Latest / Black Ibis Social Club / S3E27: Ideological Psychosis

Transcript

S3E27: Ideological Psychosis · Black Ibis Social Club

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Good afternoon and welcome to the Black Ibis Social Club.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, look, it's 7 o'clock and we're starting on time today.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: Fisto, welcome, welcome.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, hello.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, good evening.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, welcome everybody that's live and everybody that's trickling in and welcome
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: to everybody listening at home in the future, right?
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: You're listening to...
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: The black eye of a social club and the best Substack podcast in the world.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: I'm probably like the only good Substack.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just joking.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure there's some good ones.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, welcome guys.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's been two weeks.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: I had a busy two weeks.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't been really chatting on the internet the last week or so
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: because I've been dealing with some Some work stuff and taking care of everything.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: I've been just kind of exhausted.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: I have been reading everybody's stuff and keeping up with everything.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I know, Fisto,
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: you've been busy,
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: you know, fighting off a pack of rabid teens and getting into it with everybody.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoyable.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: You been enjoying yourself, man?
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: He's dead.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, there's some interesting topics I want to talk about tonight.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: And when Fisto comes back to life, we'll get him to join us.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: He's in here somewhere.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Hope everybody's doing well.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't really, to be honest, I can hear you.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: You're fine.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: There
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: it is.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my God.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't been really doing much of anything too exciting.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: I started rereading Neuromancer.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: Ooh, how's that?
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's probably a sci-fi masterpiece.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: There's something about just cyberpunk that,
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: you know, this is how I am on science fiction, right?
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: I like small-ass science fiction.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: I don't really enjoy giant space operas.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: I tend to prefer the smaller kind of weird stuff.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I really like the cyberpunk genre.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: I like almost all cyberpunk media, like video games.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: I like the role-playing games.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: I like the video games.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: The few cyberpunk movies.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: There's a few out there that I would consider cyberpunk.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: For example, I just like the aesthetic of the small guys.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: In a way, I feel that cyberpunk is very much connected to the Western.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think the Western and the cyberpunk have a lot in common.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: They're usually people out on the edge of society.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: There's a greater kind of...
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, monolithic entity above them and they're, you know, it's people out there surviving.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I just, I just liked that.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know why I've always been attracted to that.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: I've been, I've been into cyberpunk.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: Do you know, do you know what my first ever like foray into cyberpunk was?
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: It was actually with my brother and I,
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: my younger brother and I used to, we used to, our parents used to, um,
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: Renters video games from like this little indie,
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: like not indie, but like your local neighborhood video game, like VHS rental store.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: And they had a pretty good collection of SNES and NES games.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: And one day,
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: the one that caught my attention,
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: attracted my high,
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: my little,
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: I think I was in late elementary school,
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: early middle school, was the Super Nintendo Shadowrun.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: And...
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: That is one of the best role-playing games I've ever played.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: It was just my favorite.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: Have you ever played it, Pisto?
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'm kind of familiar with it.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: I was going to joke that your introduction to Cyberpunk was growing up
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: in Los Angeles,
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: and it turned out I was exactly correct.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I was exactly correct.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: You go down to the videotape store,
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: you get yourself a copy of Shadowrun, and
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: I remember the name of the
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: video store.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: This had to be mid-90s,
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: early 90s.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: The name of the video store was called Vela Video.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: It was owned by these Korean guys.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: They even had the
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: The curtained off,
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: like section off to the side,
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: kind of like,
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: with the pornography,
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: like we would walk in and always kind of get a peek,
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: you know, at the wares behind the curtain.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: But the Cyberpunk, the Shadowrun video game, the Super Nintendo video game, it...
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: It blew my mind when my brother and I loaded it up.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: It starts off and it's an isometric game.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: It starts off and you're this dude and you wake up in a morgue.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: You're basically in a cold refrigerator, like a body refrigerator.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: You open the fridge.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: The fridge rack comes out and there's these two morgue attendants and they freak out
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: and they're like, what?
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my gosh, what's this guy?
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: And you basically find your sunglasses and you walk out and you have amnesia
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: and you're spending the rest of the time and you're in Seattle.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: And you're spending the rest of the time trying to figure out what's going on.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: As soon as you walk around the corner outside, a dog comes and starts talking to you.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, it's just a crazy video game.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: Now, are you familiar with the Shadowrun role-playing game at all?
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: A little bit.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: Again, these are things that I remember a little bit from when I was a kid, too.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: But my path was different.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: My path was different.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: So Shadowrun...
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: Shatterrun was a tabletop role-playing game.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: I still think they have it.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if it's still popular.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: Brian Reniger and Shaq can tell me because he's our local resident role-playing master.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: He knows all the stuff.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: Shatterrun was a role-playing game that was created and owned by FAFSA, I think.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: Out of Seattle, I believe.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: And they're the same people that did the Battletech miniatures slash role-playing game.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: And they also had a third role-playing game called Earthdown or Earthdawn
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: or something like that.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: I never played that one.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: But Shadowrun is really interesting because it took cyberpunk, but it combined it with magic.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: And the whole shtick of it was that
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: Around like the 2000s,
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: in the age of like, you know, the cyberpunk, like neuromancer kind of timeline.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: There was like a awakening and they call it like the age, the third age of awakening.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: And basically all the magic from the past, the old world, right?
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: Reawakened.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: And it now you have some people started mutating into like elves and Trolls and stuff.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: And they're not really like elves and trolls in the same way they were
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: in like Dungeons and Dragons or like Lord of the Rings.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: They're more like mutated humans, like a new kind of reawakened species.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: Basically, certain people had this DNA that reawakened.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: There's like ghost DNA that reawakened in them a subspecies of human.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: And some people had magic.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: And you had these Native American guys that were street shamans.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: And then you had corporate mages that worked for the corporations, the Arasaka types.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: But the interesting thing about it,
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: and part of the mechanics of the game,
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: is that magic did not work with technology and vice versa.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: So you had a stat called essence, I believe.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: And the more...
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: The more cyberware you got,
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: the more tech you implanted in yourself, the lower your essence went.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: So basically,
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: the more inhuman and cybernetic and towards cyberpsychosis you went,
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: the less magical powers you had.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: So it balanced, I mean,
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: it was a game mechanic that worked along with the story mechanic because it balanced
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: the idea that you can't be this badass mage shooting fireballs and flying around,
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: but also be like a street samurai, super hacker kind of guy.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: So you kind of have to go one or the other.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: But it was an interesting world because not only did a bunch of humans
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: and magic pop up,
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: it had the full technological reality of basic cyberpunk,
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: non-magical cyberpunk with street shamans and neurological implants
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: and full matrix decking and stuff.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: But then you also had these dudes shooting fireballs at you.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then you had all these...
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: And the villain of the Shadowrun video game was actually a dragon named Drake,
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: and he ran a corporation, and there was this huge kind of plot about him.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: There was like vampires and ghouls and stuff so you know you go into a bar
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: and you know somebody might be a jacked up like choom but he also might be a vampire
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: or he might have the ghoul virus but they treated vampires and ghouls as like
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: a virus you know and it's really interesting and you had to jamming it all
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: in there yeah it was jamming all it was just a great game and one
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: of my favorite settings actually And then in the video game itself,
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: the Super Nintendo one,
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: you were kind of a shaman, kind of a street shaman slash hacker kind of guy.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: And the spirit that gave you magic and kind of protected you was the dog spirit.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: It was pretty interesting.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: It was like this mangy dog that you ran into in an alley somewhere.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: I've always like I don't know why but like there's a scene where you go into
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: the this alley and you talk to this dog and it just always stuck in my mind
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: and it really there's a there's a novel called mason dixon by thomas pinchon and
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: the characters in an at talk to a dog and a talking dog in an alley
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: and it always stick there when I read that like you know 30 years later
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: Which is why I actually read that recently.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, oh my gosh, this is just like the scene in the Shadowrun video game.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I had to go back and look.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, did he write this after this video game?
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: And he did, which is interesting.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: I doubt that Thomas Pynchon was playing Super Nintendo Shadowrun.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: But maybe he was.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: You never know.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: You never know.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: That was what kind of got me into Cyberpunk.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I just always, I fell in love with that.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I've always liked low sci-fi.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: Stuff like Tarkovsky's Stalker.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: Stalker video games.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: All this post-apocalyptic or near-apocalyptic kind of stuff.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like...
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know why.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: Big sci-fi, big kind of sci-fi never really did it for me in the same way the small stuff does.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: I do like some of the...
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: Cowboy Bebop.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: I think Cowboy Bebop is cyberpunk adjacent in a way because it's a bunch
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: of small guys in a world of corporations.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: The show Firefly is also kind of cyberpunk adjacent in a way even though it's kind
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: of like space cowboy opera.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: Interestingly enough, I don't know how...
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like Firefly did not,
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: like to me, it's a direct ripoff off of Cowboy Bebop, to be honest, right?
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how,
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: like nobody ever says,
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: I don't see anybody complaining about that,
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: but I feel like Firefly is just a Cowboy Bebop,
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: but westernized down to the whole Chinese element and everything.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's the actual literal horses that I think throw them.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: And there's more of the South will rise again vibe as well.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: Which is so interesting because the creator is such a shit lib.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: And then when I watched the movie,
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: the Serenity movie, I was like, wow, that's actually a really great movie.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: I actually saw everything backwards, to be honest.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: I had a girlfriend.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: Ironically enough,
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: the same girlfriend that introduced me to Kiwa Bebop was obsessed with Firefly.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: And she made me go see...
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: Serenity, when it came out in theaters.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: And at that time, I've never watched any of the Firefly stuff.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: So I had to go back.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: I saw basically the end movie, and I went back and watched all of Serenity.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, in Firefly, I really liked it.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: In the chat, our friend Brian says, back in the 90s, my shaman character was a salmon shaman.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: Shaman named King Slammon the Salmon.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: Let me reread that because I laughed, right?
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: I'm laughing.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'm going to read you guys for guys at home that don't see the text.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: Our friend Brian said,
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: back in the 90s,
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: my shaman character was a salmon shaman named King Slammin' the Slammin' Shaman.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: He could only have sex once before dying.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry, what?
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: That makes sense.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: It makes sense, Ryan.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: Peak character, you know?
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: For you guys that like role-playing games and tabletop games,
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I haven't played a tabletop game in 15 years now.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: But Shadowrun was a great setting, but I think it was a very crappy tabletop role-playing game.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't crappy.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: It was very crunchy.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: And making characters was a giant pain in the butt.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: It was just a very kind of a clunky setting.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, set up.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: It'd take you like six hours to create a character and you have to go to the store
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: and it always got bogged down in the hacking.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: The problem with tabletop role-playing games like that do Cyberpunk is
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: that they have a hard time getting hacking correct because what happens is
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: When you're writing a tabletop game adventure story,
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: you want all the players involved.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if you have a team of netrunners or whatever,
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: you're going to have one of them that's the hacker,
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: the data guy, the guy that hacks in.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: He's going to spend all his points in doing that.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: He's going to have the best cyber deck and the best tech gear.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: But the only problem is,
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: Once you make an interesting hacking experience for him,
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: it becomes absolutely boring for the rest of the party.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: What do they do?
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: So it's very tricky and it's very difficult, especially if it's very roll heavy.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: So that was one of the challenges of running a Shadowrun game,
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: which is how do you deal with the hacking?
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm sure you can solve it, but the system itself was very clunky and very heavy-handed.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: When it comes to role-playing game systems, I think Dungeons & Dragons blows.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody's going to hate me.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: All the nerds are like, oh, evil Alex.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think a lot of the settings are great and everything,
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: but a lot of it is just tedious to play, especially in the later editions.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's very tedious.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: I always thought that the White Wolf systems were really good.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: The Vampire, the Masquerade, what do you call it?
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: The White Wolf stuff, right?
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: I forgot the D20.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: No, it's not the D20.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: It was the D10 system, I believe.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: And it was very simple.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: You could knock out a character and you can play real fast.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I've never been a rules person.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: I've always been much more of a story-driven guy.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess maybe that's where I fell in love with the whole role-playing thing,
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: the tabletop thing.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I digress into my past.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: What I really wanted to say was that Cyberpunk was always like what really stood out to me.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: So
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: my goal is to do a full kind of retrospective on Cyberpunk here on the podcast.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to watch Edgerunners when it comes out in a week or so, I believe.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: Is it the next week?
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: Let me Google it right now.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: There you go.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: Those Edgerunners.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Season two.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: Let's see when that comes out.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: October 20th.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: So in two weeks, man.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: So we will have,
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: hopefully,
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: hopefully all the episodes come out at once so I can binge it like a,
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: like a madman, you know?
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, so you're going to love this.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: One of my classes, one of my classes has like a gang of guys that are all friends.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's like five or six of them.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it turns out they're all cyberpunk junkies.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: So they were like, did you ask him the question?
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, which question
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: to Judy or, uh, oh, I did not, I did not, I did not think of that.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, well,
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: I thought of it,
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: but it was kind of early in the conversation,
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: but when they found out,
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: when they found out that I was into edge runners,
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: that they, they were in awe and I started just dropping more on them.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: And they're like, this is amazing.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: You are, you actually are into this.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, yeah, of course I am guys.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: They say that for Halloween, I need to dress up as Falco.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, apparently with my hair, because I've been growing out my hair this past year.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, yeah, it gives serious Falco vibes.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: Nice.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that was cool, man.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: That was cool.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: So not only will we have Edgerunners in the podcast,
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: but my one period is going to be,
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: we're going to be talking about Edgerunners probably at least now.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: Everything I've seen of it so far looks good.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I really,
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: for you guys at home that have not watched Edgerunners,
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: it's a, I believe it's like an eight episode anime.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a single season.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: I think it might be more than that.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think it might be 10.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: I believe Edgerunners is created by, let me see, who made it?
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: So it's made like a combination of CD Projekt Red,
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: who made the video game, and it was also created, the anime company is, who
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: made it?
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: Jeez.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: Studio Trigger.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, 10 episodes, I was right.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: And what else is Studio Trigger?
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, Studio Trigger also did the very,
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: very, very good show called Delicious and Dungeon, which is really good.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: And it did Kill La Kill, which is another older but really good anime.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: They're doing just bangers, you know?
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_01: Mm-hmm.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: They're putting out the new episode, the new set.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: I recommend for you guys before the season two comes out to watch season one.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: Season one is not connected to season two, I don't think, because it's kind of like anthology.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: So season two is going to be a new set of characters.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: Spoiler,
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: it's because there is no more characters left after season one because it's...
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's not strictly true.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_01: Falco's there.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, our boy Falco makes it out.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: Our boy Adam Smasher makes it out of Edgerunners.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: Adam Smasher.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: And if you've played...
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's connected to the video game,
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: to Cyberpunk 2077 by CD Projekt Red,
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: which is based on the 1980s role-playing game, Cyberpunk.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: And...
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: The video game is great.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: We've talked about it a million times, but the show is really, really good.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of a prequel,
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: but it's not really required to play the video game,
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: and playing the video game is not required to watch the show.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's actually a very fantastic show.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: I would say it's a hard R show.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's not kid-friendly at all.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's not one that I watch with my daughter whatsoever,
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: and even if I let my daughter watch stuff that's a little bit higher adulthood
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: than her age,
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: this was a Both the show and the video game are a no-go for younger kids because
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: of themes like snuff pornography and that kind of stuff.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's cyberpunk.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's cyberpunk, yeah.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: Cyberpunk is not.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: I have to delicately tread around some of the themes in class.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: We don't want to scare the hoes.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, if you go back to its original source, it's always been like that.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at Molly Millions in Neuromancer,
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: she was a kind of a prostitute that was used in all kinds of messed up situations.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: And that led her to becoming a killing machine later on in the book.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like you do.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like you do, right?
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: So it's kind of a dark thing, but I'm excited to do that.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: I want to,
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: Brian Reniger, also,
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: same Brian we were talking about,
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: he made this fantastic kind of list of cyberpunk fiction for us to kind of follow.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I shared it on Substack.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: I'll share it again.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: share it again.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: I think I missed that.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: He basically went through every single book that could be considered cyberpunk,
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: and he split it into multiple columns,
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: and one of them is essential,
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_01: like 100% cyberpunk,
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: so stuff like Neuromancer, Burning Chrome, A lot of the Gibson stuff.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: And then he puts like cyberpunk,
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: maybe like in the middle where it has like cyberpunk elements and
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: then like cyber adjacent stuff.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's maybe not like critical, but still fun.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: If you like the genre,
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: I think for example,
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: I said this on Substack that I watched Ergo Proxy,
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: the anime,
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: and it has cyberpunk elements, but it's not true cyberpunk because it's core themes.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I think, I'll go into this when we go into more detail about cyberpunk in the future.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: I think the core themes of cyberpunk are that you have to have a near future setting, right?
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: Or it can even be a non-earth setting.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: It can be a completely like fictional setting.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: But a near future setting,
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: Where technology and interaction of technology and the human body are critical
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: and attention.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, body modifications, you know, internet, like brain hacking, that kind of stuff.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: And then I think that another key element is the punk element.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of times when people say, oh, this thing is cyberpunk.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: They'll get the cyber part right, but they'll miss the punk part.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: But the punk part of cyberpunk is that the characters have to be losers.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: And by losers, I mean at the bottom of society.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: At the bottom of society or outside the society.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: So sometimes a lot of stuff that's like military cyberpunk gets put in.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: And if it's like a military special forces unit doing cyberpunk cool stuff,
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: it's not really cyberpunk because those characters are not punks.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: you can have like,
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: you can have like a,
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: you can,
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: you can stretch it and say that,
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: alien, the first alien movie has cyberpunk elements because they are characters.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: They are, they're, you know, they're, they're Blue-collar workers in Spain.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they're miners.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: They're just miners.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: Getting raped by a corporation, right?
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: And there is a biological, technological element to it.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: So I could say that Alien can meet the criteria of cyberpunk in a way,
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_01: especially when you take the backstory.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's definitely a space science fiction set in a cyberpunk world, you know?
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: But then there's other things that are like, not really.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: I would say,
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: for example,
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know,
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_01: Children of the Men,
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: the movie, the Naruto movie that came out, oh gosh, almost two decades ago.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: Great movie, and it has some cyberpunk aesthetic to it, some elements, but...
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: Not really, you know, it's close enough, but not really.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: Stuff like Stalker, Tarkovsky's Stalker can kind of be cyberpunk-y.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: Stalker the video game definitely has a cyberpunk kind of,
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_01: but it's more post-apocalyptic than cyberpunk.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: So they're close together, they're adjacent, you know, they have the same feel.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: But I think true cyberpunk requires this specific focus and interplay
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: on how technology affects humanity and how we are dealing with this rapid change
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: in technology.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: And also that the characters and the stories themselves are set at a level, at the ground level.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: In a way,
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think cyberpunk,
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: when you look at science fiction and fantasy,
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: cyberpunk is the science fiction version of cyberpunk.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: Of sword and sorcery where,
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_01: high fantasy would be something like,
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: the Wheel of Time,
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: Lord of the Rings,
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: where you're dealing with massive sweeping narratives and the characters are often
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: the chosen one or they're doing things.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: they're,
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: they're taking the, you know, the, the, the world saving thing to Mount Doom.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: You have Aragon,
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: who is the king,
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: and he's,
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: he's going to become the king of the world of the known world in this place.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: You're dealing with like massive geopolitical kind of elements.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, in sword and sorcery,
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: you have somebody like Conan,
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: or Favard,
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: and I can never pronounce it in the Mauser,
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: who are like,
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: They're just basically like mercenaries,
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: or it's just basically a dude like out there,
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: robbing a tower,
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: a wizard's tower, you know, for money, for gold, or he's
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: exploring
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: a tomb.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: Get some artifact
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: in there, yeah.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, yeah, okay, you can say that Conan does become King Conan, but that's in the narrative.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: He's not King Conan during the actual stories.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: He's much like, you know, he's a thief, right?
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: He's a thug.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: He's no different than a cyberpunk character.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: And the Mouser and the Grey Mouser, for example, they're basically thieves, right?
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: They're grave robbers and thieves.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think one of the things in,
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: for example,
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: playing Dungeons and Dragons or Dungeons and Dragons type storylines,
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: the funnest thing Part of Dungeons and Dragons is actually level one to five.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: When you're like a nobody,
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: when you're just a guy scraping by,
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: trying to get some coin from some pervert magician that's sending you somewhere,
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_01: breaking into something.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: Some ratty goblin cave and trying to steal stuff.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: Once you level up,
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: once you level up a bit, you're making too much money and you've got too much power.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: You can teleport.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: It ruins the game.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: Skyrim is a great example.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: When you become like...
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: Once you become like Dovahkin and you're like Fusfro dying people and you're flying
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: through the place and everything, it kind of loses its fun.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's like I enjoy the low level stuff.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: You and your homies against the world kind of world.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and you got to move through the cracks.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: You got to move through the cracks.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: You got to move through the underbelly.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: You can't just hit everybody with that fireball spell and call it good.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_01: So that is my goal in the next few weeks.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: Hopefully,
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: if everything works out,
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'll be able to do some podcasting on Neuromancer and other cyberpunk stuff.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: We'll do one specifically on Edgerunner Season 2.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, buddy.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: We'll do that.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: The other thing, and I got to apologize.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_01: I've been having a rough one like work-wise and everything.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: I've been to the point where I have not been able to focus whatsoever on making good content.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: I keep on saying, oh, I'm going to get episodes that are like offline.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I just have not got around to it.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, give me like a year or two and I'll finally catch up with everything.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll be able to finish this book I'm working on.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll be able to finish it.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: And right now I'm just – I'm so overwhelmed with work stuff
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: that I almost canceled today's episode, but I decided I'll feel better if I do it.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: I love you guys so much.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: You guys cheer me up.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_01: You guys cheer me up.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: The other thing I did do is that I discovered a new video game.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: What's that?
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I work with a bunch of guys that play a lot of Xbox and PlayStation and my PC, right?
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: And unfortunately for like kind of the core group of like maybe 15 guys I know
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: and girls that play video games, everybody plays on a different system, okay?
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: The majority of people are playing on Xbox, and that's me.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm an Xbox person.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: I've got a few PC guys, and then we have a bunch of PlayStation guys, right?
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: So the problem is we've got to find a game that does cross-play,
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: and everybody can play together.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: And we made this list.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: Me and my buddy...
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not going to...
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: So, me and my buddy,
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: we sat down and we're like, okay, what do we need in this game that we can play?
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: And we all used to play Ark Raiders together,
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: but Ark Raiders kind of shit the bed because it made you kind of lame.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: So, we're like, it has to be cross-play.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: We have to be able to play PlayStation and Xbox and PC or whatever.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: We'll ignore those guys.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: Has to have some level of PVP.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: I like killing people.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: I like fighting.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_01: PVP is a lot
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: of fun.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know what?
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_01: Helldivers would have met the criteria because it's very cross-play.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: But Helldivers, man,
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_01: me and Mexican Daddy in the chat,
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: we played it for like two, three days, and we're just like, just don't.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_01: Just don't feel it.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, technically, technically you can make it PvP.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: Usually it's by mistake, but it is technically an option.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: There's just no stakes, you know?
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's why I love DayZ, man.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: DayZ is a game that, like, you know, it's just a miserable...
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's depressing.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's like all in Russian.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_01: You don't understand anything.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: It just doesn't, Daisy, the problem with Daisy is that it's not really cross-play, right?
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of like you can play PC only and Xbox only and PlayStation only.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: They haven't figured out cross-play for it.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: So that's kind of like my side game, my true love of video games.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_01: But so I went on the search, you know, I was like, okay, so hell divers is a no.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: There's a really fun game that's kind of like Helldivers.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's called Deep Rock Galactic, where you're a bunch of dwarves mining.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's a really fun game.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: Rock and Stone.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: Rock and Stone, right?
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: But once again,
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: it's PVE only and I like to kill,
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_01: I like to,
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_01: to like, you know, I'm just, I'm just that guy, you know, I like to fight.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: You want to, you want to know that you made a 15 year old on the other side.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: I want to know that I made some,
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: some dad gamers life miserable at the end of the chill out and
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: shoot some zombies.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: And then I'm there, they're taking this stuff.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I went on this quest,
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: this quest and I came, I don't even, I don't even know how I came across it.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think it popped up on my Instagram feed.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_01: And it just came out.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's called Active Batter.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: And it's Slav Jank.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's Slav Jank, right?
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: Slav Jank.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: Look, Slavs, Eastern Europeans make the best video games.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: I don't care, right?
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: So it's basically a combination of the Stalker video game.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you ever played the Stalker 1 or 2.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_01: They're fantastic video games.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: Familiar with it, familiar with it.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: And Tarkov, right?
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_01: Escape from Tarkov.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_01: But it is this wild game.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody's ever heard about it.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: It just kind of came out of nowhere.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, you know what?
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's 30 bucks.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'll download it.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_01: I'll give it a try.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I played it.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: And the graphics are beautiful.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's a first-person tactical extraction shooter.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's one of those games where it looks like Call of Duty, but it has a lot more depth to it.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: You have to reload magazines.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: You have to put different...
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: You have to reload your health kits.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: Your health is actually by body parts.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: So you have to wear different ceramic plates and you have to have a flashlight.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_01: It just has a pretty in-depth middle sim kind of thing.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: But the basic story is that the universe is falling apart.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's like the multiverse is broken and you're getting sucked
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: into this in-between world and you're trying
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: to collect this stuff called active matter for this corporation type thing you work
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: for.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: And you go into these like random maps and there's like three or four maps
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: that take place in like some Slavic jank place.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's a few maps that are like in Africa and there's a few maps in the United States.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: It is wild.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's insane.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: You're in this place and crazy flower mutants attack you,
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_01: giant wasps, poltergeist kids throw stuff at you.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: You go through a doorway and now you're in a house that's floating
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: above this village and it's upside down.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_01: It makes me want to vomit playing it actually because it does perspective shifts.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_01: We're playing it.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: It has a pretty
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: Like most Slav games, it has a very high threshold of learning.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: It throws you in there.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: There's like a five-minute tutorial, and then you're like, figure the fuck out.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: You got to figure out how to use a telephone or otherwise
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_01: it's like,
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: and then just like,
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: and then you like log in and then like some flower pervert beats you up and
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: then some other player like shoots you and you know,
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: he's some Ukrainian bastard or whatever, you know?
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: So me and my, because you are, because you don't know how to play.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: Basically.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah,
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_00: me and my boy,
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: my boy,
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_01: Mexican daddy,
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_01: we're out there,
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_01: Chilling,
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_01: you know, like doing our, doing our, our, our tactical walk through this village.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: And your tactical tacticalness.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: Some dudes sniped them,
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: some dudes sniped them and one shot at him from like this floating house.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_01: And we have to take cover to some suppressive fire.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_01: We have to drag We had to hide his body and try to bring him back to life,
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_01: but we didn't have enough stuff to bring him back to life,
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_01: so I had to hide his body in a little hut, like a little village house.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: We went around, we got some meds for him.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_01: We came back,
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: and there was some dude hiding inside the attic of this house,
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_01: and he started shooting through the floor at us, and we threw grenades up there.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_01: It was a blast.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: Very good game.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_01: I've been cracking that on.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you guys are playing any video games on Xbox, PS,
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: Whatever it is,
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: PS5 Pro or PC,
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_01: you can hit me up on the Xbox and I'll play some active matter with you guys.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's pretty fun, man.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_01: It came out of nowhere and I'm very impressed by it.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_01: What's really cool about it is that it does PvE and PvP.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: It rotates maps,
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_01: so you'll do maps that are just you and your homies,
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: no other players involved, so you just do kind of quest type stuff.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_01: Find some medicine or something like that.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: And then you have other maps where you'll go in and there's like 30 other dudes
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_01: in there trying to steal your shit.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_01: So it's pretty intense.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's pretty exciting.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of janky.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's got kind of a slob jank vibe to it.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_01: But then again, Cyberpunk 2077 is a slob jank game technically.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_01: It is CD Projekt Red.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: I think Active Matter is created by a Russian team that moved their studio to Hungary.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: And it's called the Active Matter team.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I think they do some other stuff.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_01: But so far, $30.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: Even if I never play it again, I got my money worth the first week of playing.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: But that's what I've been doing, man.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: I've been doing that.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: What have you been up to?
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_00: What have I been up to?
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we're getting to the end of the first quarter.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: I've been doing the Federalist Papers with students, which has been very entertaining.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_00: I've gotten a lot of comments this year.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_00: This year's going very well,
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: but I've gotten a lot of comments around, I hate school, but I love this class.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just, yeah, it's nice.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: We did a debate recently,
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: kind of like a,
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_00: We're talking about local issues in our town, local issues in our town.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_00: So we did a debate about that.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: It was kind of an exhibition debate.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I realized something important.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: I realized something important.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: Students are used to having things that are finished products.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_00: So like you sign up for this, you sign up for this, you go do this, you go do that.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it's already like, it runs smooth, it runs good because it's been around for a while.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I realized that Like with this debate we just did.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: And there were a couple of things that didn't go well and it was a little rough
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: in some spots, but overall it was, you know, it was solid.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I realized, oh, these kids have never done a startup before.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_00: These guys have never built something from brand new.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I realized I have to show them that you do a thing and it sucks.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then the next thing is better.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's that pattern of you have to do it and find out what breaks.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: Take good notes and then try it again.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what's been going on on the school front.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_00: But overall, I'm really happy with the year.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: I have probably the single largest amount of phone confiscations this year, which is great.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think I am by myself a quarter of the school's total, which is very funny to me.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_01: All by myself.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_01: You're saving them from technology.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_01: They'll thank you later in life.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: They don't know that now.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: They probably hate the shit out of you,
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: but down the line, they're going to go, man, he's looking out for us.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: He was right.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I tell him, I tell him, I'm like, guys, three years ago, I was sitting in the lunchroom.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: We're having a big meeting about cell phones.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I straight up raised my hand and said, ban him.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's what you got to do.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: Straight up, just ban him.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_00: So that's been fun.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_00: I also get to joke a bit too because I'm the government teacher.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like, guys, I have an institutional authority to do this.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I'm absolutely going to do it.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: So it's kind of an object lesson.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what's going on with school.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_00: Next week, I got some stuff coming up.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: There's going to actually be a big presentation in my town next month.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: They're having some local development people come in.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: And Alex, I have this feeling it's going to be a moment.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to be a moment for me to like to pitch my vision, to pitch my vision.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: And what I'm going to pitch is that we need to create a school.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: We need to create a university focused on 21st century challenges.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to try to pitch that to a bunch of hillbilly locals and be like,
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_00: listen, this is the
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: perfect spot.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: This is the perfect spot.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_00: This is the perfect spot to create a Jeffersonian style college,
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_00: a Jeffersonian style academy for dealing with the 21st century.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_00: So we're going to see.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to see what happens there.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_00: Beyond that, it's funny you're bringing up Skyrim because I'm playing Skyrim again.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_00: I've been wasting my time on that a little bit.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_00: I've been reading Frank Kidd's novel, Once Upon a Time in Argentina.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a few chapters deep into that and I'm enjoying it very much.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm excited to see where the book goes.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_00: What else am I doing?
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I'm finally rereading Not rereading,
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: but I got back into Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: I guess I took like an extended break and I've been reading that again.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, and then I've also got the second book of the...
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_00: Remember that book we read, Revelation Space?
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_00: The Inhibitor Trilogy.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I've got the second book of that, Redemption Arc.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm about halfway through that and enjoying it very much.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_00: That book is...
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_00: Because, you know, I'm kind of on the opposite end when it comes to sci-fi.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: They are my favorite, right.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_00: So the middle book of this trilogy,
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_00: Redemption Arc, that's apparently the book that influenced Mass Effect.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_00: And reading the book, I can see a lot of it in there.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that's kind of a fun little thing for me.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, like the main character is kind of like the Shepard character, but he's way more badass.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: He's way more of an asshole,
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_00: but they have like the Shepard character and then like the secret ships and,
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_00: you know, kind of like the overall arc is very Mass Effect, I guess.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, more like Mass Effect is very much like Inhibitor Trilogy.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I read the first one.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_01: I really liked the first one.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_01: I read Chasm City, which is kind of like the in-between.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, that's right.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_01: Isn't that a bit cyberpunk-y?
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_01: Chasm City was almost a cyberpunk novel.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's definitely a cyberpunk novel set in a space opera world.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_01: I would definitely put Chasm City as cyberpunk adjacent.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_00: What about the trilogy itself?
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_00: What about Revelation Space?
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's more like Baroque science fiction or Baroque space opera, really.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's like a gothic space opera kind of.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_01: I think that'd be the kind of ideal genre vibe to it.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's a little bit too space opera to be.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, to be cyberpunk.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_00: Also, some of the characters are too famous.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: Like the archaeologist guy, everybody knows who that dude is.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: Does he come back in the second novel?
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_00: He hasn't yet.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_00: So, I don't know.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: The lady, the lady that runs, the lady that runs Nostalgia for Infinity's back.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then her first sidekick.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the Russian chick and her like sidekick or the woman that kind of becomes her sidekick.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_00: They've been up to no good on Resurgent.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then it deals a lot with the, what are they?
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's the conjoiners.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_00: Those are like the, those are like the communist, like mind melding Borg type folk.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a lot about it's a lot about them and kind of their internal politics.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_00: They've been fighting a massive war with the Demarchants, the guys that run Yellowstone.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_00: So basically, basically shit is hitting the fan at the worst time.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_00: So I like how he's building it up because that first book.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_00: It was it really like it grinds on for a while.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then the last couple of chapters are just Christine.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like, oh, I agree.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like everything happens.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I like this ship, the infinity, whatever it's called.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: The universe.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's such a cool name for a ship.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_01: What are those?
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_01: What are the Space Mutant guys called again?
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: Space Mutant?
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the guys that run Nostalgia for Infinity.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_01: They're like all weird.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, the Ultras.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_00: The Ultras.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the Ultras, yeah.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they're kind of like bio-cyberpunks, cyborg people.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, pretty cool stuff.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_00: The Ultras are still terrifying.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_00: I
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: like that series.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, a lot of it has to do with the conjoiners finding out what
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_00: the inhibitors are actually,
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_00: like what the inhibitors actually are, and then their plan for basically not dying.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, not getting inhibited.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, not getting brutalized, murdered, murderlated forever.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_01: Getting holocausted by the inhibitor, like AIs or whatever.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, as long as everybody else gets holocausted, they're fine with that.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_00: They're fine with that.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_00: They're going to feed the universe to them, I think.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_01: I've got that one sitting on my Kindle, too, so I'm going to probably go into that when I do.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: I've got a lot of weird Japanese fiction.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know what I watched, actually, that I really enjoyed?
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_00: I was just going to say, yeah.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: I watched all of...
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_00: All of what?
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_01: ...To Cowboy Bebop by the same writer-director, and I actually like it more than Cowboy Bebop.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_01: I really freaking enjoyed it.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, Alex, Alex.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_00: I lost you there for a second.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_00: What did you watch?
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: Samurai Champloo.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, okay, okay, right, sure.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: And it's very much like a follow-up to Cowboy Bebop,
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_01: but instead of mixing jazz,
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_01: cowboys,
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_01: and space, it mixes hip-hop culture and 19th century Japan, like samurai culture.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_01: So you've got samurais tagging and stuff,
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_01: and they're doing flow battles while they're killing each other with swords,
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_01: and it's a really cool setting.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_01: It has really cool lo-fi hip-hop kind of music to it.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: Really enjoyed that one.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's the same thing,
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_01: like 26 episodes,
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_01: just like Helmut Bebop,
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_01: and characters that are very much similar to Spike and to Faye and stuff.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted to actually go on to our main topic.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_01: We've talked for a while already.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_00: Here, let me bring up one more thing,
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_00: because we can talk about this next week, but I'm on the last episode of Pluto.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, we need to do a full Pluto episode.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I wanted to tell you, I wanted to tell you the, I think you're a hundred percent correct.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_00: Pluto is excellent.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_00: And like when I was talking with my fellows in the class,
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_00: the energy around cyberpunk and the energy that they had for edge runners,
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_00: it felt like it's, this is vital stuff that actually needs to be watched.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's not garbage.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's not slop.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's, it reminded me of the good old days of when you would watch something
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_00: or you would read something and everybody was like, Oh yeah.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's something it's that it had that water cooler feel.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_00: That water cooler feel.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I missed that quite a bit.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_01: Pluto is a masterpiece of anime, but it's really a masterpiece of manga.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_01: And the same writer that did Pluto,
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_01: he did probably one of the best anime slash mangas out there called Monster,
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_01: which is also, I believe, on Netflix.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_01: So I recommend you watch that one also.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's a bit longer.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's really about like a doctor that saves the life of a young kid versus an older man.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_01: But the young kid ends up becoming like a Hannibal Lecter type serial killer.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_01: Nice.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_01: And he deals with the repercussions of,
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_01: he made the choice between saving this famous doctor,
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_01: this famous politician, or this young baby, you know, this baby.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, he could only...
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_01: Do surgery on one of the two and he chose the child,
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_01: but then the child grew up to be a monster, you know?
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_01: So it's basically like,
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_01: it's basically like, you know, you, you know, like that kind of cliche thing.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_01: And like, you know, if you go back in time, would you say maybe Hitler or something like that?
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's, it's basically that, right?
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like, yes, he did save time and shoot Woodrow Wilson.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_01: He basically saved baby Hitler.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_01: And now you've got this sociopathic cannibal lecture character that's doing all
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_01: kinds of evil stuff.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_01: And he's kind of have to deal with it.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_01: But he also I'm reading actually a manga series right now called 20th Century Boys.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it's one of the best things I've ever read.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not I'm talking about like Manga is manga.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's somewhat beneath novels, I guess you could say.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_01: Not always because the medium itself can become elevated to even a novel level.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I think in 20th Century Boys, it's absolutely at the novel level.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_00: Transcends the form.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_01: This definitely transcends the form to a very adult level, very insightful level.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't finished it yet because it's a pretty long one and I've only read
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_01: the first six books of it.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_01: It starts off with these young guys living in the 1960s Japan and
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_01: I take it back.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_01: It starts off with these young adult,
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_01: no, in their 20s, maybe pushing 30s, a group of Japanese guys.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_01: They're kind of losers.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of them are losers and stuff,
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_01: but they start coming across things that remind them there's a suicide,
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_01: that they're not really sure it's a suicide.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_01: And there's all these things that kind of pop up from their childhood and
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_01: from their childhood games.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_01: So like a mutual friend commits suicide and he leaves a letter saying,
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not committing suicide.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a symbol,
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_01: which is a symbol of They're childhood fantasies they used to write down and kind
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_01: of play when they were little kids back in the 60s.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_01: So it's very much like, in a way, it's a Japanese manga version of Stephen King's It.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_01: And there's all these events and they're,
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_01: you follow the characters through these big time jumps and some of them die along
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_01: the way.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_01: And they're all,
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_01: it all goes back to this like kind of comic book they wrote together as like,
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_01: you know, as an elementary school kid.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_01: And the group comes back together.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's just such a fantastic kind of mystery.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's one of these things where I can't really talk too much about it
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_01: because it's filled with spoilers.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_01: But I highly recommend it if you are into reading this kind of stuff.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's called 20th Century Boys by the same author who did Pluto and Monster.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_01: And he also wrote one that's really good called Billy Bad,
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_01: but that's a I'm not even going to talk about that one.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_01: But what I wanted to talk about was the idea of ideological psychosis.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_01: And what I mean by that is I have noticed, and I don't know if you guys at home, I don't know.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: Is the chat working?
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_01: Can somebody say something in chat?
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_01: Because I don't know if it's working.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_01: At least I'm not getting it.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I turned it off earlier because it seems like
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_01: it's kind of janky and funky.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's being janky.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_01: My internet's being janky.
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_00: Test, test, retard, test.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_00: Let's see.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so we should be talking to ourselves.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_01: I see yours.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_01: There you go.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_01: But I've noticed recently,
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_01: and I'm sure a lot of you guys can also attest to this,
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_01: that I see it, American Rider, that everybody's being kind of crazy lately.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not talking about just online.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_01: I'm talking about everywhere, man.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_01: The discourse,
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_01: the world,
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_01: the way people are approaching things,
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_01: everybody's is really edgy and testy and very just kind of insane, you know?
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I've realized that maybe,
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_01: you know, I've been thinking about it, like what's going on, right?
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_01: What's going on with everybody?
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_01: What's going on?
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we've reached this level of just like, you know, near like media psychosis, right?
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_01: There's this vibe where we can no longer have a discussion as humans,
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_01: as Americans, as anything.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_01: Our lives have become completely bifurcated between our internet world
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_01: where we try our best to be this weird,
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_01: authentic self,
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_01: but it's completely fabricated because you can look through Substack and Twitter
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_01: and stuff and everybody's playing a character.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_01: It makes me think, and in our impersonal, personal world, where none of us talk about anything.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_01: I could have good conversations with friends and acquaintances and coworkers
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_01: and stuff, but for the most part, you're always testing.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_01: You're always testing somebody when you meet somebody new.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_01: I meet somebody new at church and you spend the first hour of like,
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_01: oh, is this guy based or not?
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, should I drop this?
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_01: Do you want to scare the hose or do I want to ride?
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_01: I had a business meeting with an individual doing research yesterday and we went
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_01: to Starbucks and we met and He was a much older gentleman than me.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_01: He was about 20, I'd say 30 years older than me.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_01: And in the 60s,
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_01: and I'm like,
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_01: he was asking me questions because he was doing some research for a big project.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm just like, do I show some power levels here?
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_01: Do I really tell them what I really mean?
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_01: And there's this complete lack of trust.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's very...
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_01: Do I trust this guy?
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he's supposedly in the same faith as I am,
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_01: but I don't know because I'm a different generation.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's really tough.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_01: There's this level of fear and psychosis involved and everybody you interact with is fake.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_01: I've said this in the past in past episodes where the social media we interact
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_01: with today,
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_01: whether it's Substack or Twitter or any of that,
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_01: is very different than the social media we used to interact with before.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_01: It used to be that social media was kind of an ancillary element to our lives,
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_01: where it was something where we used it to find parties.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_01: you met the girl at the bar and then she added you on Facebook afterwards,
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_01: and then you're like, hey,
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'll be at the bar next week or something like that,
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_01: or you met a dude at a party and his friends and,
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_01: you go to a party,
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_01: you're like the new guy, you meet everybody, you know, you have a good time.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_01: By the time I got home,
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_01: I opened my laptop, and I had five new friend requests or ten new friend requests.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's like an address book.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_01: Right, it was like an address book.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_01: You knew who everybody was on Facebook.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_01: You knew who everybody was on MySpace, right?
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_01: There's still like the fakeness of it, you know?
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_01: But now it feels like almost 99% of it is like Instamedia influencers, guys selling you that.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you can't even trust video game stuff on that, right?
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_01: Because you know,
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_01: like the company's paying people to play these games and to make language videos,
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_01: you know?
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like this ultimate, like it's just so fake, you know?
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_01: And there's this obsession, right?
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I've noticed,
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_01: one thing I've really,
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_01: really noticed, right,
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_01: is that there's this obsession with negativity, right,
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_01: where it's everything is the end of the world,
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_01: if you were to open Substack right now,
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_01: France is burning,
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_01: it's being overrun by Islamic terrorists,
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_01: and you know,
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_01: you click on a few things and now you're on like shit lib world and you are,
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_01: you are like,
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_01: like the,
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_01: like Christo fascist nationalist Christians are running the country and there's
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_01: a war and there's 10 wars and this country is genociding these people
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_01: and these people are terrorizing these people.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_00: All the genocides.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, it's just this,
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_01: like, you know, it just, you want to just kind of poke your eyes out, man.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you're just like, well, I can't do this, you know?
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_01: And the craziest thing is that we have lost all level of objectivity, right?
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_01: Our entire online persona and our own personal personas in
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_01: the world right now have become fully subjective.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_01: Everything we do is a character.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, We used to put ourselves out on the internet.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_01: I used to be like, this is my live journal.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_01: This is Alex's live journal and everybody that's reading it knows me and whatever.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_01: But now this is my character.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_01: I am now a character in my own novel.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a main character in my own subjective reality.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_01: And any level of objectivity or anything that questions the narrative
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_01: of my worldview is automatically evil and wrong.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: And the world is exactly how I imagine it.
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I look at interactions.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_01: I was really interested in the interactions you were having with people this last few days.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_01: And there is no getting through to people because you're talking to...
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's like you're in a way,
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_01: we're in an active matter universe where the multiverse has cracked
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_01: and we're basically yelling at each other across shards of reality
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_01: because there is nothing in the world you will do to Right.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I understand.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not naive, right?
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_01: I know that in the past,
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_01: the news is always controlled and always an element of propaganda, all of it.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's always been.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_01: Since the first newspaper was written or the first,
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know,
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_01: town crier put out information from the king or whatever in the Middle Ages
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_01: or whatever, right?
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_01: You know it's propaganda, right?
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's always been propaganda.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_01: But there was still this element that there was some level of objective truth to it
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_01: where when something was reported, it was like a factual report.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_01: But now I feel like every piece of information on the internet,
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_01: even stuff that should be fully objective, Has become fully subjective, right?
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_01: And correct me if I'm wrong, right?
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_01: But all of us, including myself, I am very much guilty of this.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm pointing fingers at myself.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_01: When a news story happens,
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_01: like, for example, the stuff in Paris going on with the Paris stuff, right?
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_01: I don't go to the news site to get the news.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_01: I go to third-hand opinion sites and I see, what does so-and-so think about this?
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me my opinion on this.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_01: Let me find the people that I believe always.
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_01: And let me see if I agree if their opinion on
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_01: the subject matches my world's subjective worldview.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_01: And let me slot this into my data bank of information.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_01: And you see this.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_01: This creates a level of just ideological psychosis in all of us.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_01: It would be very easy of me to say,
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_01: well, that's the shit libs, for example, but it's really us also.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's all of us, right?
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_01: Where we don't really look at news or an actual factual news report
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_01: because they don't exist anymore.
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_01: So what we do is we get all our information through opinion pieces.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_01: Even when you turn on the news,
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_01: the actual television news, the old school news, it's still just opinion pieces.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_01: And CNN will give you your worldview.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_01: They will tailor the news for your subjective worldview.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_01: And Fox will do it for your subjective worldview.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then all people that are not mentally retarded boomers will find our news somewhere else.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_01: But we filter it through Substack articles that we agree with and that type
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_01: of thing.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why you can read something on France.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_01: From one person and you're like, what?
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_01: And then you read something from like Rod Dreher and you're like, what the fuck?
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_01: What does this have to do with Israel?
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_01: And you're like, I don't know if you've read his latest piece.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's just like insane.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't.
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_00: I avoid that guy now.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, me too.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_00: But like, I was like, oh, great.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_00: I almost have to call him a retard.
• 1:01:04
  SPEAKER_00: I pretty much don't care.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_01: But you know what I mean?
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, so everything is through these lens of like ideal ideological thing, right?
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, It creates a world where we have to find the news to match our worldview.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_01: And anything that deviates from it creates an insane level of cognitive dissidence.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not good, man.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's fucking our brain up.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's leading us to extreme nihilism.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll explain why I think it leads to extreme nihilism.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well,
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_00: let me push back slightly on just a couple of things because I think that I think
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_00: that it is a natural defensive reaction to the shattering of unitary consensus.
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I think, I suspect the event that really pushed it over completely was the war in Iran.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because the war in Iran was something that was building up for so long.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_00: For so long, decades, right?
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_00: The Holden blood feast meme,
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_00: like, please, just please bomb Iran, bomb Iran, you know, reasonable conservatives.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_00: It was something that was building up for so long.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_00: And then it's been in this shattered environment.
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_00: Very soon after that began, I thought, no one has any idea what's going on.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody knows.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody knows anything.
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it fully 100% went
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_00: Defending your side.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_00: And you saw a lot of people who jumped to this side or to that side,
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_00: and they burned all of their social capital.
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_00: I saw a lot of guys that just whatever it is they were wanting to say,
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_00: it was almost as if the missiles and the bombs and the shooting didn't matter.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_00: It was all completely online.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_00: And the missiles and the bombs and the shooting were simply a mechanism by which
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_00: to trigger the online virus.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_00: It may actually be the world's first properly information age war.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:03:07
  SPEAKER_01: So the war in Ukraine is also very similar to it.
• 1:03:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_00: So this happened that pushed it,
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_00: at least from my perspective,
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_00: that's the event that finally pushed it over completely.
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I think what you're looking at is you have a group,
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_00: you have a group of Completely 100% not savvy people,
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_00: what I would call the data cattle,
• 1:03:34
  SPEAKER_00: who are rushing to the pagan media god of their choice, right?
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_00: Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, whatever, you know, NGO.
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_00: NGO, shitlib, USA, you know, USAID, whatever you want.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then people on the right do this too,
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_00: where it's like,
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_00: okay, you know, Nick Fuente says, my God now, you know, or whatever.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think you saw this with like the Fishback campaign in Florida.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_00: There was a bit of this going on as well, where it's like, we got to get this guy in.
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_00: We got it, you know, basically everyone's running to their, everyone's running to that.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone's running to the, to the gods of their house.
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:04:13
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_00: I suspect that guys like you and me,
• 1:04:19
  SPEAKER_00: and when I say guys like you and me,
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking about the people that I know at school,
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_00: where we're talking to the bros, right?
• 1:04:27
  SPEAKER_00: Bros, what do you think's going on?
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think's going on?
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_00: And we're probably not perfect at this,
• 1:04:33
  SPEAKER_00: and I'm probably not as busy with this as I think I am,
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_00: but I do think there is also an element of,
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_00: there's at least the sense that nothing can be trusted,
• 1:04:43
  SPEAKER_00: or that there's always a sense that Our perspectives are probably completely wrong.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_00: But at the same time, what else are we supposed to do?
• 1:04:50
  SPEAKER_01: What are we supposed to do?
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_00: There is no other fucking option.
• 1:04:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there is no other fucking option.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_00: So like the only choice you can make is the least bad choice.
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know,
• 1:05:01
  SPEAKER_00: running to the pagan gods of your house,
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_00: like CNN, Fox News, like all that's like Roger Ayer.
• 1:05:05
  SPEAKER_00: Like, no, no, no, that that you're one shot at your data cattle.
• 1:05:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like you got to just unplug and burn your social media.
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_00: While there are some folks who can at least,
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_00: it's not perfect,
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_00: it's not good,
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_00: but at least there's a sense of,
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_00: I guess what I'm trying to say,
• 1:05:23
  SPEAKER_00: Alex, is if you are rooted in place at all, you're probably okay.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_00: Or at least you're more okay than others.
• 1:05:31
  SPEAKER_00: Where it's like, all this stuff is happening out there.
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't fucking matter.
• 1:05:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to work tomorrow.
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to church Sunday.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_00: I have my wife.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_00: I have my life.
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_00: I have my kids.
• 1:05:41
  SPEAKER_00: Just normal people who are rooted in something are probably doing okay.
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe, maybe now.
• 1:05:47
  SPEAKER_00: But okay is very relative because it's not the kind of okay we enjoyed 30 years ago.
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_00: You're right.
• 1:05:55
  SPEAKER_00: Something very bad is happening.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_00: There's a darkness.
• 1:05:59
  SPEAKER_01: There's a darkness over everybody.
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's Well,
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_01: a good example, to ignore the two,
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_01: concurrent wars going on right now,
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_01: because I can,
• 1:06:12
  SPEAKER_01: there's actually, like,
• 1:06:13
  SPEAKER_01: I do have some,
• 1:06:14
  SPEAKER_01: a note to go back to both the Ukraine and the Iran war,
• 1:06:18
  SPEAKER_01: not war,
• 1:06:18
  SPEAKER_01: special operations,
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_01: or ironically,
• 1:06:21
  SPEAKER_01: there's two wars that both,
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_01: no sides of the parties are agreeing that they're even called wars.
• 1:06:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's special operations or, you know, operation so-and-so.
• 1:06:31
  SPEAKER_01: But to leave that aside,
• 1:06:33
  SPEAKER_01: this kind of like mega geopolitical elements aside,
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_01: a good example of what I'm talking about,
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_01: this completely subjective insanity,
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_01: is the Lindsay Clancy trial and the thing with the Cornell stuff.
• 1:06:51
  SPEAKER_01: Now, we're talking about these two things that We don't really know the facts.
• 1:06:56
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we don't really know all the facts to it.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_01: And everything we've been told about both of these stories has been,
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_01: like right away,
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_01: the Lindsay Clancy trial thing should have been a very cut and dry situation, right?
• 1:07:08
  SPEAKER_01: There was, you know...
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_01: Killing and the punishment and that kind of stuff.
• 1:07:13
  SPEAKER_01: But it turned into an ideological,
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_01: subjective topic that tore the people that paid attention to it and have.
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_01: People were arguing.
• 1:07:27
  SPEAKER_01: Husbands and wives were arguing about it and that kind of stuff.
• 1:07:30
  SPEAKER_01: And it was a cultural, subjective, ideological battle.
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_01: The media turned it into that.
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's wild because in a way, Lindsay Clancy stuff has nothing to do with any of us.
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very cut and dry justice kind of situation that has nothing to do with us.
• 1:07:51
  SPEAKER_01: And then the same thing with the whole Cornell rape thing going on.
• 1:07:56
  SPEAKER_01: We don't know any of the details.
• 1:07:59
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure some people in the chat or some people listening have read into it.
• 1:08:03
  SPEAKER_01: I swear I have tried to avoid the whole topic because I just...
• 1:08:08
  SPEAKER_01: I just don't fucking care,
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_01: to be honest.
• 1:08:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's ridiculous.
• 1:08:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's...
• 1:08:14
  SPEAKER_01: But there's so many,
• 1:08:16
  SPEAKER_01: like already,
• 1:08:16
  SPEAKER_01: like, you know, I open Substack and every other post is about it, you know?
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_01: And it leads to a... What it leads is it leads to nihilism and narcissism, right?
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_01: Where we need to put this Story about people that have nothing to do with us
• 1:08:33
  SPEAKER_01: into our own ideological pocket.
• 1:08:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_01: we have to take the situation,
• 1:08:37
  SPEAKER_01: this event that we are given incomplete information,
• 1:08:42
  SPEAKER_01: inaccurate information often, right?
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_01: And we need to become obsessed with it.
• 1:08:46
  SPEAKER_01: And people are becoming obsessed with it,
• 1:08:48
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:08:48
  SPEAKER_01: doxing people and going after people and, you know, protesting and stuff, right?
• 1:08:54
  SPEAKER_01: And we live in a world that is,
• 1:08:56
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:08:57
  SPEAKER_01: it's a complete, like,
• 1:08:59
  SPEAKER_01: Because of the complete lack of objectivity,
• 1:09:01
  SPEAKER_01: of true objectivity,
• 1:09:03
  SPEAKER_01: of looking at it from a community standpoint,
• 1:09:05
  SPEAKER_01: from a people standpoint, we can't do that.
• 1:09:07
  SPEAKER_01: We can't do that anymore.
• 1:09:08
  SPEAKER_01: It has to be the narrative of whether it's feminism or anti-feminism.
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm saying this,
• 1:09:15
  SPEAKER_01: the anti-feminist types on both the Lindsay Clancy and the Cornell thing going on,
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_01: They're not any more correct than the people on the other side in a way, right?
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_01: Because there's a complete lack of nuance in their takes also, you know, where...
• 1:09:31
  SPEAKER_01: And they're poisoned by their own ideology on this topic.
• 1:09:35
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that leads,
• 1:09:36
  SPEAKER_01: when you completely remove,
• 1:09:39
  SPEAKER_01: when you become untethered from objective reality, you enter into a psychotic state.
• 1:09:46
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, what is psychosis?
• 1:09:47
  SPEAKER_01: Psychosis is a disconnect from reality.
• 1:09:51
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what we're all experiencing right now because of the internet and because
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_01: of the way our world is.
• 1:09:56
  SPEAKER_01: We have become psychotic.
• 1:10:01
  SPEAKER_00: It makes me think of like, it's almost like the true crimification of everything.
• 1:10:04
  SPEAKER_01: Correct.
• 1:10:05
  SPEAKER_01: Where it's already there.
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_00: We're just watching a true crime thing and it has the same, it has the same psychosis.
• 1:10:11
  SPEAKER_00: It has the same film negative experience of morality,
• 1:10:15
  SPEAKER_00: the film negative experience of morals and like, you know, like the Cornell thing.
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to hit that too hard, but like we are nitpicking a ridiculous situation.
• 1:10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Seriously, just fucking beat everybody involved until they're bloody and move on.
• 1:10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:10:33
  SPEAKER_00: That situation specifically is so ridiculous.
• 1:10:35
  SPEAKER_00: And we're arguing, I mean, we're arguing how many dildos can fit on the head of a pin.
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_00: Seriously, like, guys, fuck off.
• 1:10:41
  SPEAKER_00: Like, this is ridiculous.
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_00: But that's what happens.
• 1:10:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's what happens when you become detached from reality,
• 1:10:47
  SPEAKER_00: detached from reality, detached from God.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like, it's, you know, the whole consent argument.
• 1:10:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:10:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:10:55
  SPEAKER_00: At what point is the degenerate party no longer consent?
• 1:10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Fuck off.
• 1:10:59
  SPEAKER_00: You're all idiots for being there in the first place.
• 1:11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, absolutely in the building and burn it down.
• 1:11:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that's an,
• 1:11:04
  SPEAKER_01: that's an,
• 1:11:04
  SPEAKER_01: an objective view, you know, where like, you know, I'm not defending anybody.
• 1:11:07
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like it's all the whole,
• 1:11:09
  SPEAKER_01: the fact that it happened is abhorrent all around,
• 1:11:13
  SPEAKER_01: you know, whether it was consensual or non-consensual.
• 1:11:17
  SPEAKER_01: Even if it was consensual 100%, it's still disgusting and abhorrent.
• 1:11:23
  SPEAKER_01: If one of our Ivy League institutions that we put so much tax money on and
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_01: so much respect and cultural cachet on these people,
• 1:11:32
  SPEAKER_01: these young people going to these Ivy League colleges,
• 1:11:35
  SPEAKER_01: if any time in history, any time in our patriarchy or whatever, in the past...
• 1:11:42
  SPEAKER_01: This event happened,
• 1:11:44
  SPEAKER_01: we would find it abhorrent and disgusting and we'd flog every single one
• 1:11:48
  SPEAKER_01: of them involved in the situation.
• 1:11:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's where we lose the objectivity where it's above this level.
• 1:11:55
  SPEAKER_01: They're all criminals in
• 1:11:56
  SPEAKER_00: our mind.
• 1:11:59
  SPEAKER_01: Even if there was no actual sexual assault or rape involved,
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_01: and I'm not making any statement, I don't know the story to be honest.
• 1:12:07
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't matter.
• 1:12:09
  SPEAKER_01: Even if there's none of that involved and it was all super consensual or whatever,
• 1:12:14
  SPEAKER_01: it's still absolutely abhorrent and disgusting to me.
• 1:12:17
  SPEAKER_01: The whole event itself, the whole situation is disgusting.
• 1:12:22
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
• 1:12:23
  SPEAKER_01: but we are approaching in such a subjective way and approaching everything
• 1:12:27
  SPEAKER_01: in this very subject.
• 1:12:28
  SPEAKER_01: And this is with everything with like transgender stuff and,
• 1:12:32
  SPEAKER_01: you know, the no Kings protest and immigration stuff.
• 1:12:35
  SPEAKER_01: We can never have a true objective conversation about this.
• 1:12:39
  SPEAKER_01: Everything is about feelings and how I feel and what my opinion is and what
• 1:12:44
  SPEAKER_01: the social media influencers opinion is.
• 1:12:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it creates a world of like just Centering yourself as a main character in this narrative.
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_01: And it creates a world of nihilism and despair, really.
• 1:12:57
  SPEAKER_01: It creates victimhood because we are told that I'm supposed to care about this.
• 1:13:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm supposed to care.
• 1:13:05
  SPEAKER_01: Let's take this on a quick objective way.
• 1:13:07
  SPEAKER_01: Let's look at the Cornell thing.
• 1:13:11
  SPEAKER_01: I'm supposed,
• 1:13:12
  SPEAKER_01: according to the media and all the conversation,
• 1:13:14
  SPEAKER_01: I'm supposed to care about a bunch of rich kids that go to a university
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_01: that I'll never go to,
• 1:13:18
  SPEAKER_01: I've never been to,
• 1:13:19
  SPEAKER_01: I've never even been around, I've had zero interest in whatsoever.
• 1:13:24
  SPEAKER_01: And what am I supposed to do about it?
• 1:13:26
  SPEAKER_01: What am I supposed to do about it?
• 1:13:28
  SPEAKER_01: What do I care about Cornell or Cal State San Diego or UC Irvine or any university?
• 1:13:34
  SPEAKER_01: I have nothing to do with that.
• 1:13:37
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm supposed to care.
• 1:13:38
  SPEAKER_01: And you have these women and these men passionately writing screeds and essays
• 1:13:43
  SPEAKER_01: about this and that kind of thing.
• 1:13:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:13:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:13:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:14:07
  SPEAKER_01: Everything you're writing,
• 1:14:08
  SPEAKER_01: you're commenting,
• 1:14:09
  SPEAKER_01: you're talking about,
• 1:14:10
  SPEAKER_01: including this conversation,
• 1:14:11
  SPEAKER_01: is ultimately a subjective LARP where we are centering ourselves as main characters
• 1:14:16
  SPEAKER_01: in a media narrative that is so disconnected from the reality.
• 1:14:21
  SPEAKER_01: It truly is a cyber psychosis episode.
• 1:14:25
  SPEAKER_01: We're living in a communal psychotic episode because we have no control over this.
• 1:14:31
  SPEAKER_01: So that alone leads to depression, just nihilism.
• 1:14:37
  SPEAKER_01: Do these things run in the psychic energy?
• 1:14:39
  SPEAKER_01: Is this like a Warhammer 40k thing?
• 1:14:42
  SPEAKER_00: The warp is breaking through and it only functions because we're like this.
• 1:14:49
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:14:49
  SPEAKER_01: And in a way, like,
• 1:14:50
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:14:51
  SPEAKER_01: I like to think of,
• 1:14:52
  SPEAKER_01: I like to think of,
• 1:14:53
  SPEAKER_01: I was talking to my buddy who's in the chat right now,
• 1:14:57
  SPEAKER_01: and we were talking about Lord of the Rings,
• 1:14:59
  SPEAKER_01: we were talking about the planter, you know?
• 1:15:02
  SPEAKER_01: And the planter,
• 1:15:03
  SPEAKER_01: when you look at the planter,
• 1:15:05
  SPEAKER_01: let's say you're new to Lord of the Rings,
• 1:15:07
  SPEAKER_01: or you're new to,
• 1:15:08
  SPEAKER_01: you know, the fantasy kind of element, you look at those balls, right?
• 1:15:12
  SPEAKER_01: And you're like, well, that's a great tool, right?
• 1:15:15
  SPEAKER_01: We're almost like, we're all Saruman in a way, right?
• 1:15:20
  SPEAKER_01: And we, the planter is our social media.
• 1:15:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's our news.
• 1:15:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's our subjective, you know, and our infotainment element, right?
• 1:15:30
  SPEAKER_01: And you touch that thing and now you see everything.
• 1:15:32
  SPEAKER_01: You see everything, right?
• 1:15:35
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, you're slammed with all this stuff, this information.
• 1:15:40
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what leads to despair.
• 1:15:42
  SPEAKER_01: What happened to Saruman?
• 1:15:44
  SPEAKER_01: What was the main thing?
• 1:15:46
  SPEAKER_01: What was Saruman's fall in Lord of the Rings?
• 1:15:49
  SPEAKER_01: Saruman's fall in Lord of the Rings was despair, okay?
• 1:15:53
  SPEAKER_01: He wasn't a villain initially.
• 1:15:54
  SPEAKER_01: He was one of the Gandalfs, right?
• 1:15:57
  SPEAKER_01: One of the great wizards.
• 1:15:59
  SPEAKER_01: And he allowed himself to become corrupted by the planter because of despair.
• 1:16:04
  SPEAKER_01: He was shown all the evil.
• 1:16:08
  SPEAKER_01: He was shown the Parises and the Cornells and the Ukraine war.
• 1:16:12
  SPEAKER_01: He was just showing all that stuff.
• 1:16:14
  SPEAKER_01: And that led to despair and he led to despair and nihilism.
• 1:16:19
  SPEAKER_01: And that despair and nihilism made him narcissistic.
• 1:16:23
  SPEAKER_01: And he thought, I can change things.
• 1:16:26
  SPEAKER_01: I can make things different.
• 1:16:28
  SPEAKER_01: And you see that in people.
• 1:16:31
  SPEAKER_01: People like the crazies on Substack.
• 1:16:34
  SPEAKER_01: I wonder sometimes, I look at some of these posts, I'm like, who are these people?
• 1:16:39
  SPEAKER_01: What is behind a screen?
• 1:16:41
  SPEAKER_01: What human being is posting this insanity?
• 1:16:45
  SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
• 1:16:45
  SPEAKER_01: I want to go to their house and be like,
• 1:16:51
  SPEAKER_01: Calm down.
• 1:16:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's okay.
• 1:16:54
  SPEAKER_01: I want to just give them a hug or something like that because these people are in
• 1:16:57
  SPEAKER_01: the grips of just subjective psychosis, right?
• 1:17:01
  SPEAKER_01: And it's terrifying because when It's a slippery slope.
• 1:17:06
  SPEAKER_01: You have this despair, nihilism, narcissism, which go hand in hand.
• 1:17:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then it leads to a complete,
• 1:17:14
  SPEAKER_01: it makes you,
• 1:17:15
  SPEAKER_01: when you reach that stage of psychosis,
• 1:17:17
  SPEAKER_01: you become easily controlled and manipulated.
• 1:17:21
  SPEAKER_01: Because somebody that's in the grips of psychotic narcissism is
• 1:17:25
  SPEAKER_01: a very easily manipulated individual.
• 1:17:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:17:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:17:31
  SPEAKER_00: Just mention the Jews online, and you will ruin the day of billions of people.
• 1:17:36
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
• 1:17:37
  SPEAKER_00: Or whatever, or say Palestinians, or say troops, or say any of the words.
• 1:17:42
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:17:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like there can be no nuance, no nuance.
• 1:17:46
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:17:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know.
• 1:17:49
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what the answer is, man.
• 1:17:50
  SPEAKER_01: I think,
• 1:17:51
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:17:51
  SPEAKER_01: I think in a way I,
• 1:17:54
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:17:55
  SPEAKER_01: so I posted this the other day, like I think it was yesterday that I posted this.
• 1:17:59
  SPEAKER_01: I posted a note saying, hey, I'm sorry for not being as chatty as I usually am.
• 1:18:04
  SPEAKER_01: I usually comment on everybody's stuff.
• 1:18:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I have been reading everybody's stuff.
• 1:18:08
  SPEAKER_01: I just haven't had the energy to fully engage worthwhile.
• 1:18:11
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't want to be a drive-by poster.
• 1:18:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I realized that I'm dealing with my own stuff.
• 1:18:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'm dealing with personal stuff right now.
• 1:18:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I realized that none of this shit matters.
• 1:18:25
  SPEAKER_01: Right now,
• 1:18:28
  SPEAKER_01: if Ukraine or the Middle Eastern democracy or whatever explodes into
• 1:18:35
  SPEAKER_01: a giant fireball of doom and death or it gets absorbed into
• 1:18:41
  SPEAKER_01: the active matter multiverse or whatever – It would not change my life one damn bit.
• 1:18:48
  SPEAKER_01: And there's nothing I can do about it.
• 1:18:50
  SPEAKER_01: I have zero control.
• 1:18:53
  SPEAKER_01: I am no different than a medieval peasant affecting the silk trade coming from China.
• 1:19:01
  SPEAKER_00: I don't even know it exists.
• 1:19:04
  SPEAKER_00: What news?
• 1:19:05
  SPEAKER_00: What news of the world, Alex?
• 1:19:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that this fantasy where we are part of the world
• 1:19:15
  SPEAKER_01: That we matter, right, is narcissistic.
• 1:19:19
  SPEAKER_01: I had a,
• 1:19:23
  SPEAKER_01: not a friend,
• 1:19:23
  SPEAKER_01: but an acquaintance, and she's a very nice person, and I like her very much.
• 1:19:30
  SPEAKER_01: And she got really into the whole anti-ice thing.
• 1:19:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:19:35
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, and she's went out and protested and, you know, and dude, come on, man.
• 1:19:40
  SPEAKER_01: We live in, I live in like bumfuck nowhere.
• 1:19:43
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:19:44
  SPEAKER_01: In the scope of the United States.
• 1:19:46
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 1:19:47
  SPEAKER_01: I am, I am in like the, the, the, I don't know, D tier like urban center, right?
• 1:19:54
  SPEAKER_01: I live between Savannah and Charleston, right?
• 1:19:56
  SPEAKER_01: It is absolutely not interesting, right?
• 1:19:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's nothing we do here that can affect anybody, right?
• 1:20:03
  SPEAKER_01: Even our like state senator is like Nancy Mace, like nobody cares.
• 1:20:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's like we're, it's an entertainment type of thing, right?
• 1:20:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm a fan of her, by the way.
• 1:20:13
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just like, You're out there protesting.
• 1:20:18
  SPEAKER_01: You went out with a bunch of boomers to protest, and there's no damn ice out here.
• 1:20:22
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody cares.
• 1:20:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's not Los Angeles.
• 1:20:27
  SPEAKER_01: What are you doing?
• 1:20:29
  SPEAKER_01: Why are you stressing out about this stuff?
• 1:20:33
  SPEAKER_01: Go take care of your kids, man.
• 1:20:35
  SPEAKER_01: Take your kids to get ice cream instead.
• 1:20:36
  SPEAKER_01: Take them to the fucking zoo or something like that.
• 1:20:40
  SPEAKER_01: Why are you heartbroken and broken up about media images that have nothing to do?
• 1:20:46
  SPEAKER_01: Did you cry when Elian Gonzalez was deported by Bill Clinton back in the 90s or whatever?
• 1:20:52
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just...
• 1:20:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's just like, I think we need to stop being main characters.
• 1:20:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think the media is using the idea of democracy against us in a way
• 1:21:05
  SPEAKER_01: that it pumps us up thinking that we do have a voice, that we can make a difference.
• 1:21:09
  SPEAKER_01: And the reality is we can't.
• 1:21:11
  SPEAKER_01: And social media and the internet kind of tricks us into thinking
• 1:21:16
  SPEAKER_01: because we're monitoring the situation.
• 1:21:19
  SPEAKER_01: We are having discourse about stuff.
• 1:21:22
  SPEAKER_01: You have these guys spending all day.
• 1:21:25
  SPEAKER_01: You look at some of these accounts and they have no PFP.
• 1:21:27
  SPEAKER_01: They've never written anything of value or any actual, maybe some AI slop here and there.
• 1:21:34
  SPEAKER_01: But they post hundreds of posts about topics and stuff,
• 1:21:38
  SPEAKER_01: commenting on everything, the current news thing.
• 1:21:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, dude, nobody cares.
• 1:21:44
  SPEAKER_01: You're shouting into a hurricane of information that is just completely...
• 1:21:51
  SPEAKER_01: Like dead data.
• 1:21:52
  SPEAKER_01: You're just creating an infinite amount of just dead data.
• 1:21:56
  SPEAKER_01: And the craziest thing is that,
• 1:21:59
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:22:00
  SPEAKER_01: we used to think,
• 1:22:01
  SPEAKER_01: and this is to go back to the Ukraine war and the
• 1:22:03
  SPEAKER_00: Iran situation and stuff.
• 1:22:06
  SPEAKER_01: In the early days of the internet and in,
• 1:22:10
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:22:10
  SPEAKER_01: I would say like the 90s and stuff,
• 1:22:12
  SPEAKER_01: we truly believed that we would be able to have unfiltered access to reality.
• 1:22:21
  SPEAKER_01: That the internet and the tools of like instant communication were going
• 1:22:25
  SPEAKER_01: to give us Ultimate transparency and unfiltered reality,
• 1:22:29
  SPEAKER_01: you know, like that we were going to be able to absorb.
• 1:22:33
  SPEAKER_01: And we thought that the next wars and the next thing will be fully documented.
• 1:22:37
  SPEAKER_01: We'd fully understand everything.
• 1:22:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yet we have a war that's been going on for four years now in Ukraine between
• 1:22:44
  SPEAKER_01: a superpower with a billion nukes in the middle of Europe, right?
• 1:22:49
  SPEAKER_01: Not in fucking Mogadishu, Somalia, or some other country that nobody's had, you know,
• 1:22:56
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking in the middle of Europe and we have no real images from it.
• 1:23:04
  SPEAKER_01: There is almost a complete and total media silence.
• 1:23:08
  SPEAKER_01: And what we do have is Exceptionally propagandized information or Instagram videos
• 1:23:15
  SPEAKER_01: or those like disgusting,
• 1:23:16
  SPEAKER_01: like kill cam,
• 1:23:17
  SPEAKER_01: like drone footages and like just,
• 1:23:19
  SPEAKER_01: you know, uninhibited evil violence that we see from that conflict.
• 1:23:24
  SPEAKER_01: But we don't We don't have an understanding of it whatsoever.
• 1:23:27
  SPEAKER_01: We don't know what's going on.
• 1:23:30
  SPEAKER_01: We know less about this war than guys living in World War II knew about the Battle
• 1:23:37
  SPEAKER_01: of El Alamein or the invasion of Italy.
• 1:23:40
  SPEAKER_01: And this is in the era where more freaking telegraphs were the main way
• 1:23:45
  SPEAKER_01: of communicating across the ocean and letters and
• 1:23:50
  SPEAKER_01: The telephone wires and the news from the D-Day or the news from the invasion
• 1:23:55
  SPEAKER_01: of Italy or whatever had to be put,
• 1:23:57
  SPEAKER_01: the reels from the film had to be put on film,
• 1:24:00
  SPEAKER_01: like actual reels and shown in movie theaters during World War II in America.
• 1:24:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yet we know less about Ukraine and Iran than the Americans living in the States
• 1:24:12
  SPEAKER_01: during World War II.
• 1:24:14
  SPEAKER_01: We have less news and less actual factual information about that.
• 1:24:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's insane, right?
• 1:24:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's dystopic, right?
• 1:24:23
  SPEAKER_01: We're living in an insane fucking world, right?
• 1:24:26
  SPEAKER_01: Because the only information I can get about Ukraine right now,
• 1:24:30
  SPEAKER_01: if I try to find some,
• 1:24:31
  SPEAKER_01: is subjective information filtered to the opinions of obvious...
• 1:24:36
  SPEAKER_01: Actors in this situation,
• 1:24:38
  SPEAKER_01: whether it's pro-Ukrainian people on the main media stuff or pro-Russian weirdos
• 1:24:46
  SPEAKER_01: and degenerates on Instagram or Telegram or whatever, it's all complete and total.
• 1:24:52
  SPEAKER_01: There are people right now living in the United States that think that Russia is
• 1:24:56
  SPEAKER_01: a third world country and that Moscow...
• 1:24:59
  SPEAKER_01: But honestly, though, honestly, though, who cares?
• 1:25:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's Moscow.
• 1:25:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like you're over here, man.
• 1:25:24
  SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
• 1:25:24
  SPEAKER_01: But what I'm saying is that I'm trying to show how like,
• 1:25:27
  SPEAKER_01: how schizophrenic and psychotic,
• 1:25:29
  SPEAKER_01: like if you get into this,
• 1:25:30
  SPEAKER_01: if you truly like,
• 1:25:31
  SPEAKER_01: and then if you tell yourself, well,
• 1:25:33
  SPEAKER_01: I need to be informed,
• 1:25:34
  SPEAKER_01: I need to believe in this, I need to have an opinion on the Ukraine war, right?
• 1:25:40
  SPEAKER_01: And you're living in a completely psychotic media environment that has no actual truth.
• 1:25:47
  SPEAKER_01: For a fact, we've closed tons of bases in the Middle East, right?
• 1:25:51
  SPEAKER_01: But we don't know that officially.
• 1:25:53
  SPEAKER_01: We've known through trickles on Instagram stuff, but nobody knows officially.
• 1:25:57
  SPEAKER_01: You ask your boomer that's pro-Iran war or whatever,
• 1:26:01
  SPEAKER_01: and they're like, oh, we're all kicking ass.
• 1:26:02
  SPEAKER_01: But then it's like, but how come we don't have a fleet in Bahrain anymore?
• 1:26:07
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 1:26:07
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:26:08
  SPEAKER_01: What's going on there?
• 1:26:09
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't know.
• 1:26:10
  SPEAKER_01: And how absurd is that, that we are living in the 21st century?
• 1:26:15
  SPEAKER_01: We are living in the second quarter of the 20th century, by the way, 21st century, right?
• 1:26:21
  SPEAKER_01: And we know less about the last nine months of actual combat engagements
• 1:26:27
  SPEAKER_01: that our country's been in than the guys during Vietnam,
• 1:26:30
  SPEAKER_01: during Korea,
• 1:26:31
  SPEAKER_01: during World War II, and during World War I did at the same exact time frame.
• 1:26:35
  SPEAKER_01: Which to me is really insane.
• 1:26:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yet, if you were looking for opinions, subjective opinions, it's an infinite amount.
• 1:26:45
  SPEAKER_01: And there's an infinite amount of online psychosis about it.
• 1:26:48
  SPEAKER_01: So it's terrifying when you think about it that way because we obsess about it.
• 1:26:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so how do we disconnect?
• 1:26:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 1:26:59
  SPEAKER_01: I made a comment on Jack Donovan's Substack,
• 1:27:04
  SPEAKER_01: and he had a thing kind of very similar to what I'm saying about kind
• 1:27:08
  SPEAKER_01: of like disconnecting and stuff.
• 1:27:10
  SPEAKER_01: And a part of me that like,
• 1:27:13
  SPEAKER_01: and he was talking about how like,
• 1:27:14
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:27:16
  SPEAKER_01: And to basically control you,
• 1:27:17
  SPEAKER_01: this kind of stuff is meant to control you to make you into thinking
• 1:27:20
  SPEAKER_01: that you actually have power and then you realize you don't have power.
• 1:27:23
  SPEAKER_01: So you feel little and you go into despair and that's how you control.
• 1:27:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's how we get controlled.
• 1:27:27
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:27:27
  SPEAKER_01: But a big thing about it is like, yes, I guess I I want to disconnect.
• 1:27:32
  SPEAKER_01: I don't care anymore.
• 1:27:33
  SPEAKER_01: I don't care about Lindsey Clancy.
• 1:27:35
  SPEAKER_01: I don't care about Cornell.
• 1:27:36
  SPEAKER_01: I don't care about any of that shit anymore.
• 1:27:40
  SPEAKER_01: I'm starting to make a personal rule that if it does not affect me specifically,
• 1:27:46
  SPEAKER_01: if it has zero effect on my life and my family, I no longer care about it.
• 1:27:53
  SPEAKER_01: And yes, even stuff like war causes gas prices.
• 1:27:56
  SPEAKER_01: So that does affect me in a way.
• 1:28:00
  SPEAKER_01: I can't do anything about it, my dudes.
• 1:28:02
  SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
• 1:28:03
  SPEAKER_01: I can't worry about that, right?
• 1:28:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's like me worrying about a hurricane in California,
• 1:28:09
  SPEAKER_01: El Nino typhoon in California or something like that when I live in South Carolina.
• 1:28:13
  SPEAKER_01: It has no effect on me.
• 1:28:15
  SPEAKER_01: I cannot prepare my backyard for it.
• 1:28:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the key is to truly disconnect,
• 1:28:21
  SPEAKER_01: to truly go against the machine and reject that level of stuff and refocus your life
• 1:28:28
  SPEAKER_01: on Christ, on faith, on your family, on your local, on the little.
• 1:28:34
  SPEAKER_01: On your,
• 1:28:35
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:28:36
  SPEAKER_01: on your plants in your backyard,
• 1:28:38
  SPEAKER_01: if you have a backyard, on hobbies that really bring joy and happiness to your life.
• 1:28:44
  SPEAKER_01: And realize that, like, you know, like, I think that we need.
• 1:28:49
  SPEAKER_01: To kind of make a shit test in a way, right?
• 1:28:51
  SPEAKER_01: When we're approaching a topic,
• 1:28:53
  SPEAKER_01: like imagine yourself scrolling through Substack and you see a post
• 1:28:57
  SPEAKER_01: by Schmuckatelli, McSchmuck, right?
• 1:29:00
  SPEAKER_01: And it's about like another,
• 1:29:04
  SPEAKER_01: A histrionic, hysteric post about Muslims invading France or something like that.
• 1:29:10
  SPEAKER_01: Whatever happened to the Muslims invading Spain?
• 1:29:12
  SPEAKER_01: That disappeared all of a sudden.
• 1:29:14
  SPEAKER_01: So it makes you question the narratives even from our own side of the aisle.
• 1:29:19
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody talks about it anymore.
• 1:29:20
  SPEAKER_01: Did it just stop?
• 1:29:21
  SPEAKER_01: What happened?
• 1:29:22
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
• 1:29:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think you need to see that and go,
• 1:29:26
  SPEAKER_01: okay, what do I gain by reading this and engaging with this, right?
• 1:29:31
  SPEAKER_01: Is this going to cause a net negative in my own psychological mental health, right?
• 1:29:36
  SPEAKER_01: Am I going to get to the point where I'm going to add an extra level of concern
• 1:29:40
  SPEAKER_01: and worry about something that I have zero,
• 1:29:43
  SPEAKER_01: you know, even a negative ability to affect me, right?
• 1:29:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:29:50
  SPEAKER_01: Like Brian just said in the chat, in the end, it's all in God's hands.
• 1:29:56
  SPEAKER_01: So be it, right?
• 1:29:57
  SPEAKER_01: Like to take the quote, you know, from Slaughterhouse-Five, right?
• 1:30:02
  SPEAKER_01: So be it, you know, we cannot control this, right?
• 1:30:05
  SPEAKER_01: We have no control.
• 1:30:07
  SPEAKER_01: And why must we destroy ourselves physically,
• 1:30:10
  SPEAKER_01: emotionally, psychologically in this kind of media circus, right?
• 1:30:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that's what I'm going to start doing from now on.
• 1:30:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'm
• 1:30:23
  SPEAKER_01: What do I gain out of this?
• 1:30:25
  SPEAKER_01: Is the 20 minutes I spend fretting about this and building up this extra level
• 1:30:30
  SPEAKER_01: of darkness in my life,
• 1:30:31
  SPEAKER_01: is it worth,
• 1:30:33
  SPEAKER_01: I could be reading about Edgerunners instead,
• 1:30:36
  SPEAKER_01: or I could be enjoying a work of art,
• 1:30:38
  SPEAKER_01: or I could be enjoying some piece of art or music or something like that.
• 1:30:46
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, man.
• 1:30:47
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, yeah, you can say, but Alex, if you do that, then, you know, you're just a victim.
• 1:30:51
  SPEAKER_01: You're just going to, you know, you're not going to matter, right?
• 1:30:54
  SPEAKER_01: You're not going to, you know, you've given up your democratic involvement in the community.
• 1:31:01
  SPEAKER_01: You know what?
• 1:31:03
  SPEAKER_01: Do I really?
• 1:31:05
  SPEAKER_01: Does my post about the Ukraine war really do anything?
• 1:31:08
  SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
• 1:31:10
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, Alex, you never know when BB is going to call you up and be like, bro, what should I do?
• 1:31:14
  SPEAKER_01: Right, exactly.
• 1:31:15
  SPEAKER_00: You're never informed.
• 1:31:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm going to have Vladimir Putin listen to Black Ibis Social Club and be like,
• 1:31:21
  SPEAKER_00: oh, what should we do, right?
• 1:31:23
  SPEAKER_00: Vladimir Putin has entered the chat.
• 1:31:25
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, this is our moment, guys.
• 1:31:27
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, to be fair, though, to be fair, we did have, what's his name?
• 1:31:34
  SPEAKER_01: Dugan was a listener of the Black Ibis Social Club.
• 1:31:37
  SPEAKER_01: We're so many FBI lists because of that.
• 1:31:39
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, so like, you know,
• 1:32:00
  SPEAKER_01: Here we are
• 1:32:02
  SPEAKER_00: joking about it.
• 1:32:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then, oh, wait.
• 1:32:06
  SPEAKER_01: Alexander Dugan is going to be talking to Vladimir over there and be like,
• 1:32:10
  SPEAKER_01: hey, man, these weird American perverts talking about anime and stuff.
• 1:32:14
  SPEAKER_01: They got some good insights on the geopolitics of Eurasia.
• 1:32:18
  SPEAKER_01: And then, bam, I get shot by the CIA.
• 1:32:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so it's...
• 1:32:26
  SPEAKER_01: I get called into Arasaka headquarters tomorrow.
• 1:32:30
  SPEAKER_01: Ultimately,
• 1:32:31
  SPEAKER_01: that's the level of narcissism that we live with,
• 1:32:35
  SPEAKER_01: that we think that our opinions matter,
• 1:32:37
  SPEAKER_01: that we think that we're going to move the dial or change something like that.
• 1:32:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not, man.
• 1:32:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's not.
• 1:32:43
  SPEAKER_01: The only dialogue we can change is in the people around us.
• 1:32:46
  SPEAKER_01: And we do that to showing love towards each other and being together
• 1:32:50
  SPEAKER_01: and spending time with our families.
• 1:32:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:32:53
  SPEAKER_01: And we cannot,
• 1:32:54
  SPEAKER_01: we cannot like, like,
• 1:32:56
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:32:57
  SPEAKER_01: I like the term you used,
• 1:32:58
  SPEAKER_01: data cattle,
• 1:32:59
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:33:00
  SPEAKER_01: but even more so than data cattle,
• 1:33:03
  SPEAKER_01: so many of us, so many people have become just straight up zombies, right?
• 1:33:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:33:08
  SPEAKER_01: The zombies.
• 1:33:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, this is,
• 1:33:10
  SPEAKER_00: this is,
• 1:33:11
  SPEAKER_00: this is what I've said before that the 20th century produced corpses,
• 1:33:14
  SPEAKER_00: the 21st century produces zombies.
• 1:33:16
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:33:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's how, that's how they get you.
• 1:33:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's how they get you.
• 1:33:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually a fate worse than death.
• 1:33:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's a fate worse than death.
• 1:33:23
  SPEAKER_01: It is a fate worse than death.
• 1:33:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's interesting to finish it up and roll it back to what we were talking
• 1:33:29
  SPEAKER_01: the beginning, which is that video game active matter.
• 1:33:31
  SPEAKER_01: I told you in that world, the universe collapsed upon itself in this quantum disaster.
• 1:33:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's all sci-fi mumbo jumbo, but it collapsed in this quantum disaster.
• 1:33:45
  SPEAKER_01: Each map and stuff kind of has a story where it's kind of stuck in time.
• 1:33:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of like shards of reality.
• 1:33:52
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the enemies you've come across are these soldiers.
• 1:33:56
  SPEAKER_01: They're called like the Turned or something like that.
• 1:33:59
  SPEAKER_01: And they're basically...
• 1:34:01
  SPEAKER_01: They are soldiers that were responding to the disaster as the disaster happened, right?
• 1:34:07
  SPEAKER_01: And they've kind of become like zombies, but they're like quantum zombies in a way.
• 1:34:12
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the interesting things that they're doing,
• 1:34:15
  SPEAKER_01: the AI is programmed, they act like they're responding to the disaster, right?
• 1:34:20
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:34:21
  SPEAKER_01: So in the,
• 1:34:22
  SPEAKER_01: in the game,
• 1:34:22
  SPEAKER_01: you hear their audio chatter on like their radio chatter and they're,
• 1:34:25
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:34:26
  SPEAKER_01: they're truly responding to the disaster, but it's been years since it's happened.
• 1:34:30
  SPEAKER_01: They're basically stuck in this, like, in this reactive, like, you know, nonsense.
• 1:34:35
  SPEAKER_01: They're kind of ghosts in a way.
• 1:34:38
  SPEAKER_01: They're stuck in this quantum time loop.
• 1:34:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I feel like that's what we are.
• 1:34:44
  SPEAKER_01: So many of us are these just turned.
• 1:34:46
  SPEAKER_01: We are somewhere in our timeline, somewhere in our world.
• 1:34:50
  SPEAKER_01: There was some kind of a psychological psychic universe disaster on a spiritual level.
• 1:34:58
  SPEAKER_01: And we're all fucking stuck in it,
• 1:35:00
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:35:00
  SPEAKER_01: where we're constantly repeating the ideological subjective ideas of the past,
• 1:35:06
  SPEAKER_01: you know?
• 1:35:07
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I look on Instagram and there's people that are like...
• 1:35:12
  SPEAKER_01: They're wearing 2000s era clothes and listening to Limp Bizkit and stuff.
• 1:35:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, what's going on in this world?
• 1:35:21
  SPEAKER_01: What year is it?
• 1:35:24
  SPEAKER_01: If you were to take an objective view of the world like an alien,
• 1:35:28
  SPEAKER_01: you would not know what era we're living in right now because it's so...
• 1:35:31
  SPEAKER_01: You'd be like, I don't know, is it the 90s?
• 1:35:33
  SPEAKER_01: Is it the 2000s?
• 1:35:34
  SPEAKER_01: Is it the 80s?
• 1:35:35
  SPEAKER_01: Because our culture is in a quantum psychosis, right?
• 1:35:40
  SPEAKER_01: Where there's nothing new is coming out, nothing is going on.
• 1:35:43
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I suspect that has to do with the electronic communication that has to do
• 1:35:48
  SPEAKER_00: with social media.
• 1:35:48
  SPEAKER_00: I was saying the other day that essentially culture has accelerated the speed
• 1:35:52
  SPEAKER_00: of light and so it is frozen.
• 1:35:56
  SPEAKER_00: The information age has accelerated everything up to the speed of light and now it is frozen.
• 1:36:01
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, we are actually stuck.
• 1:36:05
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:36:06
  SPEAKER_01: Instead of getting clarity, all the technology was supposed to give us clarity.
• 1:36:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's given us static.
• 1:36:14
  SPEAKER_00: Stasis, not static, stasis.
• 1:36:17
  SPEAKER_01: Stasis and just data, like static.
• 1:36:21
  SPEAKER_01: We cannot make anything of the signal.
• 1:36:23
  SPEAKER_01: We cannot translate.
• 1:36:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's because nothing grows anymore.
• 1:36:28
  SPEAKER_00: The cycles have been killed.
• 1:36:32
  SPEAKER_00: There's no growth.
• 1:36:33
  SPEAKER_00: There's no birth.
• 1:36:33
  SPEAKER_00: There's no death.
• 1:36:35
  SPEAKER_00: There's no moving through the phases of life.
• 1:36:36
  SPEAKER_00: There's no moving through the phases of man.
• 1:36:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's just...
• 1:36:40
  SPEAKER_00: The boomers are in control.
• 1:36:41
  SPEAKER_00: Everything sucks.
• 1:36:43
  SPEAKER_00: There's another war in the Middle East.
• 1:36:44
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing ever happens.
• 1:36:45
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:36:46
  SPEAKER_01: There's been a war in the Middle East since you and I were born, my man.
• 1:36:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:36:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's what the Middle East is for, man.
• 1:36:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's gall.
• 1:36:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's gall, baby.
• 1:36:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's what it's for.
• 1:36:57
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:36:58
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, we end one, we start another one.
• 1:37:00
  SPEAKER_01: We end one, we start another one, you know?
• 1:37:02
  SPEAKER_01: And it's nothing ever changes.
• 1:37:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, we look in a way like, you know, Fukuyama's end of history.
• 1:37:10
  SPEAKER_01: You know, he said it was a positive thing.
• 1:37:13
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we are somewhat, he was somewhat right, you know?
• 1:37:16
  SPEAKER_01: We are at the end of history.
• 1:37:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's what it feels like.
• 1:37:18
  SPEAKER_01: But we're at the end of history, but it's the shitty version, you know?
• 1:37:20
  SPEAKER_01: Where nothing, like, it's just a
• 1:37:23
  SPEAKER_00: constant rehashing of it.
• 1:37:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think we need to re-watch the Trinity episode of The Return.
• 1:37:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think so, too.
• 1:37:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's where the gears begin to slow down.
• 1:37:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's where the machine began to grind to a halt, and now it's just got a light.
• 1:37:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's exactly where we're at.
• 1:37:43
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like I'm Dougie, my dude.
• 1:37:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's where I'm at.
• 1:37:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Dougie.
• 1:37:51
  SPEAKER_01: Most of us are Dougie and his weird wife.
• 1:37:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's the reality we're stuck in.
• 1:37:59
  SPEAKER_00: Talking backwards in the Black Lodge with our doppelganger out there.
• 1:38:06
  SPEAKER_01: We need to exit the Black Lodge is what we need to do.
• 1:38:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, does that make me Coop's doppelganger?
• 1:38:13
  SPEAKER_00: Because instead of smacking people, I just say, shut up, retard.
• 1:38:17
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:38:18
  SPEAKER_00: Just keep slapping, move on.
• 1:38:20
  SPEAKER_01: You're the son of the sheriff, man.
• 1:38:22
  SPEAKER_01: You're the son of the sheriff.
• 1:38:24
  SPEAKER_01: What's the guy, not the sheriff, the son of the deputy?
• 1:38:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:38:28
  SPEAKER_01: He's a bad kid.
• 1:38:30
  SPEAKER_01: Bad kid, yeah.
• 1:38:31
  SPEAKER_01: Brian's right.
• 1:38:32
  SPEAKER_01: Coffee will pull us out of it.
• 1:38:34
  SPEAKER_01: Coffee will pull us out of it.
• 1:38:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:38:37
  SPEAKER_00: Coffee and pie.
• 1:38:38
  SPEAKER_00: Coffee and pie, but guys, you'll be fine.
• 1:38:40
  SPEAKER_01: All right, guys, so we've been talking for about one and a half hours.
• 1:38:44
  SPEAKER_00: It was a wonderful chat.
• 1:38:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that was fun, man.
• 1:38:47
  SPEAKER_01: I go hang out with my daughter for a bit.
• 1:38:48
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to play a game.
• 1:38:51
  SPEAKER_01: We've created this game that we play.
• 1:38:54
  SPEAKER_01: And it's actually pretty interesting.
• 1:38:55
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what we call it yet.
• 1:38:57
  SPEAKER_01: Basically, we turn off all the lights in the house.
• 1:39:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I hide three items.
• 1:39:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm basically a monster.
• 1:39:09
  SPEAKER_01: And she hides inside this tent that she has in her room.
• 1:39:12
  SPEAKER_01: And the tent is a safe zone.
• 1:39:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I walk around in the dark with a flashlight aimed at my face.
• 1:39:18
  SPEAKER_01: So I really can't see anything besides the beam of the flashlight.
• 1:39:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm blasting crazy monster noises on my phone, like Halloween horror noises.
• 1:39:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I stomp around.
• 1:39:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I walk in a predetermined path.
• 1:39:33
  SPEAKER_01: And her job is to sneak around the house memorizing my predetermined path.
• 1:39:40
  SPEAKER_01: And find the three items and put them on the table.
• 1:39:43
  SPEAKER_01: And then when all three are found, it's the end of the game.
• 1:39:48
  SPEAKER_01: Or I catch her.
• 1:39:48
  SPEAKER_01: And if I catch her, it's the end of the game.
• 1:39:51
  SPEAKER_00: Alex, you created a slob jank extraction shooter.
• 1:39:56
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't create this.
• 1:39:57
  SPEAKER_01: My eight-year-old created this, okay?
• 1:39:59
  SPEAKER_00: Your eight-year-old is building slob jank.
• 1:40:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's fantastic.
• 1:40:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, she created this Five Nights at Freddy's kind of horror game
• 1:40:09
  SPEAKER_00: that we play.
• 1:40:10
  SPEAKER_01: And her wife's part of it, too.
• 1:40:11
  SPEAKER_01: She's also hiding.
• 1:40:12
  SPEAKER_01: So in about five minutes, I'm going to turn all the lights off in the house.
• 1:40:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm going to be stomping around, making monster noises, trying to find them.
• 1:40:20
  SPEAKER_01: And the only place that I can't go into is the tent because the tent is the safe zone.
• 1:40:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's the quantum spaceship.
• 1:40:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's the spaceship.
• 1:40:30
  SPEAKER_00: So that's funny, man.
• 1:40:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, go have fun, man.
• 1:40:33
  SPEAKER_00: Why are you talking to me?
• 1:40:34
  SPEAKER_00: Why are you talking to me?
• 1:40:35
  SPEAKER_00: Go, go.
• 1:40:35
  SPEAKER_00: I know.
• 1:40:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I'm going to do.
• 1:40:37
  SPEAKER_00: We'll be back next
• 1:40:38
  SPEAKER_01: week, right?
• 1:40:39
  SPEAKER_01: Want to do next week?
• 1:40:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, yeah.
• 1:40:41
  SPEAKER_00: Or two weeks
• 1:40:42
  SPEAKER_01: or two weeks.
• 1:40:43
  SPEAKER_01: We'll, we'll decide.
• 1:40:43
  SPEAKER_01: We'll decide.
• 1:40:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:40:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:40:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:40:46
  SPEAKER_00: Let's see what the vibe is.
• 1:40:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, next week I might have some very exciting news.
• 1:40:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so if it's good news, we can do it.
• 1:40:52
  SPEAKER_00: If it's bad news, I might be too annoyed.
• 1:40:54
  SPEAKER_01: I feel the same way.
• 1:40:55
  SPEAKER_01: I'm in this place.
• 1:40:57
  SPEAKER_01: So let's say that let's stick to,
• 1:40:58
  SPEAKER_01: let's assume maybe next week if we feel like it,
• 1:41:01
  SPEAKER_01: but we'll, otherwise we'll stick to our two week schedule that we decided on.
• 1:41:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, for all you guys, for all you guys at home listening to the recorded episode, not live.
• 1:41:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Thanks for listening, everybody in the chat.
• 1:41:12
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for joining us today.
• 1:41:14
  SPEAKER_01: Once again, I do recommend you guys catch up on Edgerunners Season 1 on Netflix.
• 1:41:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's a great, great cyberpunk anime.
• 1:41:22
  SPEAKER_01: One of the best things I've ever seen.
• 1:41:24
  SPEAKER_01: The new season is coming out on October 20th.
• 1:41:28
  SPEAKER_01: If you're into Slavijing video games, hop on Active Matter.
• 1:41:31
  SPEAKER_01: And if you have an Xbox or whatever, you can send me an invite.
• 1:41:35
  SPEAKER_01: Send me a Substack message and I'll give you my little screen name.
• 1:41:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's Daddy Loach.
• 1:41:41
  SPEAKER_01: Daddy Loach.
• 1:41:43
  SPEAKER_00: Mexican Daddy and Daddy Loach.
• 1:41:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we're pretty good.
• 1:41:46
  SPEAKER_01: And then we have a few of the regular chat guys inside the game playing.
• 1:41:53
  SPEAKER_01: Also highly recommend you catch up on your cyberpunk knowledge because I'm going
• 1:41:58
  SPEAKER_01: to be doing a lot of episodes on Neuromancer.
• 1:42:00
  SPEAKER_01: Again, we're going to revisit that.
• 1:42:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think Neuromancer came out the year I was born.
• 1:42:04
  SPEAKER_01: So Neuromancer was about 44 years old, my dudes.
• 1:42:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:42:08
  SPEAKER_00: I got to reread that.
• 1:42:09
  SPEAKER_00: I got to reread that.
• 1:42:09
  SPEAKER_00: I've been thinking about that.
• 1:42:10
  SPEAKER_00: I got it sitting on my shelf at school and I'm just like, yeah, it's time.
• 1:42:15
  SPEAKER_01: I think when I'm done with Neuromancer,
• 1:42:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to read Frank Kidd's book, and then we can invite Frank Kidd on the show.
• 1:42:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we got to have Frank on.
• 1:42:23
  SPEAKER_01: That would be so much fun.
• 1:42:26
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody has so much great stuff to say about his book,
• 1:42:29
  SPEAKER_01: and it looks really interesting,
• 1:42:31
  SPEAKER_01: and it's about Argentina and fighting Chinese, and it's interesting.
• 1:42:35
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I like the Chinese.
• 1:42:41
  SPEAKER_01: There's that.
• 1:42:44
  SPEAKER_01: Don't let Arasaka send you into nihilistic psychosis.
• 1:42:50
  SPEAKER_01: Try to take something I said to heart and try to play a game with yourself
• 1:42:55
  SPEAKER_01: when you're about to engage in a conversation on Substack or on Twitter or whatever.
• 1:42:59
  SPEAKER_01: Be like, is this worth it?
• 1:43:02
  SPEAKER_01: Do I gain anything out of it?
• 1:43:04
  SPEAKER_00: The answer is almost always no.
• 1:43:06
  SPEAKER_01: If it's no, then just say fuck it.
• 1:43:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, just leave it to Fisto to call him a retard.
• 1:43:13
  SPEAKER_01: It'll be fine.
• 1:43:14
  SPEAKER_01: Or just disengage.
• 1:43:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's better for your soul.
• 1:43:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's fine.
• 1:43:18
  SPEAKER_01: All right, guys.
• 1:43:19
  SPEAKER_01: Fisto, like always, thank you so much.
• 1:43:21
  SPEAKER_01: And for all of you guys, I love you and good night.
• 1:43:23
  SPEAKER_01: Have a great night.
• 1:43:23
  SPEAKER_00: Good night.