George Floyd vs. Henry Nowak: Do All Lives Matter? The Global Backlash Explained | Tom Bilyeu Show

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu
Episode: "George Floyd vs. Henry Nowak: Do All Lives Matter? The Global Backlash Explained"
Date: June 3, 2026
Host: Tom Bilyeu | Panelists: Andrew Saint (Drew), Ryan (C)
Episode Theme:
A deep-dive discussion into the global cultural and political fallout from the Henry Nowak case in the UK, drawing parallels and distinctions with the George Floyd case in the US. The conversation broadens into the roles of race, justice, social media, policing, immigration, and economic systems in Western societies, with an eye toward the consequences of societal overcorrections, radical populism, and policy-making in the digital age.

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1. Overview of Main Theme

This episode explores the public reaction and political implications of the Henry Nowak case in the UK, contrasting it with the George Floyd case’s impact in the US. The hosts examine claims of two-tiered justice, the construction of racial hierarchies, the manipulations of victimhood, and the dangers of institutionalized overcorrection (“anti-racism”). As the conversation evolves, Tom and guests discuss underlying Marxist lenses in Western institutions, the escalation of racial tensions fueled by social media narratives, and the importance of returning to judging individuals by character rather than skin color.

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2. Key Discussion Points & Insights

A. The Henry Nowak Case & Its Global Impact (01:00–13:00)

• Incident Recap:
  • On December 3, 2025, 18-year-old Henry Nowak was stabbed by Vikram Digwa in the UK. Police dismissed Nowak’s pleas for help, presuming he was the aggressor.
  • Nowak died — "He complains multiple times... eight or nine times that he's having a hard time breathing. I think he says four times that he's been stabbed." (Tom, 02:11)
  • Digwa was convicted of murder. However, outrage exploded due to perceived police negligence and racial bias—contrasted with responses to the killing of George Floyd.
• Key Insight:
  • The difference in government and police reactions, kneeling for Floyd but remaining "almost totally silent over Nowak," has fueled a “powder keg” moment in UK racial politics.

B. Racial Hierarchies and Victimhood (04:10–08:00)

• Double Standards Highlighted:
  • Tom: "The people in charge have built a hierarchy of victimhood, and Henry Nowak is a white male and therefore sits at the bottom of that."
  • “When they hear the same words from a white British kid, it’s deafening silence…”
• Left-wing vs. Right-wing Framing:
  • Discussion of the pendulum swinging too far, with contemporary “anti-racism” constituting a new, inverted form of judging people by race.

C. Policing, Justice, and Comparing Cases (14:31–21:00)

• Panel Debate:
  • Drew argues comparisons to Floyd are "overblown," emphasizing differences in circumstances and the delivery of justice:
    • "The reason that police aren't kneeling, why there isn't this worldwide movement, is because there's sweeping justice happening already... the person who stabbed him is now doing life in prison."
    • Justice in George Floyd’s case was more procedurally fraught, contributing to the protest intensity.
• Tom’s Framing:
  • The key problem is not the medical or forensic specifics of either case, but the cultural narrative fueling riots and deep social division.

D. The Narrative of Oppressor and Oppressed (21:02–29:17)

• Tom’s Core Argument:
  • Societal narratives rooted in "victims and oppressors" (Marxist frameworks) are the underlying source of today's strife.
  • "The riots aren't because a kid got stabbed to death, because people get stabbed to death all the time. The reason there were riots... is that the kid says, 'I can't breathe, I've been stabbed.' And the guy goes, 'I don't think you were, mate.'"
• Implied Danger:
  • This framing, if unaddressed, “guarantees violence… not breaking along race, but right-left ideology.”

E. Institutional Trust, Social Media, and The Exaggeration Engine (29:18–34:00)

• Social Media as Distortion:
  • Drew: "A lot of this is engineered. A lot of this is social media, like, extremization of it. I can't say a movie's bad. I have to say it's the worst movie ever. Everything has to be the most exaggerated adjective just so I could get the clicks and engagement…"
  • News cycles drive attention away from persistent injustice, creating the illusion that issues have gone away.

F. Anti-White Racism, Backlash & Populism (38:13–54:00)

• Constantine Kisin’s Viral Tweet: (38:13)
  • “Britain had a moment of silence for George Floyd... Henry Nowak, a British man, one of ours, is automatically dismissed and ignored because of the color of his. This is the ugly fruit of so-called anti-racism. An obsession with race that has created a two tier society.” (Read by Tom, 38:13)
• Backlash Risks:
  • Tom: "There is a growing perception, sincere perception in the white community across much of the west... to ignore it, to say that you shouldn't feel that way will rebound hard."
  • Populist anger is materializing in new politically aggressive figures (e.g., Rupert Lowe: "If Restore Britain gets a sniff of power, there will be a reckoning. I promise you we will show you the same mercy you showed our girls." 50:14).

G. Justice, Nuance, and Paths Forward (54:00–59:40)

• Martin Luther King Jr. and Mandela Lessons:
  • Tom: "The only path forward is together. And I beg people to read the Long Walk to Freedom. This is a man who put white people on his security detail… the only path forward is together."
• Reactions to Overcorrection:
  • Drew: "Now that we are all feeling it, hopefully we can now come together and realize… maybe we overcorrected. Maybe we can just treat people by… integrity of their character." (58:59)
  • Tom urges welcoming, not berating, people who come to this realization.

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3. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Tom Bilyeu (on hierarchy of victimhood):
  "The people in charge have built a hierarchy of victimhood and Henry Nowak is a white male and therefore sits at the bottom of that." (04:40)
• Andrew/Drew (on justice):
  "To me, justice has been served because the killer is already taken care of, the police officer is already out, and that's it. Whereas with the George Floyd situation, Derek Chauvin... had to come back and then be forced to be press charges against him." (15:09)
• Constantine Kisin, tweet (read by Tom):
  “An obsession with race that has created a two tier society which treats people differently because of their skin. It needs to stop.” (38:13)
• Tom Bilyeu (on overcorrection):
  "We have now swung so far in the opposite direction that we're still judging people by the color of their skin just now on the opposite side. And it is clearly deranging." (07:45)
• Rupert Lowe (as quoted by Tom):
  "If Restore Britain gets a sniff of power, there will be a reckoning. I promise you we will show you the same mercy you showed our girls." (50:14)
• Drew (on Black Lives Matter):
  "Black Lives Matter was a call for justice... When something wrong happens, we deserve our time in court too." (43:09)
• Tom Bilyeu (summarizing):
  "If someone wakes up to your cause, to welcome them is probably far more wise than to slap them around and say, I got here a long time before." (58:59)

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4. Timestamps for Key Segments

• Intro & Episode Themes: 01:00–02:55
• Henry Nowak Incident Overview: 02:55–07:35
• Comparisons to George Floyd & Racial Hierarchy: 07:36–13:00
• Justice & Police Response Debate: 14:31–21:00
• Narratives of Oppressed/Oppressor: 21:02–29:20
• Economic, Class, and Racism Analogy: 29:18–33:00
• Culture Wars, Social Media Exaggeration: 33:18–38:13
• Kisin's Tweet, Populist Backlash: 38:13–54:00
• Justice, Tone, and MLK/Nelson Mandela: 54:00–59:40
• Final Reflections (On Welcoming Change): 58:59–59:40
• Transition to AI/Economy Discussion: 60:02 onwards

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5. Additional Segments (Post-Main Debate)

A. Bernie Sanders, AI, and Wealth Redistribution (60:02–73:45)

• Bernie proposes seizing 50% of major AI companies for public ownership — described by Tom as “completely lunatic,” a misunderstanding of incentives, value creation, and the dangers overreaching government poses to prosperity.
• Tom, on capitalism:
  “The miracle is wealth. Redistributing wealth is not a miracle. How can somebody show such a rabid desire to go out and take the things that have been created, but never ask, what does it take to create something in the first place?” (62:00–62:30)
• Balancing gratitude toward businesses with necessary regulation—warns against idolizing either side.

B. Gaming Industry "Wokeness," Demographics in Media (87:57–102:53)

• God of War's new female protagonist: debates over market strategy, character design, and consumer alignment.
• Use of gender and attractiveness in character design as reflections of audience desire vs. progressive message.
• Tom parallels the importance of demographic targeting (as in Japanese manga) with the U.S. comic and gaming industries.

C. Concluding Thoughts

• Tom thanks his panel and listeners for engaging on complex, sensitive issues that have no easy answers.
• Encourages further open, nuanced debate for social progress, justice, and cohesion.
• No sponsor shout-out due to the episode’s serious tone.

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6. Language & Tone

• Direct, informed, often passionate—Tom and Drew reflect personal experience in sharp, sometimes provocative language.
• Panelists disagree without hostility, bringing distinct lived experiences and generational views.
• Heavy use of analogies, historical references, and contemporary memes for clarity.

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7. Summary Takeaways

• The Henry Nowak case is a flashpoint for growing anger about perceived anti-white bias and double standards in Western justice and media, paralleling but distinct from the George Floyd protests.
• Modern Western culture is locked in a dangerous cycle of narrative overcorrection, institutionalized victimhood, and reactionary populism.
• Both sides of the racial and justice debate risk fueling more division unless an honest, welcoming dialogue becomes the new norm.
• Social media and political opportunists are inflaming, not resolving, the core issues.
• Lasting progress requires rejecting identity-based hierarchies—progress can only be made by judging individual actions and character, as exemplified by leaders like MLK and Mandela.
• The episode transitions into broader critiques of populism, economic policy, and cultural evolution, maintaining its theme: short-term justice must not create long-term division.

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Transcript

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Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up these may apply. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Bily Show Live. We are here. We're going to be doing it today is going to be heavy, so brace yourself for that. The shocking body cam footage of Henry Nowak's final moments have sparked riots in the uk. Constantine Kissing's comparison of Britain's response to George Floyd versus Henry Nowak has gone hyper viral. Robert Lowe has gone hyperviral himself for his speech where he was reading aloud from the rape gang investigation. It is mortifying. Russia launched a major attack on Ukraine and then Ukraine has responded with their own strikes in quite spectacular fashion. And Bernie Sanders wants to seize 50% of AI companies like any good communist would. And gamers, gamers just cannot catch a break. God of War goes female and an RPG developer being accused of creating trad wife porn because a character is wearing a long dress. It's wild. It's wild out there, boys and girls. So buckle up everybody. We are going to be showing some of the NOAC footage which has led to riots in the uk. This is one of the most important things going on right now. And when we get to that point in the conversation, I will give you guys a bit of a warning. Some people may not want to look at the footage, may just want to listen, which is far easier to digest if you have kids in the room. Today might not be the day at least for the beginning. So, yeah, Drew, I feel like we need some sort of warmup before we go right into this. Like, this is rough, but I'm not

[B]

sure it's taken over Twitter feeds and it's, it's interesting. Always when an international story, something that happens in the UK kind of transcends boundaries and borders. There's so many UK specific politics stuff we never even touch on. But there's certain things that definitely come across the pond. So we definitely have to talk about it.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, look, this one, this idea is becoming global. It's a very fascinating moment that we live in, that so much of what is going on is being shared across the English speaking West. You're getting some of it bleed out into other languages, but there's like a collective thing that's happening right now. Japan is even getting into the mix where we're all going to have to deal with immigration. We're having this sort of very slow shift in the perception of what it means to be in the west in terms of this sense of original sin, that slavery is the thing that makes white European culture just forever bad and it's permanently tainted. There's like this crazy debate that at some point I think it'd be worth maybe doing a deep dive on or something where archeological evidence is coming along that if you're a student of history, I can't believe anybody is surprised by this, but that what they're seeing is that the genes in a population will abruptly shift. And I'm talking in less than a hundred years. So it's not something that you would ever expect to play out naturally. It's not even something you would expect to play out via mate choice. Because what you end up seeing is the male genetics will change, so the female genetics, of course, continue for reasons that I imagine will be relatively obvious, but the male genetics change. So you've got all of this like, big thing, big ball coming to a head with the tilt towards the left that we've seen across much of the West. And now with the juxtaposition between what happened with George Floyd and now what's happening with Henry Nowak, we have like this big collision point. And so it is a UK that is being torn apart right now by immigration policy, both from the left and the right, by the way, which is probably worth talking about today. But I want to first establish why Nowak has become this flashpoint. But there is a big bundle of context that I think has to be talked about. And if this show is going to bring value. I think it's going to be that being able to zoom back out and give a bit more of the broader context, not to get sucked into the narrative, but just to lay things out really fast in terms of what happened. So on December 3, 2025, 18 year old Henry Nowak got in an altercation with 23 year old Vikram Digwa. Digwa stabbed Noak five times with his 8 inch ceremonial blade, including a fatal wound that lacerated Noak's heart. When the police arrived, Digwa claimed to be the victim of a racist attack. So when Nowak said that he had been stabbed, the police officer said that he didn't believe him. You're going to hear that in the body cam footage. And so instead of addressing his wounds, he ends up putting him in handcuffs, rolling him over, which may or may not have contributed to that. But you can see how uncomfortable Nowak gets, I would presume either because it's changes the way that the blood is pooling in his lungs or may have put additional pressure on his heart or something, but it's instant. You see him pushing back out of very. When you watch it, at least for me, it was very distressing to see how like sort of physically uncomfortable he becomes. Uh, no, I complains multiple times, I think somebody counted, he says eight or nine times that he's having a hard time breathing. I think he says four times that he's been stabbed. Um, so the fact that they don't believe him, they don't go to treat him or anything is part of what's leading to the outrage. Thankfully, at least. Digua was convicted of murder and sentenced to life with a minimum of 21 years. But the two tiered policing that's evident in the body cam footage has sparked just absolutely massive outrage, leading to large scale riots in the town where the murder occurred. The UK right now is a powder keg partly because of rapid demographic shifts, which is going to create some anxiety. People have to have some way to metabolize that. Again, this is something that's playing out all over the place. And then also partly because of anti white bias, exactly what you're seeing on display here in the body cam footage. Now, for a long time people who've complained about anti white bias were told that they were crazy, that that was an absurd complaint, that racism is impossible against white people. But the NOWAC incident has made it impossible to deny any longer, especially given comparisons on how the government and quite frankly citizens at responded to George Floyd. So from a British perspective, think about that. George Floyd is not British. And yet the. The response was very large, very dramatic. Even in England. It's very different than how they're responding to Noak. So many in law enforcement and the government took a knee when George Floyd died, but they've remained almost totally silent over Nowak while Starmer was forced to finally speak out on the issue. He certainly did not take a knee. Simply said that the issue needed to be investigated for police misconduct. There's a video that I saw, but I don't think I pulled it where protesters were trying. They were taking a knee in front of the cops to see if they would respond in the same way that they did with George Floyd. They didn't. That was another thing that then got them furious and led to the later escalation intentions to put a fine point on the rage that's driving the riots. Five years ago, when Britain had heard the words I can't breathe coming from a black man, politicians knelt for the cameras. Footballers knelt before kickoff season after season, by the way, offering a minute of silence for George Floyd, a man who died 4,000 miles away, who wasn't British in a case with no proven racial motive. Now when they hear the same words from a white British kid, it's deafening silence. It's no kneeling, no campaign for us to learn the tragedy of racism. And there's a stated sense of we all know why Nowak wasn't given the attention. The people in charge, this is the know why. The people in charge have built a hierarchy of victimhood and Henry Nowak is a white male and therefore sits at the bottom of that. And this growing racial division is not a problem that is just going to go away by trying to force equity via redistributive justice or two tier policing. And ultimately there's going to need to be some way of convincing people that the right way to deal with this is to approach each situation assuming that you're dealing with individuals and not statistics. 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Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action.

[B]

It was definitely a tragedy and it's definitely sad. I think the comparisons to George Floyd are overblown. People just see I can't breathe and think it's the exact same situation. I think the situations are different. I think first and foremost it's interesting to me and this is Andrew Saint just talking. This is not the words of impact theory or reflective of Tom Bilyeu or anybody else in this room. I'm standing 10 toes down on what I want to say. I think that the reason that the police, the people aren't kneeling and the reason why there isn't this worldwide movement is because they're sweeping justice. That's happening already. There are people right now in 2026 that still think George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose in 2026. Right now he, he was the person who stabbed him is now doing life in prison. The police officer that was, huh, Noak. Yeah. The person who stopped Noak is doing life in prison. The police officer that was involved in the incident has resigned. Noak was found trespassing on somebody else's property and they were the ones that called the police. So for it to be he was just white and they just had like hopped on him. George Floyd was standing outside in a public place hanging out with his friend. It was a different situation. So if with anybody, if you're ever called by police and you are the one trespassing, you're going to be the one restrained. Now I could understand if they were in front of Noak's house, it would have been different. I can understand if they were in downtown London in front of Big Ben, it would have been different. But again, we just heard I can't breathe and we said, oh my gosh, this is just like George Floyd. But one thing that Everybody is very, very accurate about is, yes, this is like George Floyd because the police are the one in the wrong. And just like what we were trying to say, that Derek Chauvin was in the wrong. No, he wasn't. He's a fentanyl addict who's this, this and this, this and that. Now we're saying, yes, the police are in the wrong, but it's because he's a white guy. And they're wrong because they treat the police are in the wrong. The trading around the police is wrong, the way that they handle situations is wrong. But to me, justice has been served because the killer is already taken care of, the police officer is already out, and that's it. Whereas with the George Floyd situation, Derek Chauvin had to go through. Had to. Had administrative leave the day after it. He then had to come back and then be forced to be press charges against him. It wasn't like it was a 1,

[A]

2, 3, 4, gone conclusion heard on all of that. My read on the situation is that there's an underlying issue that will have to be reckoned with. Whether it's on this show or not becomes irrelevant. And that is there. And I'll put the finest point on it that I can. And if you see anywhere where you think my logic is not sound, definitely let me know. But what I see playing out is we have looked at the sins of the past, which have. I mean, obviously slavery has nothing to do with the people that are alive today, but there are some people caught up in Jim Crow to be sure, that are still alive. But people are being told a story of their past that creates this sense of there's an original sin to being white.

[B]

There's one thing right now, because the chat is like. Like popping off really, really bad.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

And even in the chat right now, somebody's like, yes, he did die of an overdose.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

I don't think anybody. I don't think anybody here is. Is. Has any. I never said that. I agree with the dude who stabbed him. Digua. Digua did stab him. He did. He. He died a murderous death by somebody who was now doing life in prison. To me, that's just to serve. I thought that's what we wanted. When a murderer does. When a murder murders, he gets captured. And that's the. That's the rap right now. We saw on Kate on camera a cop with a knee. A knee on his neck until this person passed out and died. And then people are still saying it's an overdose, he's a crack addict. And all these other things. So you get why as much as I want to talk about the original sin and I want to move on, we are, I'm still on step one and we have can't even all agree on step one.

[A]

So I think the reason that the chat can't agree on step one is that we're not talking about the real issue that's causing the outrage. Not that because there's two conversations to be had. There's like a forensic analysis of why did George Floyd die? Why did Noak die? Like, for instance, it's very possible that Henry Nowak was going to bleed to death no matter what the police did. When, when you watch that footage, he dies so fast that I don't know, even if they were Johnny on the spot, like did everything they could. It is very possible. And there are reports coming out. I don't remember if the reports were from the coroner himself, but reports coming out saying that the laceration to his heart was such no matter what the police did, he was going to die, that that was a fatal wound from the second that it happened. So in the end, the. What we're seeing with the police may have nothing to do with his death. It may be purely representative of the other issue going on, which is that, and this is now me saying what I think that issue is that society is being fed a narrative that is so wholly toxic that it guarantees violence. And it guarantees violence along the dumbest lines I can imagine, which I'll say are ideological because it actually won't break along race, it'll break along right, left. And so for me, it will wear the clothing of racism, but it's really over here. Victim, victimizer. And so anybody who buys into the paradigm that this is all about victims and oppressors, oh, and by the way, you can map that to race. That will derange society to the point of violence for sure. Like mass scale violence. So I'm like, okay, we can certainly have the conversation over here. Like, I'll make a statement just as a calibrating thing to see if you agree. I think both of the following statements are correct. George Floyd wouldn't have died had Derek Chauvin not kept his knee on his neck. And George Floyd wouldn't have died from said knee on his neck had he not had as many different drugs in his system as he did. Now, I'm not a medical examiner, so it's possible I'm wrong and it's possible that that isn't true and that it literally was. They cut the blood supply to his brain and he could have been healthy as an ox. And that was game over possible. But the reason you see a debate there is because people are looking at that saying, bro, he had so much fentanyl in his system. You can't look at that and say that him having his knee on him is the thing that caused him to die. That a healthy person in that situation would not have died. Now that to me is just not an interesting conversation. That to me is what the courts are meant to figure out. I'm not going to go deep enough on the forensic evidence to even answer that question. So the people having that argument, that's like, you've got to go full down the rabbit hole of the autopsy forensic evidence.

[B]

Can I say what you just said to me and see if it lands the same?

[A]

Sure.

[B]

Henry Nowak would have died regardless of the response time of the police officer. And then this is also true. Henry Nowak would not have died if he didn't hop over the fence and harassed somebody.

[A]

That's possible. I don't know about the actual exchange between the two of them. Now, given that that guy was convicted, I'm gonna guess that Henry Noak did not do anything that where Dig was response could be seen as self defense. Because there are for sure things that Henry could have done where I'd be like, yes, stabbing him was the right answer, but given that it has played out in the courts, I'm going to guess that that isn't true. But right now, just for the next like 90 seconds, what I want to make sure that you and I separate is that there are very two different arguments to be had. One is the merits of the police physical brutality. One is the merits of Digwa stabbing Noak. Like those, those are legitimate things that played out in court and it is right. And just that those things be handled in a court of law where people can make their case. Like, those are very important things.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And if the courts decided that George Floyd died simply because there was a knee on his neck, then Chauvin goes to jail and that's that. Now some people are going to cry foul that that didn't play well, that he was railroaded because this like was so hot that somebody had to go to jail for it. Fine. That still needs to play out in the court system. I understand why people are going to push back on that or whatever. But the only reason I understand why they're going to push back on it is the argument that I want to have, which is that there's a Thing happening in culture. And that thing happening in culture is definable, as my interpretation of it is that the left has for a very long time now, call it somewhere between 30 and 50 years, been largely through educational institutions propagating a very Marxist framework, which is that there are the oppressors and the oppressed, victims and victimizers, and that's the only way to understand the world. And that that maps to race. And so if you see a white person, you can automatically interpret them as an oppressor. And I'm saying that's why there's riots. The riots aren't because a kid got stabbed to death, because people get stabbed to death all the time. The reason there were riots that didn't pop off until we saw the body cam footage is that the kid says, I can't breathe, I've been stabbed. And the guy goes, I don't think you were, mate. And so now you've got people going, hold on a second. These guys are literally being trained to take like cops are being trained in the police force to absorb the frame of oppressed and oppressor based on race. Now you put that into the larger framework of just like.

[B]

Because I want to clarify that last sentence. So you think the cop said, I don't think you have me because he thinks white people are oppressors and not. I don't think you have, mate. Because I'm calling to a domestic abuse, domestic response and the person who I'm saying is in the wrong is the person that I'm pinning down.

[A]

That is correct.

[B]

So you think if, if the. Let's just use another example. If I was down there in the UK and I was like, I've been stabbed, mate. He would be like, stop everything, call the ambulance. We need to get ambulance. Like that. You think that would have been the response?

[A]

That is correct.

[B]

Copy.

[A]

Okay, so now I expect that to be debated.

[B]

But those understand completely what you're saying.

[A]

Those are the two debates. So debate one, merits of the like autopsy, physical. Was George Floyd suffocated? Would any person in that same situation have died or was this a fentanyl thing? Cool. Very reasonable. Just not the debate that I think lights the entire world on fire. The reason I think these guys are rioting is the other debate, which is, are people now being treated differently based on the color of their skin? I would say yes. And I would say that that's ratcheting up in ways that are starting to become really dangerous from a. People will push back. So just like rightly, during the Civil rights movement in America, you had not just the black people rise up, but you had people around them say, yeah, this is intolerable. We have to rise up. But that was done in what I would say, and I'm not a scholar of it, but I've seen enough to feel pretty comfortable in this. It was done in the most honorable moral way possible, where it was, we're not going to fight back. We're going to let the dogs bite us, the fire hoses hit us, and we're going to show just how grotesque this has become. And it worked. And we won the soul of America. And my generation grew up in the. We won the soul of America. And so the vision that we all had of ourselves was Martin Luther King Jr. Was right. We're going to judge people by the content of their character. And the whole idea of being colorblind has become an absurd statement. But that really was like, just imagine for a second growing up thinking that's the coolest thing that you could do, is you judge the people that you encounter by, are they good people? Not, are we of different races? And so for, I think, the majority of my generation, obviously, I can only truly speak for myself, but for my generation, it really felt like race was just on the decline as a consideration. None of us would have looked at one of our friends and thought they were cool for judging somebody based on race. And so it just felt like, yeah, this is a thing that was like, what our grandparents did. Our parents raised us not to do that. So it was like, yeah, this is cool. And so for me, and you and I were talking before we started rolling, for me, I feel exactly about race the way that I feel about la, which is that it used to be ass, then it got awesome, and I was here to watch it become awesome, and now it's become ass again. And I'm just like, the tragedy of that loop is part of what makes it heartbreaking. And being my age, and this is where we confess that Drew and I actually are different ages. Drew is substantively younger than I am. That I do wonder if that also plays. Obviously, the fact you're black and I'm white plays a huge role, but I also wonder if some of it is. I lived through a loop of. It really felt different, at least for a white kid where I grew up and now race is on my radar all day, every day. It's wild because people talk about all the time. So anyway, with that context and then the fact that it's, like, really becoming exacerbated in the UK because they're farther down the road of immigration not being metabolized well than we are. Like, you know how I feel about that? To me, that's values, but nonetheless, it's getting mapped to race.

[B]

Should people be judged by the color of their skin? No. And I think that that's been a pretty consistent message from my side for as long as I've been alive. And I think that a lot of people who are saying judging people by the color of their skin is wrong. I think that's the entire point. I think we can all agree on that. We shouldn't be doing that. Racism is bad. Yes. You shouldn't treat anybody differently just because of their skin color. Yes. Point. Point made. I'm going to give you an example, Tom, that is kind of in your wheelhouse, like economics. Right. It's an economy problem. I can. You have not. And this is not me picking on you. This just giving you an example. Right. Gas prices have fluctuated in the last three weeks in a way that we haven't seen in years. It hasn't even crossed your radar. I don't really drive when I Uber everywhere. It's whatever. I don't. I don't necessarily have that inclination. When we had the egg shortage that was going crazy last year. Eggs are what? That's crazy. Like, egg prices are crazy. But the doordash delivery didn't stop. It was still on your front doorstep. Those decisions didn't make. So even though there is a narrative that prices are rising, that people are struggling, that things are going bad, there are certain people that are like, oh, well, it sucks that my doordash bill went up 15%, but okay, whatever. Like, you swipe it away because you have. You're in a different economic background. You have, you worked hard, you grew your wealth, so now there's certain things that you don't have to worry about. You're not in that survival mode where some of your old employees, back in the quest days, gas price is $5. I might not be able to go to work. They're stressing, they're feeling a little bit more of the anxiety than you might be feeling. I use that same point for racism. While, yes, in the 80s and 90s, I feel like America was a lot more IRL touch grass. And I think that in that when you're outside and you actually talk to people, half of these people that are calling me all types of names right now, if we were all outside hanging out, they wouldn't say any of these things. I remember One of the people that's going crazy on me right now, me and him were just talking about muscle cars three months ago and talking about our love for cars. So if me and him were just in a gas station, I was filling up my Mustang and he was filling up his car. We will be boys at the pump. So a lot of this is engineered. A lot of this is social media, like, extremization of it. Like, I can't say a movie's bad. I have to say it's the worst movie ever. I can't say that. This person's head, big. They have the biggest head in the world. Everything has to be the most exaggerated adjective just so I could get the clicks and engagement and feed myself. Because it's an economic problem and we're all broke and we're trying to figure it out. So with that being the base of where we are with all this, like, minutia right here, I think the narrative that, like, racism was done and then now it's coming back, I don't think that that's completely accurate. I feel like it wasn't. It wasn't front page news anymore because the news cycle moved on just like we moved on from the Iran news cycle, just like we moved on from the Epstein news cycle. This is the biggest thing in the world. There's a bunch of pedophiles and they work in the government, and now we don't even blink an eye. And at that point when Martin Luther King was getting sicked on the dogs in daytime news, this is the biggest thing ever. We have to talk about it. And then it stopped being a story. We moved on to the Korean War. We moved on to the de dollarization. We moved on to globalism. We moved on to the Gulf War. We moved on to Kuwait. We moved on to Bill Clinton getting head in the White House. We moved on to all these other things that were bigger news stories than the racist things that were still happening in America throughout. Like, throughout that point, I'm trying very hard to be calm because every time I have rebuttals, people call me emotional. So I'm not sweating. My hands are down to my side. I hope I've done everything. I've checked all the boxes. So that way I've been a good representation.

[C]

Chat's making me. I'm getting like this in the chat right now.

[B]

Chat.

[A]

Wait, Chat's getting what?

[C]

I'm getting mad at Chat because I feel like to me, when I look at this, what killed Henry was a cop who made a bad Call and calling it anti white racism to me, and I'm getting emotional, but lets the cop hide behind this culture war instead of actually facing the consequences, which is after watching that body cam footage, these cops did not follow protocol.

[B]

It's bad copy, it's bad cop, bad policing.

[C]

And like, you know, even if we want to throw the argument of racism in here, racism arguably is a systemic issue. Right. It's not really fast.

[A]

Let me see if I can redirect because you guys, one, I want to acknowledge your point so that you feel seen and heard. Drew, especially you, you took time to really lay that out. So what I say, I say not to refute anything that you're saying. I say that what you guys are saying, maybe not Ryan, maybe Ryan I am about to directly clash with, but with you it is, you've made great points that I think sit to the side of the conversation that I'm trying to have. And by the way, I'm not trying to convince you or anybody in the chat of a point yet other than if you don't understand why these guys are popping off, why they're rioting, what's about to play out over the next five to seven years is going to be very confusing to you. What's going to play out over the next five to seven years on this particular topic, because it does broaden out when you get into generalized immigration and then it's going to go all the way to Japan. But if you understand that, as I understood it from you, Tom, because racism does not affect you, you don't understand that it never went away and that for somebody who's still in the thick of it, and I'm sure if I were reading the chat, I would see you're still in the thick of it, that it just feels so different. And so I completely concede that point. Now, what I'm trying to say is that wasn't the point I was trying to make. The point I'm trying to make is that I believe that in a truly beautiful way that gets deranged by the fact that humans are pathological in their ability. They don't exist in a permanent state, but we all have the ability to become pathological. But I think something started beautiful that was to say, oh God, slavery was horrifying. We basically stole this country from the Native Americans, some even from the French, from the Mexicans for sure. And so we don't feel good about that. And we need a way to cleanse ourselves of this early sin and we need to self flagellate and we need to understand that we are, that we must pay recompense. And so that's why you would see politicians like in a dashiki, washing black people's feet. It was a way like, how do I show you that I get it and that I'm really a good person and that and in some way, shape or form, I'm doing the thing that I need to do to repent for my sins. I mean, it's really a fascinating thing. This was what I obviously viewed as mythology for you. This is reality. But the crucifixion of Christ was, hey, this guy paid for all of your sins moving forward for all time. So we don't end up in the death spiral that I see left atheists dragging us into because they have no concept that Christ already washed us of these sins. Correct. And so now the thing we're dealing with is white people who feel that they have this original sin yoke placed upon them that does not feel just and is now finding its way into actual systems. So to Ryan, I will say you guys have incredible points about. I don't like the way the police handled this. Now as one reminder, I will just say Henry Nowak died because he was stabbed. Okay. It, it will I think help people from a thought exercise standpoint to look at this as the police may have done a horrible job but Noak was going to die no matter what. As a thought exercise maybe down the road we realize, nope, it was all the cops and they could have saved his life. But for right now, take that. It's a harder view that we need to take. So he was going to die no matter what. Cool. So let's not worry about the cops so much. Even though I get that's the flashpoint. But let's look at the politicians and there's a great tweet by Constantine Kissen if we can pull that up.

[B]

Yeah, let's jump into that one.

[A]

So what he is trying to orient people towards is look at the politicians response. Look at how people respond when it's a black man that dies versus when a white man. Okay, so I'm just going to read the tweet. So this is from Constantine kissing. Britain had a moment of silence for George Floyd. Our politicians kneeled en masse to show their outrage at his killing. I can't breathe became a slogan. George Floyd died on the other side of the world. He wasn't British. Henry Nowak was British. And his treatment by the police was shocking and negligent in the extreme. Yet there is no minute of silence. There is no coordinated public campaign. There is no kneeling at sporting events. And we all know why. During the summer of blm, some people said all lives matter. This was treated as the highest form of racism. And anyone who said this was immediately canceled. Why? Because the people in charge don't actually think all lives matter. In the same way, they have created a racial hierarchy of victimhood where a career criminal who died through mistreatment by police in a foreign country with zero evidence of racism, like George Floyd is automatically sanctified because of the color of his skin color. And Henry Nowak, a British man, one of ours, is automatically dismissed and ignored because of the color of his. This is the ugly fruit of so called anti racism. An obsession with race that has created a two tier society which treats people differently because of the color of their skin. It needs to stop. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead so don't go anywhere. Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action.

[B]

I love how he called anti racism an obsession with race that treats people differently because of the color of your sin. Now that's just racism. We don't need a new one.

[A]

Well, but I think the reason he puts that in scare quotes is the Kibram X Kendi idea of there is no not racist. So there's racist and there's anti racist and to be anti racist and I haven't read the book, but my understanding is to be anti racism and is to go in the opposite direction to give people of color preferential treatment, better treatment. I remember when vaccines were given out that they were being preferentially given to people of color. And so it's things like that that would be considered anti racist during COVID

[B]

I don't want to get down that rabbit.

[A]

So anyway, it's things like that, or let's say they're all delusional, it's the perception of things like that that are creating this backlash. And so that's what he's getting at very specifically is to overcorrect and to not fight for everybody being treated based on what they did instead of in any way, shape or form taking their ethnicity into account at all. So this post has 32.2 million views and if you're not an X user, you may not understand how massive that is, but that's absolutely massive. Now I'm sure there are plenty of people that are clapping back on him and saying that this is an absolutely terrible take, but there are likely to be Plenty of people that agree with him. But I think this really nails the thing that we ignore at our own peril. I do not need anybody to agree with it. I'm just saying we're all going to have to contend with it because this is a rapidly growing sentiment and I think it is real for the reasons that I laid out. It's a Marxist belief system that has to do with oppressed and oppressor. I think that it's the thing that is the world's most black of black pills to me is that I think this has been moving through the institutions for at least 30 years, maybe 50 years. And so the number of people that have just been subtly like given this idea that that's the right way to look at the world, I just think it's so massive. And so when people like when I see people dunking on people that hold that left view, even though I think it is a very destructive view, assume for a second that they're, well meaning that they really love people and they really want people to understand that this is the right way to move forward. That is far more terrifying because if they're really just cynical idiots, that's a little bit easier to defuse that bomb. But if they're people with a full heart, full of love, they love their friends, they love the people that they're fighting for and they're just fighting in a way that plays out in this hyper destructive fashion that's way more scary for me.

[B]

I'm also starting to realize that a lot of people don't go outside. Like there's a lot of nuance to the conversation that we're not talking about. So let's talk about Black Lives Matter for a second. And yes, Black Lives Matter was started by three women who apparently are lesbians and apparently ran off like 40% of the money. Another 40% was donated to ActBlue, which is a Democratic lobbying firm. It got co opted by the left. I understand that. But let's before it got politicized because no politician will waste a good tragedy. So just like how Rupert Lowe is doing laps in London right now. Tommy Robinson is recruiting right now, using this as recruitment fodder. Everybody's using this for their personal gain. Inside KK is going to release a video. It's going to do numbers and it's going to get Adsense. It's going to be one out of 10 on his YouTube channel. So everybody's going to use this and speak to their audience and grow their audience for respective whatever reason. So let's take out all the politics, politician politicization of it, let's take out all the monetization of it and let's just talk about the people that were on the street because of the risk of reaction that happened during that summer. The summer of BLM was a string of police involved brutalities where black people were murdered in various fashions ways. Whether it was a no knock warrant, whether it was a little kid in the park playing with a, playing with a toy, whether it was George Floyd, knee on the neck, a string of them that were connected. The police were all given administrative leave. There was no justice. So Black Lives Matter was a call for justice. Black Lives matter. So you should prosecute these crimes. Black lives matter. They shouldn't be minimized, they shouldn't be dismissed. Black Lives matter. When something wrong happens, we deserve our time in court too. That's where Black Lives Matter came from. Again, I know it got been perverted. I know Trump uses it. I know there's a bunch of people who only are on truth social who had never heard that story of Black Lives Matter. I'm not making this up. I'm black and I know when it started. I was there in the beginning. Like, this is what it, this is how it catch flame. This is how they did their first round of recruitment. This is what the message was. When I'm saying, somebody got murdered, they deserve justice. And you're saying, well, everybody deserves justice. Everybody does deserve justice. So let's start with this person who was just murdered. But it's never, let's talk about that person that just murdered. It becomes, no, everybody deserves justice. And they walk out the room talking about everybody else instead of the person that we started this riot for. I'll bring it back to this specific situation. The person who killed Henry Novak is going to jail for life. And everybody in the chat is agreeing that Henry Novak died of a stabbing. Nobody's saying he's died of fentanyl. Nobody's saying he got choked out by the police. Nobody's saying he tripped and bumped his head and if he wasn't there, it wasn't his fault. Nobody's saying, well, if he was just in his house, if he was just, if he wasn't a criminal would have been fine. Everybody's immediately going to the empathy. So to me, justice was served. Now, is there an institutional problem that we need to clean up? Absolutely. And I'm here for it. I'll have all the conversation. Is there a societal problem that we need to. Absolutely. And I'm here for the conversation. But to act like Black Lives Matter wasn't about justice in the beginning. And that's what people were fighting for because it was a lack of justice. Because there's still politicians involved in those cases that are home free. They're chilling with their parents, they're eating Thanksgiving dinner, they don't think about it. Whereas this family, the Digua family, they're never going to see their son again. He's going to live in prison, 21 years minimum. Henry Nowak, his father I feel sorry. I would never want to see. You're never supposed to be a parent burying your kid. I have as much empathy as I can. But from a legal perspective, you got the result that you wanted. The bad guy got caught, he went to jail, he had his time to court and he's going to, he's going to die under the jail. It's not good because your son's not back. But it's the second best thing that you can ask for. Somebody violently murdered Lisa, you would want that person under the jail if you can't put your hands on him personally. And that's what was the result of that. So this is the, this is where it's coming from for me. So again, I understand the Internet of it all, I understand the Trump of it all, I understand the woke of it all. I understand the purple haired lefties, I understand the wokeism. I know communism. I'm not talking about any of that stuff. Let's talk about the people that were killed because of the bad policing.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And the people that were killed for bad policing. The police should be held accountable. The police, the people's families should get a lawsuit. They should get a bag. Henry Nowak's family should definitely get a bag from the police. They need to sue them. I don't know how UK courts work but you should be getting something from the police because it was your fault. You handled that terribly. So I'm not people. I think I'm arguing that like I'm happy Henry died or that I wanted the dude with the knife to Diguad to be free. Free. Like no, you deserve to go to jail. And that's a dumb law that Muslims can carry knives but white people can't carry knives. Like that's a dumb law too. Let's change that too. So I feel like people think I'm

[A]

just as a clarification, I don't think six are Muslim. Someone will have to tell me if

[B]

it's like a random, but there's religious exceptions that Way you can carry a certain type of ceremonial dagger. That exception should be removed.

[C]

Sikhs are not Muslim. Sikhs are. Oh, it doesn't say what they are.

[B]

Actually, I forgot. Even the whole Sikh community came out and condemned Digua. So it's not even like. It's not even like all the Sikh people at the church were like, yeah, get that white boy. We did it. We up now. They. They condemned him. So that's why I'm like, who else? Do you want to be mad? Like, do you?

[A]

So well, But I am explaining that part. That's why I'm saying so. Drew, every point you make is. Is bang on. And I do worry that we're having two slightly different conversations. They're close enough that many people are going to think we're having the same conversation. I will try to reorient one more time with you as a proxy. So one, if people in the chat are saying dumb things, don't look at the chat for, like, the next few minutes, because it will. I. I think some part of you is still debating the chat instead of. And I think the service that we can offer the viewing public right now, whether they exist in the chat or later down the road.

[B]

For that specific one, I was debating KK in that. That one paragraph during the summer of BLM to the zero evidence of racism, like George Floyd. Those two paragraphs, I feel like it's okay.

[A]

So then that's perfect. Thank you for the reorientation. So let's talk about that. Because hiding in that paragraph is exactly the thing I am saying as a society, we're going to have to grapple with and telling white people to choke on it, to be quiet. They don't understand. It will not work. It will rebound hard. Like, look at the Rupert Lowe situation is a perfect example.

[B]

That's the rate

[A]

if you pull up, we're not going to show because Rupert Lowe talking about the rape gang stuff, we will get to. But first, I want to look at the one where I said Rupert Lowe.

[B]

Promise?

[A]

Yeah. Okay. So Rupert Lowe is the leader of something called Restore Britain. And I think in many ways he is. He is a reaction to two things. Number one, unchecked immigration, which is just a fool's paradise.

[B]

And we haven't talked about that too. I think that's. Like you said, that's a good point. Like, that's been floating in the background in this conversation for sure.

[A]

And we will certainly. I mean, the. In the coming years, we're gonna be talking about this a lot. So that's one is Unchecked immigration. And then the other is racism. So the. But the kind of anti white racism, even if you will only grant me the perception of. There is a growing perception, sincere perception in the white community across much of the west, but very aggressively in the UK that's growing. And so he then with that, and we will get to the thing that prompted him to write this, because the thing, the, the grooming gang scandal is at a level that is really hard to even wrap one's head around. But first I just the. Here, I'll read his words, hear them. So that when I say that this will be met with a backlash that is going to be horrible. That hopefully I can convince everybody. We have to have the conversation about that paragraph in KK saying. Okay, so we're going to return to KK's post in just one second. But first, this is Rupert Lowe, the head of Restore Britain, which is growing in popularity in the uk. Okay. He said, for those mainly Pakistani men who have inflicted the very worst pain imaginable on innocent British children, please know this. There will come a day when the power of the British state that concealed your atrocious crimes for so very long is turned against you. It will be swift, it will be brutal, it will be severe. Because if Restore Britain gets a sniff of power, there will be a reckoning. I promise you that we will show you the same mercy you showed our girls. Your race or religion will not protect you any longer. A message will be sent that is heard right across the world. If you rape our children, you will pay for it. And you will pay for it with everything. This is what Restore Britain will do. Okay, now I know what's underlying this and that somebody would say something like this to people that raped their daughters. Yeah, a hundred percent. I would expect nothing less. He shows restraint for how I would have behaved had it been my children. So I get the energy. But I want people to understand how chilling of a statement that is coming from an elected official who would like to rise to the highest position in government. And I'm saying that energy represents a rage and an anger that is growing. And now the question needs to become why understand it first? Once it's understood, then debate its merits. If the merits aren't there, find a way to diffuse the bomb because you certainly do not want that growing, whether it's justified or unjustified. I would. This is way more Malcolm X than Martin Luther King Jr. And I would really like to hear my rhetoric coming in the Martin Luther King Jr. Flavor, personally.

[B]

So populous moment Tom's populist moment is

[A]

a populist moment and I understand I will never be a good populist leader. But if we go back now to kk, the thing I'm trying to get people to understand is Drew makes very sound, rational arguments for and I'm summarizing you, so if I get this wrong, definitely speak up. But as a black man witnessing blm, this felt like finally somebody is speaking up for us. We there was a string of things for which it was very self evident. We could point out and say justice is not being done and it is not being done because of the color of our skin. And now people are saying that they're also hard done by. Yeah, granted. However, like why are we trying to move away from this thing that we're trying to get people to pay attention to? That it gets co opted down the road is beside the point. Drew is making a statement that I think is very valid, which is that there is no doubt that at times I think black people unquestionably are going to be judged by their skin and not by their character. Now the debate that I'm trying to get everybody to understand that must be had is in an attempt to cleanse the white person from their original sin of racism and slavery, have we now adopted something called anti racism, where it's a form of justice acquisition by which you elevate people of color and depress white people. Now whether you think that if you say that doesn't happen at all, then I would say woo. What I'm seeing does show it definitely happens. Now if we want to debate the severity of it, that's a totally different thing. So I'm just saying this is growing and growing and growing. And trying to cancel or dismiss people would be a mistake because the energy is filtering up to elected officials who have a level of aggression that I hope we don't want to see play out, that I hope we find people who say law and order matter. We are absolutely going to hold criminals to account. We are not going to bury things out of fear of being called racist. We're going to uncover things like this in the future instantly. We're going to have truth and reconciliation around the grooming gangs, all of that. But as Nelson Mandela would say, even though these people have done us a great injustice, this is a wild paraphrase. Even though these people have done us a great injustice, the only path forward is together. And I beg people to read the Long Walk to Freedom. This is a man who's put in prison for 27 years for race in a legitimately. Nobody denies it. Apartheid state. And when he came out, he put white people on his security detail, and they were like, bro, they're going to get you killed. And he's like, the only path forward is together. So to me, if we can't even get people to take that growing sentiment seriously without needing to agree, but to take it seriously and to investigate and to meet them with reasoned argument as to why they shouldn't feel that way or to help them feel seen so that we can diffuse some of it. Something. But to ignore it, to say that you shouldn't feel that way and we also feel that way, it becomes the exact reason that you're frustrated that people would hit Black Lives Matter with All Lives Matter is now being felt on the opposite side. And so just as infuriating as it was, I'm sure for many people in the black community to hear that, it is now infuriating on the opposite side. And just as I would say to white people, to dismiss black people, it's just as foolish to dismiss white people. And boy, do I wish that we weren't even having this conversation along the race lines, because this really is ideology. This is way closer mapped to populists left and right than it is to race. But baby steps.

[B]

My ex's mom had a saying, those who cannot hear need to feel. And I think that this is one of those moments where when people are telling you what they're going through, it doesn't really hit the same. If I'm telling you I need help with something, you're like, well, you could do this, and you could do this. And we have a thousand reasons why they. They can do a better job at what they're doing. And then when you step into that position and it hits you directly now, it's like, what do you mean? Y' all should be mad. We should be. We demand justice. And I'm just like, oh, yes, we do. Oh, we need to stop judging by people's skin. Yes, we do. I agree. Is racism bad? Yes, it is. KK I'm right there with you. I think racism is very bad.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

I've just been saying this for 40 years. You've been saying this for a tweet over the weekend. So it's one of those things where now that we are all feeling it, hopefully we can now come together and realize, hey, maybe we overcorrected. Maybe we can just treat people by the way. Integrity of their character. That's the way I want the world

[A]

to be you and me both. And I certainly get the element of snark at the edge of that statement. The only thing I would say is when somebody comes to your side, to first make them eat crow is unwise in my opinion. So I get it. And I'm sure in private conversations, all of us have those moments where we're like, I've been fucking saying this forever. But when the. When somebody wakes up to your cause, to welcome them is probably far more wise than to slap them around and say, I got here a long time before.

[B]

I'm on everybody's side. Who's on justice's side. That's it right there. That's it right there. We talked about this for an hour and three minutes. Wow.

[C]

I got a good clip, though.

[B]

Okay, let's move on, everybody. Because Bernie Sanders wants half of open AI. He saw them IPO projections and he was like, yeah, I need that. He was like, forget this billionaire tax. I need that trillionaire tax.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Owning the means of production. Bernie Sanders pushes for 50 public ownership of American AI companies. Proposes AI sovereign wealth fund that would not hope that would hold direct ownership stakes in largest AI firms. I'm going to say one thing, then I'll throw it to you. We all were promised the AI Age of abundance.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Who's going to pay for this abundance that we think that we're going to have? It end up going to be the tax of the wealthy anyway, just like the existing tax policy. If we play this out, 10, 5, whatever, many years in the future, OpenAI is going to be paying a hefty bill anyway. Why not just cut the middleman and just take it? Like start here? I don't know. I'm being cheeky in that, but I'm like, I'm so curious.

[A]

Are you saying you really believe that?

[B]

No, no. I don't think we should have public like this shouldn't be like public private ownership in this way. But I'm like, if AI is going to be this age of abundance that's going to AI based socialism that we keep getting promised.

[A]

Let's just go right to it.

[B]

Let's just go right to it.

[A]

All right, well, Drew and Bernie, like any good communist, would want to seize the means of production. Bernie has put together a new bill and it would seize 50% of the top AI companies and give them to the public. His reasoning, of course, from where I'm sitting, is completely lunatic. It's lunatic. This guy is a menace. I cannot decide if he is well meaning and just fucking retarded or if he actually believes this shit and is therefore sinister, he is saying that human knowledge is somehow something that now we all have to pay for what? And that we can just take from the builders in society and give to the people that are beneficiaries of the things that are being built, that have not created anything themselves. Now here's the reality about human knowledge. Thank God none of us have to ask for permission to access human knowledge. The reason that we are not perpetually locked in the Dark Ages is that we are all literally evolved to drink knowledge from culture. This is why when kids are around 11, they start pushing away from their parents and they start drinking from the larger culture. This is why we all say we're all products of our time, because we're going to imbibe everything that's going on around us. What do people know? So that we can stand on the shoulders of giants instead of having to reinvent ourselves every fucking generation. The absurdity of that is so extreme. For people to think that they own human knowledge is crazy. Have you guys not heard? As the Internet has made abundantly clear, the information wants to be free. We're in a better world when information is free. The Dark Ages were in part due to the destruction of books and knowledge in general that actually set society back in a measurable way. When you deny people access to that knowledge, you are denying culture its ability to propel us all forward into the future. So the fact that AI was built by creating pattern recognition out of human knowledge so that we can all use it far more efficiently should be celebrated, but it's not. Being celebrated is trying to be seized by somebody who has never built a fucking thing in his life. This guy can't even get legislation passed. He does not understand how hard it is to build something. The miracle is wealth. Redistributing wealth is not a miracle. How can somebody show such a rabid desire to go out and take the things that have been created, but never ask, what does it take to create something in the first place? It is absolutely obscene. It is obscene that somebody would want to sit on top of this incredible culture that we've created that allows us to innovate to make it such that a king 150 years ago wouldn't even have access to the basic drugs that somebody can get at a CVS that dentists didn't even use to use Novocaine. All of these things are invented based on people having an incentive to create something, an acknowledgement that not everybody is willing or able to Take all the risk to do all of that creation and instead we get this parasitic class, the political class that don't create. They only take, they only redistribute. And what they should be doing is being grateful. Like imagine if you're a parent and you have worked your ass off to have your kids to raise them and your kids have a legitimate complaint. I did not ask to be born. But if they're being loved and they're being fed and they're being educated and they're being given this incredible opportunity to, if that kid starts stealing from their parents, running off, trying to boss the parents around, tell them how to run things, it is wild. That kid does not know how to do what the parent is doing. So that is the exact case when politicians are trying to take from people who actually know how to do this incredibly difficult high risk endeavor, which is to create a self sustaining economic engine. It is so fucking difficult. 94% of all companies fail. 94%. And the government wants to come in and say of the remaining 6%, we're just going to snatch all this shit because that's so easy. They should be asking, why do only 6% of companies succeed? That's fucking brutal. Those odds are gnarly. So how do we as a government help facilitate that? One of the ways you help facilitate that is you make sure that everybody has equal access to the knowledge that is out there that people can leverage it and use. Is wild to me that we're now it, we're now trying to put caps on people's ability to go, ooh, I see a cool way to leverage everything that we know as a society and make something. Now, if people want to say, you may not use my copyrighted material in your training, fine. I love the idea of letting people opt out of being included in the training data. That's great. But the reality is if you just put your shit out on the Internet for anybody to encounter, then why all of a sudden can we not put it in the form of AI for humans to encounter? Remember, while I get right now people are super paranoid that AI is going to take over the world, it hasn't. AI has just become a way for humans to engage with the patterns that we see in the cumulative human output of all of society up to this point, done in a far more efficient pattern. And by the way, AI will cease to exist if people don't find enough value in it that they're willing to pay for it. And so what we're saying by paying for AI is Hey, you've made use of this thing in a way where I would rather give you my money and get the product than keep my money. So they are saying that they value the AI more than they value their money. That's how capitalism does its miracle. Now I get it. We don't have a capitalist society. And so the weird, hybrid bizarro world that we live in, that people call capitalism, that is completely abusive. And so I understand why people are frustrated. But the element of capitalism that still lives, where we allow people to be selfish so that they're incentivized to create something where people say, yeah, I would rather have that thing than my money, that moves society forward, that whole confusion is creating this derangement. And so we've really got to find a way to talk people like Bernie Sanders off of a ledge to get them interested in the power of being able to create something like that, to get them to see that the. That human knowledge is like oxygen. We should all have access to it. So think of open source AI that is literally every human being for free, being able to take advantage of these patterns that are present. And so trying to take from the people that are taking huge amounts of risks with their time, with their capital is lunacy. It's how you break the machine, the machine of prosperity.

[B]

This is not going away because I feel like the 50 thing is, like, doubling down. Like, it was bad enough when there was the wealth tax. It was bad enough when they like some of the Mamdani proposals. But I feel like Bernie's like, yeah, and we want half the company. Like, that's wild.

[A]

That's wild.

[B]

Like, that's kind of wild. Like 6% of IBM. Trump is actually doing socialist things and getting it done. Bernie can't even do it right. Like, 50%. Like, come on, man. Start with at least 10% and negotiate up. Come on.

[A]

That even. That is crazy. I need a button where I can acknowledge your sarcasm so people don't think that I miss it. So what Trump is doing is lunacy. What Bernie is doing is lunacy. Times 10. They should both stop immediately by, like, 9.5.

[B]

You know, 6% times 10 would be a little bit more than what Bernie eggs were. But I get you.

[A]

It's crazy.

[C]

I have a hypothetical for you on this actually gets kind of a callback to a previous conversation from the London show. So the data centers that they're building.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

In a world where we as citizens continue having to carry the burden of these data centers, do you think then there becomes an argument for ownership of these companies.

[A]

I need you to tell me what burden of the data centers you think you're carrying.

[C]

Well, so not me specifically, but, like, the areas that are facing the water shortages, increases in electricity costs, all that, because while it's not major now, it's going to continue growing. And so I guess my wonder is, is there a way we could reformat what Bernie's saying to work in a more fair sense if. If we're not going to regulate companies?

[A]

Your frame of reference is so delusional, I don't even know where to begin. You've grown up in an era where the absurd tax rates that we're paying now are just like. Yeah, more, more, more. You're not talking about. Okay, what about when am I going to get recompense for all of the fraud? I. Do you know how many millions of dollars I've paid in tax and it has just been pissed the away?

[C]

Well, I still think we need that. I guess it's more the question of.

[A]

Here's the thing. I don't want compensation for that. I want us all to stop being idiots and understand government is not your friend. Government has an impulse to get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and it will happily make victims of us all to make sure that it can be the nanny to everybody else. And we need to understand that humans are selfish. So if. If you have a beef with that, you have a beef with God, take it up with him, stop taking it up with the government. Stop trying to make it policy. Humans are selfish, but you can turn that. Much like we can turn wind or water into a source of power, you can turn people's selfishness into a source of power. The way that you do that is by saying, hey, we're going to create an environment in which you're able to build a company and let's call it an llc. So you have limited liability. So if you fail, all good. Because we recognize that the thing that you'll create, the only way it will sustain is if you make something that people want more than they want their money. And we're going to let you keep the money that you make by making this thing that is that people value more than they value their money. Okay? That is a fucking miracle. That is so hard to do, dude. So Drew said something earlier that's very profound, that when people can't hear, they need to feel. If somebody had to, like, run a business for five years and they only ate or had a house, if they can make that company work real fast, people are going to get real clear headed about how hard it is about the government fucks you up at every turn. That keeping employees inspired, motivated, compensated is very hard. That you're always going to pay. If you're not a fucking dumbass, you're always going to pay your employees before you pay yourself. All of it. All of it, all of it. And but when you, when that machine is successful for such a long period of time, people actually forget that that is fucking difficult. And they just think oh, cities just pop up and countries just run themselves and like oh these poor assholes that are in countries that aren't functional. Well I don't know what broke with them. What broke with them is fucking capitalism. They made dumb ass choices that strip people of their incentive or just are so corrupt and so parasitic from the top down that they can't get any momentum going whatsoever because companies can't even fucking form. So it, it is absolutely maddening to realize that people do not understand. They cannot map the cause and effect of how tax dollars come into existence full stop. They don't even understand. And so it's just more, more, more, more, more, more, more. Because they have passed a value judgment on selfishness and said ew, selfishness is icky. These guys are getting rich. Take their fucking money. And then they don't realize you wake the up in Soviet Russia or Cuba or Venezuela or Argentina for the last hundred years before they got their together. And it fucking sucks.

[C]

So you're more team. Make sure the companies are just paying it rather than it coming off. Well, I guess not team but you

[A]

see, I'm more team. Cause and effect. And there are things that will make your society prosperous and there's the same amount of money to collect and tax. And at the same time you have to walk a balance between the following two things. You need to via policy, show gratitude to businesses. This is why every dumb ass mayor, like the mayor of Seattle my hometown ends up going yeah, the stupid that I was saying that was anti business, that was dumb because I now have a budget hole. Because people do leave. Because people are not going to get slapped around by their government forever. Like you can think that they will. But if California is not learning the lesson, if New York's not learning the lesson, if Seattle's not learning the lesson, then they're fucking idiots and their states will decline. You've got to show gratitude for people that can build that engine through policy. I'm not asking you to like smile and take them out to dinner and say thank you. I'M just saying make policy that doesn't punish them endlessly. And recognizing corporations will abuse you if you let them. And so you've got to have both of those ideas in your head. Boy, oh boy, we need people that can build shit. Boy, oh boy, these will abuse us if we let them. And you've got to exist in that tension. And if you can't, you hurt your own people, period. You're not hurting some mythical creature. You're hurting your people. Because eventually the government runs out of other people's money. And now you live in a literal.

[B]

I think this is a perspective question because I seen this Warren Buffett clip that I want to play, and I feel like this could help ground us a lot because I think there's a. Oftentimes we think we deserve more or there should be more. And to your point, Tom, of the endless, like, line of if we just had more money, if we just had more of this, if we just had. And we don't realize how much we actually have in the actual present. But let's talk about it.

[A]

Warren Buffett, 2% in terms of income in the United states, the bottom 5%, and for sure the top 1% all live better than John D. Rockefeller was living. When I was six years old, John D. Rockefeller was the richest man in the world.

[B]

And today

[A]

you can get better medicine, better education, better entertainment, better transportation. You can do everything better than he could. You can.

[B]

I mean, it's astounding.

[A]

That's in my lifetime. All right, pause it. So here, here he is both right and wildly misleading. And so if you, it might even be like, if you click on that, I think you'll find it in the, the comments. Just look at a picture of his house. And so he said if, if it didn't, it was very quiet on our side. I don't know if it was for you guys. He said the bottom 1%, 2%, and certainly the top 5% or whatever he said bottom 5%, maybe. Top 1% certainly live better. So. Meaning the poor people right now are living better than John D. Rockefeller did. Now, that wouldn't be recognized in real life for a whole host of reasons, and it ought to be recognized in real life for a host of reasons, but it won't be. Because just as I want people to acknowledge that humans are selfish, and if you've got a beef with that, take it up with God. Humans just cannot deal with inequality. And if you've got a beef with that, take it up with God. So if you show. I don't know if we can pull it up. But if you show John D. Rockefeller as perfect his house now go ahead and tell somebody, hey, you can live there, you can have servants, people are going to treat you like a king with like just extreme deferential treatment. However, if you need a root canal, that shit gon suck. And if you, if you get a cut in your finger, it might be terminal because no antibiotics for you. They're going to be people like, yeah, fuck it, I'm gonna do it. I might only get 10 or 15 years, but that's gonna be rad. And so him not being honest about that I think does the whole point a disservice. So in some ways that are excruciatingly meaningful, our lives are way better no matter how poor you are than they would have been 100 years ago or certainly 200 years ago. Way better. But on other metrics you're going to be driven absolutely crazy because we are living in the second Gilded Age where the Elon Musk's, the Jeff Bezos of the world and all of that. They're so wealthy that it's just infuriating for people that don't believe that they can get out from under the debt that their government has put them in, or they can't figure out why they can't make ends meet because their government hates them and is stealing their money. All while saying, I'm going to give you free shit. Which by the way, every time you hear you're going to give me free shit, just remember the second half of that statement is I'm going to give you free shit by stealing your money as long as you don't forget that part. So to actually get people to respond the way that he wants them to respond, which is to understand capitalism, is dope because it takes the selfish impulse of people that want to get ahead and it funnels them through a okay, you can get ahead, but you have to innovate. You can't be violent, you can't steal, you can't defraud, but you can make something people want. We'll let you do that. And people don't realize that is a structure that government's created, which is why I'm not a libertarian. It is a structure that government has created that is awesome. But governments have an impulse to get bigger and bigger and bigger and it is the job of a well armed public to remind them their job should be to stay as small as humanly possible. And somewhere along the line, because we've been prosperous for so long. And because we do not teach people how the economy works, and because we indoctrinate people with this mentality that they are a victim, we just have completely lost the plot on how we actually got the society that we got. And we got it by going, hey, selfish people. I'm going to funnel you through this filter of if you create something that adds value, I'm going to let you get ridiculously wealthy. And if you don't think that's true, ask China how they got out from under starving their people to death. They finally said, all right, God damn, we're going to let these selfish people, we're going to funnel them through a thing that says you have to add value, but we're going to let you get ridiculously wealthy by doing it. And through banking regulations and stuff like that, they were able to actually banking deregulations. They were able to create the modern miracle of pulling hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. But we don't tell that story.

[B]

You said something about Tokyo. I was trying to bring up the book. I'm blanking on the name, though. Where?

[A]

The one I'm reading.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Tokyo Junkie.

[B]

Tokyo Junkie. The way that they were able to convert the culture from rioters, prostitution stuff to, like, a shared. We're on the same page. Is there a mechanism that they did or did you not get to, like, what is this? Is that Drew?

[A]

This is really becoming a thing for me.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I may punish you in making the deep dives less about what I know will perform and more about what I'm just, like, obsessed with.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

It's not good for the channel.

[B]

Your obsessions are always great for the channel. Because I bring passion. We love your passion, in fact.

[A]

Fact. Thank you. That's very kind. Because that's against your financial incentive. So here's what I. I haven't looked deeply enough to know what the final punchline is going to be, but I will say this, that it is going to make everyone deeply uncomfortable. What actually happens. And this is the thing that makes me very sad about revisiting Winston Churchill. If you really look closely, if in the fullness of time, we actually understand all the horrific, amoral things that he did, evil things that he did to win the war, we're going to go, oh, he was an evil man. And the reality is that after World War II, to create the incredible country of Japan and to stabilize the world, we realized, oh, China's on the rise. They're partnering with Russia now. The new threat is communism Japan could fall to communism if we let it, because we were really pushing for them to be a left leaning country. And then we saw, oh, the left is very aligned with communism. We're going to need to push these guys in the opposite direction. One of the many, many, many, many, many things that they did was go to the Yakuza and say, we need you on our side. And so the Yakuza is their mafia. And so they enlisted the help of people to like, oh, you need that union? Busted, no problem. I pay a couple visits to the right households and all of a sudden that union's not so interested in organizing anymore. So now I'm not saying I know that's what they did. I know that they engaged with the Yakuza. Did the Yakuza break up unions? Probably. But do I have evidence of that? Not yet. But it's going to be things like that. You don't get in bed with the Yakuza because you want friendly things.

[B]

You want sound domestic policy. Correct.

[A]

So that is how real change happens and society. And this is part of what scares me about the Information age society, is the layer of lies that we tell ourselves about what those things mean. And so while I am bordering on a free speech absolutist, so people need to say whatever they believe to be true about Winston Churchill, but man, do I hope in the final analysis we go, you know what, we're going to selectively focus on the good things. And same thing about Lincoln. It's like when you really look at how the end of slavery came about, it was not pure, but it's like, I'd rather tell the pure story. I think it's way more inspiring and motivational and makes me want to do better things, moral things. And looking at the like, really icky reality of it all. Oh, I hate that the world is like that.

[B]

Same for the civil rights movement. We all have the COVID story and the real story. We got to move over to Russia and Ukraine because that story is another one that's just kind of unraveling in the.

[A]

Yeah, this is so you had Putin claiming, hey, war is almost over, guys, great news. And then all of a sudden he is really realizing that, oh, I can be touched by the Ukraine basically at any moment. And so it does appear that the Ukraine is out innovating them when it comes to drone technology. So they are now reaching farther and farther into Russia with these drone strikes and hitting critical infrastructure. So they're calling it sanctions that they're putting on Russian oil by blowing up tankers refineries. And they were just about to have an economic forum, and there's a bunch of people from around the world, including US Delegates, and they bombed it right before it could start. Now, I don't know if they did it before everyone arrived, after everyone, I don't know, but they bombed the forum. So this, this is getting worse in that it's escalating because I don't know what a cornered Russia looks like. If they're losing the drone war but winning the ballistic missile war, then it's like, do they just start leveling Kiev? I don't know. We're gonna see. But this is far from over. And while I haven't interrogated this as closely as I have the US And Iran, my immediate, like, sympathies go with Ukraine. So I am admittedly like, this is kind of dope that these guys are building the drone technology. Now I probably have a lie in my head about what's actually happening. I want to imagine the Ukrainian leadership is just rallying their troops, getting their engineers excited that they're having

[B]

our World War II moment equivalent.

[A]

Exactly. So now is that really what's happening, or is Europe just having a proxy war with Russia? But this clearly is far from over, and we'll see how this plays out. But, yeah, we live in a destabilized world. I'm very unnerved by what's happening as this could escalate quickly. Russia may start running Iran's playbook of retaliating against allies of Ukraine instead of just Ukraine. So starting to strike Europe, that would be bad. And so when the drones went off course in Romania, it was my understanding that those drones were actually Ukrainian. I don't know that for sure, but driven off course somehow by Russia. But people were saying that, hey, this is basically the next vector of attack, that Russia is going to start doing things that will force a article 5 like moment where NATO has to decide, are we actively going to engage in Russia? Because Article 5 based on ex. This is just a thought experiment, but Article 5 just got triggered by this thing that happened in whatever, Romania, Latvia, I guess is the one that people are really pointing at. So we'll see.

[B]

Yeah, to your point, though, Ukraine is holding it down like they've. Everybody thought they would get ran over. Big brother, little brother type thing. This will be over in two weeks. Trump even said it when they had their beef in the White House. Without us, you guys will be wrapped up. Yeah, they've been holding it down, so.

[A]

Very impressive.

[B]

Shout out to the Ukrainian People for doing their thing. Okay. There's been some like hilarious gaming news that I feel like we should just kind of COVID briefly. I think this all pulls on the same thread in a different way because first we had the conversation about Henry Noak, the start of it. We had the second layer secondary conversation about like immigration, the changing demographics, the feeling like invisible and certain things. And then now in the gaming community they're one of the long standing franchises. God of War guys, they're on God of war 14. Like, you know what I mean? Like I get it, don't woke it. But you can only have Kratos come back from the dead and kill a God so many times. Ryan is bouncing up in the seat to put his hand up.

[C]

Well, I'll just keep it quick. But I also feel like this character it's following is so important to the lore of the Sony Kratos that it just makes sense.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So good choice on the character.

[C]

Oh, 100%. Like I will say it is disappointing as a fan that I'm not gonna get to play as Kratos much. But it's like the Miles Morales game. Same gameplay, just a different story with a different character. And I mean, I guess it's different because he is Spider man, but. But to me I'm like, this is filling out Kratos's character more and filling out his love interest more because that's his wife.

[A]

But now there's definitely big beef about it being a woman. There's no doubt about that. I think that this would probably have played very differently if the character was hot. So here is the thing, here's what I can't understand. And life is going to teach Sony a lesson or it's going to teach me a lesson. So as a player I would not play this game because the lead character is female. When I play a game, I like to imagine myself as that character. You're never going to see me in a fortnite skin that's female ever. It just makes me feel weird. I don't like it. But to each their own.

[B]

There was a Twitter like, I'll let you finish.

[C]

I think I know which one you're talking about.

[A]

That'd be interesting to hear. So on that for me it's like I, I'm not of that generation, whatever. But I see guys play female characters all the time. But the one thing that they have in common is that they have a great ass. If it's a third player character, you're just staring at the woman's ass all Day. Now, If I were 14, 24, maybe that would hold more allure. So at least I understand that. But Sony has clearly an agenda. Like, let me. I'm going to steal man the argument for. So if you're looking at your screen, they're showing the actress, it's the woman from God. What was that blood vampire show on HBO a while ago. True Blood. Thank you. That's what I know her from. So she was in True Blood, beautiful young woman, very much, I think, respected in like the D and D crowd. So, like, she's got real street cred in terms of who you would cast. But when I say that she's stunning, she is stunning. Now she's playing the character. They've made her hair red, they've made a similar length, like they've given her similar features to the character, but she is way less attractive. Now if I am Sony, this is. I'm going to steel man this argument. I'm going to say. And part of the kerfuffle around this is the game director is a woman, which I'll from my perspective, like, if I were going to invest in a game and you told me that you had a woman running a franchise called God of War, I'd be like, hard pass. I want Jason Momoa or somebody who looks like Jason Momoa in that role. Like, I want somebody who lives and breathes like heavy metal, like swelling orchestra, like kill something. Because that at least I've never played God of War, but I'm guessing based on the title and what clips I've seen that that's where we're at. Okay, so anyway, you've got a woman doing it. Don't trust that she'll have the instincts that guys who will be the primary buyer of this product, because I'm just talking as a capitalist, I don't trust that she'll read their instincts. Well, okay, so, but if I'm going to steal man, the fact that she's looking at that and she's saying, listen, it, it really does matter how you represent women. There's this YouTuber guy, Tom Billy bangs on all the time about frame of reference. So we have an opportunity to shift people's frame of reference to something that is more grounded. So rather than everybody living in this like constant pornified version of women, like, let's show that like a women, a woman really can be strong, she can be gritty. And look, there was pushback on Linda HAMILTON When Terminator 2 came out and was she too masculine and all that stuff? She ended up being a dope ass heroine remembered well over time. Same with Sigourney Weaver. Right? So let's like really ground her. Let's, let's let her be strong and covered in dirt and not wearing a bunch of fucking makeup. And like, you know, this is, this is a gritty woman who's fighting if this is Kratos love interest, like fighting for him and what they stand for and all of that. And so we just, just like a real woman who's not in a glamour photo is not always going to look incredible. Like, let's really show it. Let's show a non glamorized version of this. Heard. Got it. I bet my wife will love that. But the reality is, if this is a male power fantasy, you are dealing with brain chemistry. Now the great irony is if you look at the novels that are the female equivalent of porn, they're called Romantasy. It's a huge genre that sells untold millions of copies. Just absolute insanity. And I think the biggest one's called Fourth Wing or something like that.

[C]

Yes, Fourth Wing. There's also Court of Thorn and Roses. And there's another one that's big. All right, now iron something. Yeah, Iron Flame.

[A]

In these books, the guys be as hot as the day is long. And the book covers and stuff, hot, hot, hot, hot, hot. Even one of the people that wrote God of War posts on Instagram the most like hot girl photos ever. And all of that makes sense to me because we as human animals find that stuff attractive. And so if you're a beautiful woman, I will forgive you for posting thirst traps on Instagram because you know, the neurochemical effect that it has on people, it's a big deal. So all of that I think makes all the sense in the world. So when I look at Sony doing this, I'm just like, bro, what are you doing? There's a reason that women want the glamour shots. There's a reason that guys want to play an attractive woman because they want to see that physique. They want that neurological feedback of like, ooh, that's sexy. And when you take that away, it is a fundamental misunderstanding of what your consumer wants. And that's why so many of these games fail and they get so much backlash. It's just like, just accept that. The job of a video game is not to speak to an audience that isn't buying your product. The job of a video game is to speak well to the audience that is going to buy your product. And so if you've got to Bring them in with a great ass to then tell them a story of a fully realized woman. Awesome. Do that.

[C]

I just don't think God of War. I agree with you. Let's start with that. Like I do agree with the mentality you're saying. I don't think God of War necessarily falls into that bracket personally.

[A]

Meaning attractive woman. Not gonna work.

[C]

I think they're using it to sell more. Maybe I misunderstood because I am jumping between chads.

[A]

They're not using the main character to sell the game.

[C]

No, I think what they're using to sell the game is the God of War tag itself. Like we are emphasizing this is God of War. Even in the trailer they're show Kratos come into this because it takes place in I guess the equivalent of Valhalla for Nordic.

[A]

Let me ask real fast a calibrating question. Do you believe you're like, yes. Right choice. This game is going to hit millions of sales.

[C]

Yes. Because it's God of War. Because look at the Last of Us Part two. Last of Us Part two led by a lesbian woman. People complained about it still sold more than the original, still won all the game awards. And it is a remarkable game whether or not people actually like it. Most people agree it is well made.

[A]

So I think God wars doesn't matter as long as the game is good.

[C]

Right.

[A]

But is it neutral, advantageous or disadvantageous?

[C]

I don't think it should matter. I think it's nothing because like I

[A]

look at my friend who you're answering an ought question. I'm asking a sales figure question.

[C]

I think it is neutral and I think it is not going to sell less because it's a woman. I think it will sell less because it's not Kratos. But it will still make bank if that makes sense.

[A]

So even if they'd introduced a new guy, you're like, that doesn't matter. This is. It wouldn't have worked there no matter

[C]

who you if they had followed because there's a DLC they're working on following Atreus, which is the son of Kratos. I don't think that DLC is going to sell as well as the base game because no one came to God of War Ragnarok for Atreus. Now the true fans of the universe and the franchise want to like learn about these characters which is where these things come into play. But I don't think. I think it's just the matter of the lore, honestly, if that makes sense.

[B]

Yeah. And somebody even said like God of War is a is different type of game. So I feel like if you love that game, you would already be locked in. You're not doing it for the chicks. But if it's a newer franchise, if it's something a bit more experimental, if it's a reboot, if it's something like that, it's important, I think, to have a lead character that pulls them in. But this is similar to the Yakuza thing about Assassin's Creed. Yeah. Where when there was a Black Samurai, everybody was like, oh, why is it a black thing? They woke ified it. It was a bad. The game itself was okay. Like, it wasn't a great game, but people are like, it's because he's black. That's why the game sucked. It was like. No, it was just the 18th Assassin's Creed. That was just like the last 17. Assassin's Creed, where it's the same gameplay, same mechanism and all that. It's just a different person in the front. So I think with God of War, which is a button masher, it is the same game. If you're locked in and you love it, I think you'll already be okay with playing this again. But to your point of just marketing, I don't understand why you couldn't just make her look like how she looks in real life. I don't understand why you needed to age her up. Uglifier, whatever. The thing is. But, like, I have this pulled up right now. Whereas, like, I'm looking at other game characters. Cyberpunk 2027, Keanu Reeves look just like him. Like Idris Album, the dlc, same thing. Like, I'm seeing these other. These other games where the character does look like him, but it does seem when it comes to women characters, they modify their facial features in another after another after.

[C]

She is over 100, though. Like, she's really old in the game.

[B]

Oh, so for over 100, she's pretty high.

[C]

Kind of works. Yeah, she's like hundreds of years old. She is a giant. She's a frost giant. Specific. I know too much lore now.

[A]

Okay, so this is, if I'm mapping you guys correctly, what I hear you saying is, hey, all that hype in the game industry that's been going on since Gamergate, it's all noise. It doesn't actually have anything to do with the struggling sales figures of the different games. That's a post hoc rationalization. It's actually just quality of game. That other stuff doesn't matter.

[C]

That's what I think. Mostly. I think maybe there's an argument. On indie level, it's a different story. But I look at my best friend who has nothing to do with politics, very middle of the road guy and his exact comment was, doesn't have kratos, but I'm gonna buy it. I like God of War, you know, and I think that's kind of what.

[B]

But, but there is manipulation to it. There is. If asmongold goes on a rant about it, it is going to affect sales, if you know what I mean? Like so there is. You can avoid the controversy by just playing like a, by pitching a fastball down the middle. She's a woman, yes, but she's hot, cool. Now it's no longer a conversation. Nobody's even talking about it. But the fact that she's a mid. Now it's a conversation. Now somebody's going to overanalyze it. Somebody's going to write a think piece about it and that could impact sales numbers. So to me it's, it's a, it's an avoidable problem. So why even go down that road?

[A]

Let me see if I can make something hyper apparent to you guys and to the audience. And if when I say this you're like, yeah, that is absurd. Impact theory makes comics lesser known. Part of what we. It's sort of on hiatus now, but we've done actually quite a few comics and the realization that we made, we modeled after Japan. So Japan makes comics for specific niches. They even have different names for them and the names typically have to do with whether they're male or female. So you've got Shonen, which is for young boys. You've got Sane in, which is for older men, not older men but like in their 20s. You've got shojo, which is for girls. I forget the different names for the women stuff but like all the way up to like 60 year olds. And they don't try to make something for 60 year olds that they think that young kids are going to like. So it's all very separate. They don't make something for boys that they think girls are going to like. They just make a thing with their clear target audience in mind. Like as I think you would agree, Chainsaw man is made for young boys. Which is why the whole motivation in the beginning of the game is or the game, the show is the kid wants to touch a breast. That's it. Not something you're going to expect of wide appeal to young girls. Okay. So I look at that and I go ah yeah, makes sense. Let's when we make something. Let's make sure that we define the demographic for whom this comic is for. So this is for boys this age is for girls this age. Okay. Now we make that decision and Lisa and I are each heading up the different stories. Now, would you expect me, as self evident just to sell. Would you expect me to oversee the comics aimed at young girls and Lisa to oversee the comics aimed at young boys, or for me to oversee the comics aimed at young boys and Lisa to oversee the comics aimed at young girls?

[B]

Definitely one that matches your demographic.

[A]

Correct.

[C]

Oversee how though?

[A]

Oversee as in hire the writers, pick the art style, approve storylines, on and on and on.

[C]

Gotcha.

[A]

Which one?

[C]

I mean, I'm of the opinion that like anyone can oversee anything, I guess.

[A]

Wow. Okay.

[C]

I also don't think that also comes with the caveat of I don't think like an old man should tell the story of a young woman who was raped or something. You know what I mean? Like, that's a very specific example.

[A]

Why? Why is that not okay?

[C]

To me I'm like, you need other writers at that point. You should not be a solo person doing that. But that's like a whole different caveat because I do think you need a team of writers for sensitive topics.

[A]

Why?

[C]

Because you need a lot of perspectives on them.

[A]

I think the whole point of art is to have a singular perspective. It can make people mad, but the point is to say something.

[B]

All right, hold on.

[C]

I saw the time and I was

[A]

like, I'm late on this.

[B]

We already are.

[C]

I want to get to a conclusion, so.

[A]

All right, we'll get to the six Super Chat ass.

[B]

I don't think that's the argument. Can anybody write anything?

[A]

So I think anybody should be able to write anything they want. And so if a six year old man wants to write the tale of a 12 year old girl that's raped, of course write it. And if you say something that rings true, then people are really going to resonate with it and it's going to do well. What? The place I'm coming from is you're a business. What is more likely to land. I'm not saying that. A great artist. First of all, if you're an author, you're going to be writing all characters all over the place and you should absolutely do that. When people get weird about that, I'm always shocked. However, when people go, Stephen King can't write women for shit, I'm not shocked. That's like, yeah, cool, fine. Just like oftentimes women write men that feel more like women than they feel like men. It's like, yeah, cool. You've lived your whole life as a woman. Got it Understood. So that doesn't trip me out. I don't think they should stay silent. Write whatever fucking story you want. Write about whoever you want. But if you want to maximize the dollars. If I'm writing a story that's aimed to girls, I'm going to find me a female to oversee that. And when I look at. So I wrote the original treatment for our story of Wish Academy, so that was all me. I spent ages on it, developed it out, and I was like, this is dope. And then I showed it to Lisa and the person that was working on it with her at the time, another woman, and they were both like, this is terrible. And I was like, what do you mean? What would you guys do differently? And when they did, it was all about emotion and all this. And I was like, what the. How are we going to even externalize that? It's like you made empathy a superpower. I was like, this is weird. They oversee it. Ends up being one of our best pieces of IP from just, like, the people we show it to. How do they react? So I'm like, ah, this is exactly why we divvy it up the way that we do. And they would never, in my opinion, be able to do the stuff aimed at boys in the way that I would, because they just don't have the impulses and the instincts and all that. So from a business perspective, fastball down the middle when you can. You want somebody who's just freakishly passionate about that topic. Now, maybe the woman that's running it really is freakishly passionate about male aggression, sword play, power fantasy, being coated in blood, killing your enemies. Yeah, it's possible. It just seems statistically unlikely. And so gamers and gaming influencers in the millennial vein are screaming into the void to be heard. This is not what we want. Now, maybe they're just the loud online voices and they don't represent what's really going on, but I would say that sales figures indicate otherwise. You guys are amazing. Thank you for being here with us. I wasn't watching chat, so I don't know how much love to throw at you guys, but nonetheless, I am grateful for you guys being here and for everybody that showed us love for approaching the topic in the way that we did. I thank you. To Drew and Ryan, my most deep gratitude for you guys being a part of this and putting yourselves out there on the Internet. I really, really appreciate it. Yeah. It's amazing. You guys are rad. Everybody out there, I love you. And I know that I'm supposed to shout out our sponsor today, and I'm not going to because today was so heavy. That felt super weird. So, yeah, knowingly not. But by the way, speaking of thanks, we'll. We'll do a Make Good to My Beloved Partnerships team masterclass, Thursday, June 11th. Gonna be teaching people for free how to build a company with AI. So, guys, join these. They are free. They're incredibly useful. The link is in the description. So I hope to see you June 11th at 1pM Pacific Time. All right, Love you guys. See you on Friday. Peace.