Rothschilds, like, it's all fucking true. Yeah. How could you possibly say otherwise? If you like click yes on that, the like little correction you get is like, oh, really? If they're so powerful, how come J. Electronica destroyed one of their marriages?

Wait, what? You don't know about it? No. J. Electronica, like a Rothschild woman like had an affair with him and like left her husband. He's awesome. He's he rocks. One of the best verses on Donda ruined at least like maybe two Rothschilds lives. Maybe if I don't know if she had kids, maybe more, I don't know what, but like, he rocks.

He's the fucking. I'm just gonna think of what they tell you are wrong. This theory relies on openly anti-Semitic tropes. No family and no country has the power this theory attributes to the Rothschilds. Okay. Yeah. Right. Okay.

Okay. The next one, this is even better. There is a, quote, deep state embedded in the government that operates in secret and without oversight. What? Where? Hmm. What is the oversight that these people think exists for agencies like the S&S and the

CIA? It's literally just FISA. FISA. Congress. Congress. They always just bring up the FISA court. A fault, wrong. For much of the past four years, Republicans have speculated that a deep state was working

to undermine President Donald Trump. While the FBI and CIA do conduct covert operations, there's little evidence for a separate deep state. Oh, there's only a little evidence for it. Okay. But what I like about this one is like, this whole idea of the deep state, they contain it to just four years when Donald Trump was president. Yeah.

And it's like, it's only like, it's only a mag of people who believe in that. No other, has no other, doesn't have any other accusations behind it. Certainly couldn't have anything to do with things like, I don't know, keeping tabs on Martin Luther King or dosing people with LSD to see what happens. Like, who the fuck do they think did that shit? And how accountable were they when it just got found out and then they just said, we're never going to do it again. We promise.

And nobody went to jail. Okay. Final conspiracy question. Fossil fuel companies like Exxon knew about climate change for decades, but spread misinformation about the issue to deflect blame and influence environmental policies. Correct. Exxon and Shell knew about climate change in the 80s. And some fossil fuel companies have fought to obscure climate science.

Their efforts have paid off. Two in 10 Americans think global warming is a hoax. It's good though. They did all that shit, but it's okay because we know about it and they've been held accountable. And also, yeah, Exxon found out long time ago that their product is actually really bad for people and the world. And they just sat on it and actually put out a bunch of, spent money to smoke screen the truth.

And meanwhile, Monsanto, they would, if they knew that their corn slurry was bad for people, they would absolutely fess up immediately. And well, you know, I mean, like the same thing as a deep state, like, I mean, like we have oversight and accountability in the American political system. So like the idea that a company like Exxon could just lie about something like that and then get away with it. I mean, I mean, you'd have to be pretty. I wasn't, you know, I wasn't born, I'm young, but I wasn't born yesterday.

So there we go. That is the conspiracy score. I mean, our final score doesn't really matter here. But it says here, nine in 10 Americans would likely fail at least once taking this quiz. Even reasonable people fall for conspiracy theories during Georgia. Who are the 10 percent? I want to like meet those people who got every question on this right. Yeah.

Good boys and girls. Yeah. If you did like a heat map of like who's getting every question right, it's just like all Darian, Connecticut and Nova. Yep. And they all fail. The people who got every question on the, the 10 percent who got every question right are involved in the conspiracies that these things are about.

They're also proud of themselves that they went to work that day and like, oh, I'm going to get an extra. No, they're going to get an extra piece of bread with my Caesar salad at chopped today. Matt, they're actually proud of themselves for not going to work on one day in particular. Yeah. The guy whose job that who is working the phone bank that day is like, I know these are conspiracies. It says here, no, during George W. Bush's presidency, half of Democrats said Bush let the 9-11 attacks happen so he could start wars.

Damn, Democrats used to be. I mean, that's shocking. Half of half of Democrats. No, he's Democrat. Cool. And now half of the Democrats want him on the Democratic ticket. Yeah. Seventy-five percent of Democrats like would like give their life for the NSA.

There's no more like based lives. There's no more like Ed Asner's. It used to be, man, like lives used to be awesome because like we've talked about this before, but it's like, I mean, that is like what my dad was like and a lot of other boomers where it's like they don't like have really like a systemic critique, but just because of like their, like when they grew up and everything they have like an inherent distrust of like the CIA and like the military. They're not like that anymore.

Yeah. They don't make them that way anymore. The orange Cheeto had his effect. I think before that though, like they would like, they were like, Obama's the coolest man ever. So that Obama, another reason why Obama is so evil, like, yeah, my dad like thought all this like, yeah, like cool shit like that. And then he was like, Obama's a hell of a guy and it's like, man.

He's a firecracker. Yeah. I want to make his clit and soon. Yeah. Obama, yeah. Obama like really fucking, he really did a number on the base boomer lives. You know, this is the Washington Post though, so they like, this paragraph has to be balanced out.

We got to have both sides here. So half of Democrats believe, believed at least believed at one point that Bush let the 9-11 attacks happen so we could start wars. You know, again, I don't know how anyone could possibly argue against that in 2021. But also, if you're a Democrat, don't feel bad because two thirds of Republicans believe the quote big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Now I personally don't think that is, there's even a shred of credibility to the idea that, but after everything we just talked about, I mean, is it not possible?

That's just it. They can steal the presidential election from anyone. This whole thing is to chide you for believing these things. Meanwhile, how about some stuff that they didn't even put in there like that the U.S. government lied to start a war in the Middle East, which happened right in front of everybody's fucking face and living memory of most adults. And had a giant economic collapse that was responded to by a bipartisan recapitalization of the very bankers that fucking had it happen in the first place.

Why the hell wouldn't people believe this shit? And they have to turn it into just, you're just being too gullible, you're not being rational enough. Meanwhile, the purveyors of rationality show you every fucking day that their vested interest is to keep you believing horseshit, to keep you pliant to these fucking forces. Well, Matt, the last paragraph here says, eventually you'll run into a conspiracy theory that appeals to you politically or psychologically. So be careful and double check your sources or you could fall down the rabbit hole too.

So what? What if I do? Are you going to give me an F? Am I going to get a bad grade for the Washington Post? I'm going to be held back? Fuck off. Literally, all they have is the good people are going to think poorly of you. Well, I fucking think you eat babies.

Why would I give a shit what you think? Yeah, no, no, Bob Woodward's going to come to your house and personally scold you for believing that he is a CIA agent. Yeah, and I want to talk to him about his time with the fucking Office of Naval Intelligence. Yeah. Well, you're not invited to the news rave. I'm going, fuck you. I got these special pressed mollies that are shaped like Arthur Solzorberg to Seltzerberg.

Seltzerberg. Arthur Solzorberg, inventor of white claw. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to turn up. Fuck you. You're going to be outside. Yeah.

I'm getting, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm missing a new NFT. It's, it's Catherine Graham, but she's a stork and she's smoking weed. You know, I, it's worth $80,000. Will, you know that I run like the Moody's of NFT. Like I'm the bet, like what bond rating is for like financial instruments that make sense. I evaluate dopeness. That gets three dopes. There we go.

You know, you, you know, uh, phase banks, of course, the star of my favorite video of all time. Uh, he made like $900,000 in like one night off NFTs. See, there you go. There you go. Forget all that shit you're talking about, aesthetics and art and stuff. That is why people fucking do it. Cause you could, you could be the one to get in before it falls apart or it gets rug pulled

or whatever the fuck. That proves that these are like legit. I mean, they're legit if you make money. Oh, if you made almost a million dollars off of them, that's about as legit as it gets. Yeah. But I mean, that is the thing though. It's like he's, he commands like a captive audience and could be like, these are dope and like send the value up.

Yeah. That is the, that's why this is so great. Cause it's like there's, uh, like they're basically they're, they're pump and dumps turned into a security, like, and they have, they have mechanisms to allow you, if you have the right, you know, clout to manipulate a market legally, who the hell wouldn't want to do that? This would be like NFTs are like, it allows you to do all the cool shit that should be legal in the stock market.

Yes. Like, you know, I've, I'm Jordan Belford. I should just like hold the press conference and just say Pepsi causes AIDS. And then I short Pepsi stock like before I do that, you know, like you should be allowed to do that. That's how you make it fun. Especially since Pepsi causes AIDS. Yeah.

This you could say, oh, uh, the fucking, uh, hippo head is fucking whack. So lazy, lazy, uh, lazy orangutan, that, that's dope. Bye. We have a pretty, we don't have like a phase being sized audience. We have a pretty captive one. Like when we've asked our audience to do like good things, they've done it. Yeah. Like every fundraising thing, like working for, like all that shit, they've like always

done it. They're like a good audience. What if we made an NFT of like one of those pictures where Patrick is like asleep on the floor outside? We would make some. Oh yeah. If we like told our audience, it's dope. Yeah.

NFT, uh, NFT of the, the photo Amber took of Matt look dressed like a three year old. Yeah. That's like, it's wearing the exact same outfit as him. That honestly could make some money. Yeah. All right. Well, let's do it. I mean, is there any reason not to at this point?

I mean, it is. I wouldn't do it. We just talked about the, the global supply chains are breaking down. So I mean, might as well, how about the only, the only like defensible reason to do this would be like you're taking money, like you're maximizing your profit from like a junk made up asset, uh, like NFTs and you then you immediately get out and you put it into like a good asset, like a good financial instrument, like slots or blackjack or roulette. That would be cool.

No. No. As long as I, as long as I, as long as I still draw breath, there will never be any choppo NFTs or Cryptocurrency. No. I just, I can't do it. Next week we will be killing Will live on Twitch TV slash choppo trapeze. And then the Washington Post will say I committed suicide.

Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, like, look at the motive, qui bono. Who benefits? It's Felix. Yeah. I'm going to join the deep state and they're going to be like, I'm going to get like in 10 years.

We'll be like, don't go to work today. And I'll be like, what do you mean? I don't work. What are you talking? What the fuck are you talking about? And they're like, oh, yeah, sorry, do you have like a similar name to this guy that like goes to an office? I'm like, all right, peace.

I'll see you at the news rave. Oh boy. All right. Well, um, I think that does it for today's, uh, till next time guys, till next time. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.