TRASHFUTURE - Wrong Heads of State: Hats, Youtube, Russians (ft. Jack Frayne-Reid)

Episode Date: November 18, 2017

It's a TRASHFUTURE/Reel Politik mash up bonus weekend episode, as Jack Frayne-Reid (@coplandresident) calls up Riley (@raaleh), Hussein (@HKesvani) on Skype to chat bollocks about music, discuss the implications of James Bridle's great Medium post on Youtube Kids weirdness, and intelligence analyst Eric Garland's disturbing new revelations about Russia in the context of the recent wave of crime and corruption in elite circles. An incredibly hung over Milo Edwards (@milo_edwards) hops on the call later on and stays as long as he can hold his head upright. Reel Politik (@reel_politcast) is a great podcast we all listen to regularly here on the TRASHFUTURE, and if you're not listening then you're a goofy. While you're at it, follow us on twitter (@trashfuturepod). We recorded this episode entirely on Skype, and something is a little tinny with Riley's audio (soz!) James Bridle's post is here, and worth a read if you haven't already: https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2

Let's jam. Let's go. Which I don't know if you knew this, but is actually one of the opening lines from Cowboy Bebop. An anime. Yes, an anime. I know all about that. It's the group of stuff like Afrosamurai and Hentai and all the...

Afrosamurai Hentai. Afrosamurai Hentai is my favourite pornhub channel. What do you get when you like sign up for the premium? Every single episode of this show, I seem to refer somehow to pornhub. We're trying to get that sponsorship money, so... I mean, that's all I really want at this point, is to be sponsored by anyone who will take pornhub, especially if they'll reduce the price of pornhub premium for me. Somebody who is good at the economy, please help me budget.

My family is dying. What about that? What's his name? He was economy minister under Francois Hollande. He's like a golden god. Oh, right. Is he ever... Yeah, I was going to say, has he compared himself to a celestial body or a Roman god?

Well, he's certainly... Yeah, I was going to make a joke about Macron having a hot board, but I couldn't think of it. Anyway, as I previously stated, I think he both looks and is in every other conceivable way. Like a fucking nerd who needs to get wedged to death. But please, French security services, don't take that as a threat. It's not so much... I mean, maybe it could actually really help French labour unions. If Macron gets wedged so hard that his eyes cross somehow.

On the subject of unusual, on our podcast, weird devotion to... Or my personal weird devotion to really niche kinds of pornography, I was remembering a tweet I received the other day from someone called adult human person. I was in a bit of a Twitter spat with alongside Hussain. And eventually he said to me after I kept, you know, repeatedly making fun of him, Dude, I'm done with you. Of all the beta commies, you're... And here's where it gets weird.

Pale skinned comments were by far the least attractive and most boring. Which suggests to me that like... And also my tweets were good. Yeah. If he's like, if he's ranking all of us. Yeah, I'm the beta commies. Like, could you not have made your tweets that little bit blacker to appease the kind of person who just chucks around the word beta?

Like, you know, because we all know what they really like is people of colour. Of course. They're huge fans. They love things that aren't arguments. They love things that aren't arguments. And they also love POC. But what I found interesting is that it sort of deeply implies that like, my comments were the most pale skinned and least attractive as though he's standing over his phone

just angrily doing tribute porn on people owning him on Twitter. What porn? Have you not heard of this? Oh, it's the... Again, this is very... This has been mentioned in our show before because it's one of my favourite phenomena. But there's this new genre of like pornography that's happened. That's like, no one watches.

It's more of the people making it kind of like burlesque. And what someone will do is they'll bring up an image of a... Like a female porn star or male porn star on their iPhone. And then using another second iPhone. They will record themselves jacking off onto their iPhone. Oh, right. Okay. I've never heard of this.

No, that's... I mean, it's kind of like jacking off onto phone section. Like there's multiple layers of phone. Perhaps just one layer of backing. People view it on a phone. It's all very... It's all very, very strange. Very better.

It's extraordinarily meta and it's very much in keeping, I think, with the theme of our show. Do you guys want to know a fun fact that was tweeted in the early hours of this morning by good Twitter person Dogo? Oh, yeah. I'd love to know a fun fact. So he says, the phrase jacking off is to mean masturbating is derived from Twitter's famous and wealthy CEO, Jack Dorsey. Is that whenever he gets like a Jewish person or a woman of colour suspended

than Jack is? That's where the term comes from, his spontaneous reaction to that. Whenever a Nazi gets a blue tick, that's when the jacking begins. Yeah, he has his like, you know, see-through whiteboard where, you know, he'll note down every time he's jacked off today. And Silicon Valley, a collective moan of pleasure could be heard as soon as Jason Kessler got his tick. Is he the wanker who organised the big Nazi rally where that woman got killed? Yep.

Ah, that's him. No, my stuff. We know that thug is real. Twitter brand ambassador. What a lovely and regular website, twitter.com is. Love to start my morning right with a big cup of coffee and a browse through twitter.com. I mean, that's me, right? You just wake up and you think to yourself, you know, who's been outed today as a pedophile

or who has found themselves in a race war? The race war, surely, you know, it never begins and never ends. It's a perpetual age-old conflict. Am I right? Am I right? No, of course it is. I don't know. Hey, we've been blathering for a few minutes.

We maybe tell people who we are and what we're doing. If only I knew who I am. If I could only remember my name to quote David Crosby. Well, I'm going to have a go anyway. This is Trash Future, the podcast about how the future is trash. And who am I joined by? Do you want to be a co-host? Oh, yeah.

So as we quote-on-quote co-host, my name is Hussain Kezvani. You can follow me on H. Kezvani on Twitter. Was co-hosts is that bad? Well, you know, I don't really know to be honest. I don't know if it's good or bad. I know that at some point this podcast is probably going to like destroy my career, but I'm just not sure how. So, yeah, at the moment it's good,

but when I get like a Daily Mail reporter knocking on my door, I'm just going to have to just, you know, say, but no, I wasn't involved with anything in regards to real politics. Oh, that would never happen. Daily Mail reporters knocking at your door just for a little podcast. Now, come on, come on. I don't know who Riley Quinn is. You know, I'm a respectable blue-ticked Twitter personality.

You can see my many Trump replies. Sir, have you no decency? Have you no honor? And Hussain and I have the distinctive dangerous pleasure today of being joined by Jack Brain Reid from RealPolitik, hip-hop, air horn. Pop-wow! Are we a hip-hop air horn?

Is that a descriptor for show or is that a sound effect? Well, actually, no, the collective mass noun for a group of male leftist podcasters actually is a hip-hop air horn of male leftist podcasters. Well, I mean, we reviewed Jay-Z's arsed album on the show, so sounds accurate to me. Did you guys invest in a title subscription? Fuck no.

Absolutely not. I mean, actually, because it's got all the Prince back catalog on there, hasn't it? And that's like nowhere else because Prince has got, you know, his record label. They take fucking YouTube videos of him down because he really didn't want our generation to hear any of his music. He's like Martin Chacrally, who I also think while in prison is going to launch some sort of music streaming service, which will just be his Wu-Tang album and B-sides of defunct emo bands.

Oh, good. I mean, the thing about that Martin Chacrally Wu-Tang album is it's Wu-Tang album from like the 2010s not produced by RZA, like produced by some random guy called Silver Rings, who a lot of members of the Wu-Tang clan seem to think is a bit of a knobhead. And like, when was their last great studio album? Like, would you really pay like a million dollars for that? You know, basically what I'm saying is I think when that album comes out,

people will be disappointed. Oh, yeah, of course. But no one will admit to being disappointed because they all have put so much into it, put so much of themselves into it. They can't admit that it was a disappointment because it would be too psychically scarring. I have a story about being disappointed by the Wu-Tang clan. Okay. That before we get into the meat and potatoes of this pod,

I would like to relate. I'm down for this. Oh, yeah. So when I was a mere stripling, I went to Rock the Bells Festival in New York City. And they had an incredible lineup. Clips, Lauren Hale, KRS-1, incredible Wu-Tang headlining, which was going to own. Yeah. And so I very excitedly and very underage drinking at Lee.

I got myself down from Toronto to New York and sort of spent the entire day sort of excited to see Wu-Tang excited to see Wu-Tang. And I was disappointed in two ways because it was supposed to be that Ghostface Killer was going to come on first and do some solo stuff. And then Wu-Tang was going to come on. So Ghostface Killer comes on, grabs a microphone and said, Rock the Bells, are you ready, et cetera, et cetera. And then behind him, a large screen comes down.

Okay, interesting. It's going to be an audio visual component to this show. And then it turns on text Metro PCS, like 6969-420 or whatever, and a shout out from Ghostface Killer. What? So for 45 minutes, I shit you not. It was Ghostface Killer sort of pacing around the stage, just reading shout outs courtesy of Metro PCS.

Fuck sake. I mean, he's easily got the best solo body of work out of all the Wu-Tang. Like, he's actually got the stuff. He was doing a solo set. He's got the material to do a really good one. I mean, he's definitely got like 45 minutes worth of great solo material. So I would be gutted if I was in your position. Yeah.

I mean, did you say there was a second bit that was disappointing? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what they actually did come on. Yeah. You sort of realize that this isn't the 1990s anymore. These aren't young men and this isn't a studio.

So it was essentially like just a bunch of senior citizens and then ODB's kid in character as ODB. There's like always so many of them on stage and they all just like yell. Yeah, they shout over each other. Yeah. In the studio, these are so incredibly nuanced rappers at the best of times. But on stage, it does just become like a yelling contest. And generally, like not all of them are there and stuff.

Like Kappa Donna's off driving cabs or whatever. And presumably people you might actually miss a bit more than Kappa Donna as well. But yeah. Yeah. So yeah, that was how I got owned by the Wu-Tang Clan at an early age. Well, you know, they ain't nothing to fuck with. And you shouldn't have fucked with them. No, I should have learned my lesson in reality.

Yeah. Yeah. So I got some hashtag content that we can be getting into if everyone's good with that. Hell yeah. Love content. Oh, yeah. Well, fuck. Yeah.

Trash Future is now joined by me. My name is a husk of a man who is going to be bringing a full bear of his ridiculously hungover self into the rest of our episode today. I, for one, am looking forward to hearing his like dozy, half-formed bits. In Moscow is currently 6.32 p.m. I got up around 45 minutes ago. It was already dark. It's going to be a difficult day.

Oh, yeah. I'm now taking my third pill of the last five minutes. Oh, good. It's going to be delicious. So, lads, what about the future? Not a fan. I don't know. What do you guys think?

Trash. Yeah. Garbage. It's okay sometimes. So one of the ways... I was hoping it was going to be better, but I fear that may not be the case. Well, if I can give you some bad news as to how it's gotten worse. I've got an article from Fast Company open in front of me where,

to celebrate 60 years of truck production in Brazil, Ford has decided to try to help the problem of truckers like getting sleepy while driving huge distances on demanding deadlines. I'll fuck I read about this. Anyone who doesn't know about what this is, have an idea of probably the most effective way to have truckers not become dangerously sleepy, driving huge distances and demanding deadlines.

Amphetamines. That would be better than what it actually is, genuinely. Racking up lines of ProPlus. Liquefied. Liquefied caffeine. Maybe in the form of a drink called cofefe. Well, that sounds like some middle class shit to me, to be honest. Doing a massive line of cofefe.

Actually, I knew a guy at Cambridge who was a lawyer who did get addicted to ProPlus during his finals, and he had to smuggle it into his exams because otherwise he would get the fucking shit. How did he smuggle it in? Well, in his ass, obviously. This is literally the most Cambridge part of all. He smuggled it in in his fucking signet ring.

God, I've said it before, I'll say it again. Britain's system for selecting its ruling class is incredibly stupid. I know. I think we should just have, like, Takeshi's castle. The ruling class is just entirely Japanese guys who are, like, covered in shit. No, okay. So, to celebrate 60 years of truck production in Brazil,

Ford has decided to help the problem of truckers falling asleep, not by, say, I don't know, helping there to be more truckers with fewer hours, with better workplace protections. No, their solution was to create a hat that tracks head movements and lights up when drivers are about to fall asleep. So, it's a hat that when you're about to fall asleep, shines a light in your eyes.

It's like the Gestapo in a hat form. They have ways of making you drive. I can imagine that causing a lot of crashes, to be honest, because if they're just kind of, they start nodding off, the truck starts swerving a little bit, and then this fucking huge light just shines right in their eyes, and they're just like, oh, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, and then they're dead.

Yeah, and then they and like an entire crowd of people are dead. In the trial run of the new hat this week, hundreds of people have died in road accidents in an epidemic of what's being called hat epilepsy. A new condition we've created ourselves. Rather than even gesturing protections for workers, we are going to cause a new, we're going to invent a hat that gives people epilepsy.

I mean, why else did the CIA invent AIDS, right? Very good. So, this is just one of my favorite things. It will literally blind you if you fall asleep at the wheel. It really feels like we're replacing one problem with another here at this point. There's more blind truck drivers. Equal opportunities.

Higher, more blind truck drivers. You can't, I mean, you can't screen anyone if you literally can't see them. So, you know, that's, that's, that's... This is, this is the future liberal voice. That's diversity souls, lads. So, we don't have many details on this. It's just in like a pilot mode in Brazil.

What are they? What? Fucking pilots have got it as well. Oh my God. It's like, this is like, that's the thing. Like, I think Al Qaeda realized that like hijacking individual planes was an idea that could scale. So, Al Qaeda invented a hat that would give pilots epilepsy.

Not just imagining bin Laden in a black t-shirt pacing back and forth on a stage, saying, there must be a better way. Al Qaeda Ted Talks. Here's something else that's been, that's been going on recently in the world of online, which I think we would be remiss if we didn't sort of touch on it. It's, it's an article that we and probably everyone

who listens to this has read, which is, something is wrong on the internet, which, I mean, today in another very obvious news that we've all known forever. But basically, there was this, there was this medium post that's gone sort of quite viral by this guy called James Bridal, where what he has done is he's looked into children's content on like YouTube kids, basically.

And he's found that it's just very, very, very weird. Skype just remixed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, just found, found, found, found, found. Became sort of like Riley Quinn's slam post. I mean, I said, it is my dream to be finally one day, like be like a sweaty guy on stage, saying like, you know, corporations in my mind. It's like, like your, your, your bleep bleep music.

Hell yeah. Whereas right now you're just a sweaty guy in your kitchen. Yeah, well, I'm actually in the dining room. But what, what did you find, find, find, find, find? Well, well, well, well, well. He said Ronald Reagan late. Basically, this, this article is about how someone or something or some combination of people, fuck you, Milo, and things

is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatize and abuse children automatically and at scale. And essentially. By giving them epilepsy. It's a strange hat that they wear when they're trying to drive a truck for some inexplicable reason. So to get into what this, this YouTube thing is, basically there is this whole economy,

this whole like underground sort of percolation of YouTube videos where it's basically like content that's made to distract babies. So babies are given iPads or iPhones and just sort of are hypnotized by like weird branded content. So one of his babies are famously so on the ball. People are like, how are we going to, how are we going to distract this baby? The guy's fucking switched on.

He's on the grid. He's like, he's, he's, he's reading fucking Atlas Shrugged. Oh God. It doesn't sound like a very clever baby to me. A libertarian baby who's like a rationalist. Oh my God. Is that a fedora or a flashing light in it? Oh, that would be great.

Actually, a version of a fedora that like, like shines a blinding flashing light into your eyes every time you walk up to a woman and ask if some guy's bothering her. Well, how about a copy of Atlas Shrugged that shines blinding light in the eyes of anyone who tries to read Atlas Shrugged and blinds, blinds them. They still find a way to be objectivist.

So a fedora that wakes you up when you're driving a truck by shouting the word actually. A phone for Donald Trump that automatically shouts sir when he tries to tweet. Okay. We are getting very off topic and I love it. But so the kids YouTube thing, right? Kids YouTube is markedly weird.

For example, people will post like hour long videos of them opening Kinder Surprise eggs and like taking out the little toy, playing with the toy for a couple of seconds and then do it again. And there'll be an hour of opening hundreds of eggs and then playing with little toys. Or like hours of like looping nursery rhymes

or hours of Milo blowing his nose. But with the wrong head. I want to make a video where I just open regular eggs. It's all the same. Just like cracking an endless quantity of eggs into a bowl. What's in here? Oh, it's more yolk. Who'd have thought it?

And this one. Oh, yolk again. Oh my God. Making an egg unboxing video to own the vegan. These chickens suffered for nothing. And so what you get is these, is these sort of long, weird videos that just sort of entertain children

with sort of repetitive and familiar tropes. But due to like sort of the algorithms that run YouTube kids. So long as you sort of have a long, basically a long video with like the right kinds of content in the tags. It will then get like sucked on to this platform. And so you'll end up with something called like

nursery rhyme, finger family, Peppa Pig, Disney Cars, Lightning McQueen, egg unboxing, fucking music video, whatever. And it will just be this weird disjointed thing. And so I mean, that's fair enough, right? But where it gets weird is,

is this sort of the knockoffs that get made? So have you guys actually watched any of these? Milo, I know you've seen a couple. Yeah, I watched about like 30 seconds of three of them. And just genuinely like, it's one of those things where like it's weird because like they're like superficially innocuous, but they're so fucking weird that like,

I genuinely would rather watch a video of like an actual beheading than like these videos of like characters with their like their heads constantly switching and then a child either like crying or cheering depending on whether the heads are on the right character. Yeah, and I'm aware that this is very hard to describe, right? So I'm, where like it's...

For internet losers like us, it's really difficult to describe. It's almost beyond our can where like there will be like a character from like Aladdin will come on the screen. Some heads will float by and then it'll try to match the heads onto the body of Aladdin. And then an unrelated character from a different property

will kind of drift onto the screen and it will be a weird like hyper realistic noise of a baby crying when the wrong head gets put on. And because these are all algorithmically generated videos, no one has ever really applied a, if you like a sort of common sense filter to these and so it gets sort of spun out further and further from reality until you'll get

like a video of Peppa Pig going to a dentist, but instead of like getting her teeth cleaned, like screaming and being like in pain and like getting fed bleach and stuff just because that's... I love the Peppa Pig out. You say they're algorithmically created so somebody doesn't like sit down and animate a video

in which Peppa Pig gets subjected to extreme dental torture, marathon man style. So it's a computer making these. Well, it's sort of, it's kind of both, right? Where an algorithm without any kind of human intent spits out what the popular tropes are and it sucks them down into the queue for YouTube kids, right? And so it freaks out someone somewhere

started watching a Peppa Pig video, then that got shared and it just randomly tripped up the algorithm enough that that became a huge thing. Tons of knockoffs started to be made and some of the videos are algorithmically generated. Others, especially the weirder ones, are made by like trolls who are actually using them to like traumatize

and frighten children and also make ad revenue. So this video of Peppa Pig, we actually, we don't know if it was made by trolls who are using like who are taking advantage of YouTube's algorithms to like push frightening content onto children and make ad revenue out of it or if it was just a weird video that was basically generated algorithmically

and is mostly watched and commented on by bots because all of these videos have millions of views. Yeah, I'm watching one of, one of them now, I'm just skipping through it and it doesn't seem that disturbing but there's like, there's a bunch of like cartoon characters driving around and like people standing at bus stops and there's someone standing in a prison cell

and a wheel just came off the guy's motorbike. Like, I don't know, maybe I'm at the less disturbing bit but it is weird, like it doesn't seem to have any plot. So I'm watching one at the moment and I'm at the super weird bit. So I'm going to describe it right now. So it started off as a Peppa Pig episode where they were all like having lunch or something

and I'm about three minutes down the line there was some scene where Osama bin Laden showed up temporarily and I haven't got the sound on because obviously I don't want to ruin the sound so then they're back on the plane and I've frozen the frame at a scene where Osama bin Laden, Peppa Pig, his dad one of the caliphs of the Ottoman Empire

and some fairly kind of racist depiction of an Arab man are all on a plane being flown by Tezande with an ISIS hat. It gets weirder, it gets weirder. Tezande has defected to ISIS. The plane is branded with a Bras's logo on the wing there's an Illuminati triangle and then on the top of the plane is Squidward

from SpongeBob with a machine gun. The shit I'm watching is boring as fuck like just some weird person of like a Spider-Man costume and a big baby head is like repeatedly throwing different colors of lollipop into a swimming pool and then they're multiplying lots of different lollipops emerging all over the swimming pool and then it cuts to the weird Spider-Man baby head person

just riding a one lollipop and now the Joker has just changed their face into a rainbow design. So yeah, I'll say Jack, your video sounds more like a sort of benign acid flashback whereas Hussain sounds more like a sort of you know when you're like you've got the flu really badly and you have like fever dreams.

Tezande, ISIS, Squidward. Yeah. Why would pigs join ISIS? It's not even consistent with Islamic theology. Tezande, maybe. Why would Osama bin Laden be on the same plane as the kale of Suleiman the Magnificent? With some devious designs I imagine.

For the last few minutes I've been watching a live-acted video of what can only be described as what's live action. So it can only be described as an adult woman with a soother like a dummy in and like pigtails in her hair making soft ice cream and then getting into the shower

and then eating a watery sundae. Oh wow. This is really bad. This is like getting the border between like just like weird porn. Guys, I've been listening to all of this chat and I've come to a conclusion that the internet may actually be bad. Oh my god, what?

Who do we call? It may actually not be good. Oh okay, I'm watching Peppa Pig eat her dad. That's pretty good. Eating your dad's own lips. Yeah. But the point that like, okay, one thing is we have to also remember

that like, this is now what like infants are watching to sort of be distracted. This is key in their cognitive development. Like what are they gonna be like? Oh my god, at the end of the Peppa Pig eating her dad video her mom walks in to find Peppa Pig in her room

slicing streaks of bacon off her arm. Oh my god. Gotta eat your meat. And so what you... Like Peppa Pig epic meal time. And so ultimately, what's so strange about this is like, is that like the sort of the legions

of people just sort of producing content via algorithm without really thinking of what they're making or the algorithm just making the content itself is that we get this kind of bizarre shit that is going to like, just ruin the brains of children earlier and earlier and earlier.

Yeah. I guess, I mean, that's, you know, there's only, there's very few options. One is that they're all gonna become like nihilistic dirtbag podcasters. The other is that they're probably gonna join some sort of militia in which the insignia will be Peppa Pig

with an AK-47. A new version of ISIS, which is exactly the same as regular ISIS, but it's just pretty cool. I guess the question is, is Peppa the new Peppa? Oh shit, yeah. Yeah, you'll have like these 12 year olds,

you know, spray painting, Peppa Pig symbols, and I guess like the Peppa thing like evolved into like Keck, but what would be Peppa? I'm almost certain there's a Peppa the pig video if you look. Peppa the pig.

I'm on YouTube right now. Okay. But the point that this article makes is sort of targeting children with these very strange videos, just rack up millions of views and get advertising system, advertising money,

is that essentially, you're saying that the system of what you might call platform capitalism isn't just, you know, the medium of abuse, but like companies like Google and YouTube are actually complicit because they largely sort of

abdicate their responsibility for anything that exists on their platform, while at the same time reaping all the beneficial ownership of that platform, which is shit. Yeah. That's my controversial opinion.

It goes back to the thing about like tech companies being publishers or being mediums or like just being tech companies, right? So this is just a very kind of, it's one of the kind of more extreme examples of where that quite like how that question hasn't been answered.

You know, but it's exactly the same with like all these like alt-rights, all this alt-right stuff and like a ton of kind of, you know, content that is pretty explicit in its racism, but still ends up on like my recommended videos to watch

every time I go on to YouTube. Make about what you will, listeners. Or like, you know, you've got to name them. You've got to know them before you become, you know, their, what you call it, their useful,

useful clown. But the thing, I mean, but I mean, like the thing about, you know, the thing, you know, we would, so we were dominated conversations for a long time about like, you know, politics and like right versus left and all that stuff.

I was going to say, but like weird videos and weird YouTube and stuff has been around for like, you know, ever since like video could get streamed on line properly, right? All this like weird shit,

I remember like, you know, all the, before like YouTube and stuff, there were, you know, the games websites and on the games websites, there would be like weird gondam wing things where like the end scene would be like some sort of like weird sex scene, right?

And, you know, at 13, 14 years old, you get a kick out of watching it. So I guess, but yeah, you actually had to like search for that shit, right? And like, you have to be told by your mates that, oh, it exists. And like, we should really watch it at lunchtime

because that's perfectly fine and healthy for us to do. And it's completely sensible to do on a school computer network. Whereas I guess like the scary thing here is that while YouTube is really easy to use, as you said, like all these kids get iPads and laptops and phones and stuff,

and they can learn how to use them really, really quickly. You know, so I guess the danger comes in access, right? And no one really knows where this access goes. But then there's also that thing of like, it's like this stuff is sort of normalized. If like this stuff is more common

and kids like are going to grow. You know, we have, you know, one of the things when I read that whole piece, one of the things that kind of I was thinking about was, well, look, on the news, you know, they now show images of like bloodshed and like people dying and stuff, right? On YouTube, on like Twitter and Facebook and stuff,

you can see that like fairly easily. You don't have to like go through any forums or hacks or anything. So that stuff is always going to exist anyway. And I sort of wonder like, does this exist within, do these weird videos like exist within the same sort of nexus? Or is it like a real unique danger?

Well, I think it's sort of, it's almost a more unique danger because what happens when, is that parents give their kids an iPad, a baby's an iPad, and then they turn on one like Peppa Pig video that might be like a real Peppa Pig video that where you know the content

and basically trust it. But then they leave the kid alone with the iPad and they just keep playing recommended videos. And so because... Next thing you know, the kids deep into Paul Joseph. The Muslims have got to be stopped. Well, you know, you know, Paul Joseph has always said that like his job is like to red pill the next generation,

which basically means that he spends the majority of his time like DMing 13 year olds. Just like hanging out, hanging out outside school playgrounds. Just like, hey kids, just like poking his fucking head through the bars. Offering glasses of milk with sushi in them. His long term ambition is to be a senator.

Oh, no, I just think it's remarkable that milk and frogs are core items of iconography of both the modern far right and Tim Farron. Just have to throw that in there. To close out this YouTube segment, this is from a different article where a journalist had been looking at this phenomenon earlier.

It said some of the parents I informally polled told me their kids would often rather watch character toy videos than the actual TV show or movie the characters were drawn from. And so they... And one parent said this is super weird and we had to convince them to watch Big Hero 6 after seeing the toys all over the YouTube feed.

They didn't believe me that they would even like the actual movie. They just wanted to watch other people play with toys. How fucked up is that for some reason? Wait, what was the movie? Big Hero 6. Never heard of it. That sounds suspiciously like an anime. I'm disappointed that it's not an anime.

Stop making me play with this body pillow. Go back to running for senator in Alabama. I can't wait for my son to be saying that to me when... I'm an old man. Why are you watching Gundam again? Hey kids, stop watching those YouTube videos. We have to go and watch Benjamin Netanyahu. But mum...

I want to watch an adult woman eat a melty sundae in the shower. There's probably a Benjamin Netanyahu wrong heads video with him and Yassar. So I think maybe we'll close out this section with a rendition of the Finger Family song and then get into some politics in a few minutes if that's alright with everyone. Love to politics.

Love to politics. Mommy finger, mommy finger, where are you? Eric Garland, real Eric Garland hours, is back at it again with his threads. No, Eric Garland has done another one of his classic Twitter rants. He is using his usual Joss Whedon epic bacon style fucking dumbass language

to essentially spin up another Russian conspiracy theory because modern liberal society is basically fine. No one could possibly object to any element of it. And of course, if anything is going wrong, it has to be Russia, obviously. Say the recent Russia conspiracy theory you've got in Britain, particularly from a Blairite labour MP called Ben Bradshaw, as well as more kind of like just some kind of centrist journalists

and writers and stuff. Dads, you might say. Yes, you could possibly say that. There are other words for my think as well, as it melts. No, I've never heard of that. Slugs, toads. But anyway, it's basically that Russia did Brexit.

And, you know, I saw a tweet which just before we get on to Eric Garland because this is very much an Eric Garland vein, but it was saying basically that the killer of Joe Cox said Britain first while he killed her. And which apparently conclusively shows Russia, like because nobody in Britain has ever used the phrase Britain first before. There's not a party with that name or anything that the murderer in question had genuine links to.

I mean, often I go onto the Britain first Facebook page and it's filled with comments that go, we want our country back, followed by a few lines of Nobikovs. So it's just like you read that a real politics, Facebook, Twitter page, whatever it's called. And they're all just posting stuff like, Mr. President Donald Trump, very, very good leader, speakful worker of America.

Yes, yes, Hillary Clinton, bad, nasty woman. And it's just highly suspicious that these messages, you know, correlate so closely with Kremlin propaganda lines. Well, I've got actually that tweet you're talking about, Jack. If people doubt the Russian-aided Islamophobic Brexit propaganda had any real life effects, just remember what Joe Cox's killer said during the EU ref shouting Britain first by Peter Jukes, who I have been referred to as Peter Jukes a couple of times.

And then I referred to him as Peter, quote, as far as I know, the battle of Cable Street refers to my angry phone call with open reach, Jukes. Yeah, so the point I was just making, which does link in with Eric Golland, is how the same people who are now saying, you know, there were like two confirmed Russian accounts that were posting pro-Brexit stuff on Twitter, which obviously swayed the referendum result in Leaves' favor.

They're the same people who've been saying that it makes no difference to public opinion that every single journalist in the UK writes anti-Corbin pieces every day for the last two years. And that might have something to do with the fact that, up until recently, he was quite unpopular. So if it's the entire mainstream media saying something, then no, that doesn't actually have any effect on public opinion

because they're just passive observers rather than active participants, politics. But if it's a couple of random Russian guys on Twitter, like, they can win a referendum. Oh, absolutely. And especially if their tweets get like single-digit likes and retweets, that's really decisive. Yeah. So Eric Garland.

Eric Garland thread why Trump Russia, this is Eric Garland, depends on curing the infection of financial and sexual corruption like never before. Have you got this thread up right now? I have it very open. I want to be able to summarize it. I've got like seven screens open, like I'm an operator in The Matrix,

and it's like, you know, do you always look at it in tweets? It's like, eventually you don't even see the tweets. Okay. So he opens it by saying, note, I writing this in 140 character limit style, a classical thread capitalized except no substitutes. Thanks, Eric. As we know, sex, money, and power are part of a single ecosystem,

accrue enough power and you command plenty of the other two. So Eric Garland, former incels member, who can say, I believe that the political crisis of the current moment has fulminated because power has concentrated so much, corruption ran wild. For supposed liberal democracies, most worldwide citizens pretty much expect that the wealthy can buy their way out of trouble.

The current headlines from Weinstein and Spacey to the Paradise Papers show that a wanton disrespectful law has become commonplace. This is actually, I think, quite sensible from our boy. This... Well, yeah, I suppose. I mean, among the super rich. I mean, I do think there's a case to be made

that if you look at the way that Harvey Weinstein hired all those private investigators like ex-Mossad people and so on to basically keep the allegations of his sexual violence under wraps, there is one rule legally speaking for the super rich and another for some normal fucking creep wouldn't be able to get away with a kind of despicable shit that Weinstein did for so many years.

The fact that he's incredibly wealthy gave him an advantage in that regard in the same way that the super rich are able to get beneficial tax deals if you want to describe it in that way. They dodge shitloads of tax and cheat the taxpayer and kill vulnerable people in the process, basically. Oh, exactly. And that's the thing.

This part of Garland's thread is actually, I think, basically on point. However, the next tweet is where there is a turn. The timing of these headlines, a torrent of powerful people exposed simultaneously is, I believe, no accident and it's tied to Trump. Oh, my God. Like, it wasn't like, you know, brave people coming forward.

It wasn't just normal people being tired of this shit. It wasn't the actions of investigative journalists. No, it's tied to Trump. Well, I think, like, who was it? Like, one of the friends of our show was kind of like, you know, oh, this wasn't down to kind of like brave women who, you know, risked a lot emotionally and physically to kind of bring out their stories.

This is all done by the Politburo or something like that. Like, I don't know. Why do you think real politic is at real politic? Oh, my God, the truth is finally out. There is a web to be unwound. So Garland continues, revolting sexual behavior and abuse of the financial system has surpassed a mere moral predicament and has become a national security threat.

This isn't to say that workplace harassment of women weakens our military defenses. It's more insidious than that. It's called Compromat. Ah. Because... Sorry. I know, I know, this is...

Again, I'm getting a rage aneurysm from reading this. It's so fucking offensive. It's like, no, of course, all of our leaders and our powerful people and our successful executives and our politicians and our wealthy and Richard fucking Branson and Gary Linnaker are all so pure and good and lovely. They'd never do anything terrible. They would never do anything that shows that they don't deserve

their sort of towering heights of wealth and power. No, it must be because they were tempted, like the snake in the Garden of Eden by fucking Russia. Yeah. Pretty much. He tweets quite a lot, doesn't he? Because I'm going all the way back through his profile and I still haven't found this fucking thread.

Eric Garland is extraordinarily online. He's more online than all of us put together. Yeah, I found an article. Apparently, he existed in 2012 when he wrote a piece about how American masculinity had lost its way. Whereas back in the days of, you know, John Wayne swanning about being a fucking sexist pig and insisting men decades younger than him

went off to die in Vietnam while he never even served in World War II. Yeah, masculinity in America was on point back in those days. He was the first, he was the first in some. That seems all the like sort of like fat national review writers that all look like sort of, you know, imperfect clumps of pizza dough. They're all the ones who are like really sort of

tearily sort of saluting the troops while they sort of regret that sort of, you know, flat feet kept them out of Vietnam. It's like, it's just so nakedly, just offensively, just fucking sluggish. Yeah, I think I found the thread now finally. I've linked it to the WhatsApp group. Oh, cool.

So what he says is that my theory says, Garland, is that the proliferation of infotech has combined with the brazenness of many elites to become a compromise smorgasbord. An epidemic of abusive sexual behavior and corrupt finance has collided with hackable smart devices and mass database leaks and become levers of control for spies.

Oh, Jesus. Oh, damn it. It is absolutely astonishing the level of cognitive dissonance of which these sort of blue-tig liberals are capable. Well, it really shows that they're absolutely terrified of thinking outside of this kind of little comfort zone they've built for themselves.

So I thought, I hope to rather, that the Russia stuff would just be an aberration while they all kind of got their heads together after Hillary Clinton's loss, which was, of course, the fault of her and her campaign. But, no, apparently not. They've built a whole new world view around this conspiracy theory.

And so when it comes to something like sexual violence, where they really do need to think outside these incredibly narrow parameters they've established for their entire view of the world, they just can't. They've got to find some way. Richard Garland is only capable of writing about how Russia are pulling the strings

in this kind of fucking testosterone-fuelled macho. Let me tell you another thing, kind of way. He is fucking pathetic. He really is a gormless fucking oaf, and I hate him. He does look like an oaf, doesn't he? Yeah, he's easy. He could not look like more of a bass player. Not a good one.

Not someone who's particularly talented at bass, but just some shithouse dickhead who likes to just sit on his fucking arse and do this one Seinfeld-themed slap-bass riff that he knows off by heart. To be fair, I would do the same thing if I had a bass guitar. I would occasionally...

I would play the Seinfeld theme among other stuff. I can imagine myself doing a good tweet and if he gets more than five retweets, playing that riff every time he gets retweets. I bet Eric Garland once played bass at one show at one pub one time and he still gets drunk and talks about his years as a performer. I reckon he probably once tried to form

a free-bass-style bass trio, which is like the band briefly formed by Manny from the Stone Roses, the Bloke from the Smiths, and the Bloke and Peter Hook from New Order. Yeah, literally like the point was, it was a band with three bass players and one of them would play low,

one of them would play high, and one of them would play something in the middle. I thought this was just a little project, like they did a gig once in Manchester or something. Apparently they have an album, but... This is the picture Liberals won. Yeah, that's a long roundabout way of saying. I reckon Eric Garland really tries

to send a bass in his music. Actually, you know he's got a podcast. Of course he has a podcast. Oh, God, who would have a podcast gross? It's because he's got this Patreon page where I think he gets about like 20 quid a fucking year in subscriber fees. And apparently he does a podcast for his subscribers on that.

And I think Chappo Trapp House might have played a little bit of it on one of their episodes. I'm not entirely sure. But yeah, he apparently banned Chappo from subscribing to his Patreon. No, you don't get my strategic futurism takes, Chappo. He's premium content. Premium content.

Yeah, so that is essentially... That's basically Garland's take. He says, to tighten security, we must end this epidemic of crime among the elite. And yes, we must end this epidemic of crime among the elite, but that's not enough. We must do more. I think the reason that sort of,

Jack, to get to the core of one of the things that you're saying, is liberals need to create this reality in which Russia is responsible for everything going wrong. Because as far as their imaginations go, history ended in 1991. Nothing bad could be happening. And it's like they've buried their heads in the sand and are repeating to themselves,

history is still over, history is still over, history is still over. This is not happening, this is not happening. Yeah, absolutely. Like every few months, the new statesmen do a kind of Russia fear mongering issue. And it's generally... They've done about four different covers along these lines. Putin with a hammer and sickle tattoo, basically,

or Putin and Lenin and Stalin all together. So they do seem to think that there's something innately communist to Russia that means no matter how right-wing and authoritarian their leadership is, they remain kind of deeply Marxist at heart. There was some weird phrenology, some weird phrenology dork liberal was saying that like Marxism is inherent to being a Slav. Yeah.

What is this? It's really, really weird and, of course, completely ahistorical. And I guess another point to make is that, you know... Well, there's a couple of points. First of all, the extent to this so-called Russian interference in America seems to be so wide, so great, that apparently Russia has sowed the seeds of racial division in American society, because there was, of course, none of that in America, historically.

No, it's true. The great melting pot. It's interesting how Tsar Alexander actually slowly promoted the idea of slavery among otherwise very nice cotton planters in the south. Yeah, exactly. Always insidious. But basically, they're now saying that Black Lives Matter, the anti-fracking protesters, the protesters at Standing Rock,

standing up for both the environment and the rights of Native Americans, were all kind of Russian ops, or at the very least supported vocally online by Russia. And so a lot of it seems to be a way of cracking down on any kind of dissent from the left, as well as the right. We all know the hard left cannot tolerate dissent. Yeah, but you know, this is the hard center. And they've used this routinely to describe people who support Bernie Sanders, or even if they're kind of Sanders skeptic, are kind of opposed to the Clintonite mainstream

of the Democratic Party. Recently, you've seen Donna Brazil, who was the interim chair of the Democratic National Convention in the transitional period between the Democratic primary and the U.S. general election last year. And she's published a new book revealing how she thinks that the establishment of the Democratic Party worked to marginalize the party's left represented in that primary by Bernie Sanders. And she's been accused by numerous Clinton supporters of basically spreading Russian propaganda lines, despite this being an insider's account coming from her own experience of working in the DNC. But literally, because in their heads, they've got this thing, well, Russia don't like the Democratic Party.

Of course, everyone else does. So everyone else hasn't been corrupted by Russia, of course. Yeah, you'd have to be a Russian, not to like the Democratic Party. That's a cool new slogan for 2020. So basically, they are saying now that she's basically a Russian stooge because she dares to dissent from the party of such titans as Debbie Wasserman Schultz. And I don't know, whatever other dipshits are running around in the media, Keith Oldman and that. Yeah, Robbie Moog, the biggest dipshit in politics, Mr. Data. Do you think when Eric Garland looks into a mirror, he thinks that maybe a Russian spy is watching him because he doesn't recognize his own reflection?

I think that's possibly true, yeah. They're going into the deep end, you know, they're all reclaiming George W. Bush over shit. And I guess one last point is that it's all very well for Americans to talk about Russia influencing their political system through, you know, like a handful of Twitter bots or whatever. In the 1990s, America directly intervened in Russia's political system and then boasted about it in a Time Magazine cover article. No, America never interferes in the political system of other countries. Well, I know, I know. And the people of places like Nicaragua and El Salvador can attest to that. But it's nothing but respect for my shop. But you wonder why Russia is this kind of this right wing crony capitalist state now, socially conservative place.

It's because the US did everything they could in the 90s to collaborate with Yeltsin to crush any kind of leftist thought that was still prevalent in the country to sell off the economy and amass privatization. This created the conditions for Putin, who was Yeltsin's kind of, you know, level headed deputy to take power. So, you know, I'm just highly dubious about this stuff when I know that it's quite common for powerful countries to try and interfere in other countries, political systems, often not necessarily with a great level of success, although America did have a great level of success in the 90s. And now it had no future consequences. But also because America is currently being run by a giant baby, who is offended by another big giant baby, because said giant baby called him old. I know what the problem is, guys, they've been watching YouTube kids. I was thinking about this thing.

I was sort of thinking, like, you know, is there a moment when like Donald Trump is in the Oval Office on his own drinking a Diet Coke, just sitting back and watching Peppa Pig. And then all of a sudden, you know, Osama bin Laden and Tay Zanbe just show up. Dental torture. And that's how we ended up in war in Lebanon. Oh, God, Donald Trump dental torture. Oh, Jesus Christ. Oh, God, my brain hurts now from all of this. This is just like, this is you after every podcast, right?

Like, every time we finish and every time like we put the microphones down, you just have that moment of silence where you sort of think, number one, why the hell did we do this? And number two, I've got a migraine. Why do we continue to do it? All right. Boys and girls, I think that's a good place for any to put the microphones down and tend to migrants. I think probably is. Yeah, especially I am actually feeling like I've literally got a migraine coming on. So yeah, probably. Any case, guys, I think to everyone out there, thank you very much for listening.

And Jack, thank you very much for coming on. It's been a genuine pleasure. Oh, cheers. It's been good. I've enjoyed it. Thanks. Hell yeah. All right. Yeah.

Yeah.