Carl Benjamin - Making Sense Of 2021's Madness | Modern Wisdom Podcast 280

Carl Benjamin is the YouTuber formerly known as Sargon Of Akkad, a political commentator and host of The Lotus Eaters Podcast. It feels like a decade of history has happened already in 2021 so I invited Carl on to try and make sense of the madness. Expect to learn Carl's opinion on Steven Crowder suing Facebook, what a future with WallStreetBets in will look like, whether there is a common thread between JK Rowling and Jordan Peterson, whether American national pride is dwindling and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 3.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Check out Carl's new site - https://www.lotuseaters.com Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #carlbenjamin #sargonofakkad #chriswilliamson - 00:00 Intro 00:24 Lotus Eaters & Safe Spaces 06:18 Steven Crowder Suing Facebook 17:41 Decolonising Mars 20:48 Carl’s Thoughts on Wall Street Bets 30:12 The Power of the Individual 34:11 Is JK Rowling Too Big to be Cancelled? 42:03 Carl’s Views on Trump 50:33 Is the American Republic Dying? 1:02:19 Where to Find Carl - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Hello beautiful people of Podcast Land. Welcome back. My guest today is Carl Benjamin, the YouTuber formerly known as Sargon of Akkad, a political commentator and host of the Lotus Eaters podcast. It feels like literally a decade of history has happened already in 2021. So I invited Carl on to try and make sense of the madness. Today, expect to learn Carl's opinion on Steven Crowder suing Facebook, what a future with Wall Street bets in will look like, whether there is a common thread between J.K. Rowling and Jordan Peterson, whether American national pride is dwindling, and much more. Also, he recorded it locally on the most beautiful, lovely, brand-new Lotus Eaters podcast studio setup ever. So this is

• 0:44Chris Williamson?

  just like, it's like butter. It's like I'm pouring very, very lovely, warm, British butter into your ears. So enjoy, enjoy the butter.

• 0:55Speaker 01

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• 1:04Speaker 02

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• 1:11Speaker 03

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• 1:16Speaker 02

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• 1:19Speaker 03

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• 1:20Speaker 02

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• 1:26Speaker 04

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• 2:19Chris Williamson?

  But now it's time for the wise and wonderful Carl Benjamin.

• 2:41Chris Williamson?

  Man, I've just been on Twitter. Is it possible to browse any trends on there without it being hijacked by K-pop and Bollywood posts?

• 2:49Carl Benjamin?

  I don't know why you'd ask me. I'm not on Twitter.

• 2:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, no, but you use it, right? You look at the trending side.

• 2:55Carl Benjamin?

  I have to, yeah. To be honest with you, I'm always glad when I log into Twitter and it's some K-pop nonsense that's trending instead of Jews, Nazis or Holocaust. Because these terms trend on Twitter all the time and it just makes me think, God, this is an absolute hell site. You know, I use like, you know, Twitter alternatives and never did these terms ever trend. And so it's like, right, okay, that's very interesting and very revealing about the mindset of the people who use various platforms, isn't it?

• 3:24Chris Williamson?

  Another studio, another YouTube channel. How's everything going with the Lotus Eaters stuff?

• 3:29Carl Benjamin?

  It's going really, really well, really well. Everything's up and running. Everything is self-sufficient. We have lots of subscribers, which essentially means patrons, but pay for everything and we work very hard providing them with premium content, articles from academics, book club reviews that we do and the sort of podcasts that we can't put on YouTube because we're talking about subjects that are essentially verboten in some ways. And so it's been a sort of real lease of life as well to be able to have some freedom to talk about things in a way that the editors at Silicon Valley don't approve.

• 4:04Chris Williamson?

  Man, that's so good. What's the name from?

• 4:07Carl Benjamin?

  The name is from the Odyssey. The island of the Lotus Eaters is the first island that Odysseus and his crew arrive at. And the reason I like it, and I've always found it like, it's always been sat in my mind because. In every other island and in every other event that the crew in Odysseus goes through, there's danger, there's some kind of deep danger that underlies either it's a very obvious brutal one, like the men getting eaten by the cyclopes, or they get changed into animals by Circe or whoever. And so there's, there's an ill will, an evil will that underpins all of the other islands. But on the island of the Lotus Eaters, there doesn't appear to be. We only get like a few paragraphs in the Odyssey. And so a lot

• 4:50Carl Benjamin?

  has been extrapolated, extrapolated from that that doesn't really exist in the text. Like, you know, but the, the thing it seems to represent in my view is a paradigm shift. And so the, the, the crew he sends out to the island to meet the island, the, the islanders, they just don't want to return to the ships. They just decide that they like the place they're in and that's where they want to stay. And Odysseus has to get other crewmen to go and drag them back to the ships, which is kind of bad news for them really because everyone dies on Odysseus's journey apart from Odysseus. So Odysseus is the only one of them who makes it back to Ithaca alive. And so you can't help but think, man, it probably would have been better for the crew members if they'd just stayed where they were, you know, they would have been okay.

• 5:31Chris Williamson?

  So Lotus Eaters, Lotus Eaters is your safe space?

• 5:34Carl Benjamin?

  Yeah, actually, that's, that's kind of the way I've been looking at it. Like, because, because we've got a bit of a buffer from the vulnerability of social media deplatforming, you know, which is obviously the sword of Damocles that hangs above all our heads these days. If we speak about anything that's slightly unorthodox. The, the, you know, the worry is that, because obviously you don't want to get deplatformed, it'd be bad, you know, your reach would be severely diminished and things like this. But the, the way that the business has been set up has been very, I mean, I guess I'd say conservative, but I suppose a better word would be prudent. So that if we got deplatformed off of all of Silicon Valley platforms, we would still be employed to do something by the people

• 6:18Carl Benjamin?

  who support and subscribe to us. So yeah, it, it, in many ways, it's kind of like, um, kind of like a safe space where people are afraid of being persecuted.

• 6:27Chris Williamson?

  Is that what we're going to see more of? Do you think creators using the existing channels as like the front end of the funnel? And then trying to get people off that and onto an owned platform as quickly as possible? I see a lot of people talking about building up newsletters and mailing lists now for that same reason.

• 6:42Carl Benjamin?

  I'm, excuse me.

• 6:48Carl Benjamin?

  Sorry, I don't know if you caught my throat there. It seems to be inevitable, doesn't it? It seems to be there's no particular choice, because if Silicon Valley is subject to nothing but its own arbitrary whims, and their arbitrary whims are if you misgender someone, we're going to delete your Twitter account. We're going to, if you say the wrong thing about Covid or the US election, or something like that, we're going to delete your YouTube account. It becomes obvious that it's necessary for people to take steps to protect themselves. And I mean, I got banned from Twitter for swear words, insults against, I was arguing with Nazis in 2017, and I got banned because I was too offensive to the Nazis,

• 7:30Carl Benjamin?

  which, fair enough, you know, that's not part of like the deplatforming operation. And so I don't regard my ban from Twitter as part of like the political deplatforming, although maybe there was a political aspect to it because I'm not a leftist. You know, if I was a leftist, maybe I'd been given some grace or something, but I don't know. So I won't assume. But and so I haven't actually been deplatformed from anything, really. I'm still on Facebook. I'm still on YouTube, still on, you know, all of the other Silicon Valley platforms. But if they can deplatform the current sitting president in a, in a, in only a few days and mercilessly delete all of his accounts, I don't think anyone should take any risks, even though, like I said, I don't think I'm that risky or extreme or anything like that. I mean, you

• 8:14Carl Benjamin?

  know, I'm a Democrat, I'm for democracy, I'm for incrementalism, like, you know, an evolutionary sort of political perspective. I'm not a revolutionary. I don't want to burn things down. I don't want civil wars. I don't want any of these things. And so I don't think I'm very spicy politically. I think I'm kind of a liberal centrist in many ways, you know, in most ways. Yeah, basically. Yeah. And that's actually the curry I choose when I'm not in India as well, because I'm quite millet toast. But but I do oppose political correctness, and that can get you in trouble. So you've got to make your preparations as best as you can make them, I think.

• 8:46Chris Williamson?

  Did you see that Steven Crowe is suing Facebook? Have you seen this?

• 8:50Carl Benjamin?

  I heard about it, but I haven't looked into it. Could you tell me?

• 8:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah. So he's got that, what's it called? Asian lawyer John or something? Unfair competition.

• 9:00Carl Benjamin?

  Half Asian, I believe.

• 9:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, half Asian lawyer John. I've just mis-raced him there.

• 9:05Chris Williamson?

  Unfair competition, fraud, false advertising and antitrust. So apparently they removed Crowder's election stream, which is the biggest independent election stream ever. And he's saying that they've been throttling his reach, even though Facebook told the press in Congress that they don't do that anymore. That's big, man.

• 9:20Carl Benjamin?

  Well, that is huge. Yeah. And if anyone's in a position to actually leverage Facebook and social media in this way, it's Crowder. And I saw his comeback video, which was excellent, really, really high quality production for a guy who runs a YouTube channel with his team. I was like, wow, that's actually amazing. But yeah, no, I'm glad that sort of counterweights like Steven Crowder exist. I don't agree with everything he says, obviously, but then who agrees with everything anyone says? I don't even agree with everything I say. You know, so I'll look back a year or two in the past and be like, I was an idiot. You know, I didn't understand that at all. What was I doing? But I'm glad that the sort of plurality of opinions in the marketplace still sustains people like Steven Crowder, you know, because I think that's necessary and healthy.

• 10:05Chris Williamson?

  Does anyone believe that tech platforms are impartial anymore?

• 10:09Carl Benjamin?

  I don't see how you could. I don't think they make any pretense to impartiality anymore either, especially when the partiality is baked into the terms and conditions. Twitter being the best example of you can't misgender someone. It's like, sorry, there is only one ideology, probably in all of human history, that has made a big deal about gender identity and, you know, gender expression in the way that the left is now. We all know what ideology is, is intersectionality. And it's very obvious that this is therefore an intersectional domain if you can actually lose your account. I mean, I've had friends who have been suspended for calling people dude, which I consider to be a fairly gender neutral.

• 10:51Carl Benjamin?

  An informal, gender-neutral way of referring to a person. And it's also sort of part of a, how to describe it? Like a sort of informal, social pattern of behaviour. Where if you call someone dude, you realise that you're setting the context for the interaction. So like, you know, if I say, hey mate, you know, I don't expect you to call me sir or be formal or say, you know, mister this or whatever. And you realise that we're having a friendly conversation that has goodwill behind it. You know, it implies a kind of goodwill when I enter into the conversation. And so like, in my world, in the social spheres I exist in, calling someone dude isn't me saying you're a man.

• 11:32Carl Benjamin?

  Whereas in the sort of, I guess, San Francisco Californian left-wing view of things, actually, oh my goodness, you've just misgendered. This is a high crime against Twitter's Terms of Service. You must be banned.

• 11:42Chris Williamson?

  It's always the worst possible implication, like the worst possible way that I can take.

• 11:49Carl Benjamin?

  Interpretation, sorry. There definitely is an element of that. But I also think there's a kind of dogmatic view of certain words, like the F-word, right? That we can't say anymore. Now, I grew up watching South Park and from watching South Park, I actually had not connected really that word to homosexuality. I connected that word to a kind of insufferable childish behaviour, which is not, in my opinion, limited to people who are gay. And so I didn't consider it to be a particularly bad word, but it's now been, I guess, reclaimed by the LGBT lobby, the sort of activist lobby, and stigmatized. So now that word is actually a very bad word.

• 12:34Carl Benjamin?

  That's the equivalent of like the N-word and things like this. It's, oh god, now we've actually, you know, from a word being actually relatively benign and, you know, not trivial, has become something again you can get banned or suspended from these platforms. It's like, wow, that's interesting. Weaponising words that had otherwise lost their power, I would have thought was the opposite of the direction that the progressives would want to go in. But I suppose it does give them a useful tool with which to sort of browbeat and... Harry, the, uh, the wrong thinkers. So.

• 13:04Chris Williamson?

  I've been trying to think about why social media always seems to throttle people like Steven Crowder, like right instead of left. And I get it that like in the eyes of big corporations, that the left wing's associated with compassion and virtue and the right's associated with intolerance and bigotry, even if that may sometimes seem like it's actually being flipped on its head. But I can't work out if that explains it all. Like, is there an element that because conservatives, especially in America, they tend to play quite fast and loose with claims in a way which is more easily disputed. So the crazier claims of the left seem to be more esoteric and unfalsifiable, whereas the crazier claims of the right seem to be at least rooted in reality, even if they're unhinged.

• 13:45Carl Benjamin?

  Do we, can we, can we think of an example of each of those? Just so, uh.

• 13:49Chris Williamson?

  So when we're talking about semantic overload, when people are playing around with what words mean, with all lives matter versus Black Lives Matter, for instance. Um, but for people on the right, if it would be to do with, um, perhaps the way that, uh, workers are being moved out of jobs about stats to do with immigration, they may be inflated and they may be wrongly cited, but at least they're falsifiable.

• 14:19Carl Benjamin?

  Yes. Um, okay. Yeah. The, yeah, the one. So the way, the, the way that I think about it, um, and from the way you've just laid that out, um, is the fact that the left, the academic left at the moment seems to be essentially rooted in semantics games, uh, the redefinition of words, in fact, and the right, in my experience, and I'm not saying this is exclusive or anything, actually tends to just use the common English language definitions of words. And this is, this is why it's actually quite a pleasure to read someone like Thomas Sowell, right? Because he just lays out, he, he never has to redefine a word because he just uses it in the common English parlance, because he's not trying to be a pretentious academic about it. He's trying

• 15:02Carl Benjamin?

  to just lay out, look, this is the data, this is my interpretation of said data in a common sense, straightforward manner. Uh, do you find this persuasive? And it turns out that actually millions of people finds this, find this. Explosive, whereas the left have to come up with a very, as you said, esoteric ways of looking at things. And actually, well, let me tell you what the real definition of a woman is. Let me tell you about the real definition of patriarchy is. Let me tell you about the real, and it's what, hang on a second. You know, I didn't agree to any of these real, real definite redefinitions. Uh, and I don't agree to the definition you finally come out with. Um, the classic example being of course, the definition of a woman for a, for a right winner, I guess. Uh, which means essentially just someone who isn't politicized into the culture war. Uh, a woman in the dictionary is an adult human female, which is a good and sensible definition.

• 15:46Carl Benjamin?

  It's got particular limits, it has essential characteristics and it's not self referential. So you're not going around in a circle when you're trying to define it. So it makes sense. You don't need to actually think about that any, any further really. And that's probably why it's the basic definition. Whereas the left's version is a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman, which is actually a really concerning definition, isn't it? Because you realize, well, hang on a second, A, you haven't defined the word. A woman is anyone who identifies as a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman is anyone identifies. And so you've got this recurring loop in the definition of the word. And so the sentence is never actually completed, so we don't have a definition there anyway. Uh, obviously being self referential, it gives us no information on what a woman actually is.

• 16:28Carl Benjamin?

  Other than some kind of being that identifies as this empty word, this, this word that has yet to be given any content. Um, and also the weird thing about it, and I've been thinking about this a lot because like what the, the, the important thing about definitions is also what's excluded from the definition, not just what's included. Because if you take out the term adult from the definition of woman, then what you're saying is that non adults and maybe even non humans. Uh, if you take out the, the human part could identify as women. And that's really weird, isn't it? Because I've actually had a child come up to me when I was doing my Southwest MEP tour. Um, I actually had like a 12 year old girl come up to me and say something like, I'm a woman, uh, you know, don't oppress me.

• 17:13Carl Benjamin?

  I'm, you know, because I'm a feminist or something. And it was really weird because it's like, look, you're actually not a woman, you know, you're a child, you're, you're not a woman. So why have? This child decided that they can come up to me and act like they're some sort of moral authority on the subject of what being a woman is. Since they haven't got to the stage in life that is womanhood anyway.

• 17:33Carl Benjamin?

  And the implications of like, you know, taking out the requirement of it being an adult is actually kind of worrying and probably something that should be put back in. So I mean, even even if you were going to be an intersectionist about it, you'd be like, okay. A woman is any adult who identifies as a woman would be a perfectly acceptable. No, it wouldn't be acceptable, but it would be a better step up than just having it as completely open. You know, because I mean, well, it opens up the possibility. If we could somehow show that this pig identified as a woman. Would we be justified in treating it as a woman, you know, and how would we justify not treating it as a woman, you know? So it obviously, I don't think that we'll be able to show that, but the possibilities are strange and silly. And it's because we've moved away from the essential characteristics.

• 18:18Carl Benjamin?

  And I think that you end up in this sort of this kind of hollow world because there was a UN Women's Conference. Upon which this disabled black speaker, woman, lady, female. And I mean, I, I don't know how I'm supposed to characterize her, but she said that a woman is something like, it was something like shapeless and formless and timeless and eternal. It's like, this is sounding like an elder god from Cthulhu. Like a shapeless, formless, timeless entity. So what, what the hell is the use of the term woman anymore? You know, why would anyone want to transition to become a woman or identify as a woman? If there's no form or shape or definition to it, what was the point of this?

• 19:02Carl Benjamin?

  And so this, this gives strength to the turf argument that actually they're trying to obliterate the term woman. And this will damage women's rights because obviously if you can't define what a woman is and identify a woman from anything else. How can you have women's rights? And they've got a point.

• 19:17Chris Williamson?

  So that's a very slippery game, playing around with semantics and semantic overload. And I think that what Crowder does, when he does make his arguments, his arguments are at least rooted in things that can be falsified and that people can complain about.

• 19:29Carl Benjamin?

  Yes.

• 19:30Chris Williamson?

  Whereas with that, it's always just a game of trying to catch this incredibly slippery eel. And as soon as you get anywhere close to it, it changes form into smoke and Cthulhu and pisses off.

• 19:41Carl Benjamin?

  That that's exactly how I feel about it. And that's, that's why unfortunately, a lot of modern discourse has come down to games of semantics, which is actually terribly tiresome, if you think about it, because it doesn't advance anything. It ends up meaning you get kind of bogged down in incredibly pedantic conversations. But unfortunately, I guess that if this is the, the current ideological and philosophical trend that swept the West, we've got to engage with it as it is, right?

• 20:08Chris Williamson?

  Honestly, man, only in a world where we've managed to, whatever it is, reduce global poverty by 80%, 20 years sooner than the World Health Organization said that we were going to, would this be a thing that we can do? Oddly, a very luxurious position to be in, to be able to talk about that kind of nuance when it's just to do with language. Previously, we'd have just been happy with a meal. And that's not for me to say that we don't want society to continue to progress and iterate and further and further refine the level at which we consider human flourishing. But man, like, there's a lot of big things that needs to be done. And I don't feel like arguing over the finer definitions of words of one of them, you know, like, let's, you know, colonize the solar system and then we

• 20:52Chris Williamson?

  get around to it then. There was a thing, it was, it was last year, talking about how Mars needed to be decolonized. So they were

• 21:02Carl Benjamin?

  But we haven't even colonized it yet.

• 21:04Chris Williamson?

  And that right there is the, is the punchline. That they were concerned, there was a particular group, decolonizingmars.org, I think, or decolonizemars.org. They were concerned that colonial, colonial structures were going to be moved into new worlds. And it was obviously hilarious that we're talking about decolonizing a planet that we haven't even colonized yet.

• 21:27Carl Benjamin?

  There, there was an article a few years ago, during Gamergate, from The Guardian, where they were speculating that Gamergate would arrive on Mars if we didn't do something about this unchecked rampant populism. And Elon Musk seems to be leading the charge on that, actually. So, you know, God, Godspeed. Yeah, no, the, it's ridiculous, isn't it? The, the, but the thing is, and I like the way you frame it, right? Because you've got like, look, there is a big wide solar system out there. A, I mean, we've got enough on the earth that we haven't yet essentially conquered for mankind. But we've got this massive solar system out there. And All semantic games occupy the sort of realm of the intellectual, right?

• 22:09Carl Benjamin?

  So nothing physical changes with these semantic games. And so literally, as you say, we are just hit this wall. We've stopped. Now we're playing these semantic games on a level that doesn't really change the the material reality we're on, you know, because you can say anything you like. But at the end of the day, unless you take some action and there's something is accomplished, then we've travelled zero feet, you know, travelled zero distance.

• 22:32Chris Williamson?

  None.

• 22:32Carl Benjamin?

  And yeah.

• 22:33Chris Williamson?

  Are you familiar with Robin Hanson's great filter hypothesis? Do you know what this is?

• 22:38Carl Benjamin?

  I am not.

• 22:38Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so Robin Hanson is a very clever philosopher. He's postulated that the reason we don't see aliens, the answer to the Fermi paradox is potentially that there is a great filter, a barrier that all civilizations need to get over before they can colonize galaxies. And it could be the beginning of life. It could be the presence of liquid water. It could be the

• 23:00Carl Benjamin?

  It could be feminism.

• 23:01Chris Williamson?

  It could be playing semantic fucking games. If the reason that we don't become a galaxy colonizing civilization is because we were playing semantic games, we didn't deserve to.

• 23:10Carl Benjamin?

  Yes, that's correct. If feminists are preventing us from exploring the galaxy, we deserve it. We deserve it.

• 23:17Chris Williamson?

  What's your opinion on the madness of Wall Street Bets and Wall Street at the moment?

• 23:23Carl Benjamin?

  It's it's the same, the same kind of phenomena as Gamergate, where you have the vast collection of small people looking up at the giant institution and saying, well, why them and not me? And then when they start making any kind of motions, the giant institution moves to protect its interests, which means breaking the rules and acting arbitrarily, acting in a way that nobody really expected them to act, like Robin Hood ceasing the buying of GME shares. That's, I mean, that was just done purely to protect Robin Hood as a company. It wasn't even to protect Wall Street because they had this vulnerability, because everything has limits, I suppose.

• 24:08Carl Benjamin?

  But there's obviously, I think that there's probably shenanigans going on behind the scenes. Means at this point, because I think they've realized, oh my God, this is actually, this is costs Wall Street in total, something like seventy billion dollars. And that's massive, you know, for a bunch of idiots on Reddit who have just spent a few hundred bucks buying a couple of cheapo shares. That are not really worth anything anyway, uh, but it's, it's the will that's behind it. That's important, isn't it? It's the oppositional will. And I think that essentially what the, I guess, I will generally characterize as the elite in any sphere of life, right? It could be politics, which is why we get Donald Trump. It could be Gamergate and video games, which is why Gamergate occurred.

• 24:49Carl Benjamin?

  It could be, uh, in trading and stocks, which is why it's, you know, Wall Street Bets and the Game Stonks revolt. Um, and it, I've seen many people in other different, uh, walks of life in minor ways, finding themselves diametrically opposed to the elite class. And the elite class essentially have to come to the table and admit that they have accrued more than is justifiable. In some terms and in some ways, and this is not always money or anything like that. This is that what, what, what we're talking about really is just the sort of abstract and almost indefinable, uh, or unquantifiable, uh, concept of power and influence.

• 25:32Carl Benjamin?

  The, the little guys feel that they don't have the influence they deserve, and that's probably true. And the big guys feel that the influence that they have accrued is being attacked and being taken from them, which is also true. Uh, but the question is, is there a justified rebalancing that can take place? And I think a consensual conversation about how these things could be made more fair is definitely preferable to the kind of civic war that we're going to see happening between groups of people within the same industries and.

• 26:10Carl Benjamin?

  So far, this has not been handled well. So far, it has been a kind of social war between the various factions and they don't end well. It costs everyone lots of money. It's lots of stress. People lose things and it rarely turns out well and it just bodes towards, it's kind of a downward spiral where these things, if they're not resolved to the general satisfaction, just continue to increase the pressure. So the next time the event is bigger and bigger, and this is why, like, Gamergate, I would say, was probably about 50,000 people at its height, which is actually really small for the video game industry. But when you, you know, scaling this up to the Wall Street Bets thing, you can tell that there's a lot of the same

• 26:52Carl Benjamin?

  people who supported Gamergate and various other sort of populist uprisings like Trump, who also support Wall Street Bets, even though they're not the same people doing it and they're not interested in that sphere of life. But the, you can see the pressure's ramping up and like the Wall Street Bets thing has been huge. Their subreddit was something like 2.8 million when it started and now it's over 6 million. So it's like you can see the, just the graph shoot up in the number of people who are interested in this thing and who want to take part in pushing back against what they view, I think rightly, as a kind of ignorant, detached and self-interested elite class. It's not new. All throughout history, this has happened. It's been a common thing and this is just the 21st century iteration of this. And so here we are.

• 27:37Chris Williamson?

  But the difference is now that you've got the ability to coordinate so effectively, the proletariat can now gather en masse and they can do things instantly. And there's, no matter how big the hedge fund is, we've seen here, power in numbers on the internet, timed correctly, with a little bit of manipulation of algorithms and enough understanding of what's going on and a lot of caffeine. Like, you combine those things together and it's a subreddit, like, do you think this is the sort of thing that's going to end up with legislation being put in long term? Because this can continue to happen, this level of coordination.

• 28:11Carl Benjamin?

  It's not even that it can continue to happen, it's that it's almost impossible to stop.

• 28:16Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 28:17Carl Benjamin?

  Especially when you don't know that it's going to happen. Like the Wall Street Bets thing, I'd never heard of Wall Street Bets until about a week ago.

• 28:23Chris Williamson?

  I've been, I've been following them for around about a year. They are, they are phenomenal. They're so good. But that being said, I remember looking at it when it had 700K or so on the, on the subreddit and they were watching people lose their life savings on Apple. Like one person had a legend. If you want to go back and look at the best stuff, YouTube search Dankest Trades of Wall Street Bets and they did a quarterly roundup of like the most mad shit. So these guys have been doing it for a very long time. But yeah, the legislation.

• 28:54Carl Benjamin?

  Oh yeah. No, no, I, I, I understand they've been doing it for a while and whatnot, but it's just, um, when it becomes injected into the popular consciousness through this kind of event, you know, then it suddenly becomes a much bigger thing. I imagine that they probably will try to create some sort of legislation against this, but, but the problem is like, okay, you'll legislate against that thing, but the emotion and the impetus behind it hasn't gone away. It's like, you know, if you've got a hose that you're piping water through, a high pressure and the, the hose springs leak and you put your finger down on it. Okay. But the pressure hasn't gone away. You're just artificially preventing that pressure from exhibiting at this point. And so it bursts up again somewhere else. You've got to put another finger down, another finger

• 29:38Carl Benjamin?

  down. And until the entire thing will split open because you've just got too many, too many points on it that you're holding down. Cause the, the thing that is containing the pressure isn't suitable to contain the pressure, which is why you're getting these problems in the first place. And so what this requires is reform. You know, it's a demand for reform when these things happen because it shows that there's a problem with the system and every system that's built by mankind is going to be flawed in some way. And over time, the problems that are created by those flaws build up until they're unacceptable and the system has to change. This is just the, the nature of human planning. Um, and it would, I think, be wiser for those people who currently benefit from the system to accept that that is a, an immutable

• 30:18Carl Benjamin?

  reality of things that men build and roll with the punches rather than become authoritarian and start clamping down and, you know, legislate, oh, we have to protect ourselves. Cause then, I mean, it's not even, it's not even just that, hey, this isn't going to work in the long run. It'll work in the short run, but it was not going to work in the long run. And it might end up quite nastily in the long run. But, um, it's, it's not just that, it's. It shows that you aren't really accountable and it shows that you aren't really interested in a good faith society and that's the basis of civil society rather than, rather than any kind of like ancient or monarchical or oppressive society. What we have in the West is what we call a civil society and that's a consensual society, society into

• 31:03Carl Benjamin?

  which we all enter and agree on a certain set of rules. So we won't have designs on our neighbours and our neighbours won't have designs on us and we'll be able to operate freely and consensually through voluntary interactions and in transactions governed by fair laws and we can all just get on with our lives. And that sounds really appealing, doesn't it? But as soon as you get an elite class that's like, actually, no, you can't do these things that we can do. We've got rules that you don't have. Then it becomes, right, so we've got an, you know, an evil and ill will that underpins this thing. And then it becomes uncomfortable because then people have got designs on what you have because they don't think you have it fairly because you don't have it fairly. You got it by having a rule for you and a rule for them and never the twain should meet. And so it's, it creates instability in the system. And when it gets to this point, we've just

• 31:47Carl Benjamin?

  got an open, public revolt that's just essentially burning money to hurt Wall Street. Okay, you've got, you've gone wrong. You've gone wrong. Something has been messed up. You need to come to the table, you know, get, get the Wall Street Bets guys to just elect, you know, representatives. Tell them, look, elect like five people that you guys can trust, you know, and then send them to our headquarters. We'll sit down, we'll live stream the debate and we'll live stream the, the negotiations. So everyone can see it's totally transparent. And we'll, what do you want? What do we want? And we'll try and come to a compromise. And that way people could feel like they won. Both sides could feel like they won something. You know, the Wall Street guys would feel they, they're not about, like they've got armed guards at the, the bull outside Wall Street now. It's like, look, if you need armed guards for just, you know, a private institution.

• 32:29Chris Williamson?

  It's not working. It's not working.

• 32:30Carl Benjamin?

  Yeah, exactly. You, you're doing something that people hate and you should stop, you know? So, but I mean, that's not going to happen. This is utopian.

• 32:38Chris Williamson?

  It would be, it would be so good. Man, I had, I had Michael Malice on the show this week.

• 32:42Carl Benjamin?

  Oh, he's good, isn't he?

• 32:43Chris Williamson?

  He's phenomenal. Yeah. And I asked him about anarchy and kind of how it works and what it means. And fuck me if it doesn't explain a lot. Like he was talking about when you see the powers that be take the gloves off, that's when you realise, actually, they don't care about you. They'll give you the semblance of a piece of cheese for every time that you do a little trick, up until the point at which you you find a way around the the cheese game and you manage to get the whole wheel and then they'll come in with a hammer and hit you over the head. And as you said just there, it's not a long term viable strategy. If you decide to scale this over time, trust gets erased. You can, in one event, erase

• 33:25Chris Williamson?

  decades of trust with the people or with an industry or with a community or whatever. And, um, yeah, man.

• 33:32Carl Benjamin?

  And that's, that's, that's bad. That's the, that's where a stable society starts becoming unstable. I mean, I'm, I'm not an anarchist, but I can accept that that is a legitimate anarchist critique of a state and, you know, large scale systems. And it is a legitimate anarchist critique. And so it needs to be, it needs to be spoken about. And one of, one of Michael Malice's strong points, I've, I've only watched a few live streams of Tim Poole and Joe Rogan and things like this. But one of the things that he's really good at is identifying the will that underpins actions. You know, he's, it took me a while to notice that why his critiques were so incisive. And it's because he's addressing this will that becomes self evident when you actually look at the actors that are taking actions. You raise, yeah, this, you know, you don't do these things from a position

• 34:17Carl Benjamin?

  of good faith. You know, you don't do that. And, and he's really good at identifying that.

• 34:21Chris Williamson?

  That's why I love people that are bothered about the individual. Michael's very, very concerned about personal sovereignty and individual agency and upward mobility and stuff like that. But he has the broader spectrum, spectrum understanding. So he can see the big picture. He can see that paradigm. But he's concerned with individual motivations. And when you realize that all that big stuff are aggregates of individual stuff, and you can get right to the root of it, you get, you get some, some really good insights. There's a, something I've been thinking about. Do you think?

• 34:51Carl Benjamin?

  But before we, before we go on, I just wanna, you're absolutely right there. And I just wanna reinforce that by, by pointing out, this is why the communist critiques of capitalism always fail, right? And this is why the, the modern communist critiques are especially bad, because they always approach it with, businesses are purely about making money. And that might be. Be true if you were to abstract the concept of a business into a realm that is not connected to people. And in this abstract realm, you just look at the interests of the institution itself. But then you realize, well, as you say, you know, everything is actually individual action. And so when you look at the individuals involved, you realize they have ethical motivations, they have moral goals. They are not just these like soulless corporate lunatics. And we can see this in Silicon Valley.

• 35:35Carl Benjamin?

  You know, they've, they've adopted a kind of ideology that gives them a license to actually persecute some other kinds of ideological enemies that they've assigned. And so now it's really not about making money, you know, you could, you like, well, YouTube with the apocalypse and all of these other problems. Like YouTube and the advertisers, if they were just concerned about money, when the Wall Street Journal is like, oh my God, PewDiePie said a naughty word or made a joke about Nazis or something. They're just shrugging, go, so what? So what? Our sales are up. Why do we care? You know, but they didn't. They all reacted and oh no, that's terrible. Shut things down and advertisers pile and it's like, these are not business interests, you know? YouTube lost like, I don't know, 50, 70 billion, something like that. They lost billions of billions of dollars doing this.

• 36:19Carl Benjamin?

  So if it was just purely about business interests, there's no way that would have been the case. And yet here we are and you can, you know, see like Susan Wojcicki, you know, and listen to her in interviews. Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, they do have moral interests. And so it is wrong for the leftists to just, you know, separate those and say, right, never the twain meet. Cause this is not true. This is exactly your point.

• 36:40Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that there's a common thread between the survival of Jordan Peterson, when the Penguin Random House staff threatened to walk out over his new book? And then the political staff rebelled against Ben Shapiro writing their playbook. And then J K Rowling's book caused the uproar with Hatchet last year. Is that lesson to learn that if you're big enough, you're immune from being canceled?

• 37:00Carl Benjamin?

  Yes, because while, while.

• 37:03Carl Benjamin?

  While these businesses are not purely based on economic motivations, they still have economic motivations. And J K Rowling, I think, is the best example because she controls the rights to the Harry Potter franchise. She controls the sort of the way that the franchise is represented. She controls the essential decision-making capacity. And so the buck stops with her and she makes the money from it, which means she can't actually be cancelled if anyone else wants to make any money off Harry Potter.

• 37:30Chris Williamson?

  So is that, has she constructed her business to be like, Universal Studios got to come to me when they want to do a new theme park and the merchandising and?

• 37:39Carl Benjamin?

  And she gets to be able to sign off on the sort of tenor and tone of the thing as well, you know, like, does it fit with the mythos? Which gives her phenomenal power over the Harry Potter franchise, as I understand it. If I'm wrong, someone in the comments, correct me. But I looked into this recently because I did a bit of a thing, a few segments on them trying to cancel her. And they can't cancel her because if they cancel her, nobody gets any Harry Potter. And I mean, probably billions of people want Harry Potter, you know, hundreds of millions at the very least. You know, she's probably like the most successful British author ever. So there's, there's just no cancelling her because she holds this point of leverage. And industries die if they don't get what she's providing.

• 38:23Carl Benjamin?

  And so the activists on Twitter have been whining impotently and it's been very amusing to watch, to be honest. And J K Rowling, for anyone who doesn't know, her high crime refers back to what we were talking about with the definition of woman. She made the argument that woman is adult, human, female. And if you get rid of that, you get rid of women's rights activism, which is not wrong. And this makes her a horrible turf.

• 38:46Chris Williamson?

  Do you not think that it's mad? You've got, J K Rowling was very much in the zeitgeist at the time though, you know, she's current and doing stuff. Jordan Peterson had been in rehab for 18 months, like, and people had just taken this heritage of him. Again, Shapiro, like Ben, Ben does his thing, like he's out there talking about stuff. Jordan had been in Russia tied to a bed, trying to, trying to sweat drugs out of his system.

• 39:14Carl Benjamin?

  Yeah, but I think JK Rowling is just the most obvious and easy example to pin down, right? Because you can see exactly the linchpin. When JK Rowling gives up the right to make editorial decisions about Harry Potter franchise, she's cancelled, right? But it's not so easy with people like John Peterson and Ben Shapiro, because their staying power is based on something a bit more intangible. It's respect and influence and sort of gravitas.

• 39:46Chris Williamson?

  And that can be manipulated with the right disinformation campaign.

• 39:49Carl Benjamin?

  Absolutely. Which I think is why The Times recently put out a lie about him being diagnosed with schizophrenia, an attempt to discredit him as an intellectual, as in his mind is somehow, you know, insecure and not, not, he's not sane or something like this. This wasn't true. John Peterson released the full interview with The Times. I listened to it. He didn't say they'd been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

• 40:12Chris Williamson?

  I haven't seen that yet. What's the, what's the headline?

• 40:15Carl Benjamin?

  Well, you can actually, you can actually go to lotuses.com and we've got an article refuting this on there. Because, yeah, it's just not true. The Times has claimed that he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He hasn't been. I don't know why they're claiming this. But I can only assume that they're making up this outright lie in order to damage his public prestige as an intellectual, in order to discredit him within conservative circles, and widen the wider sort of normie public in order to essentially just get rid of him. Because he doesn't agree with certain things, does he?

• 40:45Chris Williamson?

  Man, that makes me feel so uncomfortable, you know? Like, that guy's been through hell over the last 18 months. And you sit down to have an interview. I haven't seen the interview yet, but like, I don't know.

• 40:55Carl Benjamin?

  It's on his YouTube channel. It's just the audio.

• 40:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. I noticed it was black screen when I rolled over a preview. It's, I'm gonna watch later. But, um, yeah, man, that makes me so uncomfortable. Like, it shouldn't be the case that someone who's been through absolute hell comes back. And because people don't like his ideas, which for anyone who's ever read anything that Jordan's done are not controversial. He's got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of him lecturing students available on the internet. Go through, like scrape out. You know, at least with Shapiro, he has that webpage on his site of all of the things he's ever said, which he now regrets or wishes that he hadn't said or whatever, which I also think is quite a noble thing to do.

• 41:36Carl Benjamin?

  It's a good idea as well, to be honest.

• 41:38Chris Williamson?

  No one ever has, there's no rogue tweet. From Peterson, there's no lingering sort of bodies in the cupboard for people to get out. There's just misinterpretation. That's all that they have left. But I mean, yeah, I, I hope that the more situations that occur like that, where unwarrantedly people come after prominent public figures, that they don't succeed, because there's been a few periods, yourself included, where it has succeeded.

• 42:10Carl Benjamin?

  Yeah. Um, yeah. I mean, you, the, the point about John Peterson, what he has been through has been the consequence of a media harassment campaign against him. You know, the reason that he fell into this hole. And frankly, I mean, like, you know, I, I'm, I only have sort of a middling fame on the internet and in the wider world. But even from my middling position, I mean, you can see how gray the beard is, right? Like, it wasn't this gray like two or three years ago. It's, I'm not even joking. It's really stressful. It's very stressful when you have a lot of eyes on you and there's a lot of pressure coming at you. And Peterson is like, you know, 10 times bigger than I'll ever be. And so it's, it's one of those things that's, if it's bad enough for where I am,

• 42:55Carl Benjamin?

  it must have been really difficult for him. And you, like, like you were saying, go and watch his stuff. You can tell that he's a very emotionally aware person, you know, and he probably has to be to be a clinical psychologist. So he's very emotionally connected to things and to other people. And he cares about these things. You know, he's, he's been, he's cried on live streams when thinking about other people's suffering and stuff like this, unashamedly, you know, and it's, it's very brave actually, to do this. And I've seen lots of leftists mocking him for showing his feelings. So, well, hang on a second. I thought that's what you wanted out of men. You know, what are you doing? You know, that when he opens up, don't stab him, you know, Christ. But, um, but yeah, so for, for Peterson, I can understand why this was just too much for him to handle. Uh, why he ended up falling down this, this sort of rabbit hole and having to spend a

• 43:39Carl Benjamin?

  lot of effort dragging himself back up. And like you say, you know, if you watch any of his stuff, he's talking essentially, he's essentially giving you the sort of like best dad advice that can be given. You know, get your house in order.

• 43:51Carl Benjamin?

  He is, but it's great advice for young people, not just young men, but I think young men need it more than young women because there are lots of social support structures for young women everywhere because of feminism. But young men definitely, I think, need this kind of guidance where it's like, look, get your house in order, sort yourself out, clean your room, get on, you know, get on the, the, the business end of actually doing something and improving your life. And, uh, I mean, you know, I've, I've taken his advice to heart, you know, I've, and I think a lot of other people have as well. And it really does work. It's just about taking responsibility for yourself. And if that is, if that's his high crime, and that's the great offence that Jordan Peterson has committed, well, I guess we're all in trouble, aren't we?

• 44:31Chris Williamson?

  We're fucked as a world. Do you think, uh, Trump is going to go away now? Or is there any chance that he's going to run in 2024? What's your ideas around this?

• 44:40Carl Benjamin?

  I have no idea. And I don't, I don't dare make any predictions because all predictions are aging very badly at the moment. Uh, I mean, is, can you think of a single person who has made a good prediction in the last five years? Like, I can't think of one.

• 44:53Chris Williamson?

  Uh, Morgan Housel, who's a financial expert tweeted at the start of last year, saying about how much time people had spent analyzing the 2010 until 2019 decade of trading and extrapolating out all of the different charts for the coronavirus to come in and just totally sideswipe everything that they'd done.

• 45:13Carl Benjamin?

  Yeah, that's the thing. Like, uh, the, the political environment is very unstable at the moment. Uh, so I, I don't predict, but I wouldn't be surprised if in 2024 he runs again. Uh, I expect that he will. And I think he would be a, a powerful force if he did. Um, less powerful now that he's been deplatformed from every Silicon Valley platform. Um, and that's what the Silicon Valley cartel know. They know that this has reach and influence and power. Um, So really, if I were Donald Trump and I were thinking about it, I would choose an alternative social media network and make that the network that I used. And then you can get probably hundreds of millions of people to at least look at it occasionally,

• 45:58Carl Benjamin?

  if not join it and actively participate. But I mean, the, the social media alternatives, Parler was doing fantastically well until they got deplatformed. And Gab is also doing fantastically well, and they can't be deplatformed. Because as I, as I understand it, Gab are responsible for their own infrastructure, although I've been told that's not entirely correct. So I'm not sure about the details really. But, but basically Andrew Talbot, who runs Gab, has been deplatformed in the same way that Parler was. And so he is protected against that. They can't do that twice. And so Trump should choose a platform that Silicon Valley can't deplatform and get to work. He's got a few years if he wants to do it. He's, he can do this, you know, he's got the money, he's got the time, he's got the

• 46:41Carl Benjamin?

  political capital to do it as well, especially as the MAGA base generally don't feel that this was legitimate. They think that this was a stolen election, whether you agree with them or not. So if Trump starts getting back into the action, I think that he'll do very well. The thing is, it also might be a wise political move to actually let the situation breathe for a while, right? Because what Joe Biden is doing at the moment makes him, by his own standards, kind of look like a dictator. He was the one criticizing excessive use of executive orders and then 30 of them plus in his first week. And it's like, okay, what are you doing? You know, and the radical, radical changes, you know, bringing critical race theory training

• 47:23Carl Benjamin?

  or, you know, all of the changes to the military with transgenderism and things like this. And it's like, okay, these are, these are sweeping changes that Biden is making. And they're not good changes. They're not, they're not changes that the general public actually endorses. You know, how many, how many of the general public want frontline female soldiers? Probably not that many of them, you know, it's, it's very much the sort of progressive wing of their party that's driving the agenda. And Biden's just leaping, you know, both feet in, you know, he's, doesn't seem to care about any, any objections now. And so it's like, right, okay, let him govern badly. Give him enough, give him enough rope. Exactly. Give him enough rope. So if, if, I mean, Trump waits like six months or a year before getting like fully engaged back into politics, then he might find himself

• 48:08Carl Benjamin?

  with a very weak opposition where they've overextended. You know, they've tried to impeach him, which I don't think is going to work because I don't think they're going to get the votes. And so that will be a waste of their own political capital. It'll give people like AOC time to sort of march around on the fields of victory and be really insufferable and put a lot of people's backs up just by the way that they operate. And I think that's happening. And it'll, the Republicans have kind of been routed after the Capitol riots. And so they give them time to sort of regroup, I'll Biden to ruin things and then come back in a big storm and hopefully take it. But, but again, not a prediction, just a kind of fantasy of what I think could happen.

• 48:47Chris Williamson?

  Dude, so one thing that Malice said, which really, really struck a chord with me is people thought that Trump was the river, when in fact he was the dam.

• 48:57Carl Benjamin?

  Hmm.

• 48:58Chris Williamson?

  A lot of right leaning Americans felt like they were being represented by Trump. And look what happens when you take away that dam. They no longer have anybody that's speaking for them. They no longer have anyone that they feel is representing them. So fuck it, insurrection.

• 49:17Carl Benjamin?

  I, there is definitely a strong undercurrent of the republic is over in a lot of the Republican circles now, which is not good. You know, it's not good at all.

• 49:28Chris Williamson?

  The most powerful country with the most nukes in the world.

• 49:31Carl Benjamin?

  Yeah, I'm not too worried about that. But what it is, is if, if America becomes consumed with its own internal disputes, then people like China and Russia are always watching from the margins and seeking to, I mean, China's already been violating Taiwanese airspace and things like this. Right. This has not taken long. Joe Biden is not going to have a firm hand with China like Trump did. And it will not be to the benefit of the United States. And you, I think you, I think you're really right about the dam thing. Trump, Trump really seemed to have been holding back a lot of.

• 50:05Carl Benjamin?

  Initiatives that really seem to have a negative intention towards the average American person in favor of fringe activist groups who have been making their voices very well heard but don't represent a very sizable constituency, even necessarily of the minorities they claim to represent. Like, for example, feminists, like, very few women are actually feminists, like, less than 10% of women self-identify as a feminist. And whereas 80% of women will say, well, yeah, I think there should be equality between men and women. So the other woman majority agree with the basic feminist premise, but they won't identify as feminists because they don't want to join that activist group because they can see that this is the, you know, the man-hating lunatics, right? And

• 50:48Carl Benjamin?

  so Biden is catering to these fringe internet activists with everything. And so, like, let it, you know, let it go. It'll be insufferable. But you'll, when, when, when this has gone on for enough time, hopefully, someone from the Republicans who is capable and competent and decent will come along. I've noticed that they're really going hard on a senator called Josh Hawley at the moment because he wanted to represent his constituents' concerns about the lack of apparent transparency and their belief in the invalidity of the election and the electoral process. And he is being treated as if he led some sort of armed insurrection into the Capitol, which he didn't. He was in there giving his testimony when the event

• 51:32Carl Benjamin?

  occurred. So the fact that they're treating him as if he was leading it is very interesting to me. And he hasn't backed down on this either. He got deplatformed from his book and he hasn't backed down. And so I'm, I'm thinking someone like him is probably if, because, you know, Trump, Trump's going to be in his late 70s by 2024. And as vital as Trump is, as energetic as Trump is, that is old, you know, and it is a very stressful job and etc. But Josh Hawley looks like he's in his 40s. The right kind of age to start pushing forward with this kind of if if I mean, he might not be that way inclined, he might be a Wall Street guy, you know, he might be bought off, he might not be a populist in any way, but that's not the impression I've

• 52:14Carl Benjamin?

  got from him, actually. He seems to be interested in representing the sort of rural working class and the rural interests. And someone like that is definitely necessary for the American political system if it wants to survive, I think. I think if one side is just not represented. And one of the things you notice about the Democrats is they are going hard on their Republican opponents. They are they are trying to extirpate them as much as possible. And that's the exact wrong maneuver to take if you think you're a legitimate winner. You don't want to punish the opposition for losing. You know, that's not what a democratic system is meant to be. But instead, they're acting like they didn't win. You know, they're acting like they've done something wrong. They're acting like they've got guilty consciences. And, and yeah, I don't think it's sustainable.

• 52:59Carl Benjamin?

  I think they'll overreach.

• 53:00Chris Williamson?

  One of the things I've noticed is a change in the attitude towards American national pride. I can't tell if this is actually happening at a cultural level because all my information around gets filtered through their media, obviously. But it definitely seems to be a lot less about like the Star Spangled Banner and pledging allegiance than it used to be. Is someone killing American national pride?

• 53:19Carl Benjamin?

  Oh, absolutely. It's the left and it's been a coordinated effort for at least the last two decades. And honestly, I remember back in about 2001, in fact, that I was kind of a part of it without knowing it. When when the Twin Towers had been blown up, crashed planes into collapsed. There was this distinct feeling that this was unacceptable American nationalism, when George Bush was there on the ruins with an American flag and people chanting USA, right? There was a there was a distinct feeling on the left that this was scary and this was going to lead to fascism. This was going to be and don't get me wrong, I don't approve of any of the consequences of nine 11, or nine 11 itself. I didn't support

• 54:04Carl Benjamin?

  the invasion of Iraq or anything like that. And there were obviously terrible consequences from that. But

• 54:11Carl Benjamin?

  But I think this has been, that was the flashpoint that started the left on a sort of conscious attempt to undermine American patriotism. And, and I think that that has been successful. I think that much of the left now openly admit that they hate America. They think it's an imperialist, white supremacist power, that capitalism is inherently a racist structure that's designed to oppress people. And the communists who have been pushing this view of the world have been very, very successful in planting the seeds in the left and destroying the patriotic left, the sort of, you know, the sort of working class left who actually like America and just want the rich to give them a bit of the pie. Those people have been totally marginalized. And now it's whites versus blacks, or, you know,

• 54:56Carl Benjamin?

  straights versus gays and all this. So now it doesn't really reflect actually what's happening, because I don't agree that there's a race war going on. I don't agree that there's a gender war going on. You know, I don't agree that straight people are waging war against gay people and trying to keep them down. That's just not my experience of life. And maybe I'm talking from a position of privilege, being a straight white man. But the only, the only gender or race war or like sexuality war that I see is being waged by the left, you know? So I think, I think the left have done this quite self-consciously in many ways.

• 55:25Chris Williamson?

  I think in the UK, we're already used to kind of British national pride being seen as the realm of racists and working class thugs, right? Like hanging a flag up is the sort of thing that the Community Watch ring the council about. And you get people, get people around to your house. I wonder if America will end up like that. I fear not. I don't think that they will. I think that it's too strong, that patriotism. It's been very, very, very ingrained. But the left do definitely seem like they're making a good job of trying to deconstruct that.

• 55:53Carl Benjamin?

  Yeah, I mean, they're very good at playing the long game. So in, in 2001, it didn't look like there was any possibility of demolishing American patriotism. But here we are going, well, God, are the Americans even going to be patriotic next year? You know? So, and it's only been 20 years. So it doesn't take that long. It doesn't take that long in the grand scheme of things. And you're right, obviously over here, it's gross how unpatriotic we're allowed to be. This is why I've got the flag behind me. I'm not naturally a flag flying guy. Like this, you know, it's not something that I would naturally do. But in the current circumstances, given the current context, oh yeah, we're having a British flag, you know? And if we get told off for that, an English flag goes up as well, if that's what they want, you know? I'm not, I'm, I'm not backing down on this. You know, I bought an English flag a while ago for the first time ever. And I was like, okay, what do I do with it now?

• 56:39Carl Benjamin?

  You know, do I go and fly this outside my house? Is that going to be imposing on the neighbours? I don't know. But I bought it just to say I had it because I'm sick of the genuinely anti patriotic feeling that the left is pumping out. And it's because they're essentially communist now socialist or communist, which is essentially a synonym. And they they view national pride as a form of false consciousness. They view national pride as a barrier to communism, which it is, which is why we should support and uphold it, which is why you should get a flag.

• 57:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, fair point. It is bizarre. Like you go through, you go to gyms, go to a CrossFit gym in in America, and you'll see hanging from the ceiling, there'll be US Marine Navy Corps, there'll be the red, white and blue Star Spangled Banner, and there'll be like some other stuff as well. And you just think like, there's such a, at least this was three years ago, might have changed now.

• 57:32Carl Benjamin?

  Yeah.

• 57:32Chris Williamson?

  It just felt like there's such a cohesive, I actually got quite jealous. I had like, country jealousy in a way where I was like, man, I've never, have you ever heard anyone say, I am proud to be a British citizen? Like, I'm proud to be British, you know? Like, saying the sentence, I'm proud to be British, sounds like it's something that comes out of that Muslim Ray Gangs video from a few years ago.

• 57:57Carl Benjamin?

  Two, two, two, two places, right? None of, neither of them in Britain. The first one, the first one.

• 58:03Chris Williamson?

  It's not Hong Kong, is it?

• 58:05Carl Benjamin?

  Nearly. I grew up on a military base in Germany. Obviously, it was called Joint Headquarters JSQ, it's named Munchen Gladbach, or it was, it's been decommissioned now. But there, that, again, when you're, when you're in close contact with a foreign culture, you become very much aware of your own culture and its strengths and weaknesses and the virtues and vices of it. And then you become a lot more self reflective about the thing. And so you, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't like, you know, chess beating nationalism or anything. But, you know, that was the sort of vibe that had, because it was a military base, you'd have, you know, the flag and things like that on flag poles, you know, so it felt more patriotic. And the other, the only other place I felt this is in Gibraltar,

• 58:47Carl Benjamin?

  when I went over there for the MEP tour. It was like a very beautiful British village that's been transplanted to the south of Spain. And there were British flags everywhere. And it was lovely, you know, because the weather was amazing for a start. And everyone was really nice, you know, everything was really relaxed and friendly and there's, you know, British flags everywhere and everything was very patriotic, wasn't it, Callum? You know, Callum went with me, it was great. And, and we had a great time there. And it just felt very nice, very relaxed. And, you know, it was wholesome. It was good. But they're the only two places, not in Britain.

• 59:20Chris Williamson?

  So bizarre, man. So bizarre. Give me your thoughts on AOC. I know that you like to think about her sometimes.

• 59:28Carl Benjamin?

  Not really.

• 59:31Chris Williamson?

  You have to think about it sometimes when she injects herself into the news.

• 59:34Carl Benjamin?

  Yeah, I basically view her as a kind of, kind of like a Robespierre, really. I think that she's very much like Robespierre. She's, she's a politician or a political actor, and she's a radical, a real radical. And she is uncompromising. She's, she does not consider the Republicans to be moral agents. She views them in the same way that the hobbits view the agents of Sauron, you know, the Nazgul. She views them like that. The fact that they exist is an unfortunate necessity, and the fact that she has to deal with them. But she will attack them as viciously as possible at every opportunity that she gets. I mean, the perfect example recently was her saying,

• 1:00:17Carl Benjamin?

  oh, maybe the Wall Street traders should be not stopping people from trading on their platforms. And Ted Cruz said, I agree. And she said, you nearly got me killed. It's like, you should resign. It's like, okay, well, that's not exactly the spirit of cooperation, is it, AOC? And now, today, we've got the recent, I'm a survivor of sexual assault. The way that the Republicans are treating me is basically the same way that I was treated by the person who sexually assaulted me. Therefore, the Republicans are basically gaslighting rapists. And it's like, right, okay, this is not a good faith actor. This is someone who is here to harm you. They're here to undermine you. They're here to destroy you. They're here to get rid of you as much as possible. And if you watch the, the speeches she gives, or the interviews she gives with friendly media,

• 1:01:02Carl Benjamin?

  people she knows are inside the progressive club, she almost says exactly these things. She's like, we've got to stop them. We've got to get rid of them. They should resign. We need to replace them. We need to get rid of them, and all this sort of stuff. And so it's like, she's not shy about this. And she is the destructive, radical communist force that's entered into democratic politics, and is working its way through the social mechanisms of the American body politic. Damaging people who otherwise shouldn't think that they would be damaged, right? Deplatformings and things like this. AOC is at the crest of that wave. And that's really bad. This kind of bad will, this, this, this ill will that travels through the political environment is what's going to destroy the American Republic.

• 1:01:45Carl Benjamin?

  Because the American Republic fundamentally is built on the idea of a goodwill that brings together a society from which they can constitute a government. I mean, it's literally in the Declaration of Independence, you know? And it's based on Locke's view of government and society in the state of nature, where men come together voluntarily to sacrifice some of their rights in order to provide security and protection for their property. And that will only hold as long as you understand that there is a goodwill in society and the government isn't going to be used to persecute you. But the government is already being used to persecute the MAGA folk, who happen to hold strongly to the Lockean view of the American Republic. And so on a subconscious level, I don't doubt that there are many American Republicans out there thinking, my God, the republic is absolutely over

• 1:02:29Carl Benjamin?

  because they're trying to use the government to persecute us. And this, this is the incredibly negative effect that people like AOC and the Squad are having in American politics. And, and don't get me wrong, the right has their own versions of this. But the right, the Republicans, keep out the sort of Richard Spencer's and Nick Fuentes's of the right, the, you know, the, the, the belligerent and unforgiving culture warriors that would be on the right. They don't actually engage them, you know? This is, this is why Trump was such a surprise, because he's like a halfway house between them and the mainstream Republicans, you know? So in an acceptable way politically. But yeah, so I, I'm, I'm not very much a fan of AOC and the way this operates.

• 1:03:11Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that she believes what she's saying? Because when we saw Kamala Harris last year during the Democratic primaries, and she essentially accused Joe Biden of being a sexual assaulting misogynist, whatever it was, and then when asked about it, said,

• 1:03:32Carl Benjamin?

  It was just a debate, bro. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:34Chris Williamson?

  So I don't believe that Kamala Harris, I like the fact that someone who is such an evident sociopath has made their way into the second highest seat of power in the free world is, that really scares me. Biden doesn't scare me. Biden doesn't scare me. His forgetfulness worries me, but he doesn't scare me. However, Kamala Harris really, really does scare me. I'm a pretty good judge of people. I've spent a lot of time looking at people and there is something incredibly wrong with that woman.

• 1:04:08Carl Benjamin?

  I think she's a corporate shill. I think she just is doing this for her own enrichment and the enrichment of her family and friends. But AOC, I think probably is a true believer. I think that she, she knows that she's being insanely hyperbolic when she's attacking Republicans. But I think she does on a genuine level, believe that they are bad people and should be gotten rid of. But I hate to do this, but I allow everyone to clock off at five. And so they're like, you know, come on, come on.

• 1:04:38Chris Williamson?

  Man, we're gonna have to leave it. We're gonna have to leave it all for next time.

• 1:04:40Carl Benjamin?

  We are gonna have to.

• 1:04:41Chris Williamson?

  That's fine. Dude.

• 1:04:43Carl Benjamin?

  Love to do another one, man.

• 1:04:44Chris Williamson?

  Let's get it done. It's always a pleasure to have you on. Thank you for coming on again. People want to check out more of your stuff, where should they go?

• 1:04:50Carl Benjamin?

  Go to loadseats.com.

• 1:04:51Chris Williamson?

  Perfect, man.

• 1:04:52Carl Benjamin?

  Got lots of stuff there.

• 1:04:53Chris Williamson?

  Carl, thank you. And dude, keep up the gym work. Such a, such a pleasure watching the, the weight loss journey over the last year.

• 1:05:01Carl Benjamin?

  Thank you. Yeah, I've been, I very quickly, I basically, one of the reasons I set up the office, right? And it's an entirely selfish reason is because I wanted it to be about half an hour away from my house. So I've, I've got a bike and I'm just every day riding half an hour and back to work and back. And yeah, I'm, I'm feeling great. You know, I'm much more fit than I've ever been. I've got a weight spar, I've been doing pull-ups and stuff. And yeah, so I'm quite pleased with how things are going. For, for a man in his 40s, I'm feeling pretty good about it.

• 1:05:27Chris Williamson?

  It is snowing outside, mate. So if you're gonna.

• 1:05:29Carl Benjamin?

  Oh, is it? Oh, maybe in Newcastle.

• 1:05:31Chris Williamson?

  Oh yeah, it's always snowing here in Winterfell, isn't it? Anyway, man, safe journey home. Thank you very much for coming on.

• 1:05:36Carl Benjamin?

  Cheers, man. Bye.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:05:52Speaker 02

  On October 2nd.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:05:58Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 1:06:03Speaker 02

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:06:06Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  I'm not the first man.

• 1:06:14Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.