The True Villain in The Boys (And It's Not Who You Think)

Speaker 1: Welcome to Fighting Matters. I'm Stefan Kesting from Grapplarts.com. We've got Jesse Walker from Rough Hands BJJ. How are you, Jesse? Speaker 2: Hey, everybody. Uh, doing as well as could be expected. Speaker 1: And our special guest star today is Sean Benson from The Boys, or should I say Ezekiel? Speaker 3: You can indeed. Speaker 1: All right. Ezekiel, who were you on The Boys and what was your pitch? Speaker 3: Well, what was so fun about that is, you know, we're talking before the the camera started rolling about hypocrisy and I'm playing this preacher who's almost like a cultish leader of this organization that works with Vought, you know, the bad guys on the show and uh, he's basically an utter hypocrite who is praying the gay away and trying to convert kids and and at the same time he's going to these sex parties at night and making out with three men at a time and um, so there's just sort of fun with that. There's there's more plot point to it if you watch the show. But in terms of who he was, he was just a a grandstander to the highest degree who had no moral code. Speaker 1: Yeah. I think it's the hypocrisy that drives me insane. I mean, you want to go to gay orgies or sex parties or whatever, fine. Fill your boat. But being there on one side and taking a moral stand. I mean, the best example there, I'm going off on a rant already and we're about 10 seconds in, is the whole incident with Liberty University and Jerry Falwell Jr. Did you ever hear about this? Speaker 2: I may have, but remind me. Speaker 1: So Jerry Falwell was one of the original televangelists in the 80s. And his kid, Jerry Falwell Jr., ended up running Liberty, air quotes, University. So Liberty University is a super conservative, essentially Christian university. Students have to sign a code of conduct. Guys can't even shake hands with girls. You promise not to have premarital sex. It's it's about as Little House on the Prairie meets The Handmaid's Tale as you can get. And then, years ago, Rolling Stone came out with an article on Jerry Falwell Jr. And they alleged that he really enjoyed cuckolding. He really enjoyed watching his wife get railed by literally the pool boy. And they traveled all around the country together with the pool boy. And eventually they gave him like a a the tennis club, I want to say, from Liberty University. They sold it to him for a dollar and then they turned around and rented it back from him, basically a way to give him money. Speaker 2: I love it. Go pool boy. Speaker 1: The pool boy started blackmailing them. Jerry Falwell Jr. brought in, who was it? It was Michael Cohen, Donald Trump's fixer. And and to kill the story. Basically it was a it was a buy one of those catch and kill stories where we promise we're going to cover this. We're going to pay you $200,000 to cover this in, I'm making this up, The National Enquirer. But if you mention it, we're going to sue the daylights out of you. And they killed it that way. Speaker 3: Yep. That's I mean, it's funny you mention The National Enquirer because that was David Packer, Trump's guy who did all the catch and kills. Speaker 1: Well, yeah, it's it's a small world. So then the story goes on and eventually Michael Cohen introduces Jerry Falwell Jr. to Trump. Uh Falwell looks into Trump's heart, sees that he's a good man inside there somewhere. And that's the first evangelical to stand up and support Trump in his run for election. Now, when that story came out, I wanted to believe it. It was kind of like the P tape accusations. Man, did I want that to be true? And you got to be careful of things that you want to be true because you're totally susceptible to it. But then, Liberty University ended up firing Jerry Falwell Jr. for sexual improprieties. And so like there it does look like the story has legs. And again, if if cuckolding is your thing, fill your boots, but don't be in charge of a university where you literally can't have men and women shaking hands because that's too much skin contact. Bloody hypocrites. Speaker 3: I got two questions for you. What do you think makes people need to do that and what do you think bothers you so much about it? Like why can't we just as a society go, this is my thing. I like this. And why do we, because me too, get so enraged by the hypocrisy? Speaker 1: I guess maybe it's this crazy liberal sense that we'd like the playing field to be fair and that rules for thee and not for me are fundamentally unfair. I don't know. Jesse, do you have a a deep answer to this troubling moral question? Why does hypocrisy bother us so much? Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that's a good question. I'm I've actually I'm sitting here kind of spinning my wheels uh on Sean's first question, which which is like why are people hypocrites in the first place? And again, this may be availability heuristics, you know, a bias, but it it certainly seems like there is more uh repression and self-hatred and certainly sexual, you know, uh hypocrisy that that tends to happen more on the right. I mean, how often daily we're getting stories of not that this is okay on any side of the political spectrum, but politicians that are anti this and anti that and then, you know, it comes out months later that they're now being investigated or, you know, exposed as a as a pedophile or, you know, into child porn. It it seems like the people that scream loudest and seem the most hateful uh tend to have the most to hide, which I think is really interesting. Speaker 3: I mean, I think that's part of it, right, is, you know, you've got countries founded on Puritan movements and and and there's a conservatism not politically but just um socially that becomes inherent and then there's your progressives who are trying to move the wheel. But somehow one thing that hasn't moved forward enough is it's okay to be who you are. I mean, even with all the trans fear and everything, it's like there's this idea that naming it and saying it's a part of society has become even see these right-wingers going, well, we're okay with the LGB but not the TQIA or whatever and it's like that they weren't okay with the gay a while ago. So at least the wheel's moving in the right direction. But at the same time, yeah, I I don't know the answer, but I do think it's this fear of loss of power because if the central mass isn't ready yet for the things here that aren't that crazy, that I'm just being me, then you got to pretend you're a thing. Now, pretending you're a thing is way different than pushing a thing. Right? Like not naming your proclivities at work is gray, but then making sure no one else has any proclivities is where it starts to get punishing and absolutely unconscionable. And I don't know what makes people need to do that other than I think maybe the need for power, but also self-loathing. I hate this part of myself. I wish I wasn't like this. And I always think of, you know, old monks in the 1700s who are like, I can't function in society, so I'm going to sequester and then I'm going to tell society that all the things I wish I could do in society are wrong so that no one can do it. Speaker 1: We have talked with David Lay, who's a basically a sex psychologist on this podcast. And he brought up the fact that if you take a look at, you know, call it fetishes by political orientation, that Democrats are more likely to be into things like S&M or bondage and domination, and that Republicans are more likely to be into cuckolding. And it's kind of the inversion of the things that you hold sacred that creates the sexual charge. Right? Equality, equality, equality, but then I'm going to jerk off to bondage. Hierarchy, hierarchy, hierarchy. Purity culture, but then I'm going to sit at the foot of the bed and watch some bull rail my wife. Uh it's the inversion of the things that we are supposed the things that we say and hold publicly that creates the sexual charge for us in our internal lives. Speaker 2: And certainly on on the right, I also think it comes down to some some in-group, out-group and kind of I I I hate the term, but I, you know, identity politics, right? Especially if you grew up in a in a conservative culture, in a conservative household, family, community, and then as that progresses, you're discovering these things about yourself. Oh my gosh, I think, you know, I might be gay, I might be this, I might be that. Yeah, that is that's who I am. That's who, you know, who you are, whatever. But you're now looking down the barrel of my identity is going to be shattered if I let my community know about who I am. So instead of playing it cool, they swing the pendulum far the other way and publicly hate the thing that they are so that no one ever suspects that that's not actually their identity. Speaker 3: You just touched on something really interesting too, because if you look at demographics for voting, I don't know if this is true this year, but there was a year a couple years ago where a study came out that the greatest indicator of how a person will vote is urban density. It's not education, although that's contained within urban density. It's not race or sexual orientation, although again, big cities have more races uh in a city and and more queer people, etc. But when you think of a smaller community, which is more conservative just by voting demographics, those smaller communities, you're more likely to have trouble changing. Whereas if you're in the city, you just move across town to a new apartment and you're just like, I just realized I'm fully fucking bisexual or queer or whatever. Nobody gives a shit. And so it's just easier to do, A, in a city that's liberal and B, that's half the reason why cities can be more liberal because there's a degree of anonymity, if you wish, that you don't have in a small town. So, you know, I'm actually saying that just because it's accurate, but also it would be hard if you grew up with a worldview and then all of a sudden who you are no longer innately matches that worldview. And this is nothing to do with sexual orientation, but when I was in high school, I had long hair down to here. I wore hippie clothes. I danced ballet and nobody in Guelph, Ontario in Canada did that. And I was ostracized. And then I go to a bigger city and people are like, that's so cool. Oh my God, I love your hair. Be because you can be great, but in the in the place that doesn't recognize that as great. And if you're in a small community and you believe small communities are where you belong, that must be brutal. And I'm not excusing the hypocrisy, but I think Jesse, what you said is so accurate. It's like, how do you navigate that if you're not willing to move to Brooklyn or or or some city that is like, dude, you're welcome here. However you want to be. Speaker 2: And I hate that for the people that have to live in that self-repression. Um but at the same time, and I think this gets to, I don't necessarily care about I mean, it's always a little frustrating like, you're such a hypocrite. But when the hypocrisy includes that you want to eradicate an entire section of population that you're actually part of, that is incredibly frustrating. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: Um and, you know, Speaker 1: Can we pivot back to The Boys for a little bit? Because I think a lot of people want to hear kind of the the insider dirt. And obviously, it's an amazing political allegory for either the Bush era and by accident it kind of stumbled into being the perfect allegory for the Trump era. I mean, that that must be uh explicit from the top down from is it Eric Kripke who's running the show? Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's, you know, I actually think with each season they just leaned into it more and um if I had to say there's any shortcoming, because I think the show's a 10 out of 10. Obviously, it's been good to me, but at the same time, it's only that they might even lean too far because, you know, I felt like season one, like you said, sort of tripped into it and it's like there were these overlays and you could have season one, you know, it's it's like when somebody says like rules for thee not for me, depending on your political orientation, you'll believe that's one party or another. But you can apply that state like when we say common sense is in short supply or whatever, everyone thinks they're the one with common sense. And I think season one allowed, let's say right-wingers to believe that the absurdity of the left was being reflected. It'd be a stretch, but they could. But by season two and beyond, it's like, no, you can't pretend that this isn't going right at it. So it was conscious. But the one thing that I think not gets overlooked, but, you know, a lot of people talk about the show, is actually the real evil is corporatism. It's the idea that the generation of the money of the seven and the fitting in the new person, it doesn't matter, deaths don't matter, as long as we can sell this. And that for me, when I go on rants, is basically, you know, late stage capitalism. And when you see people blaming a specific leader in a country for inflation and you people have trouble buying groceries while, you know, a grocery company is making record profits above the supply chain issues of something like COVID. But too few people want to look at that. It's it's an amorphous thing, so they just blame a guy or a woman or woke culture. And it's like, you know that the trillionaire class is emerging and the middle class has been wiped out. That's why you're having trouble buying groceries, not because of any policy Biden or Trump or anybody enacted, but it is, and again, this is in The Boys, but it's it's in everything. It's always the conservative policies going back to Reagan that are about trickle down. And trickle down is shown to never work. Um but for some reason the people making, you know, 30, 50k in a factory, they get personally attacked if you're suggesting we go back to a marginal tax rate post World War that literally built the great country, arguably. And I think that that's something that gets so lost. So, yeah, the political aspect is right in there. But the corporate aspect is staring us in the face with what Vought has the power to do without any kind of responsibility. Speaker 1: Can you just define a couple things? People who worry about this all the time know what trickle down economics means, but can you go into that a little bit more? Speaker 3: I mean, I'm no expert, but for me it's just simply the fact that if we give more money to the people who are creating the company, creating the jobs through either tax breaks, incentives, subsidies, so that we lose it from healthcare, we lose it from education. Teachers have to buy their own notebooks and pencils. What we're doing is we're creating the best economy possible and then that will lead to a trickle down of all that wealth and goodness. But we find that that doesn't happen because you've got offshore accounts, you've got um trading of art, you've got yachts being bought and sold, but you don't have that billionaire just all of a sudden making a coffee shop viable because they and their friends go there so much and are so rich that then you've got a vibrant town center. It's never shown itself to be true and, you know, it was named in the 80s as a effective tool, but it doesn't work. And so what happens is you get wealth hoarding to the point where we have a wealth divide between the upper and lower class that's greater than the wealth divide that precipitated the French Revolution. Like the actual statistics of rich versus poor, that that divide is greater. And and it's ironic because, you know, people get so scared about the WEF. This is one of the big things where people will just name it as a as this specter that's wrecking your life. But then when Trump's inaugurated, you just have the Google, the Apple, the Elon Musk standing behind him like they're in plain sight. The billionaire, trillionaire companies that are just going, we're behind him. Like it you couldn't The Boys couldn't construct a more on the nose image of in plain sight what's happening. But the average person who's mad at the left wing and believes that communism's going to kill them is unwilling to see that, but then is happy to name a specter and they can't name anything the WEF has done that hurts them. But it's just this the word Davos, like that is a James Bond word. Like you they should have picked a better spot if they wanted to have a better public image for the world. Like you just you should have gone somewhere more pleasant. But in any case, that to me is where trickle down is right in front of our faces. But 40 years later, 40 plus, people are still blaming uh woke or or the idea that, you know, a trans kid can feel comfortable at their school for somehow why their groceries aren't affordable, but then wondering why the billionaires again, edging toward trillionaire. It it's it's astonishing to me and it for someone who doesn't want to make the link, and again, it's not a fact. But the idea that it won't even be entertained as part of the possibility of of where we need to restructure taxes or just, you know, uh limits on on what one person can hoard, that to me is and again, that's where people get scared of the word communism going back to the 50s. Speaker 2: Well, and I I see I think we we've seen that very thing really reflected. I mean, in the last 40 days of the shutdown of the federal government, right? You know, villainizing snap recipients, the removal of the subsidies from the ACA, as if what did Reagan say? The welfare queen, right? This this imaginary uh boogie woman, as it were, that is, you know, soaking the United States dry of its wealth when that has never been the case, like you said. They keep sending the money up to the the billionaire and trillionaire class and it gets stuck there. Um and it effectively has killed the middle class. Speaker 3: Well, and it's a version of misinformation, you know, there's there's a couple videos making the rounds on TikTok right now that show somebody being pulled off a train track or being pulled off from a bus hitting them and then it will say so and so is now being sued for assault. The person who saved them. And all the comments are like, this is what the lefties have done. Good Samaritans don't exist anymore, but it's all fake. And one comment will go, that video's from 2019, these names are made up. But then they'll add a clip on the top of a judge going, you're going to jail. And it's just like, nobody cares to vet and source these things. So if somebody can't even just go, did that happen on this before they rage uh tweet or comment, then how can we expect them to look at an economic arc going back 40 years and if we go post World War II with what we're calling the Red Scare, who's going to go back to 70, 80 years and then form, and then again, you know, we were talking before the show about things that grind our gears, a nuanced look at things. it's it's sort of impossible to get that. And so my my sadness is how hard it is to just say, you know, that's not true, right? But we know psychologically that when someone believes something, even if faulty, when you tell them the truth, that registers as an attack to them. Like their physiological response is, you're attacking me. And so telling a lie, you've won. The second someone hears and believes it. And then the person who comes along trying to help the world with going, you know, that's not actually what was said. And you know, Jesse, you mentioned early on like sort of you weren't specific politically. This is and and and Stefan, you know, the the the Trump quote from 1997 in Playboy about if I ran, I'd run as a Republican. That's not a real quote. And so the lefties as well are like, see, right-winger, dumb. And you're like, that wasn't said by him. Like, can we just across the board take 10 seconds, but it's way hard. You know, even on my TikTok, if I post a video that's political and I make a mistake, never on purpose. That video could garner 500,000 views. And I will always make a retraction. I'll say, I made a mistake. Mark Carney wasn't ordered to be OBE. I I I misread that. That retraction video gets 300 views. So I can claim an honesty, which is valid, but the honesty doesn't perpetuate as much as the mistake or in some cases the overt misinformation. And so what do we do? Like, you know, we might be wrong about something, but at least the three of us are out there trying to like pull back the misinformation a little. And it's a losing battle when you even look at those lies versus retractions. Speaker 1: I am 100% sure that Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are busy worrying about the spread of misinformation and and are willing to take a hit. They they're willing to say, you know, if we let misinformation spread, my social media site and my uh revenue source will become less sticky and I'll make less money, but it'll be better for the world. Speaker 3: That's right. Speaker 1: That that has to be coming, right? Speaker 3: Well, even on my TikTok, I learned very quickly that if I start with a controversial statement, not necessarily one I believe, the engagement is way higher. And when I wake up and three people have been fighting in the comments, the engagement is way higher. And I'm not there to correct what they're saying. I just create a platform and they dance on it. And I don't derive an income from TikTok. It's just fun for me. But I'm I'm learning a lot about how what you just said, these algorithms work. They don't care what the comment is, it's just that there is one. And it's as simple as if it bleeds, it leads. I think there was a newspaper in the 80s that tried to not just do negative reporting. And I think they folded within a year. Nobody wanted to hear a night the human interest stories page 10 of the life section. It's not a headline for anybody walking by in Times Square to buy from the little paper boy. Speaker 1: Yeah. Outrage is the emotion that keeps people on a platform, whether that's a TV station, a newspaper, or a a social media uh channel. It it it very it's an evolutionary thing. We we want to be outraged. And now that uh photo realistic AI video is right on the cusp of being a thing. I don't know how we pull out of this death spiral. Here here's the controversial statement. The only good argument for NFTs, non-fungible tokens, the only good one, Speaker 3: Here we go. Speaker 1: Is that you get a camera and somewhere on this camera, Canon has this NFT generator. So when I take a photo of you uh holding up a sign, it somehow stamps it digitally and it says, this is a legitimate picture. It was taken at this time, in this place. It's 100 you can trust it. Or if I take a video, same thing. Because otherwise, we're going to end up in uh you're already seeing it. Well, I know there's this horrible video of Donald Trump doing this horrible thing, but is it really real? Yeah, I I I I'm going to I'm going to go with it's probably not real. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 1: Uh Speaker 3: And if you look at Trump, I mean, recently he got all mad at Canada because of the Reagan ad. And the Reagan ad used Reagan's own words. It did not include the whole speech, but it wasn't edited to paraphrase. It just, you know, and and it was like, this is uh misinformation, but he'll post AI videos of Obama getting arrested. And so the thing is is that, you know, it'd be great if things were stamped, but I honestly don't think people care. It goes to the idea that there's these photos of the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in a pool with Mark Epstein. And nobody cares that it's not real. They just care it exists and they can repost it to fuel their idea that all lefties are pedos. And they don't I so I I like the idea of stamping it. I like the idea that Canon can do that, but I think the average person. Speaker 1: No, they can't. All right, that's my billion dollar idea for Canon. Speaker 3: Oh. I don't think you've done your research because I think your average person wouldn't give a fuck. I really I I wish they would, but it goes back to fact checking, it goes back to all that. Like we have the ability to check if something's real and people aren't using it. Speaker 3: But here's my question. Like we're all middle-aged guys and, you know, the wheel turns. David Chilton wrote The Wealthy Barber and I think this is late 80s and there's a forward where it describes, you know, the economy's degraded, people don't trust each other, we've never been more politically divided. It's basically describing that post stock market, whatever. And then he goes, this is from 1867 in a Russian newspaper. And so my question is, are things getting markedly worse or do people like us who started as young rebels and then we're aging, do we just go, man, the world's doomed, but it's always been doomed and it's never actually other than whatever, like, you know, even climate change, which is real. Um but there'll be adaptations as there always has been. I'm not excusing it. I I think the adaptations won't serve most of us. Uh however, I wonder if there isn't an alarmist aspect to all of it. Not and and I don't know what the balance is. Like, where do you go, yeah, we've always been claiming, you know, the sky is falling. Speaker 1: The sky did fall on 19th century Russia. Pretty big. I mean, there was a gigantic civil war and millions and millions and millions of people died. Speaker 2: And we fought World Wars over this stuff. Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely. Speaker 1: And uh civilizations have been wiped out completely by climate change in the past. And the biggest, what is it? Four of the five biggest extinctions in biological history were probably driven by climate change. There's that one Chicxulub uh the the extinction 65 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs. That was probably, well, almost certainly a meteor that set off got climate change event. Uh so, you know, I mean, for one thing, as we get older, we're supposed to be getting more conservative, right? That statistically people become more conservative as they get older. Speaker 2: And less so for you guys. Speaker 1: Yeah. Viva la revolution. That's the only clip that's going to get uh Yeah, right. I mean, if if you were yelling and screaming in 1920s or 1900 Britain, the the era the reign of Queen Victoria going, hey, this isn't stable. We're not going to be the empire of the world or we're not going to be the dominant empire. People would have said, oh, you're so silly. And 50 years later, it was true. So, Speaker 3: But then my and again, I'm not negating that because I think that's right, but what is the stasis we're all looking for? Because I remember and I wish I'd screenshot it, but New Year's 2020, 2019's ending, New Year's 2020. Now granted that was after Trump's four years, but people are like, get me out of this dumpster fire. 2020's got to be better than this shit. Like it wasn't so and then COVID comes and creates a whole new set of challenges. There's no, you know, make America great again and anybody savvy goes when, you know, you see Jordan Klepper do this where he asks people and they're like, the 60s, you're like, you mean when there was no civil rights for, you know, and and so at what point would we stasis it so that it doesn't keep turning? So that, you know, where the 1867 Russians happy or the 1862 Russians happy and then 1862 newspaper was correct. I don't know. And that's, you know, all of this for me comes back to some version of surrender. And when you talked about are we more conservative, Jesse, like, no, but for me it goes back to the idea of, well, partly because I got sober 18 years ago and so I'm I learned to try and uh make or offer instead of take. So that's just inherent in that pathway that I need to walk. If it weren't for that, maybe I would be more conservative. I don't know. If if none of my humility that that forced upon me had arrived. But in any case, I don't know what the good period was. And so that's where my surrender goes, I can fight the good fight against, let's say, misinformation. And then I have to surrender no matter what. We can fight those turns of the wheel. Climate, we actually can. 1987, Montreal Protocol. Now we have an ozone layer again. So that's what frustrates me. And I mean, that's just I'm tangential here, but DuPont in the 70s fought against any regulations against CFCs and then they finally came up with a substitute, said in their lobbying, do what you need now. And only then could scientists be heard to the point where we and now they're doing it again with the Koch Institute with it's not settled science. So again, I don't know what the balance of surrender and fighting is. Speaker 1: I just had a conversation with a guy about climate change. He's like, Stefan, my whole life people have been trying to scare me. Remember when the ozone layer was about to, you know, we were all about to fry? I'm like, yeah, and it got fixed because we reached an agreement and we fixed the problem. Speaker 3: We fixed it. Speaker 1: Yeah. And then he went off, of course, that uh to a totally different topic. Speaker 3: Because you attacked him with facts. Speaker 1: This is true. And and they're the facts don't care about your feelings crowd. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I feel like we've been a a sky is falling kind of culture for a long time. You know, how long have we been even in the last couple of decades been referring to people on the right as fascistic or calling them Nazis, right? Uh to the point where now that we're getting to a point where we are really seeing, you know, the rise of fascism again in US politics, that the word has become meaningless. And now we use it, like, well, you've been calling you've been calling us fascists and Nazis since Reagan. Well, yeah, you're right. We have. Uh we probably shouldn't have uh because now it's it's real and the word no longer has any meaning. It's powerless. So I think there's a bit of that that plays into it as well. You know, 2019, yeah, 2019 sucked. Um it probably was a dumpster fire, but 2020 was was worse and I guess it can always get worse. Speaker 1: And you referred to the measure one of the measures there, Sean, which is the discrepancy of wealth, right? The inequality of wealth distribution. That's an objective measure that we can measure over time and see how that's changing. So it's not us, you know, clutching our pearls about, you know, language being used inappropriately or people being mean. It no, it's it represents the implosion of a standard of living for 99% of North American society. Speaker 3: Well, I think that's absolutely right. And and and I think what you said, Jesse, is really important because, you know, even in our recent election, you know, the the the gentleman who became Prime Minister, he said this is the most important election of of our time. And and that's the kind of languaging that people use to get like it's, you know, and that was said about Kamala and Trump and but that was also said about Biden. And so people get fatigued. And what's ironic, what you said, Stefan, is absolutely true. Outrage keeps us on the thing, but there can be like most significant event in our lifetime fatigue. And especially as we get a little older and you've seen an economic crash of 2007, 8, you saw 9/11, you saw Trump's first term, you saw and you start to go, you know, this is this is again, not not to surrender too much, but this is just called life. And there's how do you have a nuanced conversation while still getting people engaged? And I don't know how to do that because if you don't say this is fundamentally important and look, you had Trump threatening uh not just economically, but verbally saying we want you to be the 51st state. And so that actually does become no leader in my lifetime has ever threatened Canada's sovereignty. And he he can say it was a joke or whatever, but he just keeps saying it to the point where you go, yeah, that this now does become existentially significant. But when every election of the last 15 years has been the most important of our lifetime, then you go, yeah, some voters are tired of it. So again, I don't know what that balance is between trying to get the engagement through some version of outrage or at least uh and at the same time, be nuanced and fact-based. Speaker 1: Well, I think it's undeniable when you take a look at in the Canadian example, the conservatives were set to just destroy the liberals. And then Trump Trump jumped in there with the 51st state talk. And that pretty much single-handedly completely reversed the polling and the results. They it's you watch these lines go and like you can see the day that the the 51st state threats were started being made and the tariff threats were being made. And it really is it the most significant election in our time? I don't know, but it sure felt pretty significant. Speaker 3: I think so, absolutely. And also, you know, what I think our leader before Trudeau, I think the mistake he made was, you know, early COVID, Canada was doing very well globally and then as things moved on, our buying power just didn't quite keep up. And so as people are feeling a little economic pinch, nobody wants to hear about social issues when they're worried about their bread price. And so I I think he didn't really read the room and then Poilievre, and again, for Americans listening, that's the opposition leader. He was doing a very effective, I won't say good because it was all just sort of rage baiting, three-word phrases, but attacking based on prices and stop with your woke crap. But when Trump showed up and started threatening not just sovereignty, but economic sovereignty, all of a sudden everyone went, well, Trudeau's out of the picture because for the Americans, he stepped down. And now a world-class economist stepped in and people kind of went, oh, we I kind of want the adult in the room who can just, you know, handle economic things and we'll worry about everything else later. And it was it within one day it shifted. And again, for Americans who love sports, you've never seen a team up more lose. Like the opposition guy was up like 25 points. He could have literally just started redecorating the Prime Minister's home and he fumbled the greatest lead anyone's ever had going into an election and it was partly because his messaging didn't shift either and partly because Trump just came in and horse in the hospital there to the point where we just went, we want we want a horse wrangler. Speaker 1: So, question for you. I don't know if it's hypocrisy or being completely unwilling to see the point. You do run into people occasionally, and I found it this morning, who are making excuses as to why, you know, a patently evil character, say like Homelander in The Boys, is actually not at all a good analogy for today. So I'm reading off of Quora. Homelander is completely unlike Trump. Homelander is evil and content to murder innocents to achieve his goals. Trump is genuine and open and works hard to do what's right. While Trump has legitimate gripes against the disingenuous lying establishment media, Homelander works to suppress the truth. So unfortunately, Kripke has a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. It's like world-class apologetics. How's this guy, who who might be a bot for all we know, doing these amazing mental gymnastics? It's like all of the the cartoonishly evil tech barons deciding that they can defend their actions by making references to Lord of the Rings, right? Elon Musk invoking the Hobbits of the Shire when he's trying to get people enraged about black and brown immigrants. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: How can you misunderstand the source material that badly? Speaker 3: Well, and is it is it common? I mean, the the the timeliness of this conversation is great. We were talking about The Boys in the locker room here at the school last week and, you know, there more than one person was like, I can't watch it because it is too close to real life right now. Um so I feel like what Stefan's bringing up is almost the opposite, which is like this this just doesn't reflect reality at all. Speaker 1: Well, there's there's two things that are exciting to me about this. My parents are both professors and writers and we're good friends with Margaret Atwood. My mom was, my dad is, my mom passed. And I mean, I'm going back pre-Handmaid's Tale, but one night at a party they were all doing these sketches and my mom would interpret them and she goes, whoever drew this one has no imagination whatsoever. And then it turned out to be Margaret Atwood. And everyone's laughing and that sort of professorial. And Margaret Atwood goes, no, it's true. I just write reality. I I've only ever written what I perceive as reality. I'm not imagining anything. And when you look at Handmaid's Tale, I have friends who can't watch that because they feel it's too close to the truth. And I also think, you know, going back to the Trump idea of how can someone miss it, they've already decided Trump is great. And so when Homelander who is genuinely evil, they can't relate those two. And I actually, it's funny you mentioned The Boys starting as being something to do with Bush. I remember watching post 9/11 when reporting on, let's say, missing $18 billion skids of cash was worse than the people who were missing the 18, like, it became unpatriotic to report the truth. And so I think the birth of that in modern day was around the the patriotism that excused all ills post 9/11. And, you know, whatever you think of Bill Maher, he couldn't speak honestly in his monologues or make jokes that weren't just utterly patriotic to the point of losing his show. And I think what got lost in there is a version of, yeah, but the reporting on it isn't the problem. And that created a sort of that patriotism, which is again, rampant in The Boys, especially with Homelander. That created a version of distrust of reporting that doesn't just wave the flag. And then when you jump forward, you've got a guy who within a year had 30,000 verified lies. And all he had to do is go, that's fake news, that's the mainstream media. And our our opposition leader up here adopted it. Luckily, Canadians aren't quite as sports divided as the states. We have more parties and we're I always say like in showbiz, you can make about 10% of what you make in the states successfully. And we have 10% of the population and we have everything the states has, but 10% of the extremism. And so luckily come election time, people didn't want those talking points. But this idea that the mainstream media who sources, verifies, retracts is the villain. Not perfectly, every media has bias for sure. But that they're not to be trusted. That's the greatest coup we pulled off. But for me, the the um conception of that was post 9/11 when there was this idea that you have to report positively or else you're unpatriotic. And that dovetails so perfectly with Homelander. And then you all of a sudden can believe Trump. And now you don't think you can't see a crack. To the point where literally uh John Stewart did a thing about a week and a half ago about the languaging has become that he's a savior. That he's Christ-like. To the point where, you know, anything earthly is actually an insult to Trump. Like people really believe this. And I don't know how he got to that place. He's an absolute cult of personality. And uh he's not a good leader, but he's an effective one. Speaker 1: Obviously, I'm not a Trump fan. But the the amount of charisma that he has and the ability to seize attention, he's genius level at that. Speaker 3: Genius. Speaker 1: We've never seen anybody like that. And I'm reminded of Dan Carlin, the the guy who runs Hardcore History, talking about a professor of his say, you know, when they were like laughing at Hitler, right? The little guy marching around, little mustache, ridiculous if you take a look at it in today's with today's eyes. But to the eyes of the Germans at the time in the 1930s and 1920s, it was something very different. He was touching the nerve of grievance that was there. The little mustache was a reminder to everybody that he'd served in World War I. And that, you know, that they'd been stabbed in the back by the Jews and by the commies. So short is that Dan Carlin was saying that when American fascism comes, it's not going to look like German fascism. It's going to look more like John Wayne. It's going to be a media figure. So he was wrong about John Wayne, although you could make an argument that Reagan was kind of a proto John Wayne. Uh or a a derivative of the derivative of the proto John Wayne figure. But I mean, if there'd been no Apprentice TV show, there would be no Donald Trump. Right? He's an expert. Not only is a celebrity, he's a celebrity expert. And we really we're talking to a celebrity who has strong expert opinions today, Sean. But there's something incredibly seductive about a celebrity expert, right? Dr. Oz said, who the hell is Dr. Oz? Uh Kramer, uh but that that um finance guy said, who the hell is he? He's just some loud guy. No, he's a celebrity expert. Speaker 3: That's right. And, you know, I'm definitely not an expert. I do a lot of homework and I love this stuff, but I appreciate it. But yeah, there's something, look, I know people who before The Apprentice, New York friends, older actor friends, left-wing friends, who were astonished when Trump would come to a party. They'd be like, and Donald Trump was there. There's something like apparently Bill Clinton had this where if he shook your hand and put that other hand on your forearm, you just voted for him. You he had this ability to remember names, details, but also this way of looking at people that won them over completely. And I know for a fact, because again, pre pre there's a reason he got the apprentice, because pre-The Apprentice, people who never would have thought of him in any way, but they were like, wow. He the guy could command a room and he still does. And I do think that, you know, the left, and it's funny we're talking, like, I don't actually consider myself left-wing because I don't like those labels and I don't like the sports thing. Most of my positions would be left or extreme left. And all I mean by that is like, I want universal basic income. I want people to have all their needs met. We have the resources. I want them to have healthcare. I want robust addiction and shelter. Um but where I go a little more right-wing is after that, if you steal my bike, I want the punishment to be draconian because if your needs are met, there's no longer a socio-economic excuse for you coloring outside of the societal lines. But today, I get it. And I have to have a heart for people who never grew up with food or uh role models such that they get drawn into something that feeds their wound and their need in a way that hurts me. But at the same time, I'm like, fuck, I kind of get it. But if you meet people's needs, at that point, let's go actually pretty severe. And so I would look more right-wing over there. But what what I think the left-wing does miss is what we're talking about is there are people whose need is not facts and figures. There are people whose need is to feel that guy gets me. There are people whose grudge against their high school teacher who made them feel dumb says, I got your back. I'm going to change everything. And whether it's a Hitler or a Trump, Trump is not Hitler. Uh I think that doesn't serve the left when they say that. But yeah, and I mean again, my mom's German. Um she was born in the 30s in Germany. So don't even get me started on the insanity, but also the absolutely, the justification. I mean, the Treaty of Versailles explicitly blamed the war on Germany. Their economy was in tatters. Anybody could have walked in there with that type of drive and said, no. We're not that. We have pride and all that. And then, this is the Trump playbook, create villains. Those uh migrant caravans that always were about to show up anytime he needed an electoral boost. Um they never really arrived, but it created enough fear of the other. That is a Hitler playbook, but that's any leader's playbook. Uh who's who's willing to be unconscionable. But some people's need is not to be truthful. It's to feel connected. But I want to could we pivot because we're talking about Nazis. There was just a thing that came out an article today about on the West Coast. You might know these gyms where there were boxing and some MMA gym owners who were at these alt-right Nazi rallies. What is that dovetailing in our community of martial arts? Like what is that, you know, and you even said I'm one of the last teachers or coaches who, you know, believes in in science. I can't remember how you phrased it, but why are so many people in our community, the BJJ community specifically, but also in my karate world, drawn to that white nationalism? Speaker 1: Yeah, uh so this article that came out in the CPC today talking about the involvement of MMA and boxing gyms in essentially white power movements in British Columbia. Uh I looked at it. I was like, please, God, let this not be anybody named that I know. And thankfully, it wasn't. Speaker 3: What is it about BJJ? Speaker 1: I think and even just right-wing in general, even if it's not necessarily that full scale, like we don't want to paint everybody, but. Speaker 3: Sure. Speaker 1: I I I blame Rogan and I blame COVID. had had huge, huge impact here. Rogan is kind of the patron saint of BJJ and to some extent MMA. And in the last five years, he's swung super hard to the right. Hosting Elon Musk, hosting Donald Trump, hosting Tulsi Gabbard, hosting um what was it? Was it Kash Patel? Providing a massive platform for all of those guys. But he he once said he supported Bernie Sanders. Yeah, that was pre-COVID. That that was pre-COVID and pre-multimillionaire Rogan. Uh I think COVID also broke the brains of a lot of the not necessarily the practitioners in the space, but certainly the influencers, most of whom had gyms and would make a lot of money uh teaching seminars. And when 2020 came along, and I think the problem was worse in the states than in Canada, because Canada, I think provided more financial support to Jijitsu gyms or to small businesses that were forced to close. Uh whether that was enough, whether that was appropriate, that's a whole separate argument, but there was more support than in the states. So now you had some poor bastard who's sunk his life savings into opening a Jijitsu club at the mini mall in Hodunk, Idaho. And he's told, okay, you can't be open, but we're also not going to help you. So how does he open ethically? The way he opens ethically is by saying, well, COVID's no worse than the flu. So I'm not, I might be breaking the law, but I'm not doing anything wrong. Speaker 3: Really great point. Speaker 1: And then that evolves into, well, if they're lying to you about COVID, now they're lying to you about vaccines. Now they're lying to you about the agenda of the WEF. Now, you know, the deep state and then you go off into uh Maga and conspiracy world because if the CDC is lying to you and the World Health Organization is lying to you and the Canadian Health Organization is lying to you and every doctor is lying to you, then then you're by definition conspiracy world. And there have been, I'm sure there have been left-wing movements that relied very, very heavily on conspiracy. I don't know enough about the rise of the Marxists in the early 1900s in Russia. But I wouldn't be at all surprised if they were steeped in conspiracy. But right now, the conspiracism is so heavily connected through to right-wing politics. How does that tie into uh white power? Well, that's I don't think I have as clear uh theory of vision of how that happened. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, my first run-in with it, you know, number one, I am one of those school owners that managed to survive COVID without turning into a crazy person. Well, a different type of crazy person, I guess. Speaker 3: Just going to say. I can't I can't say I'm not. Speaker 2: Different different flavor. Um but, you know, I can remember uh even in the odds and the teens. I mean, I I have a very vivid memory. I I came from the Krav Maga world uh before I got into Jijitsu. And my most vivid memory of like, holy shit, these are not the people that I thought that I was associating with was, you know, I was at a seminar and it was during the uh Ferguson riots, right? You know, in in St. Louis about uh a police shooting there. And, you know, I was surrounded by people that were cheering on the abuse and and even killing in some cases of of the rioters and protesters in Ferguson. And it was it was shocking to me uh that I, you know, I felt like I was in a a snake pit that, you know, 30 seconds earlier, I'm like, I'm among friends. I'm among like-minded uh and then just literally a switch flipped. And um I'm like, wow, this is these are not who I thought these people were. Um this is not the organization I thought I was part of. And so it's it's been there in some form for a really long time. Speaker 3: Well, I don't think you're wrong. I mean, I've been doing BJJ coming on a decade, but I've been doing karate for 32 years. And I've been lucky that my club's very progressive in the sense of, you know, the head of the club, who's 80 now, you know, he's not pushing any social agendas whatsoever and he's actually quite progressive at the core. But karate, so many of its roots in North America, especially in America, is ex-servicemen because they'd go over in World War II, they'd go over in Korea, they'd encounter people in Hawaii or wherever they were stationed. And I've always found it to be a relatively bizarre link between soldiers, veterans and the right wing because we all know, especially if again, if you do follow John Stewart and one of his big campaigns post 9/11 with with first responders is how little the conservative governments want to give and help veterans. But at the same time, veterans are so staunchly as a group leaning right and so many of those early karate men were service people coming back. Now, I really have been lucky that I've trained directly with Japanese people who don't bring some kind of post-war thing or my teachers who did as well. Uh Okinawans uh more than Japanese, so to speak. But it's one of those things where I do think that military link and even when you mentioned Krav Maga, that's a, you know, a military art, so to speak. And uh I I do think there's an overlap there between conservatism and military and that conservatism tends to nationalism. Speaker 1: Thank God for Kano because Kano, the founder of Judo, was actually pretty progressive. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 1: But if you dig down into the history of many of the other martial arts, then they're some incredibly conservative, might even say regressive uh founders. I mean, Aikido is the perfect example, right? I mean, Morihei Ueshiba was over in Manchuria, uh basically promoting the Japanese co-prosperity sphere, translation, Japan gets to take over the world and you can all be prosperous uh as long as you are our serfs and our slaves. So, you know, it's it's like yoga, right? You you dig into most yoga systems and the guy running it at the base was an either an alcoholic or an absolute sexual abuser. I mean, there's a reason that Bikram for Bikram's yoga is currently on the lam in India. Uh so, I I think finding yourself at the top of any pyramid, whether it's a little martial arts pyramid or a yoga pyramid, that's intoxicating and you need, you know, in the old days, in the very old days, when a a Roman general was given a triumph, like a big celebration, we're all going to celebrate how wonderfully you are. Supposedly, riding behind him in a chariot would be a slave, uh whose job was to whisper in his ear, remember you are mortal. And I I think if you climb to the top of one of these pyramids, it'd be pretty hard to remember that you are mortal and that that, you know, you poop and that you're subject to failure. You start, you know, huffing your own farts and you believe that you're somehow better than everybody. Speaker 3: Well, I love that. And also that to me goes to again, a small C concept of conservative, which is if I thrive in a world and I've hit the top of a pyramid, the worst thing that could happen is if that world changes. And so there's an inherent desire to go, this is how it should be because the second change come. I remember running into James Caan once in Los Angeles. And we were having a chat and I didn't really know I was an alcoholic at this point, but I was. Like I was. And I said, hey, James, how do you keep a healthy life like aside from the career? And he looked at me and he goes, I really appreciate you asking me that. He goes, you know, there's been times where I was the number one actor in the world, arguably. And there's nowhere to go from there but down. And so no matter how good things are, you're still descending. And at that point, you find other ways to feel good. So look out for that at all times. I didn't heed his warning and some subconscious, unconscious part of me was asking because I needed that answer. But it was such a beautiful thing he said and I think it goes exactly to what you're saying is, when you get up here, yeah, man, let's stamp this, let's let's nothing can change. And there's an inherent need at that point to become conservative. And now anything that threatens that is some newfangled idea, some fake news, some whatever, because you can only topple. Speaker 1: You said something so clear earlier about poor bastards. And you know, I do think that's right. Like, I'm in a house I paid for playing villains. I act um for people who don't know, that's my career, that's all I do. And most of the jobs I've done that have been good have been villainous. If something I can tap into and part of the reason I think I can do it well is because a villain is never a villain to himself. It's and so there's always a human element to what I do when I'm playing the villain. And I've done, you know, scenes where I've raped women and the mother of the producer's like, why do I still like him? And it's because I'm trying to bring and I believe I do an aspect of this person feels this was their only choice. And in that humanity is even the cost of their evil. And when you talk about that, the the the self-justification that occurs. No club owner was like, I'm an asshole. I don't care if people die. So then, well, for that to be true, immediate mental math has to be, therefore no one extra is going to die if I do this. Therefore it's just a flu. But if that doesn't square with science, then the science must be and the reverse engineering, it's a real easy leap to that. Speaker 1: A real easy leap. Especially when you've got the the patron saint of the sport platforming every COVID denier and every vaccine denier on the planet. Speaker 3: Absolutely. Speaker 1: What's funny because I did a post today on TikTok about uh Canada is no longer a measles-free country. That's just, you know, Andrew Wakefield, 1998, publishes flawed science, unethical the way he collected blood samples from kids, unreplicable science. He's lost, he's he's no longer in the register of doctors. But people think this anti-vax, not everybody, but a lot of people think it started with COVID. No, I remember like, you know, some people I know got into chiropractic. And chiropractic has this weird dovetailing with all medicine is bad. And I remember people talking to me about this in the early 2000s about how vaccines are all a scam and all this. And they were quoting Wakefield. And when you retract and undo the science, the the the the ship's already in motion. The missile's already flying and we're just kind of stuck with all that. It it became this pervasive thing under the surface for a lot of people. Jenny McCarthy and even De Niro mentioned this with autism. And then all of a sudden, COVID comes and everybody goes, oh yeah, I can also latch onto this other available thing in the ether and not worry about the fact it's all been discredited. Speaker 2: And little did we know it was Tylenol the whole time. Speaker 1: Yeah. Oh God, yeah. It really, yeah. So Sean, if people want to keep up with your political thoughts, TikTok's the best place to do that? Speaker 3: You know, it is. And uh I've consciously separated my TikTok and my Instagram because I like my Instagram just to be, hey, here's a bit of my life, mostly my career. And then TikTok's where I just have at it. And I sort of tripped into it. I mean, I got on TikTok years ago as a sort of like, what's this? And I do the little dance trends or put up some stand-up comedy or some music or an acting clip and no one really cared. And then one day, I was talking about Justin Trudeau, at the time the Canadian leader. And I was I didn't vote for Trudeau. And I said that in my video and I said, however, and I just outlined some misinformation. And I woke up the next day with thousands of new followers and the video had gone viral. And I was like, great, now I can post a dance video. No one cared. And then I would respond to a comment and then that would get a lot of views. So I sort of fell into this political thing. I mean, no, by no means an expert, but I do keep up and I do care. And, you know, we talked about this before the cameras rolled. My sort of manifesto is just keeping a nuanced fact-based approach. And here's an interesting combo and I, you know, I I I haven't posted the video yet, but somebody responded to this idea of measles going, yeah, but do immigrants need to be vaccinated? And the thing I'm going to post is, look, right-wingers, don't ask bullshit like this with mean intent. But left-wingers, you do have to acknowledge that we don't have immigrants be vaccinated. And we have had an influx in Canada, even the liberals said, oh, we went a little far with student visas, etc. And that is a reality that people from other countries, when I went to Bhutan to track, I needed to prove certain immunizations. And so while it we don't actually have numbers on the increase in measles as a result of anti-vaccination versus immigrants, but that's a conversation we're allowed to have. And and we should have. So the right-wingers doing it as a gotcha and then the left-wingers saying to the right-winger, you're just doing gotcha. And I'm like, hey, bothia, you back off on your bullshit question. You know why you're asking. But in if you if we assume a good spirit ask, it's a valid combo, which is, you know, other countries are allowed to say, hey, if you're going to come here, we need certain types of immunizations, etc. And and I don't think that's the worst conversation to have if we are having rises of uh transmissible disease that could be from people coming who aren't vaccinated. Speaker 1: Yeah, I I didn't know that actually. And I will actually take the right-wing the right the the good faith right-wing position here, which probably isn't a good faith argument. It's just a different way of saying immigrants are dirty. Speaker 3: Well, that's the problem is nuance dovetails with the worst guy you know's belief. Speaker 1: Yeah. That's that's a very good way of saying it. But yeah, I sure. You want to come to Canada? Here's a giant list of vaccinations you need to get. Um either before getting here or shortly after getting here. But the reality is that in today's interconnected world, it's not the fact that we have immigrants coming in for the most part. What it is is how fertile is the ground here. And, you know, if our if our measles vaccination rate drops to 50%, which is way, way, way under what we need for herd immunity. We will get a case of measles coming in somehow. It'll be some guy coming back from a trip to Florida. Speaker 3: That's right. Speaker 1: It'll be some immigrant coming in. It'll be me uh traveling for business to Germany. So the the base thing is the the immunization rates at home. Speaker 3: Yes. Speaker 1: I remember when I think it was the Delta variant of COVID started coming into Canada from India. But it was already here. And then they were like, we should shut down the flight from India. Speaker 3: Too late. Speaker 1: That too late. It's already here. You don't you've already got an exponential growth situation. In an interconnected world, it's inevitable that it gets here unless we pull a total North Korea and seal all the borders to everybody, which I don't think anybody wants. But you know and I know and they know. It's just a different way of saying immigrants are dirty. Speaker 3: Well, that's it. And I love the point you make, which is that regardless of who's going there and back, a certain amount of immunization uh is is essential. And so it doesn't matter if it's me going to India on a trip and coming back where they maybe don't need to have immunizations or them it doesn't matter. It's not an immigrant thing, it's a cross-border travel thing. But it goes, you know, it's interesting because, you know, one of the other big And it's an economic thing. Sorry, I'm going to interrupt you. For all these, you know, dollar, dollar bill bottom liners, the cost of immunizing a thousand people versus treating one kid with measles in the hospital for a week. I mean, it's a no-brainer. Immunize bloody everybody because it's so much cheaper. Speaker 1: Oh God, yeah. Oh God. And this goes to like crime and punishment, which is actually where I wanted to go with this. You know, because again, for American listeners in Canada, uh there's a lot of people who are saying that our bail system, we let people out, then they commit these crimes and a lot of them are immigrants, etc. But what the right-wing never wants to talk about is how effective social programs are in reducing crime. You know, yes, if somebody commits a crime, I want not that person to get out on bail. And that is happening and that is a problem because repeat offenders, you know, when one in four women are sexually assaulted, it's not one in four men doing it. It's I believe one in 40. Each person does about 10 statistically. And so that becomes something where that is where I'm quite extreme on crime and punishment. And look, if if you aren't a Canadian citizen and you're found to commit a crime, bye. Like that to me is just any country reasonably. Speaker 1: But that does happen. Speaker 3: Exactly. Speaker 1: We were just we were just dealing with somebody in my job as a firefighter who was abusing the 911 system. And it took a while until he got it took a couple of months for him to get deported. And for the first couple of months, it was a giant pain in the ass because he would literally call 911 two or three times a day for imaginary stuff. And that's a lot of resources getting tied up. And he's gone now. So, congratulations. He should have been deported. Speaker 3: I don't love that he did that, but I do love that. And and, you know, we don't if unless we're willing to pay for 10 times more judges, 10 times more lawyers, it is a conundrum of we have to be innocent till proven guilty. At the same time, when you've got like, guess who's not out on bail nine times? An innocent person. Like, you know, it's it's one's uh one could be a mistake, two's a pattern, three is who you are. So, but we can't societally do that because now you're going to get you look, I'm in a platonic ideal. In Plato's heaven, I'm for capital punishment for violent crimes and murders. But we've never been able to apply it in a way that's fair across socio-economic lines. Because I do think there's a social contract and if you keep if you violate it through that type of aggression or violence or murder, you punch your ski ticket, you're off the hill. I'm quite draconian about that. But I understand that we can't apply you'll just have too many people who are poor. It's the OJ thing. OJ spent $10 million defending himself. That says one of two things, that if you're innocent, it costs you $10 million to prove it. Or if you're guilty, $10 million can buy your freedom. Either way, that's a broken system and that's a system in which we can't have capital punishment. But on paper, I'm for it. I just we can't do it. We've never proven that we have the ability to do that fairly. Speaker 1: And I think the other caveat there is we also don't have the ability to prove 100%, right? How many innocent people like if we could know 100% for sure that somebody was guilty and that they'd done this horrific thing that we deem as a and we just want them out of the game. We just don't want to cool. I I'm actually in agreement. But there've been so many cases where somebody spent 15 years, 20 years in jail and oh look, along came DNA evidence and it turned out that the guy didn't do it. I think David Milgaard was an example. He's a weird guy and everybody in town knew that he'd killed a girl and they the cops, they just knew. Of course it's this guy. And he went to jail for I want to say, I shouldn't be talking outside my knowledge, but decades anyway. And then DNA evidence came along and oh, guess what, it wasn't him. If it had been put uh been given capital punishment, he'd be dead. So, Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely agree. Is that the is that the hip song? Is that the 38 years old? Speaker 1: 38 years old, never kissed a girl? Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that I don't know. Speaker 1: Jamie, pull that up. Speaker 3: Yeah. I'm going to Google this right now. Speaker 1: Yeah. Uh cuz uh I just my mind works that way. Speaker 3: When Speaker 1: Jesse, we've gone down a weird uh path. Capital punishment, yay or nay? I am exactly where Sean is in in theory, I am absolutely fine with taking bad actors off the board. Um but like he said, we have never been able to do it in a fair way. Uh so until we can achieve that, I I remain uncomfortable with it. Speaker 3: Same. And this goes to the ice idea, right? Because everybody who thinks they want that, what if they were the one who was found guilty of something they were innocent of? Like the guy who votes for Trump and then goes, Trump, I'm pleading with you not to take my wife. Brother, let's talk about this. It's like, you thought you were going to be the one exempt from this and then you supported it and now you're shocked. What's the old uh meme like uh man who has face eaten by leopard, uh man he voted for the leopard eats face party. You know, and everyone assumes it won't be them. Speaker 1: I never thought the leopards would eat my face. Speaker 3: Yep. Well, I grew up with my German mom and she had the Pastor Martin Niemöller quote, right? First they came for the trade unionists. I didn't speak out because I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me. And, you know, when you're eight years old reading that, you don't quite get it, but it imprints. And I think that, you know, if I have any lefty or socialism, which I definitely do, a lot of it just came from growing up in a house. And it's interesting because, you know, when we talk about the BJJ community, you know, a lot of people coming from Brazil or or Venezuela or whatever, I I I just feel like I see a lot of conflation with authoritarianism under the guise of communism. Not that those ideologies don't get people on board, but what I mean is in my lifetime, these despotic regimes aren't actually functioning as communism. They start perhaps with an ideology, but very quickly become not a people uh controlling the means of production, etc. They become an authoritarian in a palace who is basically using these ideas, but not actually implementing anything that's actually communist. And even that's obviously where Stalin landed and Russia landed, even if they started out with a genuine attempt at something um based on Marx and Engels. So, you know, that's for me even where it's like, you can call it communist, but if you look at it, it's not. But the problem is is that you get people on board with these left ideas and then that leads to the authoritarianism if the authoritarian then bait and switches it. Speaker 1: Well, you can have left-wing authoritarianism and right-wing authoritarianism. We have again, left and right are you said earlier, we've been calling uh some of the political movements in the states Nazi. I have not. And I actually I don't think that um the current Maga is Nazi, but I do think it's fascist, right? Words mean things and fascism has a specific set of definitions. The biggest one is this idea of a return to a previous glory. Right? Hitler's Germany wasn't the first Reich. It wasn't the second Reich. It was the third Reich. It was a return to the glory of the Bismarck days and the Franco-Prussian War and a return to the glories of uh just after Charlemagne in the 800s. That was the first Reich. Uh Mussolini wasn't saying, hey, we're going to make something completely new. We're going to return to the glory of Rome. If you take a look at the buildings that he built in Rome, it's 100% obvious who he was trying to to model. He wasn't building Etruscan style buildings. He was building Roman style buildings. And that goes right along with trying to get colonies in North Africa. He was trying to expand the Roman, excuse me, uh the Italian fascist empire out. So, you know, that's it's it's like yoga, right? You you dig into most yoga systems and the guy running it at the base was an either an alcoholic or an absolute sexual abuser. I mean, there's a reason that Bikram for Bikram's yoga is currently on the lam in India. Uh so, I I think fascism, if you take a look at the definitions of it by almost any set of definitions, uh Maga is fascist. I don't think it's Nazi, although every Nazi supports Maga. Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's right. There there's a joke that's been around almost as long as the internet that if an argument on the internet goes on long enough, somebody's going to call the other person Hitler or a Nazi. Speaker 1: That's that's it. Speaker 3: Right. Well, and even it did get even devalued because right-wingers will be like, stop calling us Nazis. And I'll see conservatives who aren't Nazis in my comments be like, stop calling us Nazis. But Obama, there's literal posters of him with the Hitler mustache, uh and and him being hung as a Hitler figure. You can find those photos in two seconds in the real photos. And, you know, you're absolutely right. Is it becomes like the ultimate but meaningless insult when it just ends up at that point. So any right-wingers who are sad about being called Nazis, you know, I don't know who drew first blood in the modern uh world, but there's there's ample evidence that Obama was being called that and, you know, he's uh totalitarian dropping those black hawks in Texas and all that stuff and all the fears of these exercises. And, you know, it's funny going back to conspiracies, that's a tricky one because you were saying you're not sure which party started it. Like, I grew up in the like I was born in the 70s, but in the early 80s, I started really being fascinated with all of the 60s retrospectives that were on. 15 years since Woodstock, 20 years since and, you know, it was very it's this weird thing where the distrusting orthodoxy was the purview of the left. It was that the government is trying to control you was the purview of the left. And it's so it's so weird to me where hippies and anti-vax, modern day hippies, I mean, um and only plants can heal you and and and it sort of circles around. But it's funny, I did a post on TikTok a while ago where I just said, look, I'm not we're not anti-vaxers on this page. But it's not when somebody says there's microbes in it that Google's doing and they're trying to track you. The idea of that isn't crazy when you look at what the CIA has actually done. Like if you were in 1968 describing the behaviors of the CIA, you'd be considered insane and we now know there's so many true documented things. And what's interesting, and this is where conspiracy theorists get to run rampant with it, that video got taken down for anti-vax information and misinformation. So even the discussion of, is there a validity to exploring conspiracies because of how many conspiracies have been shown to be true? When that discussion gets taken down, if I was a different kind of guy, that would be proof of conspiracy. Speaker 1: Sure. Well, the CIA uh or the NSA are tracking us. They're just doing it through these bloody things. Speaker 3: Yeah, we chose to. Speaker 1: They don't need to inject it. We've got them right here. Speaker 3: Yeah. Like what what would you rather have? If you're the evil tech overlord or the NSA, you can have one or two. You can have a chip that everybody who had the COVID injection has a liquid metal chip, which doesn't exist. And you can tell where they are at all times. Or they're going to carry this thing around permanently. Not only will you be able to see where they are, you'll be able to see what they're thinking, what they're reading, what they're eating, who they're friends with. And they line up to buy it. Speaker 1: Yeah. So, I I'm going to go that they would rather have all the information that you are putting on this thing uh for free. Speaker 3: Well, there's that quote that Orwell called it correctly, but he didn't anticipate that we would buy the cameras and film ourselves. Speaker 1: Yeah. And then the other one is, you know, people talk a lot about Orwell and I think accurately. But Brave New World is the one that doesn't get talked about enough because the soma that basically numbs the culture. I think that, you know, I love this thing, but my God, does it just numb me out in a way that it feels like I'm doing something, but I'm not. It feels like I'm engaged, but I'm not. And uh I always think about it as a war of attention, right? Like, every time I watch Netflix or watch anything on this phone, these companies have now prevented me from writing my next script, which could steal from them eyes or money. And so the soma of it all is one that, you know, I choose it. I just go, I'm going to just the kids call it rotting. I'm I'm going to rot this Sunday. And as a conscious choice, great, but as an unconscious choice, oh my God, are we we've been numbed out. And we've been numbed out while thinking we're feeling things because of engagement. But it's not real engagement and it's not moving any needle and there's the dead internet theory that basically we're all just arguing with bots anyways. Speaker 1: I would love to know what percentage of conversations I have and what percentage of online friends I have are bots. I mean, it's it's an impossible number to get. I would imagine a very significant portion of the conversations I have are are bots because one bot can spend all day arguing with people on a specific topic. Although you're getting much more sophisticated bots now that it it used to be you could tell so easily, right? You go to that person's page, they've got one post on a cinnamon bun recipe. And then you look in their comments and every single one is arguing about how Obama wasn't born in the United States. Every single comment. Okay, that's clearly a bot. But now they're so much more sophisticated. They create complete social media profiles. They'll go and they'll engage with people not on the topic. Hey, thanks so much for posting that video on Great Slave Lake that you just did there, Stefan. I found it so useful. I really hope you go visit it someday. Oh. And then when you go and check that bot uh profile out, no, this is a real person. Look, he's engaging with Kesting about this wilderness stuff. Yeah, well, no, they you can build a bot that's smart enough to do that. Speaker 3: 100%. And um on my TikTok, a lot of times I'll respond to a comment. And the people who really like my page will be like, what are you doing, Sean? This is obviously a bot. And I'm like, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But the bot is putting a conversation into the ether and other people, whether it's real or not, will adopt that as a as a way to think. So bot or not, you're all bots to me. Right? Like, until we meet and roll together and sweat on each other, this could all just I'm not going full brains in a vat, but maybe. So at a certain point, it's like, what's the difference? What's the difference between a bot voice saying something that's inflammatory and misinformed and an actual dude named Joe typing it if everybody reads it with the same, you know, capitalization. And this is one of the the tough things about the democratization of the internet, which is we don't really own the conversation. We're just on the platform having it. But also everybody's opinion is printed in the same. It used to be a headline on a newspaper had validity and then that is what we'd all sort of chat around knowing that that was the source. But now, you know, I think Twitter was really responsible for this. That became this equals this, but this one's vetted and sourced and this one's not. Speaker 1: Well, Jesse, I think we have a potential title for the episode. Sean Benson, you're all bots to me. Speaker 3: You're all bots to me. I love it. That's a good one. That's a wrap. I wholeheartedly endorse this. What a pleasure to chat with you guys. Speaker 1: Oh, this was great. What's your TikTok handle so people can follow you there? And your Instagram handle? Speaker 3: Well, let me I think I had I I got late to the game, so it's uh yeah, the Insta Sean M Benson, Sean with a U. The TikTok, I think is Shany Benzo 90. It's not real sexy. Shany Benzo, S H A U N Y B E N S O. Speaker 1: Awesome. Yeah, check it out. And leave it if you're watching and you and you jump on there, leave a comment because I really love interacting. It's a nice way to drink a coffee in the morning and rip some thoughts. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure to talk to you and I hope to uh chat with you again. Speaker 3: Absolutely. Such a pleasure.