As promised in last episode's show notes, we move forward directly off our prior discussion to finally, two years into the podcast, stop just calling common people idiots and actually go in depth on both why they're idiots and through what specific mechanisms this idiocy results in commoners being the basis of society's problems (including the problems they themselves love to lament).

“The worst conspiracies are in plain sight”- Edward Snowden

Mentioned in the episode:

The Real Reason For the 40 Hour Work Week:

https://www.businessinsider.com/the-real-reason-for-the-40-hour-workweek-2014-6

Which Lives Actually Matter? (my blog post on the emergence of BLM):

https://thewhiteboardpig.wordpress.com/2014/12/15/which-lives-actually-matter/

Currently trending distractions continue to offer us perfect opportunities to explore tying together many previously discussed concepts and examining how they play out via these circus acts - in today's case, the "Epstein files". Sick of hearing about Epstein? We are too, but the situation (more importantly, people's reactions to it) is too perfectly illustrative of our worldview to ignore.

We continue to refine our idea of what Jeff was and was not, but more importantly, we take a look at people's reactions to help understand what the point of these voluntarily self-indicting releases are. This discussion goes full circle to tie back to previously discussed topics like Eddy Bernays, incapacitatingly stupid solutions, boogeyman, and the common person as the real problem with the modern society.

We're planning to follow this episode up with a continued, more detailed discussion of how underlying personal weakness drives people to engage with these topics in the way that they do.

“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”- Anton Chigurh, No Country For Old Men

In this rather lengthy episode we start with a bit of "told you so", hitting on our predictions regarding the reveal of Julie Andrews and the unwinding of the existing social control structure. We examine these things in the light of current events and reactions to current events. As it turns out, what really upsets people has very little to do with the actual happens in the world, but a lot to do with the dissolving of their comfortable delusions. With the world at an inflection point, it's time for people to decide whether the delusions are worth clinging to, particularly after the realization that it's exactly those delusions that landed us where we are.

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”- Frank Zappa

With the world continuing forward in a perfectly predictable fashion - so predictable that it's becoming tiresome and repetitive to keep addressing it - we launch what we'll consider "Season 3" with a return to our philosophical roots.

In this episode we bring back one of our best lines of discussion: how to live life and create a meaningful existence for yourself without the need to bury your head in the sand and ignore everything else we've talked about on the podcast to do so. We explore the idea of living an authentic, aesthetically pleasing life.

"It will be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own; the passion of their tremendous will relaxes in the face of all stylized nature, of all conquered and serving nature. Even when they have to build palaces and design gardens they demur at giving nature freedom."

- The Gay Science

“I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lacks an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks at you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales, calling this good and that evil.

Nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights are underweight; nor do people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this "great majority." But what is goodheartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments and when he does not account the desire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress—as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower.
Among some pious people I found a hatred of reason and was well disposed to them for that; for this at least betrayed their bad intellectual conscience. But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing—that is what I feel to be contemptible, and this is the feeling for which I look first in everybody. Some folly keeps persuading me that every human being has this feeling, simply because he is human. This is my type of injustice.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche

As promised, we follow up our prior episode on the forced retreat into the mental cave by explaining how the new social control scheme of no narrative at all is rapidly taking the place of the narrative/counter-narrative dichotomy that has been in place for nearly a century. Incapacitatingly stupid solutions are being supplanted by incapacitatingly stupid "noticing". All the wild opinions, conspiracies, and everything previously kept carefully outside the Overton Window - are now not just being allowed back in, but are being blasted at society like a bukkake fire hose - rendering people completely unable to function or organize due to total lack of agreement on the facts of reality itself.

If "God is dead" defined the 20th century, "consensus reality is dead" will define the 21st century.

As a bonus, you can hear out of touch with the kids Gen X'er Joel mix up Roblox and Discord.

This episode is an old (6/12/25), unpublished recording brought back from the dead, due to its high applicability to the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk assassination. This was originally intended to be episode 33, but is now released as episode 35.

In this episode we talk about information overload and mental focus limiting, using the video game based concept of "view distance". We cover both how these things occur naturally - and, of course, how they're used as part of the social control scheme. These ideas are more relevant than ever in the context of current events.

We plan to do a follow up on this episode, directly tying these concepts to what we're seeing in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination.

“That a belief, however necessary it may be for the preservation of a creature, has nothing to do with truth, one can see, for example, in the fact that we have to believe in time, space, and motion, but without feeling constrained to grant them absolute reality.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche

Far be it from us to bring back a topic everyone else has predictably forgot about after saying they never would... but here we are, because here is where we must be.

In this episode that's been far too long in the making, we use good old Jeff Epstein as an example to talk about people who understand morality as an illusory construct and those whose don't - and why it results in those who don't failing to correctly comprehend and contextualize the behavior of those who do. Equally importantly, we also cover the facts and fictions around the historically recurring popular belief that the world is run by "evil people".

In this talk, we make a lot of ties back to prior discussions on morality and prior oft used analogies like the Snowpiercer train (with no additional recap or explanation), so it's important to be caught up on the rest of the podcast before jumping into this episode.

“One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. 'Good' is no longer good when one's neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a 'common good'! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil