Modern Wisdom - #048 - Sargon Of Akkad - What Is Happening With Patreon, Gillette and Brexit?

Episode Date: January 21, 2019

Sargon Of Akkad, also known as Carl Benjamin, is a YouTuber and Political Commentator. Today we're talking hot topics, including Carl's recent removal from Patreon and Jordan Peterson & Sam Harris's subsequent exits from the platform, Gillette's new advert & it's implications for the future of manhood, and the current state of Brexit & Theresa May's government. More Stuff: Sargon Of Akkad on Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/user/SargonofAkkad100 Gillette's Advert - https://youtu.be/koPmuEyP3a0 The Eyes To The Right & The Nose To The Left In Parliament - https://twitter.com/ChrisWillx/status/1085908179572215808 Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi friends, I am incredibly ill this week as you can hear by the sound of my nasal tones. I'm like a walking advert for Vicks Vapourub. However, this week I am sitting down with Carl Benjamin, also known as Sagan of a Cad. He is a very well known YouTuber with nearly 900,000 subs and a fantastic political commentator. Gen genuinely loved sitting down with him today. We talked about the Gillette advert, the most recent Gillette advert, and its implications, we spoke about Brexit and just what the fuck is going on.

And we talked about his de-platforming from Patreon and Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson's subsequent exit. It is one of my favorite episodes to date. Thank you very much for coming on Karl. I will be doing more episodes with him in the future. If you enjoy it, please make sure that you share it with a friend and go and check out Sargon of Accad, aka AD on YouTube. His content is absolutely fantastic. So let's get into it. Mr. Carl Benjamin, also known as Saga on a Cat, also known as Patreon's number one enemy at the moment. How are you today, sir?

I'm good. I didn't really consider myself Patreon's number one enemy. I don't know why they're doing this, but apparently, Subscribestar has started working for people now, so it's kind of an issue that's passed us all by, I suppose. Yeah, it's kind of in and out, in and out pretty fast, right? Yeah, it's been strange. For the, for the listeners who don't know what's occurred over the last few months, could you give us the, the rundown, the zeitgeist? Yeah, basically Patreon found me insulting a bunch of Nazis on a live stream on quite an obscure channel

and they took Umbridge to the way that I was insulting them and they decided to delete my Patreon account without warning which is strange because I mean the terms of service obviously don't say that they track down things that you do elsewhere on the internet and use that to judge you, but apparently they do. So be warned if you have a Patreon account. So Patreon was your way of assisting your channel Sargon of a card on YouTube, crowdfunding, it allows fans to get exclusive content and early access to certain things and stuff like that. And by being shut down from that, I'm going to guess that that was a primary source of income that you were driving from your channel, right? It was certainly one of the major ways I was monetizing my channel, yeah.

The YouTube has a joint feature that you can turn on, but I'm really hesitant to do it, because it's something like 30% of the money that people donate through it, and taken by YouTube themselves, whereas with Patreon is only 5%. And with subscribe starts, only 5% as well. Okay. And just 30%'s huge amount in my opinion. It is a big amount, yeah. Well, it's obviously YouTube is starting to see a gap

in the fact that if you've got companies that have agendas and who are potentially gonna disenfranchise the content creators. So that was the point of Patreon in the first place. YouTube, with the one saying, we have advertisers. Therefore, you can't say certain things or be quite edgy and push boundaries. There are a lot of advertisers who, know, and advertisers who don't want you to be too edgy, not they really care, I think, in my opinion, but they would demonetizing certain videos and things like that. And Patreon offered itself as, hey, look, you can keep your

content going without advertisers, without having to get these corporations involved, will facilitate you doing that. And now they're like, oh, actually, but if you say something we don't like and you don't apologize, then, you know, we're not the given the opportunity to apologise, but, you know, but the, if you say something, we don't like we're going to kick you off, it's just like, so what happens? What happens when you wake up on the morning of whatever day it is and you find out your Patreon accounts gone? It's not a very nice feeling. I'm going to be honest, you know, because I mean, I was relying on that money quite significantly. I mean, it is kind of terrifying knowing that you're living under a sort of damacles. You know, like every day I wake up and I check

that my YouTube channel is still there. I'm not joking. I'm, it sounds terrible, doesn't it? You know, it's like every morning, you phone up your boss just to check you have a job to go into. Yeah. You know, it's like, that's how I feel about it sometimes. And it's, it's my choice, obviously. I'm the one who started doing a YouTube channel,

but, you know, it wasn't like this when I started, you know, it wasn't, I mean, like Mumkey Jones was a young comedian who mocks, he mocked Elliot Roger. And he actually ended up doing some really good work with it, because he went through and read his crazy manifesto and things like this. And he would explain why Elliot Roger was such a, you know, lunatic. And he got his entire YouTube presence deleted for being apparently controversial. And it's like, well, you know, come on, the controversial stuff is the stuff that's interesting, isn't it? No one's just watching

daytime television on YouTube, are they? They're going to go somewhere else where the controversial content goes because that'll make that new platform, cough, cough, bitch, cough, a better alternative. I think BitChube's got a better model because it's stored like torrents. So it's across thousands of different computers, decentralizing it. And I think, so they don't have a giant warehouse full of hard drives to keep everything on. So I think that's the future.

It's just YouTube's currently the dominant market share. But anyway, sorry. Yeah, no, certainly. So you've woken up and you found out that how many subscribers or patrons did you have at the time? About 3,500. That is a very significant number, isn't it? Yeah, it's quite a lot, yeah.

And so, I mean, honestly, it's just, I mean, I just laughed because to be honest with you, I've kind of been expecting something for a while. And I feel the impending fisting, but you just didn't know whether it was from YouTube or Twitter or Instagram or. Yeah, basically, I think a bunch of prominent freedom activist YouTubers have been in the crosshairs for quite some time now. And I mean, obviously, really, it started with the alt-right and I objected to it then. And then it came

on Alex Jones. And it's been a very slippery slope since then. And it really is the tightening of the sort of new sort of censorship. Because I mean, you know, you say, okay, we're not gonna have platform Nazis. Okay, well, you know, I, that, it's hard to argue that, you know, I mean, I consider and make the same argument from their freedom, but if every, you know, if there's this giant consensus to do it, you're yelling into a gale, you know, and then it comes to some of the Calixtones.

And Alex Jones, no matter what you think, from he wasn't an Nazi, you know, he was a radical libertarian conspiracy theorist. And he was the one going, oh, they're going to shut us down and all the sort of stuff. And then on one day, they shut him down. And it was, so, okay, well, that's, and that was enough to get a lot of people

paying attention. And then on Patreon, they got rid of me, James Olsup and Milo Yenopolis. James Olsup's a white, I'd enter tearing, but he's not Nazi. He's not calling for violence or anything. Milo's just very conservative, and I'm a classical liberal.

So, the fact that they've jumped like several new steps closer and tighter to the center. And, I mean, there's no particular reason that Milo should have been kicked off in the first place. And I did actually object to it on the day it happened. But everyone else just ignored it. And then two days later, that was it. My Patreon was gone as well. And that was like shit. Because Milo's had a really bad run recently, being de-platformed. Like what's terrifying and you alluded to it earlier on, is the fact that your connection to your audience

and people who genuinely care about your content and essentially your friends for one of the better term if you were to try and create it in the real world they are at the behest of a man with a button and the man can press the button and when the button gets pressed your friendship with, what you up to now, nearly a million subs on YouTube, you're coming on 900,000, something like that. So your friendship with, or connection with a million people is gone.

Yeah. And it's not just, it's not just the voice that I had that they're silencing. It's the ability for anyone who wanted to hear what I had to say. They've been deafened in the process. And the whole thing's really quite terrifying because almost all of the internet is run from Silicon Valley. And so I did a video on Starship Troopers. Oh, I'll go out and I had to read a lot about fascism because the accusation on the book and the movie is that it's a fascist book movie. It's not. But I did end up having to read a lot about fascism to be able to make the distinction because, I mean, you know, if you don't

know much about either subject, it's easy to just say guns, therefore fascism, that's not how it works. But one of the things that fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentelli said about the fascist state that I found really interesting is the idea of it being an ethical state. As in, it has a plan. It has a goal. And so everything that the state's doing in a liberal society like we live in, everything the state should be working towards is the protection of the rights and freedoms of the

citizen. The state doesn't tell you how to be a citizen. It's there to safeguard your independence as an individual in the world. But the fascist state and the socialist state is not really like that. They have a goal, a moral teleology, and they know how they've got manifestos. They have a series of steps on how they can implement these. So I was thinking, what on earth would a liberal manifesto even look like? We want everything all the time from everyone.

You need a grand plan for the world to have a manifesto. And so one of the ways that Giovanni Gentelli described this, I thought was really fascinating. It was like the fascist state is wide awake and has a will of its own. And you can definitely say that about Silicon Valley. It's wide awake and has a will of its own because you can listen to Tim Cook saying that it's a sin not a censor. And then you can listen to all the other CEOs. I mean, Jack Conte just openly said, we all talked to each other. We're very open and we share. And it's like, okay, and there's there's a definitive kind of culture

that's come out of the sort of Bay Area in which Silicon Valley set. And it's got designs on remodeling the world. And I don't agree with those designs. I think they're quite authoritarian. And I mean, it's honestly, they're trying to create the demolition man future, which is a video I'm going to do fairly soon, actually, because it's so scary how unbelievably similar that they wanted. But yeah, sorry, this Silicon Valley, it scares me because it kind of acts like a fascist organization. Yeah, I think it is very worrying that you have such a high amount of power concentrated in such a small place.

Like it's the equivalent of a market monopoly. Oh, absolutely. It was competitive. If there was any competitiveness legislation with regards to having to distribute the power more evenly geographically, because you're totally right. Like, you end up with an echo chamber. Like, we all, everyone that's listening, I'm sure, will have heard about how echo chambers exist online. But if you lump this many businesses together and this many CEOs in the same

telegram and WhatsApp group chats, what do you think happens then? And it's normal for that to happen. You form a community with the people in the local area around you, and people of similar status to you, it's natural that happens. It's not like it's an evil conspiracy, but I mean, when Tim Cook was standing at the recent Apple thing where the viral clip from going around, he looked like a preacher. He was saying for the list, he was saying that they had to, I can't remember word for word obviously, but the general thrust of it is that it was on the responsibilities of the big tech corporations to project their values out into the world and to make sure that the world is run according to these values and the internet in particular, because these are the masters of the internet that we're

talking about. I mean, Tim Cook's one of the most powerful men in the world, and he's saying we have a particular, and it sounded genuinely religious, you know, and he used religious terminology. He said, it's a sin, not a censor. And it's like, well, Jesus Christ, man, you know, if we're going to get into the realm of what's sinful and not, then I guess you're going to have to debate with the Pope or something, aren't you? Because it sounds so far away from the vision that most people think of when they think about Silicon Valley's start-up, fuck the system, guys with long hair and dreads just doing what they want and it's free love man. Is this the vision for Silicon Valley that was started 40 years ago?

Is that really where it was supposed to go? It's changed a lot, hasn't it? Because, I mean, if you look at like PayPal, it was Peter Thiel, Thiel, how are you pronouncing it? The PayPal on the market, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Elon Musk and a bunch of others. And they're not like far left lunatics at all. You know, they're quite libertarian in many ways.

It seems that the far left have just moved in slowly, but surely, and you know, crept, you know, it's like a, I don't want to say a plague. Something, something akin, something akin to a plague. Yeah, something akin. Yeah, yeah, I was going to be more generous. I was fine. But you know what I mean, it's over time, the nature of it has changed.

I get that. So you, you ended up getting, I don't know whether the term is de-platformed from Patreon or not, but it removed from Patreon. And you'd mentioned about, it happened with MyLon, it happened with some other of your contemporaries. But based on what I saw, the immediate backlash from some other pretty prominent figures online

gave Lent a lot of publicity and credence to your side of the story. It certainly seemed, quite a few people who came out in support of you, right? Yeah, I mean, the problem is that Patreon didn't even try to really justify it. They can't appeal to their own terms of service. When doing this, that's the thing. That's why people talk about it as if it's a political maneuver because it does appear to be a political maneuver. I mean, I've been on Patreon for four years and they knew what I was like when I joined. I haven't really changed. You know, my political opinions are not the same, but still in the same

vein. You know, I've not particularly changed that. And I've always been opposed to political correctness. And they're effectively saying, because somewhere else, you were politically incorrect on our platform we're going to get rid of you, even though our terms and service only said it's things that happen on our platform. And Jack Conte literally said, we don't care about what you do on Twitter, we care about you doing patrons, that's OK.

Well, that seems fairly cut and dry to me. And so when they're just literally reversing this, then, I mean, how was I to know? I possibly wouldn't have been so unpolitically correct. Had I known that Patron were watching everything I did every week? Remove your make, yeah. I mean, you need to be careful what you say when you go to the toilet now, what you say when you're out walking the dog, where does the where does the finish? It is getting quite well, Ian, I really do think. I never really thought we'd end up living in some kind of omnipotent panopticon, where you can, no, no, because anything

you've said at any point in time or space can now be found by internet sleuths if it's on the internet, if it's in social media, if it's, you know, I mean, like look at Cheng Yuga's old, like when he was in college or whatever, his old blog from the 90s that he had up, I mean, it was really rude, you know, it was, it was like young men's rude talk, you know, and, you know, and obviously he's not saying this to women's faces. So it's not like he's going out and saying, hey, lady, you've got a nice rack, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he did kind of sound like Elliot Roger

while he was doing it. But that was all dug up like 20 years later, after he'd disavowed it like 10 years previously and said, look, this is something I did, I'm not proud of it. But now it doesn't matter. I'm not going to kick off of the board of the Justice Democrats, a political organization in the US, and him and Carl Kalinsky. And so it's just like it's merciless, absolutely merciless. And it's currently happening to

Tulsi Gabar right now, like she was raised in a right-wing Christian anti-Gay Household, like actively, dad was an activist against gay rights. And she grew up naturally with a bunch of those opinions as you expect. And she, you know, like she what she's going to Congress six years ago, but before then she had already changed her mind on the idea of gay rights, which is why she joined the Democrats. And now she's being just grilled for it. Like I'm seeing that she's such a mild person. And I'm just seeing the worst kind of backlash from the very far left activists who are now like,

well, if you were once ever against gay rights, then you are forever and we're just gonna treat you like you still hold this opinion. It's such a... Oh, full. Yeah, and the problem is because everybody wants to have this absolutist approach to people are either bad or good and the gray area is too gray and any seceding of ground is you

allowing them to proliferate these really terrible ideas. But Sam Harris has a great concept where he talks about the son of a terrorist over in Iraq and he says this son's two years old so let's imagine the free will that he's got he's two years old and he's maybe stamping on insects or something like that and you think well is it his fault and you go well no no like look at the people he's around he's got this aggression it's really aggressive culture and blah blah blah okay roll it forward he's seven years old and he's at school and he's bullying people you all is it his fault now and you go blah. Okay, roll it forward. He's seven years old and he's at school and he's bullying people. You know, is it his fault now?

And you go, well, no, no, it's still probably not his fault. He's got this crazy honor culture and he's very, very highly held within society. Okay, now continue to roll the tape forward. Now he's 15, now he's 20, now he's a warlord at 30. Like, where do we stop? Or where do we draw the line about understanding people's backgrounds? Yeah, no, that's a really really good point and a really good way of laying out too.

At what point do we hold people accountable for the things they believe and can we allow them to change if they want to and it seems like they're not before they can vote. I mean, if you're not allowed to vote, you basically, what we're saying to you, what the government is saying to you is, your views are not sufficiently well formed for you to be able to contribute to the national discourse. Yeah, they are.

So how can anything from circa that period be used as a canary in a coal mine for what you're like as a real person. A perfect example. I know you can. We've got a guy who works for a Canadian dude called iffy and I was talking to him the other day and I said, I've just seen that you've changed, you've changed, you've changed, you've twit a handle.

Why have you done that? And he says, man, like I've had twit as since I was like 11 and some of the shit that's on there because he's doing law at the moment. He's like, I just don't want in 10 years time. Someone could go back and find the shit I was on there, because he's doing law at the moment, he's like, I just don't want in 10 years' time, someone to go back and find the shit, I was tweeting when I was 12 years old. And he's not got dreams of going into fucking Congress, but this is how pervasive the situation is,

that people are terrified of having something dredged up. It's unbelievable that this is why I call it a panopticon, because it really is, someone having the ability to see everything about your life, if they just care to look. I mean, I tell you what, I am so god damn glad that social media didn't exist when I was a child. I am just, and I'm going to keep my son off of it for as long as I can because I mean, it's awful. It's awful the idea that like because I think that this is something that's really thought about, but like, I think that people's pasts are generally considered to be in in regular society, sort of the part of their private lives, you know, it's something bad happened

to you in the past or you did something silly. If you've paid the penance for it, say you went to jail or something, you know, like three years later you're going for a job. You know, it's appropriate to leave that in the past because otherwise the person can never improve and they're never given any incentive to improve. And so, I currently effectively stuck being a criminal forever. And but now the way the internet works is that no, any link can be sent to you and is as fresh as the day it was First printed, you know first uploaded or whatever and so it's It's it's all there and it's gonna be there forever

And so we're gonna have to be really really careful about what we say in public I guess it's a very nasty trailer of breadcrumbs back to a person that you never or that you the you know longer are I suppose So am I right in thinking that Sam Harris has closed his Patreon account now? He has, yeah. So he's still eats some Dave Root. So how many, how many patrons do you think are combined between them? Oh, I wouldn't even know. It must be a fair number, though. 50,000? Probably maybe something like that.

I honestly don't know. It's got to be a lot, though. Yeah. It's got to be a lot though. Yeah. It's got to be a lot. And they are now moving across to... They're actually setting up their own platform. Okay. But I don't know what it's called yet. Okay. But I'm obviously going to be looking forward to using it. But I'm also using Subscribestar, which is another platform that was existing before any of this happened. You know, I think it opened in May last year. And speaking to the Cartel nature of Silicon Valley, in fact, the woman who was overseeing

the de-platforming of my Patreon accounts had worked at PayPal for 80 years, and then she was put in charge of Patreon's trust and safety team. And then the day or the day after, I and a bunch of other YouTube content creators went to subscribe star, which is, they're already content creators on there, obviously, and they've been operating quite happily for about six months. But we went over there and suddenly PayPal and all of the other sort of Silicon Valley processing paypal and all of the other sort of Silicon Valley processing firms. Decide to pull their services from paper, from from subscribe stuff. As if subscribe started done something wrong, or as if we were being censured by Silicon Valley itself or something like that. This is why I really am

certain that it's a cartel. It's so juvenile, isn't it? It's terrible. Yeah. I mean, if Patreon don't want me on, okay. But what's that got to do with subscribe time? I mean, like, I still have a PayPal count. You know, I'm still buying Shania and eBay and... Yeah, I haven't been to platform from PayPal. So why when I or a bunch of us go to another platform, the PayPal pull out of that platform. It's like, bitch, you still give me money. You know, you do that. So why, so I can only see it as being them protecting the Patreon from the competition.

Because obviously, Subscribestar is not based in Silicon Valley. So, so has that been reversed now? What do you mean, sorry? The PayPal not accepting payments through space. No, I believe Subscribestar have figured out a way to get around it by using some other processor probably outside of the US. Isn't that bizarre that bringing across some of the biggest Patreon or the biggest crowd funded content creators on the internet was actually one of the worst things probably

operationally for about 24 hours that could have happened to us. Well, yeah, I mean, the thing is, I don't think anyone really expected PayPal to say, right, we're not going to do business with you anymore, because none of the people who Patreon had done business with had been a problem. You know, I mean, we're all, you know, we're all been on Patreon for years, and Patreon had no problem. And suddenly they're like, oh, that's not politically correct enough. We've got an excuse to get rid of you.

And we're not going to let you go to another platform because we're going to get PayPal to it's very, very strange. Crazy, crazy juvenile. So I want to move on to the most current topic in the world at hand, which is this new Gillette advert, which I'm going to guess that you will have seen. Yes. Have you seen the British version of it? No, I haven't. Oh, man, I will make sure for those who are watching and I will send it across to you, but it's the same, but this is the funniest thing about the whole everything to do with this advert that the British version is narrated by Scottish guy. I mean, like the Scottish, the Scottish are the most alpha males. I don't know man. Scotland seems cuckst to me. I don't know man, Scotland seems cuckst to me. Does it?

Oh, unbelievably so. Scotland is unbelievably progressive. It's really bad. Like, and I like the idea of the Scots being a bunch of rowdy, rowdy, northern lads. You know, I like the idea of them being Scottish. That's how I kind of constructed, like exactly the same you did, but like, man,

they, for example, the Scottish government was putting out a bunch of, uh, on, but a bus stop adverts just saying, dear, transphobes, we are afraid of your transphobia. Dear racist, we hate your racism stuff like this. And it's like, yeah, so the, I mean, and this is, this goes back to what I mean about the ethical states, you know, the state has a goal above just being the protector of your rights and freedoms. Now they're like, look, you're not anti-racist enough. You're transphobic. You need to change. And I don't think it should be up to the government trying to decide your opinions for

you. I just don't. I think that's just a moral wrong. And you're giving the state an ethical dimension that effectively puts you in the same camp as Mussolini. So you should probably stop that, scosh government. It's kind of scary. You know, it's not for you to decide what's right and wrong, you fucking lunatics. Yep, good point. So for the viewers who haven't seen this Gillette advert, can you

give me the sargon of a CADS cliff notes on what you think it is, or how would you describe it to someone that hasn't seen it? It's just feminist propaganda. It's just 101. It's so basic. I mean, it starts off with the mean two movements and toxic masculinity. So you know, you're dealing with a feminist. I mean, the author, the director, sorry, was Kim Gary. Yeah. She's a famous feminist director. She's directed many controversial sort of short clips like this that have caused a stir because she seems to take a one-sided feminist narrative on the idea that women are being oppressed by men and men have to change.

And I mean, the way she was like the whole thing conflates, like boys rough housing as children with Harvey Weinstein's predatory behavior in Hollywood. And then they have like Terry Crew, who again was assaulted by a Hollywood executive, you know, some powerful Hollywood exec. And it's all tied back as if it was because Harvey Weinstein played fought with his brother when he was a kid. It's not the reason. You know, the reason is because he's disgusting, ugly, repulsive pervert with absolutely no moral standards.

He doesn't represent anyone, but Harvey Weinstein and the goons around him that he protects. You know, that's not reflective of the most men. And it's definitely inappropriate to say that it is. Yeah. It's kind of the traffic thinking it's absolutely worse, isn't it? It's all it's bigger to thinking it's absolutely worse. I mean, you know, we don't just sit there and go black people, look at these crime rates, you're all responsible.

You know, that would be ridiculously racist. So when they go, men, look at what Harvey Weinstein's done, you're responsible, it's the same logic. So, yeah. I don't know. So during the advert, the bit that really, really got me was there's, I think they're at a barbecue. So there's a bunch of guys at a barbecue doing man things, drinking beer and flipping beef and stuff like that. And there's a couple

of kids play fighting, two boys play fighting. And the scene is allowed to continue, then it cuts away and then it comes back. And the suggestion is that men should step in to stop other men or stop other males, i.e. boys from play fighting. And you write that the implication is that by allowing boys to play fight, you are fostering this tyrannical misogynist in waiting. Yes. But it sounds ridiculous when you say it. Yes.

To anyone who either was a young boy or who knows young boys, you know, you have children or something like that, it just sounds absurd. You know, because young boys play fighting is essentially, I looked up a bunch, I went and researched this to do the video I did on it. Basically, young boys play fighting is completely normal according to like leading psychologists. Oh, yeah.

And, I mean, you know, every man knows this because when they were a kid, they had play fights with their friends too. You know, it's just like the way men socialize among themselves and establish hierarchies. You know, and like one of the studies that I was looking at was 85% of boys, teenage boys, could tell when a play fight was going on, you know, like 85% of the time. They could tell that the fight was, could tell when a play fight was going on, like 85% of the time. They could tell that the fight was going, there was a play fight because, you know, they're having fun. And then this was mostly like 70% adults as well, like men and women who had grown up with a brother. But women who had grown up without a brother always thought

the fights were serious. And so it's like, okay, there really is a distinction here about male, female thinking, you know, and women who are not used to what young men are like don't recognize the behavior for what it is. But the thing is it's the same with like animals, you know, you see, you know, puppies fighting and stuff like this, you know, it's just natural, you know, and so they're and they panic about this excessively and so The kind of it kind of is a small group of mostly women who don't really understand men and are kind of afraid of them That's how I view modern feminism these days And so honestly, how have you? Because it's the backlash the backlash on this Gillette advert's been insane the

The backlash on this Gillette advert's been insane. The YouTube operating down rate was 10 to 1 on dislike. And there, yeah, it was 10 to 1. And then the views didn't increase by a tremendous amount. I was watching this on YouTube yesterday. The views didn't increase by a tremendous amount. And the dislike to like has been brought back down to around about

five to one. Really, it was two to one when I saw it the other day. Well, it may have even gone further, but it went in very, very first went out and that may be due to just the first adopters of the people who have taken the most offense. So you know, that could be realistic, but there's a lot of accusations of a bit of unfair play going around. I've seen many people saying, like, dislike has been removed and things like this.

A lot of comments are being deleted and pinned ones are changing. Have you also seen, I don't know how much truth is behind this, but there's a lot of websites that are reporting it. Have you seen that Kim Gary has actually been accused of sexual abuse by two men and five women? No, I did not know that. The irony. I mean, I guess we've got to listen and believe, haven't we? Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, well, yeah, definitely. So I, I, I'm struggling to find it on anyone who is super reputable yet. I think it's probably dangerous to, um, well, I will wait for confirmation. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Gillette Miss Andrist, whereas it just Gillette Miss Andrist ad was directed by an accused

pedophile, Miss Kim Derrick, one of her victims committed suicide. Oh my days. Well, I mean, we'll wait and find out a little bit more about that. But that no matter what, whether that's the truth or not, and even if it's not the truth, it's probably speaks to just how bipartisan it makes everything. Do you know what I mean? Like it's like, okay, well, even if someone's made that up, they're like, right, well, this is how far the feminist narrative has tried to push masculine. Oh, no, we need to come up. We need to come back with something that's even more outlandish and ridiculous.

And you went up to this extremist sort of. It is, it is just an entirely one-sided argument that they're having. And the thing is the only people on the, like, no one in reality thinks the boy's play-fighting is a particularly harmful behavior, because it's always by consent. You know, I mean, you know, we're not talking about bullying, obviously. Bullying is something different, but like the pathologizing of just male behaviors, and

then, I mean, in the effort, you know, when the dad goes up and says, we don't treat each other that way, it's like, well, they both consent. You know, I mean, you could see in the, in the clip they're showing you, the two boys have a big grins on their face. You know, they couldn't have portrayed it more as boys play fighting. Yeah, it's a better if they try. Progressive. Exactly. You know, and so it's not wrong for them to treat that, each other that way, because they both consent to being treated that way. You know, they both consent to the sort of competition of the rough and tumble, which is fine.

I mean, you know, it's fun when I was a kid to play phone with my friends. But you used to like it. You're totally right as well. It helps. I'm sure if we had Jordan Peterson at hand, I'm sure he'd be able to tell us exactly why, but yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I mean, I'm waiting for the commentary from him. I imagine will be a thesis on just how wrong Gillette is in terms of upbringing of young men. You'll give us all the psychological literature as well. And the thing is, although I can't cite it and it's not my field, I've heard him across the content I've consumed of him talking about just how important this is and how it helps young boys to be able to learn the limits of their own strength and the appropriate section in terms of how your body moves and how other people's bodies

move. And it's the games iterated across time analogy he uses talking about rats. And he says if one rat play fights with another rat and then it loses it rolls over and then the rat allows it to come back and play a game. Yeah. And you've got to let them win 30% of the time, roughly, to keep them engaged in the game. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I watch a lot of young people. And there we go. Yeah. And I think there's some definitely some truth to it. And I think it's very much about socializing boys because I think that young men are very powerful. This is what this is what I think. I think that young men are very powerful. This is what I think, I don't say women,

but a certain kind of excessively concerned, sort of moral, busy body woman is usually like. And I can think of many examples of this kind of women. They're not badly intentioned or anything, but I just don't think they understand. And I think that young men are strong. They're a powerful force in the world when they want to be. And this is usually why societies had quite strict rules

for young men. I mean, if you go back to the Middle Ages, young men would have been taught how to use a spear in a shield and a bow and things like this. And they would have had to, you know, join, you know, become part of the local sort of militia or something like that. Yeah, kind of.

That's a description of some sort. Yeah. There may well have been for the king. The description of some sort. Yeah. There may well have been some kind of conscription exactly. And it's because it's understood that young men have fighting instincts, you know, not all of them all the time. But there is definitely a part of young men that is naturally designed to fight. And I mean, I watched the documentary. I think it was Michael Potillo a few few years ago where he effectively went and like

some kind of underground gang in London. It's like boxing gang, you know, Ben Ockel boxing gang. Okay. And it was about the pleasure of fighting because these men who did this, they didn't take drugs or drink. Their drug was fighting itself, the adrenaline kick of it. And I think that like that's what Call of Duty is tapping into, you know, that kind of video game, it's that kind of adrenaline high from conflict and combat. That's almost. No, no, no, no, no, not quite that. Like, like, like the, the fact that physical competition is also a game, you know, it might become like a deadly, you know, game and but there are set rules and if you mean in a war, they're the rules of who can kill who first,

you know, they don't have to be rules are conceptual, they might just be physical rules, but there are set rules and there's an objective and both of you are going for it and it's understood that you're on the same terms, like for the reason it's not murder for to kill a soldier in a battle, you know, it's understood that you're both there to fight. And I think there's a part of the male psyche that is enjoys that, you know, and for some men, I mean, obviously get the sort of weaker men who don't like these kind of physical competitions. And I think it's that kind of, I guess you call it primal if you want, but that kind of urge that the shooter genre is tapping into with kids these days.

I think it's wrong to try and deny that aspect of human nature, but obviously the feminists have absolutely no empathy for men whatsoever and don't even try. He couldn't possibly understand it. All they see is, oh, there is a defective woman as Christine Holtzummers puts it. I think she's right on that. I think we do. Yeah. I think what's interesting is the fact that the scalable and much more effective strategy

for controlling men or eye-making men's behavior more holistic and more beneficial to sight as a whole would be to remodel it and have it almost brought on by desire as opposed to entrenched and locked in by rules. So if you were able to have it be desirable for all men to call out every man that was a rapist immediately, or if you had it as a rule that playfights were something that was taken pride in but was done with honor and with a sense of decorum, etc., etc. That's much more scalable and it's much more difficult because it's enforced by the group. As opposed to choosing a top down approach, that's a bottom-up approach, right? Which is man-rested naturally by the culture. Supposed to a top down approach, which is this, it's almost like trying to litigate... It's authoritarian, isn't it? Yeah. It's here are the rules. A group of people who don't really understand you are going to dictate rules for you, and now you so that there was a New Zealand TV series called Seven Periods with Mr.

Gormsby, and it was about this old Victorian, like, like, like an old British Empire Army officer had moved to New Zealand to teach a group of kids who were often like, you know, a Maori, and but not just Maori, you know, just a group of, but it was a group of kids who are often like, you know, a Maori, and but not just Maori, you know, it's the group of, but it was group of boys. And I don't know why this thing resonated with me, but there was something about it. I found unbelievably charming. And it was because of the old fashioned way that gorms be the teacher, treated the boys.

You know, he, he didn't treat them in the way that boys treated now. Is it, they're not, he didn't scold them for acting like boys. There's fictional, so it's all a representation, but I think there's some truth to all, like the idea of this, because the way you tell them off

is something they really resonated with me. It wasn't, you should not do that. It was that enough. And so when the boys are fighting or playing around being ran boncious, whatever, it wasn't, you know? And so it's, you know, someone the boys are fighting or playing around being rambunctious, whatever. It wasn't, you know, pathologizing, saying, where are you wrong? You're not, you're doing this because you don't even realize why and you shouldn't do it because bad under every circumstance. It was just know the limit, you know? And so, you know, don't, it's not

innately wrong to be what you are, but it is wrong to go too far in what you're doing. And that's, I think, the best way to try and talk to young men about how to behave, frankly, if feminists want to do that. And they do want to do that. And it's like, okay, well, then as someone who was a young man, has a son and a young man has a son and might have a bit more quote unquote lived experience, than your average feminist in this regard,

don't tell men they can't do something. Just make sure that they are doing it to within a restri- an acceptable parameter. Yeah, you know, because then it's not bad for them to be innately what they are. Yeah. Speaking of chafing, there is a scene in the video where a man is shaving his legs as well, I think, isn't it? You've seen that. I-I can't remember. There is, there's a, there's a, there's a, he's got it up on the couch, I think, and he's shaving his legs, which is totally fine. I've got some, I've got some friends that are swimmers.

That might, do you know what it is? Might actually only be in the UK version, and if it is, that's hilarious. Yeah, I don't recall that being in the US. It's definitely, definitely exists. I've got to watch that. Imagine, imagine for a second that I have made you the director of the exact opposite advert. So it's women, it's women telling

women what women should do from a completely opposing narrative. Can you, can you try and run us through the storyboard of what you think would happen? Well, surely. What I would want to happen or what I think we'd end up with. No, what you would, what the equivalent would be if they were to take the exact polar opposite of what we've got. Well, it has to be something about false rape allegations, wouldn't it? So women, false rape allegations begin in the school, you know, where, so we'd have Kavanaugh's trial where he's being accused falsely by three people who like recanted

their statements and one person who just had absolutely no evidence or no corroborating witnesses or even the time or dates when this is when the accusations are supposed to have happened, it seems that there was nothing against Kavanaugh and he had unbelievably reputable female character witnesses on his side to back him up. So it would start with something like that, the the the stress of having to go through this as Kavanaugh.

And then we'd talk that back. So, you know, it's my young girl, I don't know. I would be pathologizing some kind of young woman's behaviour where she's getting to play with dolls and... Yeah, playing with dolls or getting, you know, you know, smiling at two different boys or something, you know, smiling at two different boys or something and getting stuff. You know, so it'd be something about a natural female behavior that, you know, that I would be trying to,

I would be trying to make something that they need to stop. You shouldn't be putting your makeup on during the morning, you should be letting your leg hair grow. Well, well, you know, but whatever it is. But the thing is, I don't think that the reverse should be made, obviously. No, you know, obviously. It is, but the thing is I don't think that the reverse should be made obviously no, you know, I obviously It's to illustrate just how Yeah insane it is and I you know if you were to tell young girls that they should be less feminine

Yeah, be awful. Why? I don't know. Yeah, why would anyone But you know what a horrible thing to do Like stop playing with Darl. What you are. Yeah. No, you're not allowed to have your own choice. I don't know.

It really is an interesting one. So the, I guess this speaks volumes to just how pop culturally we are at the moment. But the fact that Brexit sits below the Gillette advert on my list of things that I wanted to talk about today. But can you give us the Carl Benjamin rundown of what's happened over the last week? Okay, well, the Theresa May is a massively

unpopular Prime Minister, but the conservatives are terribly afraid about losing their control over the government. And so they have to back her. But what she's, what Theresa May is proposing is so outside of the bounds of reason to the hardline your escaptics of the Tory party, that her position is tremendously weak, but she does keep managing to survive votes of no confidence, apparently. Ungolievably so.

Yeah, but it's it's only because the Tories know that if she goes, they all go because they've pinned their colors to her mask. They're saying, well, that was a mistake, wasn't it? You know, it's it's really bad. And they're convinced that they have to have a deal. And I mean, you can, you know, the head of the world trade organization said, well, yeah, okay, if you,

if you leave on World Trade Organization terms, there will be a small period of disruption, but it won't be the end of the world, and then we'll be able to carry on as an independent country. I would rather take the small period of disruption, even if it means after paying more for this or a flight of mine is delayed or something like that, I'll accept it for the sovereignty of my country

and we'll figure it out. That's the thing. I have faith in the British people to figure these things out. Our political class just has absolutely no faith in this regard. They're concerned about like, what about GDP? It's like, man, I don't really care. I care that we get out of the European Union. I don't want them controlling us.

I don't want to be under jurisdiction of their courts. I don't want their foreign policy to be our foreign policy. I just want us to have left. No more laws, no more interference, just nothing. And I'm prepared to watch GDP shrink a bit for that. I'm sorry. This is a point of principle in my position and in my opinion now. And the conservatives don't think that that can be done. They think that they think that they can push through a deal that the European Union will agree to, but the deal is awful as I mean you can watch any of the Euroskeptics just excoriate it all the time as being effectively a submission to Brussels because it is. I mean it puts all of the power in their hands, we have absolutely none and it would if it would be better to remain than take that deal, but we have voted to leave. So we must leave.

So we have to go on no deal because the European Union have said they're not going to renegotiate at all because they're being utterly entranced in about this in order to try and punish the conservatives presumably and the rest of the country. Right. These are rightly so on their side. Like if you've made your fucking bed, Yeah, understandably. But the thing is I think that it's going to come back and bite them in the ass because I think that what they expected is they could beat Theresa down into into proposing almost anything and they did and she has, but she can't get that through parliament. So they're not going to get the deal they want. And there are going to be consequences to

Britain leaving on a WTO Brexit. And these consequences will be bad. There will be some negative consequences for us, but there are definitely going to be negative consequences for them. For example, was the German finance minister the other day was raising the alarm about the fact that if we didn't pay our 39 billion, that's French, German, Italian, and Dutch taxes that go up. How do you think the French are going to take that? Probably not brilliantly, considering they're still writing. I'm sure the Germans are going to be thrilled. I doubt the

Salvini, or even open the email. You know, Salvini, you've got to raise taxes. You have bollocks to eye. Whatever. And then the Netherlands exit movement will grow incrementally stronger. So do you think that's coming as well? No, not in the short term, but I think it will fester, like the same with Brexit in fact, I think it will fester for a number of years until people demand a referendum, assuming the EU even lasts so long. And then you've got the problem with Ireland, right? So the Irish economy is deeply tied to the British economy,

especially the food economy. And we're talking like hundreds of millions of tons of beef and cheese every year. And if we don't carry on trading with the EU in the way that we did before, if the EU says, we're not gonna, you know, we're gonna put tariffs on you, et cetera, et cetera. Then they're worried that we're gonna start getting

beef and cheese from South America, which will actually make our beef and cheese cheaper, and it will destroy our island's economy because the money that they would have taken from us is actually now going to go to Argentina and Brazil and places like that. It's like, well, there we go. It is an interconnected house of cards, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, one of the things about this, that Ireland is, it's already said that it's going to have to start requesting more money from the European Union in the event of any Brexit, which is going to turn Ireland from a net contributor into a net beneficiary of the European

Union. So the EU, again, loses, it's, it's, you know, it's immediately losing two of its net contributors, Britain being the second biggest one, and Ireland being a net contributor, but obviously not a very big one. But that's all bad news for the French and German taxpayer, really. So can you think about what it's like to wake up as Theresa May every morning for the last week? Robin, no. Okay, well, yeah, we're given.

She's done this to herself, though. This is the most annoying thing that Theresa May I find, is that it's completely within her power to go, you know what? Everyone's wrong, I'm going to make a decision and it's just going to be this way. We're going to go with no deal. You can just say no deal, we're going to start. We can unilaterally do all of the things that we would offer the European Union. We're not going to do anything bad, obviously, we're going to give European citizens rights

to stay, rights to work, etc. We'll give them citizenship. However, I don't care. We won't impose a border along the Irish, along Northern Ireland Irish border. We're not going to put any tariffs on your trade. We're going to carry on as normal. And then the balls and your court, you know, what are you going to do?

And then she's the one who's calling the chance. Yeah, yeah, she doesn't do because she's weak. You know, yeah. I mean, the fact that you have a parliament, a party behind it, which doesn't support her, but which also doesn't have the balls to be able to get rid of her is such a, it's the most British situation. Do you not think? Yeah, I do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so quintessentially British. It really is. You know, like, like, okay, one of the things I've always got to remember about the remaining campaigners is they're not cowards. They're just wrong, you know, they'll go out there and they will march. You know, they'll go out there and lodge numbers for their cause. And they'll stand there like, you know, I interviewed a few of the other day, outside of Parliament, standing there in the cold and the rain and, you know, they stand there waving, they truly believe

in what they're saying, you know, it's not that they're weak people individually or necessarily, it's that they are just confused in my opinion. But the Parliament, it really is kind of like a, you know, Parliament of Lambs leading a country of lions, you know Because at this point, like I think a lot of people even if they vote for me, they're just like look just get on with it You know, you know, we you know step up a let we can take it. We'll just we'll just go with them Whatever it is. That's just how it happened exactly, you know But the the the the parliament is a very remain parliament and it's very weak and that they're always kind of right You know like rubbing their hands and looking

on another hole, passing the responsibility on. It's like, just get on with it. Yeah, totally. I don't know whether you saw when the actual announcement happened. I don't watch a lot of the discourse that occurs in parliament. But to just see how archaic and like old and worldy it is, it's just, this is why everyone thinks that British people drink shitload of tea and constantly wear things that have got wood on them and like they've all got bad teeth. Like this is, this is why and the guys they're bowing and then they walk forward and then they bow again and then this lady forward, then they bow again. And then this lady reads about the nose to the left and the eyes to the right.

And then they give it to the speaker and he starts shouting about the nose and the eyes. And he's like, this is going out on the fucking world stage. Guys. I kind of like that though. I like it, but it's I like it because it's embarrassing. Yeah, I like it because it's embarrassing though, I got it. Yeah, I like it because it's got this sense of heritage, which I appreciate in a more nuanced way because I'm British and because it reminds me of, you know, 1945 and Yorkshire

T and shit like that. But like, fuck me, imagine like, just anyone, anyone, imagine the Italians, imagine the Italians watching this. Like, or the Americans watching this. And they're like, I think that a large number of them, you as distinguished. Really?

And I think that's, yeah, and I think it's it is in many ways. Like I have problems with John Burkow and the things that he does, but I have actually no problem with the way he rules Parliament. I think it's hilarious. It is hilarious. I love his put downs.

I say, we all get along without you if you can't control yourself. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. It's such a unique and culturally British thing that I would love to see it go away. I think it's, I think it's adorable. And it is embarrassing if you're British. Because you're looking and thinking, well, that doesn't really represent me. But the thing is like, you know, if it went away, that would be something that,

looking from the outside, I think it's, it's like, like, when I'm looking at, when I'm looking at the Chinese festivals where they can't get dragon down the street. It's me, it's just this wild wacky thing I'm watching, but it's entertaining. I imagine Tafarin isn't much the same. Yeah, you're probably right. It's the distillation of everything that everyone accuses Britain of being. I remember when I got my master's degree from Newcastle, there was a mace bearer and everyone had to doff their caps and this guy's walking in. And I'm like, I'm looking at the timetable on the thing.

I'm sat next to my mom and dad. And I'm like, there's a guy with a mace here. I don't know why he's gonna do. And sure enough, next thing I know, some guy walks in with a medieval weapon and a robe that looked like something out of Harry Potter and then he doth his cap and the announcer doth his cap. And he just, there's a real old and world

e-cuteness about it. Yeah. But it really does concern me about how that plays out on the international stage. You know, I say, fuck it, that I say,, you know, like, should we double down on it? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I, I, I, no, that's exactly what, that's exactly what's the thing is just chad doubling down on it.

Yep. Just being like, yeah, no, this is, this is exactly what we, and this is the thing is, like, your country's might be like 10 minutes old, but ours is over a thousand years old. Yeah. So you know, we've got a bunch of luggage to get over you, man. Okay. You're just leaving baggage is these, these traditions that we spent a long time building up. You know, this ridiculous outfit and precession.

I didn't just have an overnight. He was exactly some credit. Yeah, you try and make that happen in your country. See how long it takes you. Yeah, thousand years. I'll give you a thousand years and you can come back with a man with a mace and everyone drinking tea and everyone can have bad teeth. We can't be here. Yeah, man. Well, it's amazing isn't it? But like it's, I do find it increasingly more

adorable as time goes on. Like, you know, when I was young, I used to find it terrible. I've got that so awful. I'm like, you know, embarrassing, you know. But then, I mean, you go to, like, I went to Rome recently, like, see the Vatican City and you see the guards in their ridiculous outfits and they think wow the beef eaters look cool by comparison. Yeah, they do. Yeah, these guys look like like gestures or something you know, but and so yeah I'm down with keeping the traditions even if they look gay. Yeah, it looks It looks so. They do look incredibly odd.

But, man, Carl, I've absolutely loved today. Thank you very much for your time. I will make sure that the link to your YouTube channel and everything else that we've spoken about are in the show notes below. And I am about to send you the advert of a man, a Scottish man talking about shaving your legs. Can't wait.

Thanks very much. Thanks, buddy. Bye-bye.