TRASHFUTURE - G for Goondetta ft. Josh Boerman

Episode Date: July 29, 2025

It's episode one of JoshWeek, as Josh from the Worst of All Possible Worlds joins us to talk about the Online Safety Act coming into force, the sudden about-turn by sensible liberals on Palestine (but you're definitely not allowed to even gently suggest that their complicity in what's happened should have any effect on their lives, of course), and then we look at the ongoing transformation of the US media industry into MAGA courtiers.  See the JoshPlay - https://www.thespaceuk.com/shows/2025/the-boy-from-bantay Listen to the Worlds of all Possible Worlds - https://www.worstpossible.world Listen to Ill Conceived - https://illconceivedpodcast.com

Mr Trump, can you escape the Jeffrey Epstein crisis? Maybe that's why we heard this. What's that song? I don't know. It's very famous. It's from a musical. Yeah. Memories. Music boomed out from the convoy of golf carts, drowning out the surrounding sound.

Look, I just think it's important to have a comfort character if you're going to be a world leader. Yeah. You know, it's if you're going to be asked. a difficult question about a guy that you claim you, like, always hated hanging out with and that you were never really friends with you didn't share any interests. If you're going to answer questions about, like, a trove of evidence that comes out of you writing notes to each other being like, I love you, you're my best friend. We have a secret language together.

I love all of the stuff we do together, especially our many shared interests. That's right. That's right. Yeah, you need to be able. You need to be like, that's the thing. People don't respect neurodivergence in world leaders. And if you're really, really stressed, you need to reach for a comfort character like Rumtum Tugger. Or Grizzabella in the case of Donald Trump. Let's be real. I mean, that motherfucker was listening to memories, which we all know is the big 11 o'clock number that Grizzabella sings, as originated

memorably by Betty Buckley in the original cast of Cats on Broadway. We all know this. This is like, this should no longer be that you have to be 35 to be president of the United States. It's like you should have to have that level of Broadway knowledge. Yeah, yeah, of Andrew Lloyd Weber specifically, even though he's British. Yeah. But you hate, but you said to this earlier that you hate cats. Oh, I fucking hate it. I mean, that's why also, that's another thing I think you share with the American

president is that you know so much about stuff that you hate. Yeah, I know, yes. Okay, so a couple things, right. Hi, everybody. I'm Josh. You may have heard me before from my podcast, the worst. of all possible worlds, where we talk about media and pop culture.

Really heating up the cold open there. I co-host it with two guys who both love musicals, one of whom specifically loves cats and the other of whom fucking hates cats. And so half the time, the shit that we are arguing about off

mic is the musical cats. Uh-huh. Well, John, everyone can say I loved the video, though. Uh-huh. Like Donald Trump in his, like, motorcade of golf carts, and he's just blasting out the musical cats while like while people are yelling like,

are you a paedophile, sir? He's got Jeffrey Epstein's Island, and he's just like, memories. All the light. Like, he's so awesome. He's so funny. He's like the funniest guy who ever lived.

It's so good. Yeah, it's like, the problem is, is that he is responding to quite legitimate questions. Yeah. With the contempt that I think politicians should save for idiotic questions like, can a woman have a penis?

I think the, Like, my advice to the new Corbyn Party, to Zach Polanski, to anyone who wants to be a progressive politician, find a show tune. And then anytime someone asks you an idiotic question to which you'd like to show contempt to, that's right. Then you should just walk away blaring that show tune. What's yours, Riley? I am the very modern lover, multi-party. Yeah, yeah. It would definitely, it would definitely be something from the HMS Pinafore. Okay, I love that.

Or maybe something from the Mikado. Okay. So you're both Gilbert and Sullivan boys is what I'm hearing I think I don't really like musicals But I think Gilbert and Sullivan is kind of like It's like a musical that knows that it's shit Which is sort of what I like about it I mean Opera in general is kind of like

Self-aware Camp in that way What about you saying? I don't know because I don't really want I've never really seen musicals before I've seen like yeah no no like It just never was really part of like my life And so I'm trying to think about like I guess I would say like guys and dolls

Just because it's the only one that I know Wait, but do you know the song from The Simpsons that's not actually in the musical? Yeah, basically that's right, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, awesome. That would be the funniest thing to sing to the press, and they're like, that's not even a song. Yeah, yeah, or like, you have to meet the press and you're like, I hate every ape I see from chimpanzee. No, I mean, but I mean, let's be serious.

This is me, right? So, like, really what is going to be is, like, the opening theme song of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Yeah. Or, like, I think you could do, like, numb, you know? I think that'd be good The 9 inch nails version or the Johnny Cash version? No, I presumably it's like the The Lincoln Park song, right?

Yeah, the Lincoln Park one. I am thinking of hurt. Fuck. Of which I would say like, I've become so numb to day. No, it would, yeah. No, it would be, it would be the Evangelian theme song or it would be like, fucking, I've been listening

to a lot of deaf tones recently, like again, so maybe, maybe something. But I'd be kind of hard because it would just be like loos and ms, just like, over and over. A cruel Hussein's thesis? Is this anything? Yeah.

Yeah. This is tangentially irrelevant, but my PT turned up to the gym the other day in like a trap star singlet and like ankle length like baggy jorts. Hell yeah. And like Nike TNs. And I was like, oh yeah, man, you look like Fred Durst in 2002. And he was like, who's that? Oh, no.

My man is 27. Then this is a perfect example for our new strategy of political communication, which is you just back away slowly. while the very modern model of a modern major general plays loudly. Or I sing numb because he won't know it. Yeah, exactly. But I just wrote this. Yeah, exactly.

Anyway, anyway, hi everybody. It's T.F. We're in studio. We got Josh Borman from the worst of all possible worlds at Illconceived here, who heated up the cold open way, way earlier than planned. You know what? I love heating up anything, honestly. That's why I'm here.

I looked at the temperature. It is currently 92 degrees Fahrenheit in New York. That's 33 in fake dollars. which is just insane. That's not good. You should rename your podcast a worst of all possible or worse of all possible musicals.

Yeah. That's such a good point. The show where you list endlessly debate whether cats is good or whether cats is bad. Actually, honestly, the question of doing a cat's episode has been a topic of contention

for a very, very long time. You've got to have it out, struggle session. That's your Tacoma Narrows Bridge episode. Maybe. I don't know. We'll see. All right. Look, we got a lot to get through today.

And number one, Josh has chosen to come to the UK. The year is 2025. The entire internet has been made illegal in this country as the online safety bill expands to include Al Jazeera, all of Reddit, most of Twitter, every podcast, and possession of a VPN is now punishable by death. Brave gooners meet in the woods to exchange old copies of nuts, zoo, and other relics of time pass. Welcome to the world of G for Goondetta, colon, the goon powder treason and plot. It must be like kind of hard. Like, you know, Josh, like he's this, he's come all the way from the US.

They're a very long trip. You know, everyone knows, like, getting out of Heathrow is really, really hard. You get to your hotel room and you just want to, like, jerk it, right? You just need to really, really the pressure. You go on your computer to do that. A feat, like a bright of passage when you go to end to visit any country. And then you are confronted by the screen, and the screen is just a picture of Kirstama, asking you whether you have your goon pass.

And obviously, you don't have the goon pass. I had to do for Blue Sky DMs. Yeah. I had to fucking do this shit where I had to, like, take a picture of my face to prove that I'm an adult. Oh my God, really? Anyone? Any DM?

It doesn't matter. Any DM. Imagine if you show them your face and then they're like, we need more evidence. Show us your dick now. Yeah. No DMs for you. No. So if you're not familiar with this out of the country, the UK has recently, we talked about the

online safety act ages ago, but it's now come into force. And what it is meant is that anything deemed unsafe is now, you will have to validate the U.R. 18 to reach it. And things that are deemed unsafe, it's not just things like pornography, but it's also, for example, like graphic images of Gaza are considered to be unsafe. And so those news sources are now censored. Quite a bit of Wikipedia, apparently. I don't know the full details of that, but like quite a bit of Wikipedia and its related projects may be considered to be unsafe. It's a kind of universal basic Mary White Houseification of like the entire internet. Well, and I think for Blue Sky, the reason that they were like, in order to access DMs, you have to do age verification is they're just trying to shield their ass from potential liability because theoretically in DMs you could send anything. Yeah. And, you know, this is like, like everything in the UK, right? This is a piece of legislation that is responding to a moral panic driven by the press that has ended up creating a huge amount of government overreach into

people's lives to satisfy basically no one, but that could have huge effects around the world as lots of places need to just start stepping up user verification measures. So yeah, the idea that you can, for example, also, like, let's just say, maybe you're a young person, you're questioning your gender identity. Maybe you're going on Reddit to try and find out, what can I do to like maybe find support to find resources, maybe even to find hormones. Sorry, you have to prove your 18. And you're not going to prove your 18 unless you're going to be able to use a VPN that is now, and now the government's responded to mass use of VPNs by saying, we're going to make it illegal to use a VPN. And by the way, like every major

company uses VPNs all the time. So good luck with that. And secondly, as I've seen, you can just print out a picture of an adult and then put that picture in front of the camera and then it will say, okay, fine, you're an adult. Or the other thing you can do is you can just say, okay, I'm going to allow, we've actually talked about some of the startups that are doing this before. I'm going to allow some venture funded company. I've got a screenshot from all past. trust, one of them here, where you can give your access to your, quote, email digital footprint. That's so fucked. Yes.

The email digital footprint, which allows the software to say, okay, well, are you getting emailed by your bank? Right. So they're basically taking all of your emails, throwing them through a large language model, and seeing if it aligns with what you would expect to see from a grown-up. Yeah. It's like, are you getting emails from the club? Or are you getting emails from the bank, basically?

Either way, you're an adult, baby. Riley's getting both. Yeah. All you pit bull. Yes. And again, it's like in order to do any of this, you just, we've seen every time the British state does something like this, you know, again, it's often to, in response to some kind of moral panic, creates an enormous amount of like state penetration into someone's life. And then the assumption is there will never be a kind of revolutionary conservative movement that can then take over those channels of fine-grained control and then use them for the purposes of expanding fascism. Yeah, I mean, that's, I think, a preview of coming attractions in this. episode, but it's also something that we're seeing in the United States as well. Big difference is that in the US, this kind of thing, the age verification shit, is happening at a state level. And it's always in response

to the pornos, right? Where it's like in Texas, for instance, and I think South Carolina, there's a few other states where in order to regulate this adult content, they've said, you need to upload your driver's license, you need to do that sort of thing. And as you said, the net effect of this is that the government will be able to deem anything that they don't like pornographic. And I've seen enough evangelical Christian shit in my lifetime to know that eventually the scope of that which is deemed pornographic broadens and broadens and broadens to include matters of gender and sexuality where they just disagree with the presentation fundamentally. Yeah.

And that, of course, would never happen here. No, God, no. No, there's no sort of giant cross-party consensus that that kind of thing should be happening here. Yeah. So, well, we are now living in G for Gondetta. but first they came for the goons and I said nothing because I was not a goon. Then they came for basically everybody else and, you know, et cetera. It's going to be like an underground railroad for copies of Max Power,

exchanging them in secret. With the expansion of Sadiq Khan's U-Lez, the cars and the tits will both be illegal. And then Max Power will be the most illegal magazine. U-Laz stands for Underground Lesbian. Yeah, that's course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Before we get into the next UK sort of local thing, we're going to be talking about the movies in the back half.

I found this to be utterly outrageous. I didn't know that we were generating a homegrown fetterman. Oh, you are? Yeah. We appear to be generating a homegrown fetterman in the form of David Lammy. Okay. Yeah. And again, David Lammy is someone who has repeatedly gone on the radio and defended more or less everything Israel is done in Gaza for the last three years.

Is he wearing the shorts now? What is it that makes him fetterman ask? I'll tell you what. It's that he has this, this guy who is Britain's four and, secretary, for those who don't know, has begun to say, I have imposter syndrome and anxiety. Motherfucker, maybe you actually should just leave. How are you going to have overseen, let's say, the collusion of the UK in the greatest humanitarian catastrophe of the 21st century, and then go on fucking James O'Brien's podcast and be like, oh, I'm so, my mental health. My mental

health is not great. Hey, fuck you. Maybe it shouldn't be. Maybe it shouldn't be good. Yeah. You know, Maybe it should be worse. Yeah, but I do want to discuss also a little of what seems to be, I've noticed this. I'm sure you might have noticed this as well, a sort of about turn and willingness to criticize Israel and support Gaza among labor MPs, little by little, and that all at once, kind of starting a few weeks ago, and then obviously Glastonbury came, and then there was the moral panic that we could all ignore the real things that were going on again. Good liberals could, you know, be like, hey, well, I don't have to change my mind because

everyone's freaking out about Bob villain. That's fine. Right. But then, you know, again, with scenes of basically hell on earth of starvation, of sort of mass death, of sort of inevitable famine, are coming out of Gaza. And poor David Lammy just feels awful about it. Yeah, he feels really bad. And that's, I guess that's, what else could he have done other than just like feel bad? Yeah, who can say? And have imposter syndrome. Why, what is he the foreign secretary of the United Kingdom? Yeah. Little old me, Israel had never listened to me. Yeah. No, they, why. I bet they don't even think I'm good at the job. And it's like, they probably don't even want my weapon.

And the thing is, again, it's like, I don't care what possible reason you, there is no possible reason that where you should ever be encouraged in your career of being foreign secretary if this is what you've overseen. If you've had imposter syndrome, you were right. It's funny that like this is sort of Blair Mark II. And they've once again overseen mass death in the Middle East. It's like to every sort of new labor right administration is granted one major, at least humanitarian crisis.

I feel like the Blairites were less apologetic about Iraq, though, at least sort of in the medium term. I guess we don't really know where things are going yet regarding Gaza. But like it's almost as though they're saying, right, there's some senior political figures are like, all right, realizing, right, to everyone listening to this to all of us, it was clear the day, the following day, what was going to happen. It was clear. It was clear before, to be perfectly honest, right? it was and if he wasn't clear then, which it was to us, but even then, if it wasn't clear to someone else then, you could have listened to the Amalek speech. You could have listened to anything that like Ben-Vir said. You could have listened to anything that Belles-L Smotrich said. You could have listened to the ICJ at every single stage where someone serious asked, is there a genocide that

is at risk of being committed here? Is there a genocide being committed here? The answer was a resounding yes. Yes, it is. Yes, there is a risk of one. It is happening. And I've speculated as to what this might be that's causing these like, you know, respectable senior liberal figures. It's in the happening of the States, too. Matt Iglesias. Hakeem Jeffries put out a half-baked. Like, it's still very like, I mean, if Hakeem Jeffries is putting out a half-bake statement, he must have seen some absolutely dire private evidence. Yeah. That is way worse than anyone thinks. And he's been, he's been seeing, I'm sure, also the same pictures and videos as the rest of us. But like you said, there's something else, something else and something more going on that still isn't going to allow the Democrats

to rescind their support of the Israeli government, obviously. But they're going to encourage things very strongly. Of course. Same with labor. If you are a labor politician now, you have spent the last probably eight weeks, again, with a little break after Glassonbury, because everyone just got to enjoy a moral panic again.

But you've spent the last eight weeks realizing that you are actually, you have been complicit in abetting a genocide, and that this probably doesn't, and again, because this is what they're concerned with, look good for you personally, right? This is something that is, oh, I'm overseeing a famine. I'm on record speaking in support of the famine.

I don't want to be remembered for, I thought I'd be on record as standing up for our allies in the Middle East. And so now, Starmer is saying, oh, the appalling scenes in Gaza are unrelenting. Again, as always, without saying, where are the scenes coming from? Right. Are there just scenes? Are they just there? Did they appear out of the ground?

Right? No, obviously not. And he says, the French, you know, are saying, well, we'll recognize. recognize a Palestinian state. And apparently also, they were really trying to get Canada in the UK to go along with it too. Yeah. Which didn't work out because at the end of the day, they still fear Trump too much.

Anglo countries consistently bitch made. USA. We don't even recognize France. Yeah. So, look, but Starmer, of course, is still talking about things like a pathway to peace, to turn a ceasefire into lasting peace. Recognition of a Palestinian state has to be one of those steps. Oh, who should do it, Keir?

Do you think there's somebody who could maybe? recognize the state of Palestine? No, heavens, no. It is insane, isn't it? We've had, like, God knows how long, well, like, 40, 50 years of, like, liberal politicians going on about a two-state solution, but also it's one where, like, one state isn't allowed to be recognized. Like, oh, there should be a two-state solution, but also there's only allowed to be one state.

Well, it's a two-state solution when one of the two states is saying it feels safe enough for there to be a two-stays, which just never arrives. No, it's funny. It never comes. Yeah. Around the corner, I'm sure. Yeah. You know, and so Starmer goes on.

He says, the situation is, quote, an absolute catastrophe and that people in Britain are revolted at what they're seeing on their screens. So we have to get to that ceasefire, you know. I'm interested in hearing like the American view as well, because mine is sort of a mixture of, well, all of it is speculation. Because obviously, like, the reasons behind why this has happened, you can sort of, I think there are multiple theories. The first is that it suddenly became acceptable once, like, mainstream press decided that it was a story. And like, I went to the, um, the protest outside of Downing Street. on Friday last week. And there were lots of people

of placards of the Daily Express front cover. And I imagine that isn't because they like reading the Daily Express. I'm guessing that men, like they probably don't like reading the Daily Express, but it's more just this idea

that, oh, okay, like something significant has changed in this like media environment where up until now, if you said that you wanted a ceasefire or if you wanted like, even if you wanted a two-state solution, you were basically on the side of Hamas, right?

I think that's definitely a piece of its state side. Like, you are now seeing articles in the New York Times. they're unequivocally arguing that this is a genocide, which you would not be seeing six months ago. But the most important thing, though, is to have waited until it is too late to stop it to recognize it. That's the crucial thing.

This is it, because the other part of it is also, and this is like more of a, you know, my tinfoil hat is sort of on, but it's backwards because I'm cool. I'm cool. Like Fred Nurse, yeah. Exactly. I'm a tinfoil Freddell.

But it's also one where it's just like, perhaps this sort of like any romantic idea of what Israel was, or what Israel could be has basically gone down the toilet. And I've been thinking about this for a little bit because whenever you sort of see people now who defend Israel, no one is really talking about like, oh, it's a place where like a lot of art is produced or there's a lot of culture that's produced.

You never hear about Pride in Tel Aviv anymore. You don't really even hear about Pride in Tel Aviv anymore. You're right. You don't even hear about Soda Stream anymore. What happens to that, right? Everyone's now getting Phillips. The Phillips ones for whatever reason. No.

Like, you don't, you don't, like, even the sort of Israel as like a startup tech nation. It's like you don't hear any of that anymore. And you haven't heard about that for a while. You know, and so like a lot of the PR around Israel and why it's so important has basically been dissolved, which is why the only defense of it among like the increasingly unhinged is like you have to sort of commit war crimes in order to protect Jewish people and their safety and we're not going to elaborate on that any further.

And if you do, we're just going to yell at you. And so what's been very interesting to watch from the UK is that the people who are still defending Israel, just before I came on, I was watching a clip from Julia Hartley Brewer, fan of the show. Oh, I saw that was, that was, that was, it was genuinely, it was, it was, it was, it was shocking and revolting. It was, it was, it was shocking and revolting that I have to share a world with this person. So this is like, Julia Hartley Brewer who like looks at the photo of like a starving child in Gaza and basically says, well, the mom looks kind of fat. So like maybe it's like, fuck off. I'm not, I'm not even joking like, no, I know you're not. I've paraphrase, but only very slightly for editorial, like editorializing reasons, not really because of the content. And if you, and you know, you've got Melanie Phillips who is basically sort of, sort of, now saying that like, yeah, Gaza needs to be taken over by Israel because of safety. That's the only argument they have. And you cannot really sort of ask them to elaborate on that because they'll just yell at you. But my thinking is like even among the sort of like, sort of centrist liberal types who have either said nothing up until now or who have said

stuff, but in a very like, I believe in a two state solution way, I feel like it's become very apparent to them. But like, look, this isn't going to happen. Like even they live in, even they will end up living in the real world. And once you've got like enough people being like, look, everything that like this very sort of demoralized political class is saying about like, you know, two state solutions and the and the solutions of diplomacy, once they've stopped believing in that, then it becomes this problem because the fantasy sort of dissipates. And as a result, you just end up like, and what we've ended up in a situation, you know, we've ended up in a situation where no one really believes in the two state solution. Right. But you've got a small but like

very vocal and very like an elevated group of people who have been given a lot of media time, a lot of airtime, a lot of sympathy, now being very open and basically saying, but yeah, like, the starvation isn't happening. I mean, but just like it's very outright genocide denial in a sense, in a way that like in the past you would have associated that with like people who were denying like Srebrenica or were, you know, your classic genocide denies, right? That's where we're at right now. And I think your point is well made Hussein that like this has forced a lot of Zionists to confront the reality of their ideology. Like I live in New York, right? So like, There is no place in the world other than the state of Israel itself where you are going to find more supporters of the Israeli state.

And outside of the absolute most diehard dogmatic Zionists, almost everybody else is seeing these images and seeing what they represent, right? And reading the stories about the fact that they still aren't letting aid caravans in insufficient amounts. They're seeing what happened with the freedom flotilla and all of those people just getting fucking detained. And I think that because Judaism is fundamentally a religion about like trying to restore some sense of justice to the world, you know, at least if if you're somebody who like, I think believes in sort of the kind of religion that I believe has some value to it, you know? You see, you've always understood Zionism as being a restoration of these grand ideals of a world in which we are making a better world that protects everybody. But you see these images and you see these videos and you see these videos. you realize that nobody's being fucking protected by any of this. And at some point, you basically just have to have a reckoning where you either double or even

triple down on your existing ideology or you look at what's right in front of you and you say, fuck it, I was wrong this entire time. And I think a lot of people are doing that. And I think this is like the last statement I was going to make very quickly was just that. It was like there comes this point now where like people, the fantasies that I think were projected and people sort of held onto for a long time about like, oh, this is just a war. there are secret military bases under the hospitals in Gaza

actually 14 year olds can be terrorists as well like eventually that facade breaks down and then you have a choice as to either like to either double down on that and like the people who have doubled down on it people like Melanie Phillips but also like you can find them quite easily on like most social media platforms just very openly

doing like textbook genocide denial in a way that in the past like they were at least a bit more discreet about it or at least a bit more like oh you know we work within diplomatic institutions and therefore We're not like, you know, the Turks who like deny, deny, like, the Armenian genocide and stuff. Well, I was actually, I was just going to say that the, um, some of the Zionist commentary on this has really reminded me of that old joke was like, there's two types of Turkish guys.

Guys who'll say that, you know, the Armenian genocide never happened. And the people will say it never happened, but they deserved it. And that's what you feel like reading a lot of these kind of like Israeli flagged logo tweets on Twitter where it's like, it oscillates between there is no genocide, that's a mass propaganda. And like, well, we've got to kill them all, obviously. Otherwise, how will we ever be safe? And the thing, what I want to go back to, right, is it's not even the diehards who will never change. Rather, it's the liberals who believed in this all the time and then chicken the fuck out, right?

If you're David Shore, you're Madagliacius, you're news night, you're the news agents, you're the economist podcast. You're the new statesman podcast, right? This is what you've been advocating for the whole time. And, I mean, even like, Mattie Glacius, because he's a very stupid man, is sort of trying to square this circle as opposed to just doing what the rest of them are doing and trying to hope that no one notices. that they're switched, that they're only coming out against this now. And for years and years and years, they were saying that it was so necessary. But these are also the thing, the ideology that these people do have and they do still believe in is the supremacy, morality, and necessity of the rules-based international order. And I think that what's happening is that they are seeing Israel break every single one of those rules.

And that gives them sort of the leeway within their own minds to be like, well, they broke the rules. And that's their issue with it, as opposed to the underlying. just fucking immorality. And what I talk about someone like Maddie Glacis being especially stupid, it's that he's framed this explicitly, but I think people like James O'Brien take this framing implicitly.

They're just not dumb enough to say it out loud, which is, oh, everyone up until now was crying wolf. It's like, no, you're not crying wolf if you're saying this is happening. You're just wrong. You're just wrong. And you have defended what is, I believe history will look on as perhaps

them, or I hope anyway, as perhaps the most indefensible thing you could have done, the most indefensible position to have held. I genuinely hope that people like David Lamy and James O'Brien and Kierstarmor and the rest, fucking Maddie Glacius, on both sides of the Atlantic, David Shore.

All you, you're like, oh. The Nelk, boys, I'm looking at you. I want to see you in fucking, like, Nuremberg too, with Kier-Starmer together. I don't even know, I just think that'd be very funny as an image. I'm here with the mom's basement, guys. We're going to add, We're going to add a charge of infringing on the rights of goons to Keir Stomers' rash.

But, like, seriously, it must be that they are never allowed to forget that what they have supported is the worst atrocity of the 21st century. Well, that guy who has such bad eyesight, he can only see a wolf when it's three feet away. I think the people saying they saw a wolf five minutes ago were lying, actually. And I think it only just appeared right now three feet away from my face. I think it was unproductive to have said that the wolf is coming. That's true, because at the end of the day, the wolf is here, you know? And it looks pretty aggressive.

I mean, also, I want to sort of revise something I said earlier when it's too late to stop it. It's not too late to stop it. Right. You could stop it by just disarming Israel allowing food aid in. There you go. You stop it. That stops it. Even right now, if Donald Trump tomorrow were to go up there and say, we are effective immediately rescinding all aid to Israel until they stop, they would fucking stop.

He's not going to do that, obviously. But that's what makes this so uniquely frustrating as well, is that. this how obvious it is that like we know why this is happening. We know it's proximate causes. We know the people who are funding this. We know that the United States will never back down. And we also know that it actually wouldn't even

fucking matter if Kamala Harris were president right now. She'd be doing the exact same goddamn thing, but also feeling really bad about it. Yeah, she'd be shaking ahead a lot more. Yeah. And it's like ultimately, this is the moment where all the nice liberals who said, oh, well, it's

complicated. Everyone who ever said, Oh, it's complicated. Look, I'm a nice liberal. I don't want anyone to get hurt, but like it's got his right to defend itself. Every, it said, oh, well, maybe there. Myself, I think you'll find out there. Anyone was like, oh, but what? There might have been a command sender to that hospital.

I saw a video. It's like the every single, if you indulged in any of that for one minute, this is what you wanted. This is what you wanted what's happening now. I also, I also like want to add because there was like someone else, one of the, one of the pod Tom's, the Pod Save America guys, who was like. Pod Johns. Pod John's.

Sorry. Sorry. My mistake. This was a Tom from the Johns. What the fuck? Yeah. I was just like, I'm not going insane. Anyway, yeah.

Like, one of those guys who was just like, yeah, like, people made mistakes, but actually it's a really big mistake to like get mad at them when they sort of want to admit it because we need like a big tent if we're going to like win the next election. What I don't care about the election stuff. I don't want to share a fucking tent with you. My, my, my point is more just like, what we're talking about is genocide denial, right? We're not talking about like fucking policy changes. We're not talking about like someone who was maybe pro austerity. And this is not to say that like austerity, like supporting austerity was fine. But I think in terms of just like relative scales and just like be obviousness of what was happening.

It's just like, yeah, what we're talking about is genocide denial. And look, like if you're like seeking forgiveness, if you're seeking redemption for like supporting this and like you recognize that actually that was a mistake or you've been conned or whatever like cool, that's fine. But like, you know, ultimately like, you know, if you want to seek redemption, like that's between like you and your. God, right? Yeah, exactly. Don't expect a special fucking dispensation just because you feel bad about it. And there's this feeling that like, oh, these people like are owed forgiveness. And I think the biggest mistake here is just to sort of be like, no, you guys are owed nothing. You guys are owed less for nothing. They're not the ones whose feelings fucking matter right now. That's the other thing. Right. You want to talk about like where the attention ought to be. It's not on, you know,

this, somebody who fucking lives comfortably out and fucking patchhog who is now realized that. the error of his ways, he can live with that guilt. The people who matter are the actual hundreds of people every single fucking day who are getting gunned down while waiting for rice. Oh, damn. Look, it's just now important to never forgive or forget anyone who allowed an inch on any of this. And I think also a lot of it is that these people aren't really seeking forgiveness. Like, they're not, they're not apologizing for having gotten it wrong.

They're just saying up and they're being like, oh, no, I've decided it's happening now. Hi, guys. Yeah, and you're not allowed to get mad at me. This is everything too. In fact, in fact, you should praise me for coming around on it. Because I'm like a centrist liberal with a liberal position, which is obviously a majority of this country. And therefore, if you get mad at me, you're actually getting mad at everyone else.

And so you're the bad person, not me. And I mean, it's astonishing to me, right? That sort of on the subject of the new Corbyn party, which by the way, I now see has like 400,000 people signing up. It's polling well, I think they're going to get it together. It'll be fine. The no name party. I'm all doing.

I don't care. I'm staying where I am, but I think they're going to do well, and I'm supporting, obviously supporting them. If I was like the Green Party right now, I'd be offering every new member, like a free Laboubu.

Yeah. Yeah. A recycled Labubu. No, it has to be a new one and it has to include the rare variants. But also, it's like, and what is have I got news for you doing, right?

They're saying, oh, Jeremy Corbyn who launched a new political party, although he is yet to name it, as presumably Friends of Hamas was already taken. Taken by who? Yeah. Who's launched that party? I want to go.

Hang on. We've not joined. What's going on? Yeah. And it's like, I mean, I say, have I got news for you? Perhaps the most relevant political comedy show that Britain has ever produced. But it's like just the sort of the wretchedness of spirit to have to remain contemptuous of the one person who's been right the whole time. Yeah.

And it's just such a bad joke. Well, yeah. What everyone here has in common is that they're all hurt animals. You know, none of them have actually had a moral awakening. None of them have decided that they are more human. and none of them have decided that all of a sudden, oh, right, I recognize the dignity and sort of the worth of the life of my fellow humans. None of them have done that.

They're just hurt animals who are terrified more than anything of being the odd one out or the one holding the metaphorical bag. Look, we were going to do more segments, but this one ran long. So I'm going to move on to our main one. We're going to talk about the Epstein birthday book probably, maybe even at the live show when no, that's a good idea. Yeah, yeah. I'll be there, by the way.

So, you know, not on stage. We actually have an opening for the fifth spot If you want to double Josh, yeah I'll fucking do it You want to double Josh? You want to put me on stage? Yeah, it's double Josh. All right, put me on stage.

Anyway, if you're out there listening and you would like to sign Epstein's birthday, but please come along at the live show and we're going to be presenting that to Epstein's family later on in the week. All right. Well, the thing what we were talking about, Josh, because, you get, worst of all possible worlds

is basically a media studies podcast with its sideline and arguing about musicals. That's right. And evangelical Christians. Yeah. Oh, yeah, those guys. I wanted to talk a little bit about what's happening in the American media ecosystem because what it, what I've noticed about Trump, the Trump two term is like the Trump one term was like

one of elite reorganization. And then Trump two is elite consolidation around, okay, this is the program. Everybody get on board with it. Yeah. Yeah. And basically finding ways to capture existing media institutions and then retool them to the ends of the project. So do you just want me to talk a little bit about like what's been going on with Paramount and CBS. And then we'll finish on the article about the Palantir production studio. Hell yeah. So just to sort of orient you to the basics of what's going on, you may well have heard a little bit about the controversy because it's touching a lot of different things.

You might have heard about how like South Park put out an episode recently that got Trump really, really mad. Or that Stephen Colbert's late show got canceled and, you know, that he's now been bringing on. I can't believe that Colbert, that his tears did. not shield him. No, I mean,

now he's really resisting really, really hard. He brought Lin-Manuel Miranda on the show to do a rap or something. But, uh, oh, God.

I know. If they got Linwell-Mirranda to do cats, maybe he'd get through. Wait, are you being serious? Oh, no,

I'm dead fucking serious. No. Oh my God. I thought you were just fucking around. No, that's in it. Oh, wow.

He did the rap from break stuff. It was very moving. So, just to sort of outline what's been going on, this situation, that's going on right now is sort of the synthesis of a lot of different things that have been going on that could have gone differently if Trump did not win re-election. But guess what? He did.

And now we're here. So in July 2024, Paramount, which is the corporation that among other things owns the movie studio of the same name, as well as CBS, the Broadcasting Network, and in a number of other networks as well, including Comedy Central, they announced that they would be pursuing a merger with Skydance Entertainment. And SkyDance is the movie studio that David Ellison runs, Larry's son, you know, the Oracle guy, his son. The 80-year-old who's also going for immortality. Exactly. He was deeply, deeply implicated in the Trump administration and whose Stargate project seems to be hitting a bit of a snack. Yeah. And Larry Ellison actually has two kids who both run studios. The other one is Megan, who runs Anna Perna. And these two studios are sort of like,

other's yin and yang. Anapurna is a lot of like really indie focused stuff. Uh, they go for critical acclaim. Whereas Skydance is blockbusters, right? So, uh, the new top gun movies, the new Mission Impossible movies, the new Jack Ryan movies and the new Jack Reacher movies, both Jack ours. All of that is Skydance. And, uh, you know, Paramount has been serving as distributor for these films and they thought it would be really nice synthesis to just kind of take Skydance and bring it in house. because that'll make them more money. Basically to like,

there will never be Sicario one again. Taylor Sheridan will always have the complete creative control that led to what I'm sure we can all agree is the better of the two Sicario movie. I don't know. I'll take your word for it.

It's a waste of time to start with the first one in the series when you can go straight to number two. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't know you hadn't seen them. No, no, no, no. I've spoken about this on the podcast. They're basically, they're two movies,

but they're completely different despite being one and two in the same series. I'll retire to the trash future lounge and pull those up on the big TV. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, so that was July, right? And the thing about any merger, of course, is that the United States government has to approve it.

So in this case, for media stuff, it's the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission. They're the ones who govern the lay of the land regarding media in the U.S. It's sort of like, I guess, off-com, right? And they initially, they didn't really seem to be, like, tipping their hand one way or the other, because obviously in July 2024,

Joe Biden was still president. In October of 2024, there was an interview with Kamala Harris on 60 Minutes, which is the weekly news program on CBS, right? It's an hour, hence the title. And they generally will talk about like the big news of the week. And they interviewed Kamala Harris and Donald Trump alleged that it was edited misleadingly in Kamala Harris's favor. He basically was arguing that like they left her looking like a dipshit on the cutting room floor. And the requested damages in that lawsuit, 10. billion dollars with a B. Uh-huh. Yeah, that makes sense so far, is that you, you, you, you didn't include any of the bits of Kamala Harris, like crushing up and snorting Zanz and the American people deserve to know. Right. And that's what happened, obviously, during the Cupboard show that interview. They later, by the way, doubled their request for damages to $20 billion because fuck it, why not? Well, yeah, because that's the thing. Why not? You're just playing fucking Calvin ball.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, double down. Now, this was initially seen as just like fucking laughable, right? Like, what are you talking about? $20 billion? Like, that's not real money. And initially, it looked like CBS was going to, like, fight, pursue, win because they had a very strong case on their hands. This is a nuisance lawsuit, right? But after Trump became president, things changed. And in April of this year, Bill Owens, who was a longtime executive producer on 60 Minutes, he basically saw where things were headed, you know, and he resigned. And that was sort of the big thing. When that moment happened, everybody was like, oh, fuck, Paramount's going to settle because they want to clear this deal. And that's exactly what happened. On July 2, so just a few weeks ago, they settled for $16 million

with Trump. And it's kind of noteworthy that this is exactly $1 million more than a $15 million settlement that Trump did with ABC because George Stephanopoulos misspoke on this week and said that Trump was found liable for rape when in fact he was found liable for sexual abuse. So that's, where we've gotten to. And additionally, Trump has claimed that CBS is going to air another $20 million worth of pro-Trump PSAs. We'll see if that happens or not. But given his tendency toward just like saying some shit and it happening, I wouldn't bet against the guy. You know, they're going to read the musical cast in his entirety. And the understanding, I think, that among every elite, that this is now just where things are going. And like with, like with the political elites on,

on Gaza, it's you just don't want to be the odd one out. You are a herd animal. Exactly. And this is a naked quid pro quo, right? Because, again, July 2 was when the settlement happens. And then the actual merger got approved on July 24. 22 days later, you know, check was in the mail. It cleared.

We're all good. Now, for $20 billion. Yeah. No, only for $16. That's the thing that it's only $16 million. It's not even that much money. Like the whole, but it's enough to show. that they're willing to do what he wants them to do.

That's the fucking point of it all. And, you know, I mean, look, I hate to state the obvious, but if you are either a sort of private or semi-private organization, like a sort of business or a university, as is, and you begin just essentially colluding with a revolutionary right-wing program, they just, they give up after a while, right? It's not like they keep, it's not like they will just keep doing that now. They just chill out and they let you get away with the,

They're like, oh, okay, you helped. That's enough. No, of course fucking not, right? Like, once you start doing this, it's just going to keep happening. One other thing that's worth noting is that as part of the merger, David Ellison promised the FCC, and there's a memo. This is on paper, that they are going to appoint an ombudsman at CBS to, and I am quoting here from the memo, ensure that the company's array of news and entertainment programming

embodies a diversity of viewpoints across the political and ideological spectrum, which means, of course, they're going to do whatever Trump wants them to do. You know what it means. Literally what it means is you're welcome to having the, at best, the BBC, basically. Yes. Where every government, whether sort of a putatively liberal one or a revolutionary conservative one, always puts a partisan conservative in charge of it. And up until the Reagan administration in the United States, there was something called

the equal time rule, which required that much like the BBC, you present opposing viewpoints on everything, that's gone now. So there is no actual requirement at this point to put forth any sort of a counterpoint to the robust Trumpism that we are almost certainly going to see from the Columbia broadcasting system in the coming years. It's a rule of power, right? It is the naked rule of power. It is, and it's, to me, it's like the, I've been thinking about the 1920s and 70s in Italy quite a bit for obvious reasons. The birth of like mass politics defined by mass political violence in a sort of, you know, in the modern world is Italy in the 1920s.

And then Italy sort of in and after the 1970s is the birth of Berlusconiism, right? That is just the I am the man. I is one man, one vote. I'm the man. I have the vote. So, you know, everybody please line up to appease me. And it's like it seems like the United States is almost running backwards through this process of going back through Berlusconi towards the

through the years of lead poisoning. Yeah. To the Italy and the late 19thens. A more more Mussolini like thing. Yeah. And I mean, I've got a really remarkable quote here too. This is from Brendan Carr, who is the chairperson of the FCC. And he says, this is why he approved

the merger. This is a quote from him on why he approved it. The new owners of CBS came in and said, it's time for a change. We're going to reorient it towards getting rid of bias. At the end of the day, that's what made the difference for us. I want to go, I want to move on, though. We're talking about existing institutions that are panicking and changing to comply in advance or after threats, as the case may be. But also, like, there is now a profitable industry in essentially, like, just making different versions of the triumph of the will, basically, but for

burger people. Yeah, I mean, these guys are skating to where the puck is going to be, right? Because already it's become very clear that a big piece of what the Trump or, uh, Trump, I almost said Trump organization, but that's the thing is that the Trump organization of the Trump White House are inseparable from each other at this point. They're the same thing.

It's more like a Zaybatsu in some ways. Like, with the fucking tariffs, right? I mean, we just, I guess, now we're going to have 15% tariffs on everything coming in from Europe. We're effectively tripling import duties. Awesome. Love that. The press keeps framing it as a deal. It wasn't

a deal. It was a fucking shakedown. I want to talk about this article that we were talking about. Yeah. Right. This article about Founders Films. Founders Films aims to remake Hollywood with Patriotism, Palantir, and Ein Rand. Absolutely. I had to add

the P in there because they, surely you could have, you could have had a third P. Well, the P is silent. Yeah. Ein Rand. So it says, as conservative backlash sweeps across U.S. media, some are reaching for the ultimate prize, Hollywood. And they've been doing this for decades. decades and decades and decades.

And there is just this moment where now they've got it, right? I mean, again, you've been tracking this for a very long time. You're talking about this as a sort of economic and cultural political phenomenon. And generally speaking, there's been like a parallel industry as epitomized by say like the Daily Wire and

stuff like that. But they've never had control of the real thing. And that's why Skydance is such a fucking jewel in their crown, right? Is that they're now going to have, I mean, not like total control, but all, largely, effective control of the blockbuster studio. And it says, now a set of prominent figures close to the software firm Palantir are pitching a new project to shake up streaming TV and film with a portfolio range from feature films about daring Israeli military operations.

Yes. I bet that's going to be pretty fucking popular. Jesus Christ. Yeah. One of them is about the pager thing. Yeah. Daring Israeli and American military operations to a three-part Ein Rand trilogy. Oh, God.

Is it Atlas shrugged again? We don't know yet. We're going to see. Yeah. It's just sort of a daring combination of iron rounds and the Navy SEALs somehow. We knew what it was? It was like, that's why that second helicopter crashed when they were going to go to bin Laden is that they could auctioned off the fuel to a, it was more efficient to the market.

Oh, yeah. Is it going to be like contemporary? Is it John Golt? Like having to deal with like a bunch of like zoomers who are like just on their phones all the time. And whenever he's just like, buildings, buildings are so cool. And the Gen Z is just like sort of, I read something about like Vigensi stare, which is, I don't know ever it's a real thing,

but it's like this kind of, this sort of like very vacant stare that is confusing a lot of older generations. And I wonder if that's going to be like a big part of like whatever. What they're going to do is like, how close are they just to being like, yeah, we're going to do the running man for real.

You know, they say, we're going to say yes to projects about American exceptionalism, name America's enemies. Yes. Back artists unconditionally. No,

they're not. No, they're not. I guess there is a condition. Yeah. Right. That is the condition. There's one pretty big condition.

Yeah, and take risks a novel IP. So I'm very excited, yeah, to see, like, the Israel cinematic universe. Awesome. It's so funny to hear them just, like, not understanding that this is stuff that's used to take the piss out of them, like American exceptionalism. They're like, yeah, that's right. American exceptionalism, we are different to every other country that there's ever been. Yeah, well, this is, they say, the American brand is broken.

Hollywood is AWOL. Movies have become more ideological, more. more cautious and less entertaining. And again, it's like, yeah, that's true. But not for the reasons you think. Yeah, it's not like, it's not like movies have become more ideological and less entertaining because they're, I don't know, marginally more inclusive, even in the sense that very few of them are. Right.

Well, and also, I think that they would hold up as sort of the exemplar of a non-ideological film to be something like, say, Jack Ryan or Top Gun, which are in. insanely fucking jingoistic movies. My favorite non-ideological movie is the Sands of Iwo Jima. Yeah, I love that non-ideological movie. I will say top gun maverick whips shit though. I love that movie. It's fun.

Anyway, they say large segments of American and international viewers are underserved. And I think you could argue, those people are underserved largely because they have slowly been driven into antisocial madness by talk radio. Right? You have been, what has happened is not that you are under. serve because you have some kind of nebulous preference that arises from nowhere, right? You're underserved because you've been successfully convinced by a propaganda campaign that anything other than ice chewing, flag waving, gun-toting nationalism is something that you cannot

bear to even look at. Well, and also, it's not true to say that people, those people, those viewers are underserved. There is a massive industry for those dog shit movies. We talk about them on the podcast like every month. Yeah, of course. They say production costs of sword and sales are flagging. And it's like, again, could there be other reasons? Impossible to say.

So Shyam Sankar, the guy who started this, who came from Palantir, right? He, this is the article that's about this. The article isn't in support of this, right? This is quoting this is sort of skeptical treatment of it. In a post late last year in his substack, Shyam Sankar, the guy in charge, outlined his view for a return to the blockbusters of the 80s and 90s. Yeah, right. Like Red Dawn, Top Gun, Rocky Four, and the hundred.

for Red October. But that's what Skydance is doing. Like, that's the thing. This already is happening. He said the entertainment industry needs to be unafraid of offending Chinese audience and use American cultural power to spread skeptical views of the Chinese government, saying, breaking out of our cultural malaise will require studios to wake up and choose America. Absolutely. And again, like, is... When has Hollywood not been skeptical of the Chinese government? I mean, it's just the China's a gigantic foreign market. Yeah, yeah, but they mostly like, they edit the movies for Chinese release, right?

That's why so much stuff is CGI so that it can be changed easily when it gets released in China. Because you're not allowed, like, blot in Chinese movies. There's loads of random rules like that that are not even propaganda. They're just strange censorship things.

Yeah, and, you know, they say, we need to invoke the Renaissance in American film in the 1970s, when directors, including Stephen Spielberg brought back heroes, villains, and romance and rekindled the flame of the American cinematic universe. We've got to make Unwoke E.T.

Yeah. Finally. I'm going to make E.T. where he just gets immediately sent to El Salvador. Basically, it's like saying, what they're really saying is, you must sign up for full-throated, kitschy jingoism, right?

Which is, your hero should be called Slab Rip Chest, and he should be doing nothing but, like, easily triumphing over America's enemies. I mean, to me, it seems like what they're proposing is a kind of haze code,

but for gun-toting of all-American heroism. That's the thing. It's like, all of this sounds like, it doesn't just sound, like, bad and corny, and trite, it also just sounds like bad storytelling. There is no good storytelling without conflict. And if what you have is this all-powerful protagonist

that can easily defeat anything it comes up against, you don't have a fucking story. Well, their slate includes films like 102 minutes, a feature of film about the evacuation of the World Trade Center. The tagline reads, Courage is contagious. The company also is creating a three-part adaptation of Atlas Shrug, so it's Atlas Shrugged.

Ah, yes. And a film about the assassination of Kossum Soleimani. You know that thing everyone remembers. And they're just, I just wish I could have been a fly on the wall when Donald Trump was just like, I kill that guy. Yeah. What's strange is that courage is contagious is also the tagline of the movie I'm making about the 19-9-11 hijackers. The deck also pitches Operation Pineapple Express,

not to be confused with the 2000s stoner comedy. A movie about the quote botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. So again, it's like, we're going to have a movie. But Seth Rogen is in it. Seth Rogen plays a Joe Biden, who was too high and senile to care about the brave men and women of the armed forces. How the fuck did we end up at Carmel Airport, dude?

What happened? What happened to that movie where, what's his name? Lawrence Fox was supposed to play the Biden's son, Hunter Biden. Oh, that came out. Did that come out? Okay, because Hunter Biden has too much source

to be played by Lawrence Fox. Well, that's right, because I was sort of thinking that obviously, like, Josh has made the point that these guys don't know how to tell the story and they don't know, like, what stories are because, like,

they're losers. And, like, they're very much, you know about anecdote about Trump and how, like, he gets his son, to fast forward through Bloodsport because he just wants to watch the fight scenes. That reminds me of like

kind of what all these films are going to be. Like they're all these like, they want to advertise the big moments, right? They want to advertise all like the guns and the killing and all that type of stuff. That makes for a great trailer. And you see like with a lot of these AI guys who are like,

who are sort of doing these like horrible reinterpretations of like Ghibli films. Like they'll sort of really emphasize like the kind of bits, the references that they like remember. And the sort of impression they want to give is like, oh look, it's like, you know, we can produce this really cool things.

It's like, no, you kind of just did a trailer using like stuff that already existed and you sort of made it 3D and a bit weird. I feel like from the, from the Hunter Biden movie, I feel like that the trailer, I saw the whole movie from the trailer itself. It was Bright Bart, by the way, that distributed that one. That came out in 2022. Yeah. Well, I think, I think it is very much like, okay, you want, you, like, these guys want to make trailers and they want to make trailers, which are like distillations of the sort of like anxieties and things. fears and frustrations. They sort of like often espouse on Twitter and on their substacks and everything. But the idea of like making a film, there's a reason why like this is sort of never

worked. Like even when the Daily Wire was trying to do originals and they produced that one film which was like passable by film stand in the sense of like it operated fine as a story. It wasn't a particularly good film. But it was like it was supposed to be one that was like actually the Second Amendment's really good and like, you know, having kid people who are trained with guns. Like it was like a, it was like a film that really was just like, oh yeah, the good guy was. if a gun is better than a bad guy if a gun and also the good guy if a gun is like this kickass woman, which was certainly like not

particularly appealing to many of the Daily Wire subscribers based on like the comments I had read. But the point being about like because Ben Shapiro had at least gone to film school or at least he tried to write screenplays. Like he sort of knew how it worked, right? Even if he was as very bad at doing it.

Like these guys... Okay. Let's just say hypothetically you got your hero's journey. These guys don't know how it works. And so I imagine what's going to end up happening is that like they'll make a few things. It won't really work the way that they will. They'll run into the same problems as every movie studio, which is just like,

oh, it's expensive to make a film. Working with actors really sucks when, like, the actors want to be treated well. And, like, every actor still wants to be treated well. Even if they're, like, ideologically to the right, like, you know, ultimately, they're not being paid very much. And I don't know how long, like, I don't know whether you're going to be able to, like, sustain that.

But even if you're casting Mel Gibson and a lot of stuff. Yeah, well, I mean, like, whatever way, like, I don't know how, like, far they'll go down. But I don't imagine that this is going to sort of be a long, term endeavor by any means. Oh, so you don't, you don't think that when the towers fall, a film about Israel's 2024 booby-trap pager operation against Hezbollah is going to be a blockbuster success. Well, it depends. Will they be able to get Sidney Sweeney to like do something? Because like that's probably the only way it's going to work.

They're going to remake it and she's going to be in a big pager costume. Yeah, she's playing the pager. She's going to be the leader of Hezbollah. Or a most other movie called Roaring Lion, a movie about the recent attack against Iran, which depicts Israel as, quote, striving for nuclear non-proliferation and exercising its right to self-defense. Oh, yeah.

Israel really wants nuclear nine. Yeah. It's like, you know, these are, again, there's a few things, right? These aren't movies. These are posts. Right. These are, these are,

and this is just, the desire is, I wish to be flattered. I wish to be reassured and flattered. And, you know, I think there is, there definitely also was an era of like, kind of more liberal monoculture, also wanting to be reassured and flattered.

There hasn't been a lot of, let's say, risk-taking in the big film industry, but the problem is, what you're trying to reassure and flatter is revolutionary fascism. Yeah. Right. That's, yeah, it is equally shallow, but we could argue much worse. And, you know, just like, ultimately, the dream, I think, of people like founders' films or the people and the sort of other main American media companies that are surrendering constantly and sort of like eagerly signing up to this.

It's the same as any fascist dream, which is the dream is to exercise power, to force out people you consider to be both terrifying and weak at the same time, to terrorize them and ultimately kill them, right? It's the dream isn't that audiences are going to flock to Israel as a lion, the movie or whatever. The dream is that you're not really going to have any other options for movies.

Right. And that the dream is that if you don't see, if like, I don't know, you're a tween and you don't see this movie, then you're going to be mocked and degraded by your peers. The idea, at every step of the way, all of this like, oh, there's a market that's being underserved. It's such a thin veneer over what is ultimately always revealed at base to be a desire to dominate and humiliate.

Yeah, we're doing the child for the will, but it's going to be a musical. Okay, it's going to be fabulous. They're not upset that the market is underserved. They're upset that products that attempt to serve this market don't meet with the market response that they believe that they deserve. serve. Anyway, look, we're also reaching the end of the time. I promise

Epstein Blackbook episode on Thursday in Edinburgh. We're going to do it live. We're going to do Epstein Blackbook episode live. We're going to read the blackbook live. We're going to read the very wealthy Peterfile. I'm the only other person in the world, a copy of the Black Book. I'm sorry, I

forgot to release it. I was really busy. Yeah, Riley's using it to do telemarketing. Yeah, the Wall Street Journal has the other copy. They released it. My copy, I forgot. Got it. I'm sorry. That's on me. I had it for like four or five years and I kept procrastinating, releasing it. I'm sorry. That's a mood. We can auction off the copy with Riley's marginalia. Right. I was going to like give it to the news, but I felt like an imposter and so I've kept

it in my basement ever since. Anyway, anyway, look, so we'll see some of you in Edinburgh in a couple days. 31st of July. Still a few tickets left, I believe. Just a couple. Yeah. And also my Edinburgh show, today first of July to 4th of August, still some tickets remaining, but selling quite fast. and Newcastle Wednesday 30th. Come to that. That one's really close to sold out. Lovely. All right.

Do those. And can I also just point out, come to my Edinburgh show too, actually. Yeah, of course. That's why I'm going to be up there. I am directing a show. It's called The Boy from Bontai. It's written and performed by an absolutely brilliant friend of mine named Jeremy

Raffa. He's an incredible pianist. And the show is just about his journey as a musician and an artist. And our first performance, is going to be on August 1st. So it's going to be the day after the Trash Future show. If you're already up, get a ticket. And also listen to the worst of all possible worlds

where we talk about media and ill-conceived where we talk about natalism. Two fun podcasts that I do. Those are my plugs. Yeah. All right. Okay. Time for dinner, I think, Josh.

Let's do it. Bye, everyone. Bye.