Pirate Wires - Israel/Iran, Tucker and Ted Cruz, & The Dems Love Getting Arrested (ft. Simone & Malcolm Collins)

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

EPISODE #97: This past week, the U.S. found itself on the brink of WWIII due to the Iran/Israel crises. Will Trump get us involved in another war? To be honest, none of us want to talk about this, but it’s present in every part of our culture right now. To cope, we get into the viral clip of Tucker calling out Ted Cruz. Elsewhere in the news, the hottest new trend for Dems is to get arrested, and the March To Gaza ends at the hands of Egyptian police. Finally, we make the case why every American needs to be in shape, and Solana gives us his white pill, why we are truly living in amazing times right now.Featuring Mike Solana, Riley Nork, Brandon Gorell, Simone Collins, Malcolm CollinsWe have partnered with AdQuick! They gave us a 'Moon Should Be A State' billboard in Times Square!https://www.adquick.com/Sign Up For The Pirate Wires Daily! 3 Takes Delivered To Your Inbox Every Morning:https://get.piratewires.com/pw/dailyTopics Discussed: https://www.piratewires.com/p/operation-jacked-nation?f=homePirate Wires On X: https://twitter.com/PirateWiresMike On X: https://twitter.com/micsolanaBrandon On X: https://x.com/brandongorrellRiley On X: https://x.com/rylzdigitalSimone & Malcolm Collins On X: https://x.com/SimoneHCollinsTIMESTAMPS:0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod!1:30 - Simone & Malcolm's YT Channel - Based Camp3:30 - Israel/Iran - WWIII?? Or Are We Just Tired Of Talking About The Middle East..9:50 - Tucker Carlson Gets Ted To Fumble On Iran Population17:50 - Democrats Love Getting Arrested34:55 - The March To Gaza56:20 - ADQUICK! Thank you AdQuick For Sponsoring The Pod!57:20 - Make America Jacked Again: he Case for Government Fat Camps1:10:20 - The White Pill - Solana Tells Us Why He's So Optimistic Right Now In Tech1:24:00 - Thanks For Listening! Like & Subscribe!#podcast #technology #politics #culture

How many people live in Iran, by the way? I don't know the population. You don't know the population of the country you seek to topple? I sort of resent having to talk about Israel and Iran. I'm like fine with that. I don't care. Sorry, I don't I don't give a shit. I would take Qatari money, I think. I would I would maybe I don't know.

I would have a hard time turning down any money. We are about to, by the way. You're taking part in the party honey. We might. I'm not making a big deal. What's up guys? Welcome back to the podcast. We have two of my favorite, honestly, I'm not just saying this, I'm not just gassing them up. These are two of my favorite YouTubers in the ecosystem right now.

Malcolm and Simone Collins. You guys have been, first of all, thank you both for joining us today. You have been just, I think, some of the more fearless, interesting thinkers out there. I invited you both to Hereticon. I thought your talk was fantastic. You have me on your podcast. That got your podcast on my radar, which is truly fantastic. It's the base camp with Simone and Malcolm Collins. There are all sorts of crazy topics that you cover, obviously, or maybe not obvious to our audience. You're sort of more well known for the pro-natalism argument, the population decline stuff.

All of that's really fascinating, but you cover everything. One that recently popped up in my news feed was our gay people destroying Western civilization. Turned out not. Or it was like, maybe in the beginning I was watching, I watched the whole thing. No, that's the way we filmed it. We're like, okay, we want you to be on the edge of your seat the entire time. Because like when we did that, we didn't know. Like I was going to go like, I'm going to go with whichever way the data goes. But it's one of these questions where, you know, like are, you knew that if it was true that a rise in like gayness happened right before

civilizational collapses, we wouldn't be allowed to talk about it. So like I had no idea. And there's so many questions like that in our society. Yeah. Well, I mean, another one that was really, really fascinating to me, and I would also say comforting, was the Muslim birth rate. Also not as high as I think people think. That was like another, I think, just banger in the sort of world of your work. And then it's Islamic to ban child marriage, says Muslim Eye Court. I mean, just like all sorts of crazy shit in here that is also just, I think, important topics. It's a wide range. Are there any that you maybe want to call out? How do you guys approach- Oh, no. I mean, I actually, all of these are ones I could talk on for so long. The Islamophobic to ban child marriage is really interesting because this was the high Muslim court in Pakistan.

And in the country, marriages as young as six and nine, especially in rural regions, are pretty common. And I found this to be a nuanced topic or more nuanced than other people would think because it is a genuine part of their culture and a part of their religion. And part of the thing that I learned when doing that episode that really surprised me is because I know about Islam from like Western like atheist debates. I thought most Muslims believed the older age for Aisha and the early age for Aisha was just something that people used to try to attack Muslims like those six and nine ages. But then when I was doing that episode, I learned like pretty much all conservative Muslims believe the six and nine age. And that shocked me, especially the Shia. But I want to go into this week's news because if there was a week of news, if there was a week of news, it was this one. Let's get into Iran versus Israel. It is war. Riley,

take us away. Yeah, time to do what podcasts were made for really. And that's to offer our unsolicited, unqualified opinions about complex foreign policy matters. Right. So for very shortly after we recorded our pod, this was last week, which was very unfortunate timing. Israel conducted the first strikes of this recent campaign targeting Iran's nuclear and ballistic programs, according to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. These surprise attacks reportedly killed the entire top echelon of Iran's military commanders, as well as some of the country's

leading nuclear scientists. Iran soon retaliated with airstrikes of their own, and now missiles and drones are sort of flying back and forth on an ongoing basis. For a beautiful visual of that, our producer Matt found an amazing clip of a wedding in Lebanon, I believe, playing like ABBA music as missiles are flying overhead. Just a perfect visual. Meanwhile, Trump, much to the chagrin of many in his base who are averse to maybe sort of the warmonger rhetoric, has called for an all caps, unsolicited or unconditional surrender on the part of Iran and saying yesterday, we're long beyond a ceasefire.

We're looking for a total complete victory. The situation has new developments every day and hopefully nothing else major happens before this episode comes out, but bear with us. It's worth noting that so far the administration has denied any direct involvement in this conflict on the part of the US. However, yesterday it was reported

the Navy's largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, was being deployed to the Mediterranean. The whole situation has dominated the timeline as well as the podcast circuit where Tucker and Ted Cruz had a viral moment that was making the rounds regarding the population of Iran that we can maybe play a clip of. How many people live in Iran, by the way? I don't know the population of Iran that we can maybe play a clip of. How many people live around by the way?

I don't know the population. At all? No, I don't know the population. You don't know the population of the country you seek to topple? How many people live around? 92 million. Okay. How could you not know that?

That's the latest development in the World War III saga. What do we think is a time for me to go in my nuclear bunker yet? Okay, before we even get into it, I just, I sort of resent having to talk about Israel and Iran. I don't want to talk about foreign policy. We, I say no to pieces all the time. Pirate wires, people who are trying to publish on this topic.

I don't think it's our core competency. It's not my lane. I don't want to focus on what multi-thousand-year-old blood feud thousands of miles away on the other side of the world. And yet, because it has so relentlessly seeped into our culture, even separate from, I think, the geopolitical stuff, it matters to, I guess, right-wing identity, left-wing identity, how Americans

think of themselves. And yeah, a lot of thoughts on this myself. We're going to share them, as Roddy said, on our unsolicited opinion on this war. But I mean, how have you guys navigated this as well? Because it's not typically the kind of thing that you cover, but I did see that you just published a video on it. And are you feeling like the pressure to get involved in this topic? First off, what we saw with Ukraine, basically pioneering what I kind of think of

as like Amazon Prime warfare, where you're just taking piecemeal, all these pieces across the border, and then using them strategically to, in a very targeted way, take out your adversary. This is further solidified by Israel, but of course they've been planning this for years. I think the bigger picture here, especially within the context of OpenAI getting a $200 million contract for defense with the US government just now, warfare is fundamentally changing

and we're only beginning to infuse AI. I mean, this is like the low tech version. This is the DoorDash war. And now we're going to have like AI DoorDash. We're going to have like, it's going to be insane. So I mean, even if people don't want to talk about Israel and the Middle East in general, we're seeing something that we should all be paying big attention to in terms of being aware of things. I mean, in terms of like should be all good at bunkers, preppers will have fun doing it anyway. Like prepper is going to prep. So like this is great anyway, it's fine. Well, I mean, something I think is really important to talk about with this outside of the, again, the justification of it is how much it's going to change regional geopolitics.

Israel didn't just knock out Iran, they systematically knocked out every single one of their proxies before getting to Iran. They knocked out Belezar or whatever his name is. They knocked out Hezbollah, they knocked out Gaza, the Houthis have been pretty much defanged. The only major strength they still have is this new force that's rising in Iraq right now. And with Iran out of the picture as a major power player, you know, who takes their place? Does Saudi continue to grab more power here? Does Turkey make a finally a major play in the Middle East for power?

What does Qatar do? Like, actually, I wanna hear your thoughts. What does Qatar do? Dude, I have no idea. I don't understand the Qatar of it all, other than every single time someone talks about this issue, you have people on the one hand blaming Israel for funding academics and influencers

to talk about this issue, and on the other, people blaming Qatar for funding the pro-Palestine people. Like how many times have I heard people accuse Candice Owens of taking Qatari money, which I don't know if she has or not. Does anyone know if she has? I don't have any sense of that. My sense of this, honestly, is people just do care a lot about it and I'm not one of those people. And I care about- I would take Qatari money, I think.

I would maybe, I don't know, I would have a hard time turning down any money. We are about to, by the way. You're taking Qatari money? We might. Well, they might be flying us out to Doha for this conference business class. And I'm like, yeah, sure. If someone offers to fly us to our business class,

we say yes. You say yes and thank you. That's true. Yes, to the Katsari money. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I don't really blame any of them, but I also do think people just care a lot about this. One of those people is Tucker Carlson.

He just had this interview with Ted Cruz, which I thought was really incredible. I will say that I think I was early to the, let me quickly make fun of this thing. This clip was framed to me. There's a clip of Tucker Carlson asking Ted Cruz the population of Iran. It goes wildly viral immediately, and it's framed as this massive owning of Ted Cruz. They're like, this idiot does not know the population of Iran. And I'm sitting there like,

I don't know the population of Iran. And I don't believe that Tucker Carlson knew the population of Iran before he Googled it before his interview. I think that's, I think he Googled it, and he got the number and then he uses it as a gotcha. And I don't think that the population,

so my point on that, I go online and I said, listen, I don't think this matters. I think probably Ted Cruz should know the population of Iran. I mean, he is an elected official. He's talking about this issue. I don't know why he wouldn't, but it doesn't really change the central question here,

which is, do you feel comfortable with Iran having a nuclear bomb? It does not matter if their population is 10 million or 50 million or 500 million. What matters is, do you feel safe in a world where Iran can nuke you? And if Ted Cruz is not just lying through his teeth

and genuinely believes they're, you know, imminently going to have the bomb, then of course that's what he cares about. And so this raises for me the question of the concept of America first. What is in America's interest? And that's what all this comes down to. And you have the Tucker Carlson people screaming, we don't want boots on the ground in Iran. I don't either. And if someone were suggesting that, I would be wildly against it.

And I would publicly be against it. And I would say, I don't want to do this. I just don't know anyone. I don't see anyone asking for that. So I don't know what we're talking about here other than the question of, do I want Iran to have a bomb? Israel is fucking the shit out of them right now, has nothing to do with me. And I don't know, I'm like fine with that.

I don't care. Sorry, I don't give a shit. I've seen the pushback on Tucker really interesting from this. So after he said this like anti-war stuff, he apparently had to apologize to Trump like over the phone. He called him because Trump was like, Hey, why is Tucker saying this stuff? And then since then, at least within the circles that I watch, he started being called Cucker Carlson. And it's ended up making Elon look really good in comparison because he didn't immediately

back down. And I just find this hilarious that, and I also agree with you, this war and the way that Israel is carrying it out is really interesting and it's very different than any war I've seen in my lifetime. It seems very obvious that they do not plan to put boots on the ground unless they're going to try to get in to the pickaxe mines, in which case it would just be an infiltration squad to get a bomb in there and destroy it and then get out. Nobody wants an occupation here because nobody needs an occupation.

There's no value in a place like Iran anymore, which is really interesting. They keep kind of referring, because on the question, let's talk about the question of does it matter if you know the population of Iran here? And I wanna maybe, I can't steel man it. I can tell you what their reasons were.

They said, you know, this is important if we're talking about regime change. This is important. And then there was a version of it. It's either regime change. You should know how many people are there because of the regime change question or you should know how many people you're trying to kill right now. You know, what is the population of people you're trying to murder? Is it in this case? I guess it's like 92 million or something in Iran. My question is like, well, what is the population of Jews who are going to be killed by a nuclear bomb potentially? Because that's clearly what Israel is thinking about.

And in Tel Aviv, that's 450,000. And do you know how I know that number? Because I googled it before this interview. I had no fucking idea. And I don't care. I do know that if someone was threatening to annihilate me and they were about to build a nuclear bomb, I would care about that. That's something that I would care about.

No, that's a really important point is that, yeah, like Iran is systematically failing its people, economically, politically, like they're not that happy. Also, even from like a religious standpoint, people are losing God in Iran. Like it just sort of, as much as I don't think the United States or Israel or anyone else should be involved in their regime change, I think they would

benefit from it. If anything this could be good for them because it could be clearing out a very toxic regime in a form of governance is clearly failing the country. But a lot of people when people commented on our video on what's going on there was a lot lot of, well, the United States just goes in and screws things up and Israel just wants to make Iran fall apart. And I really don't think that's it. I think that what we have is,

as we were kind of talking about it, like Iran is kind of the mean girl of the Middle East. She's using her flunky friends to hurt other people. And people are like, man, knock it off. Okay. We can be friends. The Saudis don't like Iran. So it's not just Israel.

It's just that Israel, they're the only non-Muslims in the region who are at war with Iran. Well, they're kind of, they're the picked on nerd who has a reason to lash back out and has no social capital to lose. Like, you know, she's not hurt. Like she's already clearly the punching bag.

So it's okay for her to like covered in blood, Carrie style, like reee and like go after everyone. Before we move on from the Iran Israel thing, I do central to the entire feud, I guess, officially. So unofficially to me, I think we kind of cut to the heart of it. Unofficially to me, it seems to be a question of how right-wingers feel about Jews, honestly.

And I know that that's, Tucker frames that as unfair and he went off on Ted Cruz about that, but to me, that's my reading of it, is it really does seem to have to do with the Jewish place in America. But if we were to talk about the question of American interest, how do you all feel about, is Iran with a nuclear bomb really a threat to us? It seems like definitely a threat to Israel, sure.

And so I understand their actions, but is it a threat to us? What does this have to do with us? I think that we are in such a better world right now than we were before, because keep in mind, it wasn't just Iran that was handled. It was their entire axis of power in the region. With Iran defanged in the region, it gives our allies, like Saudi Arabia, opportunity to grow. It gives nicer players in the region's opportunity to grow, like Turkey, even though they aren't exactly an ally of ours. But also keep in mind how much it locks China and Russia in a corner.

You know, this was one of their core sort of axis of power on a world stage. And now they are increasingly in a cage with this power player defanged. Brandon, how do you think about this? No thoughts. No thoughts, Riley? I think like there are greater, maybe nuclear threats than Iran.

I think North Korea has like nuclear missiles aimed at us like right now and could hit us maybe like tomorrow or at least shoot a nuclear missile at us tomorrow. So I think there are maybe greater threats. And I think a lot of like Tucker and a lot of the right wing criticism here, they're really skeptical of any American involvement in the Iran conflict. And you know, that hasn't happened yet. But I think, you know, for all of the points that we brought up of why they might be critical, I think also another big factor is any possible US involvement. But aren't you sort of, when you invoke North Korea,

aren't you sort of cutting to the heart of the matter according to the people who wanna get involved, or at least involved in so far as to destroy Iran's capability of building a nuclear weapon? They don't have one yet, and they don't have one point of dust yet, but neither did North Korea. And if you could go back in time and stop North Korea

from having a nuclear bomb, would you have done that? That's a good point, yeah. And it's, I think, and I'm sort of ambivalent on this question myself, but I do see where the Ted Cruz's of the world are coming from. They're saying, I just don't want this to be a threat ever for our kids. And yes, I will do whatever it takes to get there.

And then there's the question of regional destabilization, it's destabilization. And they're saying, oh, you want regime change. And I'm like, I don't really think that Ted Cruz wants anything other than not a nuclear bomb in Iran. And I think that that is whatever. Fine. He's sort of saying, I don't care as much about that hundred million people as I do our 350. So I don't know. That's that for that. We got to move on. We have a lot of crying democratic politics, literally crying men that we have to talk about. Riley, break it down. Sure. Yeah. So the resistance movement, you know, has taken many forms since like

Trump first got elected. We had a AOC and Bernie, they're like fighting oligarchy tour. You had boomers singing outside government buildings at one point. But the latest hot new trend is apparently getting arrested. While many Democrat politicians maybe aren't strangers to being put in handcuffs, looking at you, Scott Wiener. They're now doing so in public during these sort of like performative acts of like resistance, right? So New York City mayoral candidate, Brad Lander, was the latest to do so. He got detained while protesting at an immigration court. His fellow candidate, Zoran, also recently was trying

to like push past law enforcement to go like confront Tom Homan. He wanted to be arrested so bad. He wanted so bad. He wanted so bad, you can tell. Yes, absolutely. How many more years is he not charged? Do you believe in the first amendment? Do you believe in the first amendment, Tom Homan? you can tell. Yes, absolutely.

And this all follows like last week when California Senator Alex Padilla was put in handcuffs after attempting to storm the podium during a press conference from Chrissy Noem. The Newark mayor as well. Newark, yes. And that congresswoman. Yes. Yes. Who was actually arrested. Yes. It was a red. Was she full on? I think she like swung at someone. Yeah. Yeah. She like went off. She's facing jail time. I think. Yeah. Yikes. You know what they say? What do they famously say under the Trump era? It was when they tried to arrest Trump, it was a. Oh, nobody's above the law. Nobody's above the law. Nobody's above the law. So I don't know what, I guess let's just start. I mean, Simone and Malcolm, what do you guys make of,

what do you make of the literally crying democratic men who were previously arrested for about 15 minutes before all charges were dropped? I'm sure you loved them. This kind of martyrdom has been practiced forever. I mean, with the early days of Christianity, you had basically people going on tour on their way to the Colosseum,

being accompanied by Roman soldiers on their way to judgment and death, but stopping and speaking with locals on the way quite enthusiastically and winning a lot of followers as a result. This kind of martyrdom gets attention It's effective. I think the people undergoing it enjoy the attention and this is so soft compared to you know succumbing to lions and a Coliseum

I didn't know that can you tell me that history? I want to back up you're saying yeah on their way to execution They would tour this is true and completely wild so I'm going to the details Yeah, this this it's actually one of the reasons why some, some people theorize Christianity spread so quickly was because this was permitted to happen. I think maybe the Roman and we don't, we can only speculate, but we can think that the Roman soldiers were hoping to provide a cautionary tale. Like, look at this Christian, he's going to go get eaten by a lion. Maybe they were sympathetic. So what would happen is they go town to town and the person would look really important because they'd have these like giant Roman guards

flanking them on either side. Yeah, talk about a status signal. And this same thing is happening to these politicians, although the arrest, the press. No, but then the Roman guards would let them go on stage and they'd build like these stages and talk to the town. It would be like if Luigi Mangione got to have like an around the world like in his in his prison guard speech campaign. Yeah. Well, of course we are sort of doing that to him. I mean, the second he shoots that guy, he's everywhere. The news wants to create this. The media wants to create this kind of circus around him. That's so interesting. Well, and he did this very intentionally. I mean, he came into this knowing he was sending a signal and people now are well aware as

they have been for thousands of years, that committing crimes in a very conspicuous way can help to extend a message. And I just, I feel like- But, Simone, I'm not arguing this is different. This is more downstream of like something that Greta Thornburg really got good at doing, which is a picture of like her being arrested where she's actually chummy with all the police and everything. And then, you know, I think this is more downstream of that. And I don't know if it's working. I think it works for like brainwashed Democrats. But I think your

average American sees us and is just like, why are you wasting tax dollars? This is not fair, perhaps. But I think the average American sees a man crying and is super turned off for almost any reason. And I don't even, I don't even know that that's right. I don't, maybe I want to live in a world where I could cry, perhaps. I think I might. Maybe I deserve a cry every now and then. I'm not sitting here trying to be a macho, mention-ever-cry kind of guy.

But I do think the optics of it, they make me uncomfortable. And I consider myself somewhat evolved. So I don't think that's going to play well. And I think it especially doesn't play well when you did it on purpose. When we saw not Padilla who seemed authentically hysterical, but Brad Lander, when he goes and he gets himself arrested and then he's paraded out by Kathy Hokel

and they're walking around outside and Brad's so happy. He's smiling, he's got all the cameras are on him. It reminds me of the scene at the end of I think it's Scream 5 when the killer. I'm going to spoil the whole movie for you guys right now. So the killer ends up being the niece of Sidney Prescott, who's the original hero of the entire franchise, and she did the entire thing to be famous. And it's this whole commentary on fame and murder. And she walks out after everyone knows she's the killer

and all the cameras are on her and her eyes are lit up and she's so happy that she's now famous. She gets to be as famous as her aunt, the survivor of the killings was. And that's how Lander looked to me. He had this deranged look in his eye where he was just like so fucking happy about this. And it's just deeply cringy.

And yet I also think it's gonna keep happening because there are two people specifically who really, really, really want it to be arrested and have not been arrested yet. The first one obviously is Zorhan, or Zo, what is his name? The communist in New York who has never had a job. So that guy wants to be arrested.

His whole life has been geared towards getting arrested and crying about it. He did cry. He also cried. I get threats on my life. On the people that I love. And I try not to talk about it. He was just crying yesterday because he was caught saying globalize the Intifada was not that big of a deal.

And everyone was like, Hey, that's like super anti-Semitic and terrifying. And then he was like, well, people are mean to me because I'm Muslim. And he started crying on camera. Anyway, separate story. He wants to be arrested. That's his whole thing. But the other person who really wants to be arrested, who's been begging for it, in fact, explicitly asking for it on Twitter, is Gavin Newsom. Gavin Newsom wants so badly for Trump

to arrest him. And it's just, it's just obvious. And I guess at what point, when it's this obvious, does maybe to your point, Malcolm, like at what point does it maybe undercut the, the, the thing? I don't know. Not yet though. It seems like they're all still actively trying to be arrested. I just want to say Trump beat them to it. You know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the Yeah. Well, that's the other, but isn't that the crazy thing about this? The, the really deeply crazy thing about it is they're not actually memetic with each other. Like Padilla is not being memetic with Lander, who's not being memetic with Gavin Newsom for asking it. They're all being the medic with Trump who had that epic shot of him, the mug shot of him.

And you know, 97,000 indictments or whatever. Like that is what it all comes down to is Trump. They tried to arrest Trump. He literally, they arrested him. They booked him. They took his photo and he won the presidency because people loved it, because people were like, man, that's fucked up what they did to him. He's fighting for us.

He's going to prison for us. It's like this whole weird Jesus thing. And that's actually, that's who they're mimetic with. It's not with each other. What I love here is how good a job Trump did of this. Like looking so cool in that photo and then trolling them in his presidential photo to make it look just like his mugshot. Yeah.

They're his biggest fan in a way, much more so than any of the right-wing people. Like the Democrats in Congress and the people on Blue Sky, they love Trump in a way that I, we have this guy, Riley, what's his name? The one who always responds to our daily emails. Oh God. Let's give him a shout out.

I forget. I think he's Brett, something Brett Houser. Brett Houser. So every day he responds sort of with a nasty comment Oh God, let's give him a shout out. I forget. I think he's Brett, something Brett Hauser. Brett Hauser. So every day he responds sort of with a nasty comment about one of our takes. Sometimes he's like, okay, you got me boys. And then sometimes he's like, that one wasn't that bad. But this guy hates, like on paper, this guy, he hates us more than anybody. And yet I think just technically speaking, he's our greatest fan. I think that he, I think in a way, in a sick fucked up kind of way, he loves us more than

anybody. And that's, I think how these people are looking on. Sorry, I have to repeat one of our haters recently did a comment on us that I loved so much. Um, which was the, this was on our Palantir take and he goes, oh, now I see the future that space gay fascists want as a take on space gay communism. And I was like, yeah, okay. Yeah, we're space gay fascists. Guilty as charged. I mean, do you guys not feel that maybe gay space fascism is a little more real than gay space communism at this point? I agree. It's way cooler. Gay space fascism.

in gay space communism at this point. I agree. It's way cooler. Gay space fascism. I did make it happen. They don't have the balls to put together whatever it is they want. Well, it is also cool. Do you guys remember maybe I'm making so many

rare references today, but Lydia Gaga's video, video, Alejandro, I know that you're talking about. Yeah, I know the song. I definitely don't. You know the video. The video is straight up fascist iconography. It is leather, it's dudes in the leather hat, it's really muscled bodies.

Isn't that just gay, like, Wilson Street iconography? There is a bleed between the gay aesthetic and the fascist aesthetic. There is, I think, quite an overlap there, and Gaga said, I see it. And she showed us it all. She's ours. She's a visionary. I see it and it is glorious. Yes. Yeah, it is. I mean, listen, the boys know how to cook and... Nobody was mad for nothing for how they dressed.

The one thing that bothers me about these arrests is I think to the American base, the one that never gets listened to, the one that doesn't publish online, the one that doesn't comment online is what a pantomime this makes crime and punishment and justice in the United States. Because more and more now crimes are just not being prosecuted. Like, oh, under $10,000 was stolen from you. We're not really going to do anything about it. And I think a lot of Americans have come into contact or had a loved one come into conflict

or been subject to a crime that is not being properly handled. And then they see these high profile arrests and it's like, wait, so all this attention is being put toward these completely feckless, meaningless arrests when meanwhile, I don't feel safe anymore. I don't actually feel like justice is being carried out

or someone gets arrested that I thought was a big threat to me and then they're instantly released. But they weren't even real arrests though. Yeah, they were just detained. They were just handcuffed. Like they were not, they call them arrests. It's just a very prominent waste of time. I don't think it's a waste of time.

Listen, this is maybe controversial, but when you swing on a federal officer, I'm glad that Padilla got cuffed. I'm glad, I'm really glad that Lander got cuffed. Like he was, he was putting himself in the middle of an ICE detainee, detainee. Like why is that allowed? Why does like the Padilla thing really get to me because guaranteed nobody knew it was Padilla

Nobody was like this is a senator. Yes, this is senator Padilla. It's just some crazy guy rushing the stage Yes, and of course be detained. Yeah, right like you have to stop that like I don't there's literally no choice And then I remember the the night after that or the day maybe the day after that There was like a fucking riot in Congress about this. Cory Booker was like on the stage being like, just really going nuts about this thing. And it's like, this is fully made up. You know, like nobody knew who Padilla was, dude.

Like, you just rushed the stage. Just like, what do you really do? You know all the staffers were Googling it really quick. They're like, wait, he's in the Senate? Are we sure? Right. Let's fact check that. They got him out of the room.

Yeah. And that's all they did. And it's like, I don't know. It's just totally hysterical. Well, because that happened within seconds, the Democrats were marching through the halls. And like I said, it was not an arrest is the thing. And I see what you're saying Simone

about like the crime stuff matters. But to me, I guess maybe what I'm arguing for is like, maybe Lander specifically should have been arrested. Maybe the problem is not that he was arrested. I mean, I think that it would be greater if law enforcement was just allowed to like, you punch me, I punch you right back. And then I arrest you.

No, I mean, you're right that there should be a response. It's just a shame that people are seeing this, this, this, this, this, this drama play out when they know it's, it's all signaling. Well, because we have, there are just no, I think if the central issue here is actually immigration and it seems to be for all of the democratic or I think almost, I think all of the democratic fake arrests were related to immigration. And so if that's the central issue that we're discussing, there are no very, very few sympathetic characters

in this story for an illegal immigrant crossed to the American people. The average American just does not give a shit what they're doing. If they're picking blueberries as the Democrats keep insisting we need immigrants, basically basically slaves to pick the blueberries for them. Or if they are, you know, like straight up like criminals, the Americans don't care. They want them all gone.

There was maybe some sympathy for the guy who there were some people who are maybe accidentally deported. I think that didn't really play that well. But those stories have all fallen away because I don't think that's actually happening very often. It's just like these are run of the mill deportations. So what do the Democrats do if they're really trying to stand on this issue? They have to find some kind of sympathetic character. And if there are none that exist, they have to create them.

They have to become them. And that's what they're trying to do now. And separately from trying to become famous, like the the the the story, the immigration story is kind of bleeding down together with this idea that Trump is a fascist who's arresting his political opponents. And that's what they're maybe trying to make stick.

Well, I found really interesting. And I think that this is a point you're highlighting here. And it's something that I keep coming back to is this issue is during the initial raid, like wave of arrests and deportations.

You know, Trump was able to find dozens upon dozens and newspapers and random commenters of, oh, this guy raped like 13 people, and this guy like murdered three people, and like this guy is like a child trafficker. And then these people would be like, yeah, I'm Biden. Like, how dare you, Trump?

You'd get all these clips of like these genuinely terrible people that the local police system had tried to hide from ICE. And why doesn't the left have like their versions of like unambiguously not evil people who are being accidentally deported? I'm seeing a weird like, the right for whatever reason has tons and tons of examples of like just unambiguously, why was this person allowed to stay here and why were you defending them? But the left has not found their, and this is Joe Schmo average dad who got in trouble for a traffic violation. Well, we had some of that. Like I said, at the beginning,

you were those accidental deportations. I remember them talking about the one, there was a whole profile, uh, on the deportations to El Salvador. And there was this whole thing about like the gay hairstylists who got sent from Venezuela, who got sent to one. And like, there was this wave of them, but for whatever reason, they are not,

they don't like, even that one, I thought would have stuck in the news, but they just, they float away. And even the ones that you all mentioned about all of the unambiguously bad people, those didn't really make the news either, or even the right wing news. Like no one really seems to care about them. We're creating this other layer of theater that's more interesting somehow than the actual issue. Well, here's a really interesting point about that. And it's something that the left does reliably, which is if the right doesn't attack an issue, the left won't respond and platform an issue. So if we don't, if they're like, oh, this person shouldn't have been

deported and most right-wing people are like, yeah, they probably shouldn't have been, they won't continue with that. This is why the left all ended up focusing around the one person who the right did push back against with that like Columbia student who constantly said he hated the U S they did try to form around him. Yeah. They also tried to form around that guy who was really, like of all of the early ones who were accidentally deported, they focused on the one who had

all of the criminal activity. The Maryland dad? Yeah, the Maryland dad. That's the one that they, of all of them, they chose him. And that was because I think to your point, you had people on the right who were like, no, no, no, yes, he was accidentally deported, we don't care, we're keeping him over there, which I also don't agree with.

My opinion was they should have brought him over and tried him for those, and it seems like they're doing that now, which is maybe why we're not talking about it anymore. You guys, a moment ago, you mentioned, and this will be our third episode of Neuron now that we're talking about this girl, but you know what, she's a star,

and I am a huge fan of hers. You mentioned Greta Thunberg. I believe that she has inspired a movement. It is a movement we must talk about. Riley, tell us about it. Yeah, this segue is nice off of our last segment about like performative, like protest theater, because this case is the March to Gaza,

a planned protest march. It featured thousands of largely Western demonstrators. They were attempting to literally walk into a war zone, ran into a bit of a speed bump recently, though, in Egypt. Egyptian police and even just everyday locals began clashing with them once they approached the city of Ismailia. The footage is just crazy. You can see white people in kafias

yelling free Palestine while locals throw water bottles at them. Very, very beautiful scene there. A total of 88 foreign activists were reportedly arrested or were scheduled to be deported after the incident. And because of course, the group is also apparently planning a hunger strike if anyone in their group is quote forcibly deported by Egyptian officials. Egypt for their part has been very clear that any visits to Ra'afah or the Gaza border had to have been pre-approved.

Meanwhile to other stories in a sort of similar vein of like spoiled Western virtue signaling, Ilhan Omar recently came out and said that the US is becoming worse than her home country of Somalia under Donald Trump saying of his crackdown on ice protests slash recent military parade. I grew up in a dictatorship and I don't even remember witnessing anything like that. Elsewhere whoopie Goldberg had a viral moment on the view recently, we can maybe play a clip of this, equating life in America for women and gay people with their counterparts in Iran saying the two were sort of like a one to one comparison. Let's not do that.

Let's not do that. Because if we start with that, we have we have been known in this country to tie gay folks to the car. Listen, I'm sorry, they used to just keep hanging black people. So let's- It is not even the same. I couldn't step foot wearing this outfit. Oh, no, wait, wait, wait. That's not what you mean to say. It is the same. No, it's not. The year 2025 in the United States is nothing like if I step foot wearing this outfit. The young people. They're on the list.

She was on Star Trek, dude. She like America gave her everything. I loved her because of Star Trek. Star Trek is where I watch that show every night. She was my favorites. I wish that she would stop talking because I even despite her really bad opinions, I still have a lot of feeling in my heart for her because of Star Trek and I like Sister Act too,

but Star Trek was important to me, it was meaningful to me. I wish she would just fucking stop. That's crazy. She said also that Alyssa, the sort of puppet, like sort of sock puppet Republican on that show, that they just throw eggs at. She mentioned that like gay people were killed or something in Iran in Iran or was

illegal and whoopi said, well, they string them up here in as well. They string up gay people and it's like, you mean people did that once in Wyoming and they got arrested and put in prison like forever. And aren't there questions about that case too? Like there are, but we're not going to get into them on this pod. Yeah, we have a lot of research for that one. But it is like almost it's the meaning of us. Come on, it's like the meaning of us to even talk about whether or not Iran is more oppressive to gay people and women than America, or if there's an equivalency there, whoopies just dumb.

I think the more important thing here is the march. I think you guys did a whole show, a whole like, yes, you know, we're going really deep on this. So, I mean, speaking of gay people, one of the leaders of the march was a guy named Murphy, who was like a PM or something, or some elected official from Ireland who is married to a guy and used to have like pride flags all over his profile. He takes them all down before he goes out there, you know, clearly showing that he understands these people don't support him.

But one of the things I find interesting about what happened here is where the right is sort of missing what actually happened to, I think, oversell our own narrative. One is that they didn't try to arrange things with the Egyptian government. They did. The Egyptian government just never got back to them and basically set a series of traps and a very complicated series of traps, which is really impressive when you hear about it. You're like, wow, that's almost a massage level. The second is that they actually had a huge contingent of Islamists who were coming from Tunisia and picking people up in various North African countries. However, this group was actually stopped before they got into Egypt by an Egypt aligned power, I want to say in East Tunisia or something like that,

who basically locked them down and then was like, oh, just wait here and we'll come back to you and let you know, we'll talk with our bosses. And they just kept doing that every day until they realized, oh, we're just being left in the desert. But what I find really, the other thing that I think is sort of mistold in this story is that these people thought that all Muslims were pro-Palestine, and they didn't really believe that. They understood the divisions. And also in Egypt, Egypt is one of the most pro-Gaza countries, if you're talking about the average citizen. It's 96% pro-Gaza and increasing aid. What they missed is, one, that they can't protest in Egypt the way they protest in the US. No one does like sit down block road protests in Egypt.

So what happened when they attempted that is that the Egyptian police came down and surrounded them and then the townies basically got to like throw stuff at them without any recourse, which is what I would do. I wish in the US the way we handled like road protesters is that the police would surround them and then like townie kids could like throw water bottles at their heads. Which is what happens in Egypt. They were just like, this is a blast. So that is, I think a truer representation

of the mistake that they were making. The final thing I'll really note here is that if you look at the walls between Egypt and Palestine, here is that if you look at the walls between Egypt and Palestine, this enclosure makes the Tyrannosaurus enclosure in Jurassic Park look rather piddly. And it is not like the walls between Israel and Gaza. And I would ask people, when you think of like, why is nobody taking the Gazan people? And this is an important question that people need to ask. One of the big answers to this is that they're terrified. The government is terrified.

You know, not long ago, Egypt had a situation where Hamas blew up the wall there and, you know, 200,000 to 700,000 Gazans flooded into the country, leading to like waves of murder and stuff like, I mean, whenever they move into a country like with Jordan, they tried to start a revolt with Lebanon. They tried to start a revolt with Tunisia. They tried to start a revolt. In Denmark, when they had immigrants move there, they had a 62% incarceration rate. And if you're just looking at male Denmark incarceration rate, it's only 2%. And within the next generation, even if you don't date by age with a 35% incarceration rate compared to the 2% Denmark incarceration rate. So I can see why people are so hesitant to take these immigrants.

It's not, it's not their fault. Like this is a systemic problem. I mean, back to Iran, sorry, but like when they give funding to, to like Palestine, it is to give them weapons, it is to give them training. Like this is a systematically, memetically, and logistically radicalized and militarized population. They're not receiving assistance in any like really significant, powerful, and enthusiastic way

that enables them to become more economic and more economically productive and more, more helpful to society. And there are absolutely populations that in the past and even in the present, various countries actively go out of their way to get like Mennonites. Oh my gosh, everyone wants Mennonites. And first it was Canada, then it was Mexico. Now there's a bunch of countries in South America. Where do Mennonites come from? I thought that- Well, the original ones that Canada targeted were in Russia. They were like, come over here, farm, build. And then, and then Mexico tried to take away Canada's Mennonites when Canada stopped

giving them as much educational independence. And now, as basically Mexico is not really able to defend them as well, because they're also very pacifist because of all their gang and drug problems. Many of them are moving from Mexico to like, you know, the various like to Ecuador, I think to Belize, to Argentina. And so there are populations that are, you know, known for being like, hey, come over here. We'd love to have you here.

And countries are willing to make concessions to bring them over. And the problem is that Palestinians are like, or Palestinians have become, have been made by people using them as a cudgel to hit Israel, for example, into an anti-Mennonite. Like they are, they are not economically productive, they are violent, and they've been radicalized and made violent and trained in violence, which is just, it's so unfair. And we can't, it's really frustrating. Yeah. I think a lot of this is really cultural. So look, when they were in Denmark, Denmark, multiple generations after being in Denmark, the female employment rate was around 20% and the male employment rate was still under 50%. That's a wildly low

employment rate when you're talking about multiple generations in another country. If you look at the video, which we had in our episode about this, of the Gazan woman who is laughing and cheering and having a party because four of her kids died, and she was saying she was so hoping that her grandkids could die too, because they'd get an auto pass into heaven. You know, I'm not going to judge her for this. For generations, they have been brainwashed and radicalized. No, that's her brainwashing, that's her religion, Simone. It might be one interpretation of her religion, but it's a valid one. You can only eradicate this by separating kids from their parents, which is cultural genocide. Well, one thing is for sure. And that's that white people don't generally know any of this and their interpretation, the average, what did I see? I saw crying, all crying, um,

I saw all crying. A weird looking German without a neck. I saw a, what was this next guy? Oh, an Irish guy. And the Irish are just like super obsessed with this issue for some reason that I don't understand entirely. I saw a deranged Canadian girl who looked sort of like a young Lena Dunham or no,

she looked like Carolyn Ellison is what she looked like. The one, the bride of SBF from the old crypto days. Oh, that's a look. So these are the people who had come down in this march. And as you said, because I think they expected some kind of broad Muslim reception of them in their work. You see at one point the Irish guy specifically yelling at some local Egyptians demanding that they as Muslims join him. And I just like, that is a level of hubris that I cannot even fully comprehend.

I look at that and I think, and I did think at first, I must be missing something. There has to be more to this story. Are they joking actually? Like, are these right wingers? Is this AI video? This can't actually be what I, they can't actually have gone to Egypt

and demanded that the Muslims join them in a pilgrimage to Palestine. That seems too crazy to be true. Then they could not have possibly expected the Egyptians to obey American civil liberty traditions and not give them shit and take their passport, which they did. They went live. They were live streaming. There was one of the women who I think was from Scandinavia was live streaming about this and the brutalization that she was experiencing. Oh, the sweaty woman on the bus? Yes.

That, I don't understand where these people come from. Well, the crazier quote for me was the guy who was yelling at the police, we have these rights in America. Why can't we do this here? We can do this in America. Why can't we do this here? Good question. They're, go ahead.

No, I'm just curious, Malcolm, cause you seem to attract this. What literally were they doing to attract so much attention? Like did they just march into a city square somewhere and start? No. So they had this plan. Um, the, the place where they really hit the most attraction was on their way to Sinai. So they had a bus convoy, which was ambushed by a series of checkpoints. And then they basically got kicked off the bus convoy and they'd keep

regrouping after groups of them were arrested and sent away. And one of the big parts where you see a lot of people attacking them is when they were trying to do like a road blockage sit down, which is just unheard of in Egypt. You don't do this in Egypt. Right. And so it was more just like locals having fun on them. They weren't particularly close to a major city center or anything like that. That's so funny that it's the road because as you mentioned too, that's something that we all hate so much. And we just have normalized to a certain extent.

But when you take that shit somewhere else, the rules are a little bit different. I remember a couple of years ago when the protest blockades, the environmental blockades were popping off. There was one down in Panama and there was this dude who I believe was a retired American actually, who got back in his car and he took out his gun and he walked over and he shot one of these people and killed them and there's this, I don't mean to laugh. I do not mean to laugh.

I remember that. Wasn't it like here, didn't people like that? People were like, that's cool. There's a picture of this dude with his gut. It's like this old weathered looking like white dude who's just like dead eyes shooting. And there's like a little bullet, what is it? The casing flying out the side.

And that, like that was that. Like no more protests in Panama. But that's something that, I mean, I guess some people would say, this is a great thing about America is that you can protest here and not get shot. I would say, and this is something, it's just departure from the topics,

but I do think we have time. And it occurs to me, I really do want the two of your opinion on this. I have this, I think that the problem here with blocking our own roads, which I consider to be very dangerous, I don't think you should be able to block roads and hold people hostage on bridges and things like this,

is that it's associated with status somehow. It's seen as cool and edgy. And the way to undo this, the only way perhaps, is not to arrest them, but to flog them. I think that we should bring back public flogging. And I think that it would be really embarrassing. And if we had like once every three weeks, every third week of the month or something,

we had like a live broadcast of protesters who blocked bridges and put people's lives in danger being flogged rather than going to prison. And they have an option, maybe. They have the option. They can either go to prison or they can just be flogged. They don't have to be flogged. They can choose the flogging.

I think that would fix this. And I't have to be flogged. They can choose the flogging. I think that would fix this. And I think it would be better than killing them, which I am super against because I'm a liberal. What do you guys think about flogging? I would be a bit concerned that it could create martyrs. I quite like the Egyptian system where the cops just detain them

and then anybody from the town. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, the martyring, going to jail is martyring. When you're publicly spanking a grown adult until they cry, that does not create a martyr. I don't, I think no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that would do a lot to support. I'm now, they probably can't, they're gonna start blubbering like a baby, but. We could always have a delay. We could have a delay of a few minutes and just not, we could just not broadcast the ones that don't cry. That's a, that's good, yes.

Thoughts, Simone, you must have a thought on this. Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, I'm much more of a prison colony kind of person, but yeah, I think the idea of corporal punishment in public is underrated. And I think giving people the right to choose is great. You know, the consent is involved. Last thoughts on this, this March before we move on, Brandon? No, sorry.

Cool, well, I guess I would like to know, is it just over, you guys? Did it, is it- Well, so the interesting thing about it is the Egyptian government has used it to galvanize support for their rule. The populace largely agrees with the stance that they took despite being overwhelmingly pro-Palestine.

So it had the exact opposite effect that the protesters wanted. What did they really want? They wanted to go there and do what exactly? I don't understand that they could increase the supply of aid through the border and loosen border restrictions. And instead the government made it look like them being anti-imperialistic and being able to stand up to the West. Wait, they thought they were going to force Egypt to open up the border. Yeah. See, that's just crazy. I don't understand how you go to Egypt and think that you wearing a kiffia as a white

person shouting at an Egyptian police officer is going to do anything other than get you vanished. If you look at protesters, particularly Gaza protesters, one of the things they often do is protest Democrats rather than Republicans. They actually almost never protest Republicans because they've gotten this strategy of like, this is the side I think I can win against. And we see this in what they're doing here. They're like, well, they could go to Israel is what Egypt said.

Why didn't you go to Israel? Why didn't you go to Washington? And they're like, well, these people are more sympathetic to us. I genuinely think is what or less sympathetic to us when they didn't you go to Israel? Why didn't you go to Washington? And they're like, well, these people are more sympathetic to us. I genuinely think is what or less sympathetic to us when they didn't understand is that actually Tel Aviv is going to be more sympathetic to them than Cairo. But on top of it, there's a systematic issue whereby the left is really bad at modeling the right. Whereas the right seems to be much better at modeling and predicting the left. So I think there's also just this this block. I've got to be honest.

That may be a result of the habit on the left to expunge people who even are willing to talk with people who are not seen as being on the left. So they just become so out of touch that they can't anticipate what's going to happen. I've got to be honest. I did not see this coming. I think I have a pretty

good read on the left. I did not anticipate the Greta Thunberg march to Egypt. That was something not on my bingo card for 2025. And I thought it genuinely shocking. It kind of really confused me about, about who they are, really. Well, bringing it back to Greta too, what's interesting is that I think she is indicative of a larger shift in what is happening to the environmentalist movement. That what is she doing now? She's not championing sustainable energy. She's on a boat to Gaza.

And you also see this, we were just talking about in an episode we haven't released yet, the no Kings protest. And you know, among the people who donated to it, who funded this protest, trying to frame, of course, Trump as a tyrannical king, is the Sierra club. And we're like, what, what does this have to do with the environment? I mean, first year, 501 c three, this is political stuff. But like second, it just seems like the environmentalist movement in some ways,

at least the old version of it. And I do think we're gonna see a revival in a more like genuinely sustainable way. But the old version of it has become just so corrupt and bankrupt that it can't even stay on topic anymore. It's just trying to maintain relevancy now by like talking about Palestine. You don't hear about climate justice anymore.

No. That was a thing at one point. Well, it's getting awkward. It was a huge thing. It's been 20 years since an inconvenient truth. It's like when the world ending folks, like we're running late here, you can only sit around and watch the waters not rise

for so long before you start to think, hey, I think maybe this was all a little bit overplayed. Yeah. Well, the problem is though, that climate change is going to cause a huge amount of suffering and death. And we need to prepare for it. We need to plan for it.

And we also do need to shift energy infrastructure. We need to embrace nuclear but it's not... Yeah. But the problem is that the movement became so corrupted that there was so much machine creep that suddenly you had Germany going to coal and dropping its nuclear because, I don't know, aesthetics. So yeah, anyway, we're seeing new sub trends coming up, like chaos gardening and terraforma and like all these really interesting, almost like post-apocalyptic, living off the grid, perma-culture, romantic cottage core,

but like with a sci-fi aesthetic, things coming up in a grassroots level, which I'm loving. And I think that, you know, in the end, we're going to see this revival of like, once the tech gets out and it rolls out more like really small scale nuclear power, a lot of people living in off the grid communities. And that's where I have a lot of hope for this movement. But man, it's just crazy to see that like where environmentalism goes to die is in like

rallying for Gaza and Palestine. Well, we actually I'm glad that we're talking about weird tech. We got a whole bunch of stuff coming up on that. Okay, so we have to talk about making America jacked again. And then I do want to get on the topic of technology. I have a lot that I want to talk about, but before all that,

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No calls, no back and forth, just drop in your creative and go live in minutes. If your messages deserve more than just another scroll by post, make it larger than life with AdQuick. Sigh of angels. Thank you, AdQuick. All right, Make America Jacked again. Riley, tell us about that camp for adults.

Yeah, so we publish a piece this week from Oliver Bateman. It was making the case for government sponsored fat camps. What these would consist of Ozempic Navy SEAL boot camp training. And the whole idea is getting Americans off for like 12 weeks stints. They return their fit, they're healthy. And what does that do for, you know, long-term health? Does that inspire more people to get in shape?

Does it inspire good habits among Americans? And does that do good things for the birth rate? Who knows? Because people are more attractive. Maybe if that's an attraction issue, you know, maybe are we, are we making some progress there? So that was the case. Oliver Bayman made in a piece from PirateWires this week.

Everybody should go check it out. Yeah. Curious to hear some of what your guys thoughts might be. Should we go through with these government sponsored fat cams? I'll just quickly tee up the piece a little bit. When the piece came to me, it was originally framed as

a you guys remember when we were young, there was the presidential fitness test in schools. I don't know if you all experienced that. So it was framed as, let's do an adult version of that, which that it was run by, it's not much to run, but it's just, you know, it's kind of coordinated by the government and adults can go and do it.

And you're not forced to do it. It's just like a fun thing. And I thought, oh, that's kind of whimsical and interesting. And I would like to do that as an adult and kind of measure myself against others and get a sense of where I should be in terms of fitness. And Oliver had this thing, he was like, and also we should really be doing government fat camps.

And I said, yes. I said, yes, sir, publish that piece. What do you guys, I mean, Brandon, what's your first thoughts on it? I thought it was a good idea. Oliver Bateman is the writer, by the way. He had some really interesting ideas in there. One of them was to have a national leaderboard

of like the most fit person and like you get badges and you call them like very interesting names, like the national most ripped champion or whatever. But I think I would go one step further. I would pay Americans to do this. I think like there should be a stipend to take off work and to go do this. One other thing I noticed was in our mentions afterwards, there was a lot of strange cope about how a lot of people were like, yeah, but actually food is the problem, which I understand, but it sounded to me a little bit like

they just didn't want to exercise. They just wanted us to fix the food issue. And it's like, yes, of course, you know, it's easier to lose weight by restricting your caloric intake simply because it takes more energy to exercise than to restrict caloric intake. But I takes more energy to exercise than to restrict caloric intake. But I didn't understand necessarily that as a criticism of the,

of the fat camp idea. I've never thought about the whole maha thing before is cope. But in a way when you're blaming the food supply and that would be nested in with this European thing that happens where people say a lot of people were like, we have to change the food to European food. And I'm like, what is European food? I don't understand. Well, they say it because people go to Europe

and they say, oh, I ate pasta the whole time and I lost weight. And then they say, that's because our food supply is bad, which I don't actually think. I still don't get it, because they're like, there's no seed oils in Europe. And it's like, that's not true. There's sunflower oil.

They all use seed oils. Grape seed oil. Yeah, like I don't understand that either. But I've never thought of it as COPA 4. That's pretty interesting. That actually it's just like, no, you have to get better at monitoring your calories and working out.

So this is the way I'd handle this if I was running this. I would make this part of a US military operation. Exactly. It's sort of like a military readiness thing. Use the recruiting centers that we already have that likely have training equipment at them sort of on off-cycle so that people can use them during off-cycle.

And then you create like little local competitions. I think like America-wide competitions are gonna create an idea of what is fit that is very unhealthy. But I think if you do local town-based competitions or local gym-based competitions, that could actually create a very like a good idea of what you can strive for. And then within those gyms, you maybe offer like positions to higher joining ranks within the military if you're winning these competitions, which assigns status to doing this, but also was a good pathway to get people into our military.

The other thing I note here, which is really interesting about all of this, is the change that we've had around the status of large amounts of muscle. If you go back to when I was a kid, having a lot of muscle made you look like a dock worker. It made you look like Popeye or something like that. I think one of the reasons we're seeing this

is a change in what it means to be ripped from a status perspective. You know, historically there was a period where it was considered very high status to be pale because, you know, wealthy women didn't have to go out and work in the fields. And then it was considered very high status to be tanned because it meant that you weren't in an office and you had the time to go to a beach and tan yourself or use tanning machines eventually. And then people find out how to hack these systems. And now I think it's considered high status to be ripped

because only wealthy people have the time to go out and work out and get these types of bodies now. So I think that we're at a good time for this as well because you've got the combination of ozempic but also the status association with this. And we can use this to hopefully funnel people into our military, which needs that. Now, we need we need voluntary military service as maybe even a college alternative. Like

you can go to college, you could you could do, you know, two years of voluntary military service where you're also not only getting healthy. And this is how it is with many countries where, okay, yes, you are going through basic training, you're getting fit, you're also learning more about a healthy diet, but you're also getting really good government training. This could be in IT, this could be in the medical field, you know, this could be in things that also the government specifically needs training in. And I think, you know, as AI hits really hard, there's going to be a lot of discussion on like, how do we retrain Americans in mass? Like, there are ways to combine this with really needed things, but I love that this is also combined

with weight loss. I mean, Malcolm and I, we have no fat clause in our marriage contract. We love this kind of stuff. Like this is great. I think America is fighting for this. What? Do you actually? Yeah, we actually do. Yeah, we actually do. It's great. I think America is ready for this. What? Do you actually? Yeah, we actually do. Yeah, we actually do. It's great. Well, like if one of you gets fat, then that's grounds for a divorce or what?

Then they have to, they're not allowed to be basically. Then you have to. Yeah, I'm the only one who ever violates it. And I get all sorts of diet restrictions if I get overweight. Yeah. What do you think is causing, if it's something you've thought about,

I definitely thought about it too, but maybe not. I haven't discovered maybe why people are getting fat. I agree less fatness would be good. Why are Americans so fat? Is it the food? They're sedentary. I'll tell you a really big one that everyone's ignoring. And it's because, you know, the left doesn't like to admit that people have

genetic differences, is if you look at the polygenic scores, these are the scores that are associated with certain traits and certain outcomes in humans, we can look at the polygenic scores that are most associated with a high fertility rate in the United States. And the two polygenic scores most associated

with a high fertility rate is the polygenic score that is meant to code for low educational attainment. And the second, so literally, idiocracy, but the second is actually the polygenic score that is associated with high rates of obesity. And people can be like, that's really surprising. Why are fat people, despite it hurting their fertility, having more kids? And I think that this actually comes down to when Ok Cupid, a long time ago, it did this thing where it would score people by how attractive they were. And you could do a game or you could

look at people's pictures and try to judge whether or not they were a virgin to see if you had a good virgin. They had one for gay. I played these games a lot. But one of the hints it always gave on the virgin are, was that obese people actually have sex much earlier and much more frequently than other individuals. Now part of this might be due to a low self-esteem issue. Men and women or obese women? Well, obese women often sleep with obese men. But I don't think it's just, my understanding was that obese women had more sex

than obese men. I think don't think it's just, my understanding was that obese women had more sex than obese men. Oh, of course they do, but I can also, I don't think that they're getting married to skinny men. Oh, yeah, yeah, I don't know anything about this. I don't know anything about any part of this actually. My read is that obese women might be passed around a bit by skinny men, but in reality

when they get married and they start having kids, they're pairing off with other obese people. Okay. Makes sense. Wait, so what, so it's, we don't- What I'm saying is it's literally an increase in the genetic underlying polygenic markers for obesity due to selective pressures created by our current dating markets. Isn't there just a correlation between income and kids?

That's true as well. The less income you have, the more kids you have. Well, I know the lower income you have, the fatter you are because the dumber you are. Oh, those are the things that are correlated. Those three things. And so I think it's all intelligence. Yeah. And dumb people are having more kids because they're not thinking about the risk perhaps.

And I have no idea, man. Well, sometimes dumb people just can't figure it out. Simone had this really chilling incident when she was having her first kid in an inner city hospital in Philadelphia. And she remembers the person next to her was this fairly young girl. And this was apparently her third or fourth kid.

And she was crying and asking the doctor, how do I not get pregnant? Yeah, how does this keep happening to me? And I'm like, oh my God, this is really bad. Yeah, it was really sad. And yeah, but I think, yeah, I think we should probably consider, you know, again, mandatory or not mandatory, but like optional military service, back ends.

The problem is that if we maintain a sedentary lifestyle, you know, again, mandatory or not mandatory, but like optional military service, back ends. The problem is that if we maintain a sedentary lifestyle, we are going to continue to have obesity, period. Because that's the biggest thing that has changed. People used to move around throughout the day, whether they were homemakers or working, they were far more likely to be moving around. And we just don't do that anymore.

So that until we change that or learn how to stop eating and it was M. Big is obviously really helping with that. We're going to see some serious problems. Yeah. I think some government funds that we spend a lot of money on a lot of dumb stuff. I think some money set aside to actually just let people go somewhere and lose some weight and then perhaps. But they'll gain it back.

All diet interventions end up when you go off of Zempik, you gain the weight back. When you do a diet, you gain the weight back. Unfortunately, this is a short-lived thing. What do you guys think about government-funded Zempik shots for anybody who wants them? I mean, if you were deploying them at that type of scale, it probably wouldn't cost that much. Yeah, it would be affordable in the ROI you'd get because we do have, I mean, as much as people are like, oh, we're a capitalist nation, we're actually pretty, we're pretty socialist

in a larger scheme of things. We pay a lot less in healthcare for people who have government subsidized healthcare if they are less obese. So absolutely ROI, it'd be worth it. It seems like, I mean, aren't you, we already doing that though. I think if you are obese, can you not get that shot covered by insurance? I don't know. It's getting easier now to get it, but I'd- We're all going to have them soon. They're going to have them out there for soon, which sort of brings me to my- It should be included in SNAP benefits.

Cause then they should be included instead of SNAP benefits at this point. Then they would buy less food. The concept of obese people, did you see, who was it? It was the Minnesota Senator who famously threw her shoe at someone. The sort of bad haircut. Are you talking about the, who brought in the lady on snap benefits and she's super fat? Yes. Yeah. I don't know what her name is.

I don't want to be making, I'm not trying to make fun of fat people right now. I'm really not. I feel bad for fat people. I don't think they want to be fat. I do think it's very bad optics for the Democrats to parade a morbidly obese woman out in front of the country and say we need to pay her. We need to pay more money to feed this person. That's just bad politics.

What are we doing here? Like who approved that? I don't understand. I don't also really believe in the concept of American starving. I don't think that's ever happened. I don't think there were a country with too much food, with too much arable land to be a country

that's susceptible to famine. It hasn't happened yet. Maybe it will eventually, if the Chinese keep targeting our food supply, I don't know. I think it's fine. I think that I'm not worried about SNAP. I think that's kind of like an illusion. It's this thing that Democrats do to parade around victims and say the whole world is terrible. I don't think it's that bad. I think

America's pretty good. I think the Ozempic shop is great. I think I have been increasingly, and we're getting now to the white pill segment. Welcome to the white pill segment. I have been feeling so optimistic and I know it's strange to some people because I often am complaining about things, but it's been coming on me like a fever recently. Truly, I will suddenly look around and feel really good and feel positive about the world and think, wow, I could, what a great time to be alive and I can do anything. And things actually seem to be going okay. There are a handful of technologies I wanna call out. One, Mid Journey's new video generation

feels miraculous to me. It is beautiful. It is incredible that people have this ability. We are, to borrow from the left, sort of vernacular democratizing art in a way. It's gonna allow people to express themselves in ways we've never seen before. I'm excited about it. I think it's going to be really cool.

Self-driving cars are a miracle technology. If you had talked to me 10 years ago and said we were going to have just ghost taxis roaming around the city, picking people up, driving around, that feels like Star Trek. I'm in Los Angeles right now walking down the street. I see little automated delivery bots now, walking down the street. I see little automated delivery bots dropping food off everywhere I go. That feels like we're living in the future. There's so much cool stuff happening right now and we have not even gotten to the singularity yet. It occurred to me recently that we're at the sort of technological

singularity precipice for real, separate from the rhetoric. People talk about this online a lot. If you just walk outside and really look around, there's some really cool stuff coming. And I'm really excited about it. I don't know, have you guys, do you feel this way at all? Or are you more negative? I mean, we are obviously at the fulcrum point of all human civilization at this point.

Like we are at the age where the future of what humanity becomes tips and it's obviously going to happen within our lifetime. Like when I'm raising kids, you know, my wife's pregnant with kid number five right now. Um, and I think about what does education mean for them? What is jobs going to mean for them? You know, when AI can do 50, 60% of what humans can do, which I think it'll be able to do in like two years, what's it going to be doing in 20 years? What's it going to be doing in 30 years, right? Like none of the existing life path advice makes sense anymore. That's why we've built like alternate educational systems for them, like parasia.io or whistling.ai system. But like, I hear you where you're like, there is this bright, really optimistic future.

But I also feel like people who are living within this generation sort of have this additional responsibility to actually scout out how society is gonna change and make their bets. Because I don't think everyone is going to be part of that future. No one is not everyone's a part of our present. We're talking about the morbidly obese woman in front of Congress arguing for food stamps or whatever, or more of them is like she's not a part of this.

It's already shitty for her. And it's shitty for a lot of people. And it was shitty for me in those moments when I wasn't looking around feeling optimistic. I realized it's sort of just a frame of mind. And I maybe since 2020, when things got really bad and I felt like they were not going to ever get better genuinely is kind of how I felt in the summer of 2020. It seemed like society was collapsing in front of us. I have been in this fight or flight kind of defensive posturing since then, and I lost a lot of myself to that. I lost a lot of my maybe not lost, but suppressed a lot

of my more optimistic orientation to what felt like a fight to survive in a sense, because the things that I cared about were vanishing in front of me, I thought. But there is really yesterday going from opt negative to positive, nothing about the world had changed at all. It was entirely inside of my mind. And I don't know, I think it's like everything that we talk about, Malcolm, when you were about, you were talking about the AI future,

and earlier you both alluded to the global warming and things like this. I think it's all we know for sure is the future is going to be different. The future has always been different. It's always been radically different, at least since the Industrial Revolution, right? Like every 25 years has been very, very, very different. I think a lot of this is going to the way it's going to shape is going to come down to how we

see it and how we shape it ourselves. And I think that the positive stuff, it's not, the hope is not lost. I feel a little bit like Bill Murray now at the end of Scrooge, giving a monologue about how good things could be if you just tried, but I really believe it, at least right now, thank God. And we could go away, you know, in a few hours, but for now, I feel pretty good. I agree with you here. But what I guess I'm saying here is I think that part of humanity is going to get this utopia where AI increases their quality of living and their lifestyle and things they have access to almost infinitely. But I think that part of humanity is going to get this utopia where AI increases their equality of living and their lifestyle and things they have access to almost infinitely but I think a part of humanity is going

to be completely disempowered by AI in a way that becomes when AI can do everything better than you and you don't control any AIs like your lifestyle is going to feel very dim to a lot of people and I think that you may not have a fear of being in that second class of people because of your existing position in society. You're obviously on the boat. You're obviously with the AI and the humanity that takes our manifest destiny among the stars. No, I would disagree completely with you, actually. I think that the people who are the most scared right now are not the people who have nothing. They are the people like us who seem to be on the boat.

Those are the people who seem in a world where AI is replacing humans or the good humans. Those are the ones who have anxiety about this. Not the morbidly obese woman. AI is not going to make her life worse. I just don't see how that's going to happen. It could. No, it's not. You're right. But it's going to make her life irrelevant. Her life's already irrelevant. It's your life. I think you're I think that you're projecting. I think maybe you are as an intelligent person in the world of knowledge,

work, ostensibly, maybe. I guess are we in the all in the world of knowledge where I don't know. We're not doing manual labor. And I think that that's the class of person who's worried right now, who's anxious. But I don't I don't believe you have to be. But I would say it's not class of person who's worried right now, who's anxious. But I don't believe you have to be, but I would say it's not most of society. I think it's this narrow class of people who are weirdly building the thing,

who are very close to the thing, who are the most anxious correctly about the thing. One piece of support for that actually is that study that had 50 participants that's going around right now, where it said basically you get dumber if you use LLMs. Oh, when in writing tasks that your brain shows lower levels of connectivity. Yeah, when you're not writing. It's crazy how many people jumped on that

and are promoting the fuck out of it right now as we speak. It's too Captain Obvious. But I think there are a couple things going on here. One is, yeah, absolutely. All of our friends who are landscapers, plumbers, like what they're not even remotely concerned. And in a post AI techno feudal world, we're like post demographic labs to where governments sort of fail to provide social services and maintain infrastructure and provide

security, people who are able to serve their local communities through protection through food production, through fixing things, through building things, they're gonna be fine. And so I think a lot of these people, yeah, they're not at all concerned whether or not they're plugged in, because either they're blithely unaware

but they're still gonna benefit, or they see what's happening and they're like, yeah, I'm gonna be fine. Knowledge workers are the ones who are most threatened by this. But I think, to your point, absolutely. I mean, what we see with the difference between people who consider themselves to be lucky and those who consider themselves to be unlucky is more that the lucky people,

seeing themselves lucky, catch a good opportunity when it crosses their path. And the unlucky people just don't see a good opportunity despite it being waved right in front of their faces. So coming into this with a more bright mindset is absolutely the way to go because that's how you're going to end up on the winning side of it. It reminds me a little bit of political differences. There was a chart that Nate Silver pushed a couple days ago. I think it went semi-viral. Left-wing people are much unhappier, far, far, far unhappier than right-wing people. Antonio Garcia Martinez quote tweeted that and said,

you know, it's the happiness that leads to politics, not the other way around. I don't know where I land on that question, but I do know that people who feel they have control over their own lives are generally speaking happier. Regardless of whether, like, I don't know if that's true or not. I certainly know that.

No, it's show in research across across different fields, having more control correlates with greater happiness. Feeling out of power is. And a great study that bolsters the it's not the other way around. There's a study done recently that looked at amounts of social media use of conservatives versus progressives. And it showed that while if you were a progressive using social media ton made you really depressed, if you were a conservative, it didn't have nearly as much of an impact. So it appears that it is exposure to progressive culture that leads to the unhappiness. And keep in mind that progressive culture is permeated by an external locus of

control, whereas conservative culture is permeated by an internal locus of control. And if you feel like you are powerless, like you are systemically disadvantaged, like the world is conspiring against you and there's nothing you can do about it, of course you're going to be stressed out. Of course you're going to be unhappy. That's what, when you say progressive culture, what is that message? You're right, is fundamentally a message of these horrible things that you have no control over are shaping your life. And what choice is there but in the presence of that kind of a message or not presence, but in the sort of ecosystem of that kind, you're breathing in that message. You become that woman at the no Kings protest who went viral, that old sort of like 65,

70 year old woman. That 70 year old woman who said, yes, yes, like, oh, I'm just afraid and I'm so unhappy. Yes. Crying. It was so sad. They've made her sick. That was from watching MSNBC every single day. She was absolutely terrified of the world. I just, I just, I'm just so scared. I'm 74 years old. I worry about everything. And I just, I worry about everything. And I just, I just, I just am so scared. And she said, you know,

I just don't know what's changed or what's happening. And it's like, well, nothing really, other than you're watching MSNBC. That's the change. Like you're just, you're watching more of that now than you were what, 10 years ago. And your life is miserable because of it. Folks, this is a PSA for you.

Stop watching MSNBC. It is literally bad for your mental health. Last thoughts for my two just incredible guests. I love you guys. What are your last thoughts? We have just a couple minutes left. Watching MSNBC is great for my mental health. I find it hilarious.

I'm so sad that it may go out of business. I just love watching them mess stuff up. I love watching them whine. I could watch, who that that lesbian woman who winds on yeah, Rachel Maddow, I could watch Rachel Maddow all day. Because I the great thing about being on this side of the political divide is like your people are generally like happy and excited about life. And not particularly spiteful. And the other side, you just see this like anger and despair and it feels so good, but not just that,

but it also feels so good to welcome people into our tent who have come from the other side. Because there's always this moment when they're like, wait, everyone here is happy. And I thought they were all gonna hate me because I'm, you know, gay or because I'm, you know, an environmentalist or because I'm, and we're like, no, there was a great study that came out just two days ago or three days ago, which I found really fascinating. And it showed the left versus the right ideological clusters. And it showed that

the left had a very small almost little pinpoint ideological cluster. And the modern right was this giant circle of ideological clusters. And then it even showed that what's actually been happening over time and the writers of it were leftists, so they were very alarmed by this, is they go, it's not that the centrist are moving, it's that all the centrist are moving to the right. Because they accept them and we don't, which I found really fascinating. Because they haven't been in charge. It's the left is the dominant ideology. It's the ruling ideology. The urban monoculture. There can't be dissent. That's just how power I think works. And so when that's what it used to work in the right in the nineties, when you had the, you know, Judeo Christian cultural group that tried to implement its control

on everyone. And I think that this is what people miss about. They think that what happened is like the Overton window just moved to the left and now like what is center is is different and that's why the modern right looks a lot like the 90s left and I'm like no no no what actually happened is the dominant culture in our society flipped so the modern left is acting like the right of the 1990s trying to use the legal system to impose their cultural value and the modern right is made up of a large, disparate group of cultural groups looking to protect their cultural autonomy against the imperialistic imposition used

by the current dominant cultural group in the legal system. And that's why it looks like the left of the 90s because it is the left of the 90s. Simone, your thoughts. It's through this disparate cloud and this this variety of ideas that we're going to survive. So the next best thing to to government sponsored fat camps is government sponsored improv camps.

The answer to the AI age is learning to yes and in an enthusiastic way. And I think that that's that's the way that that's the way to take it on. Enjoy it, have fun. And I think that you'll see way to take it on. Enjoy it, have fun. And I think that you'll see a ton of opportunities and absolutely AI can be hugely democratizing. It will concentrate wealth like crazy, but as long as you're yes anding and taking a very enthusiastic and optimistic approach

headfirst into the future, you're gonna do great. Amazing. Well, thank you guys both again for joining. Have a great weekend. Thanks for watching. Cheers. Cheers.