Podcast

Examines Movie Reality

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♪ After the mind will be a category ♪

♪ Shop my pictures where
the bastards of philosophy ♪

♪ Drinking the clutch
brings up our skills ♪

♪ Like a sucker punch ♪

♪ Whole cart to see ’em my feet ♪

♪ Yeah, yeah, oh see ’em my feet ♪

♪ Yeah, oh see ’em my feet ♪

♪ Yeah, yeah, oh ♪

I watch a lot of movies.

If you are a big fan, you’ve probably
watched on YouTube, Seamick Bee, IMDB.

And it’s where I watch old movies.

It’s like 50% Kung Fu movies,
50% science fiction movies.

And I just make mystery science
theater style jokes about them.

If that’s your thing great, if it’s not,

I understand that’s not
like everybody’s deal.

But it shows just how much I watch movies.

I watch lots and lots and lots of movies.

I have a two hour train ride.

So I watch a movie
probably every single day,

which is a very nice
way to spend my time,

because on the train has
become my media time.

So I don’t work, I don’t come home
and actually watch TV or movies at home.

It’s almost always on the train,

but that sheer volume means I’m
always very satisfied with my media intake.

But it does mean that
watching that many movies

means you inherently start
to analyze that many movies.

So that’s a big thing for
me is seeing movies again

and again and again and then
see how they change things

and differences and then you
learn stuff about stuff in movies.

I did a whole episode of
Seamick Bee on Fake Blood,

how to make fake blood in
the original Dawn of the Dead.

It was actually chocolate syrup.

So when they were like,
“Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.

” I eating the body.

It was probably all chocolate
syrupy over their face.

It was a black and white movie, so
it showed up really well and delicious.

Some of the fake blood was
not edible, but when they do

zombie movies, they want
the fake blood to be edible.

One of them used like a pepto bismal as a
base, which means those people had some

probably interesting toilet
experiences after eating

the dead bodies as zombies
in the movie they were in.

I mean, it’s the price of fame.

I have spent a lot of time
watching movies and of course

all these sort of, I don’t
even know if they’d be cliches,

but you learn stuff about science in the
real world and movies and how they relate.

And I’m getting to the point where it’s
like, now sometimes I see stuff and I’m like,

ah, I shouldn’t really
be doing that anymore.

Like the people who make movies
should know better than that.

So I kind of put together a list of things

that I kind of want to
stop seeing in movies.

I did, you’ve heard of the bestel test,
which is you have two female characters

talking to each other and
they’re not talking about

the man or not talking
about a man in the movie.

It’s very hard for a lot of
movies to pass the bestel test.

I made the C-McB movie
test and it was, if your country

has nationalized healthcare,
would this story happen?

Because I was looking at a lot of
movies where my a relative got cancer

and we didn’t have any money
and we’re gonna lose the ranch.

So we have to go rob a bank to
get enough money to save the ranch

or some sort of convoluted
thing like that whereas if

you had national healthcare,
none of that would happen.

So this movie wouldn’t exist.

So that was a different kind of test for
essentially, is this movie super-American

or have the singular American
ideal of what the world is like?

Because in most other countries, this
situation would not occur in the first place.

A lot of ranches came
up, I do remember that.

But these are more small things
that I think overall we forgive,

but I think it might just
be time for movie makers

to just be like, you know,
it’s time for us to just like,

let’s do this properly from now
on or find some other solution

or be more creative
in the way we handle

things so that this
sort of scientific reality,

oh fuck, that one that
pissed me off the most.

(laughs)

It was like the last Star Wars movie
that came out that I saw in theaters.

It’s the one where the
rebels are just flying away

and then the empire’s
just chasing them in space.

They were shooting
lasers and the lasers were

arcing in space and it
was setting me off so much.

Because in space, you do
not need to arc anything.

Like there’s no gravity to fight against.

You don’t need to
shoot up and down like a

mortar because there’s
no gravity in space.

Unless you’re close to a planet, but then
it wouldn’t necessarily arc up and down.

You might have to shoot it out and so it
curves back inwards and hits the target.

They were shooting at
the ships ahead of them

and they were arcing up and then
going down and then just missing.

Like they were boats, but they’re
not boats because they’re in space.

And in the movie, it
took me out of the movie.

The Will Helm screen also
takes me out of movies now.

I learned it as a kid
and then the first few

times I heard it, I
thought, oh, that’s cool.

I’m in kind of like this private movie joke
that if you know you know kind of thing.

And now when I hear it, it actually will
take me out of the movie in that moment.

So you could do it in like light
action movies or fun movies and stuff,

but if you’re doing a serious
movie, never use the Will

Helm screen that’ll actually
ruin the movie for me.

It’ll take me out of your movie completely.

I’m essentially adding to this
list of things that now when

I hear or see them, it sort
of takes me out of the movie.

Not if I, ah, you could turn
this into a drinking game.

So you could have every
time one, it make a list of this.

And every time one of these
things happens, you have to

take a drink or you’d have
to watch a bunch of movies.

Most of this stuff only happens once per
movie, or each stuff one really big drink.

Ah, you have to chug a drink.

So you’d be there drinking with
your friends, but other thing happens.

The last person to shout it out
has to jug something, has to jug.

I’m talking for 40 minutes
straight, I gotta get set.

Yeah, I’m gonna get to drink a water
and then I come back and continue.

Just give me a second.

See, I was trying to organize
this into a drinking game.

I’ve actually done a couple of
drinking games over my time podcasting.

Most of them had to do a Steven Segal.

I think I had two Steven
Segal drinking games,

but I’ve made some
other drinking games.

I’ll see if I can make
them available somewhere.

It’s easier for people to access.

But these are some of
the things, I don’t know if

they’re cliches yet, but
they should be if they’re not.

And movie makers should stop doing them.

So they’re my first one.

And it was a guy walks into a room and
he starts dousing the room and gasoline.

And then he stops and he starts mine.

Winded from running up the stairs

’cause they didn’t wanna
be right back for too long.

So the initial one of
these was I was watching a

movie and a guy was
dousing a room and gasoline.

And there’s someone laying on the floor.

And he’s gonna set the room on fire

and that person’s gonna
burn to death in the fire.

And then the person,
they’re sort of like hurt.

They’re laying on the ground.

They can’t get up anymore.

And the guy starts to do a little
monologue about essentially how evil he is.

And then he flips the lighter.

Now in reality, the whole
time has been talking.

All that gasoline has been
building up as fumes within the room.

So as soon as he flips that
lighter, the whole place goes up.

There’s no question about it.

If he’s standing too close to the place

when he flips the lighter,
that whole place goes up.

Gasoline, fumes are just
as flammable as gasoline.

I learned this one by watching
these guys, they had this giant pyre.

And they were gonna set up on fire.

They wanted to make a giant bonfire and
this guy was pouring gasoline all around it.

And then as he went to throw the match
in, before he even got to throw the match,

it exploded because all the
gasoline he’d been pouring on

had been accumulating as
fumes as this cloud around him.

That cloud went up and then
the inside of the pyre exploded.

So that’s when I learned,
yes, you can’t be standing

close to something you’ve
just doused in gasoline.

So when they do the gasoline
and then they make a trail

away from the building or
whatever, that makes more sense.

I don’t know how well
that works in reality.

But it would actually make most sense

if you just threw something
into the room from a distance.

So you are no longer
allowed to douse a room in

gasoline and then light
a zippo or light a match

and then not have the whole
thing just explode in your face.

This is relative.

So someone is running away from
something that’s about to explode.

Or I don’t know, it seems
to be on boats a lot.

I guess you get as he explodes
and then you’d like fall into the water.

The explosion throws them.

Maybe they’re unconscious for a few
seconds, but basically everyone goes whoo,

that was scary or that
was tough or that was fun.

You know, some sort of, you know,
pithy statement and then they’re fine.

Now what I learned was that the thing

that throws your body
into the air is a shock wave.

And it’s a massive change in air pressure.

And this is the problem with
having lungs as a human being.

That the massive change in air pressure
outside your body versus inside your body

means that a blast wave is actually
going to collapse your lungs and kill you.

So every time you see a movie,
this might be ruined movies for you.

You may want to stop right now.

If you actually want to enjoy
movies for the rest of your life,

if an explosion is powerful enough to
throw your body any sort of distance,

then that is probably crushing
your lungs in the process,

especially the massive explosions
we see in movies most of the time.

So if you are in a room
and there’s an explosion

and you duck into a hallway
and then the big fireball goes past

you and you go, oh, because
I’ve seen that in movies as well.

That also, again, the air pressure
alone will be enough to kill you.

So that’s not acceptable anymore.

You can’t have a body thrown.

You can’t just dodge to
the side of an explosion.

You can’t have a small barrio that you hide
behind and then the fire goes over top.

And it looks very dramatic on
screen, but it doesn’t hurt you at all.

You just go, whoo, almost got exploded.

Because the fire isn’t actually the thing

that’s doing most of the
damage and explosion.

It’s actually the pressure, the
sound wave, the shock wave,

all this sort of pressures
in this incredibly violent way.

That’s what’s going
to be doing the damage

to the stuff around
you and your body itself.

It’s the same, I actually
saw a movie not too

long ago and they jumped
behind a bar in a bar

where some bomb exploded
in the middle of a bar.

Now, they’re doing okay, but that
bar better be really, really reinforced.

Like, if it’s just a piece of wood and,
again, bars are not particularly thick,

I assume it would
actually kill you as well.

Getting shot.

Now, we all love people getting shot.

I actually do, let’s see
this as the problem,

’cause I enjoy the movies
where the hero gets beat down

and then gets up and fights through
and in reality, like his body’s broken,

but he’s, you know, so
his spirit is so strong.

It’s mostly like fighting movies
and Kung Fu movies and stuff.

I love the guy who gets back up.

It’s actually to me with the
biggest appeal of Spider-Man

as a character because quite often
in Spider-Man comics and stories,

Spider-Man gets his ass
kicked and then his sort of

resilience of spirit is
what carries him through.

Now, I had a similar experience,
only I had the realistic one,

where I was in a judo competition
and the guy pulled my fingers back

and broke two of my fingers and,
you know, I watched too many movies,

so I was like, tape it up, I’m going back
in and of course my resilience of spirit

is going to take me
to a place where I now

go back in and then
win with my special move.

The reality is, in a competition,
if you have two broken fingers

and a big part of the game is
grabbing each other like judo,

you can’t do that with
one hand and you lose

and I lost real fast and
then I started to cry.

And this is not like, this was like
not crying because I lost a fight.

This was crying because this
was the end of my judo career.

Like this was the realization
that I had been defeated

for the last very real
time in my life because my

hand’s going to have to
heal by the time it heals.

Everyone who’s sort of in my group
is going to have passed on beyond me.

All that kind of washed over me
in one moment and it was very sad.

It’s funny now because
I can see it in terms of

what would happen in the movie
and what happened in real life

because in the movie I would
have not used my hurt hand

and then done something really good and
then just used foot techniques or something

and beat them that way and
been the champion of the world.

In reality, 10 seconds
later I was on my ass.

So you get shot in the shoulder.

The shoulder has become the
default for this is not a fatal wound.

So it goes in, maybe it’s
still in there and they want

to do a dramatic scene
where they took a bullet out.

Maybe it’s a through and through

and it’s really clean and
they just have to stitch it up.

I’m pretty sure any bullet
wound is going to stop

you from doing much
for the rest of that day.

Like after a judo
competition or a judo practice

where I do well, I need to
come home and take it out.

And that’s like, say I’m not injured.

That’s just like from the
what I’ve just put my body

through that day, I need
to go home, lay down,

maybe have a cold bath,
I’m not doing anything

else the next day
with any sort of vigor.

These guys, they get shot, they sew it up

and they go back out and
they perform at 100% ability.

I’m a little tired of that or this
could work for stabs as well.

Like you get stabbed,
I’ve never been stabbed.

But I’m assuming after you stab, you just
kind of like don’t do as well at anything.

There are people who get hurt stabbed
or shot and maybe they don’t notice

but then they should continue on not
noticing and then just drop from blood loss.

I think that actually would be an interesting
thing to do in a couple of movies.

Like during the middle of an action scene,

a guy just drops, you
could then you realize he

got shot and they didn’t
deal with it fast enough.

The volume of bullets is pretty significant,
like getting shot multiple times.

I’m sorry, I can’t see that ever again.

It’s always dumb action movies.

So I guess I’m more forgiving because I’m
not expecting them to be really realistic.

But if we’re gonna talk about realism
in movies where they’re shooting guns,

it’s the sheer volume of ammunition
they would have to bring with them.

Like, there was a guy who calculated,

it was a John Wick or it
was probably before that.

So maybe a Matrix movie.

For them to shoot the
sheer volume of bullets,

they’re shooting in
those action scenes.

They would need a guy behind
him with like a wheelbarrow,

full of ammunition to
help him reload constantly

because they’re just
like going through these

machine gun clips in
seconds and they’re reloading.

But where are those reloads coming from?

That, of course, again, being the Matrix,

it’s kind of got like
a magic element to it.

So I guess it’s pretty
easy to forgive in that case.

Like, you could just have in
the Matrix a, like you just have to

do like a video game where you
unload and reload and it’s fine.

It’s just full because it’s
the Matrix, it’s not real.

But that would mean the
real parts of like the bits filmed

outside the Matrix have to be
even like hyper realistic then.

They have to follow like super rules.

And I actually have guys
with barrel it’s of ammunition.

I think they did that in a third movie.

They had one where it was Max
and that guy was coming up and

he was basically shoving
bullets up to reload those things.

So I guess the Matrix did a good job.

We’ll give some credits in the Matrix.

Something that bothers me just personally.

And this comes from being not a rich dude

at any point in my life
is when they have guns

and it’s empty and
they just throw it away.

I’m like, do that’s expensive,
don’t throw that away.

It’s just wasteful.

When you defeat an
enemy, I absolutely believe

you should pick up
his gun, use it until it’s

dry and then continue
on with your own gun.

Maybe throw his gun away because
it’s empty and you don’t have his refills.

But I think at the end of
the day, guns cost money

and we should be a little
bit more fiscally responsible.

Maybe there’s another
environmental element in there as well.

On a very, very small side note,

just racking shotguns
unnecessarily on a regular basis.

Like, oh yeah, like it’s cool.

Racking a shotgun is one of
the coolest things you can do.

But I think it’s unnecessary
most of the time.

Still talking about gun fights.

Gun fights are a big
part of a lot of movies.

Like, suspense movies,
lots of movies have gun

fights in them because
guns are very exciting.

Hiding behind a couch or a
car door during a gun fight.

I don’t want to see that ever again.

Or I don’t want to see it
and have it be successful.

So if you hide behind a couch,
technically they can’t see you.

But if they do that thing where they shoot,

but they shoot the
couch, the couch is not

providing you with any
sort of defensive mechanism.

It’s just hiding your position.

The car door, a small gun bullet is going
to go through a car door fairly easily.

The only thing you can really hide behind
in a car would be like the engine block.

Maybe the wheels would be strong enough.

But still, again, if you’re
hiding on one side of

the car behind the wheel,
the bullet would have

to go through the car, maybe
through the wheel as well.

I could see that doing something still.

Big, big gun probably still doesn’t work.

The engine block is the only thing
that has substantive enough to stop it.

I actually, now we’re
getting onto electric cars.

I don’t know enough about
the structure of an electric car.

I know most electric cars.

They put it like a panel
of batteries on the bottom.

And each wheel has like a little engine.

That’s an interesting question
that I didn’t think about

until I just got here
right now, because I’m

thinking movies where
it’s like a big gas engine car.

That doesn’t exist anymore.

So when they have the scene
where the car is going towards

the bad guys and everyone’s shooting at
the car, essentially, it’s the engine block

that’s technically supposed
to be stopping all those bullets.

The engine block doesn’t exist
anymore in a modern car in a real way.

Ooh, I think I found a new problem
just by talking through these old problems.

We’re going to have to revamp
gun fights for electric cars.

We could blow them up
way more dramatically now,

because we can have the battery
set off, just like the Samsung phones.

The car, the bottom of
the car, like it’s that film

that goes in expands and then the
whole car like lifts up and then explodes.

It would give you a second run away.

And the explosion wouldn’t
be violent enough to throw

your body, so you’d actually
be able to survive that.

I think I’m solving my own problems by
talking through my problems with movies.

Electric cars actually deal with some of
the problems I’m talking about, that’s neat.

Okay, sorry, back on
track, back on my notes.

Hiding behind a couch, if they shoot
through the couch, you should get hit.

I mean, there is this
very, very small chance

that your body is not in
the place they’re aiming at

because they can’t see your
body, but realistically speaking,

they’re gonna shoot a couple of
times and then they’re gonna get you.

I never wanna see someone
run down a hallway away

from enemies and the
enemies have machine guns

of some sort or a goutling
gun or something and they

shoot down the hallway
and don’t hit the person.

It’s just not even that it’s like
dumb, it’s statistically impossible.

Like because it’s essentially a tube
and you’re running down the tube

and then shooting down the
tube as well, they have to hit you.

So you have to do something else.

You have to like duck into a doorway,
you have to have something happen.

If you are running down a straight hallway

and people are shooting straight
down the hallway, they gotta kill you.

I guess this has to be it from now on.

I can’t ever see someone run down a hallway
away from gunfire again and survive.

And that makes no sense and it’s
really, really annoying to me now.

This should relate to the
shoulder wound rule as well

’cause if I’m running down a hallway and
people are shooting, they’re gonna hit me.

They’re gonna hit me, therefore, I
should probably hit the ground pretty hard.

Talking about hitting
the ground pretty hard.

So John Wick, I am willing to
accept the magic bulletproof suits.

I think it’s cool.

They all get to wear a
nice suit and then they

can hold up the jacket
and that’s bulletproof.

But the thing that pissed me off in that

is that the bullets
then also lose all impact.

So I have my bulletproof suit on.

It’s stopping the bullets venturing my body
but the bullet is still hitting my body.

If you watch the John Wick movies, they
get shot and those magic bulletproof suits

just stop the bullets and they
don’t seem to have any impact

on the receiver at all, I
guess the victim, I don’t know.

That really started to bug me
because it would be actually really cool

is if I’m wearing the
magic bulletproof suit

and then my opponent
shoots me, it knocks me down.

It hurts, I get big
bruises, it like wins me.

It’s basically like being
punched from a distance.

You’ve now turned a
gunfight into a fist fight

in a weird way as long as you don’t hit the
face because their faces aren’t covered.

They did a couple of where
they held up the jacket

and front of their head and
then shot around it and stuff.

But then this is still loose material.

This material, yeah, okay,
so it’s stopping the bullet

but then it seems to be
like deflecting the bullet

or have some magic
power where it’s almost like

a Star Trek shield
that’s stopping the bullet.

That part went a little too far from me.

I actually think they
could have incorporated

physical results of
getting shot, not killed,

but getting shot and it
knocks you down, it hurts you,

it dislocates your shoulder
if you get shot enough.

It causes you enough
pain that you’re winded,

you can’t breathe and then
you have to fight through that.

You have a very, very
interesting scene going on

because you can shoot
a guy and then he’s like,

“Oh, God, my side, I
can’t breathe anymore.

” And then you have
a chance to escape.

They shoot you and they knock you down.

Now I have to struggle
to get up and escape again.

It should absolutely add a
minimum, knock you off balance.

Like if I’m running and then someone,
I’m wearing my magic bulletproof suit

and then someone shoots me,
it should knock me to the side,

it should knock me over, it should make
me trip, something like that should happen.

‘Cause I am still being hit
with something at speed.

Since we’re talking about running,
these all vaguely relate to each other,

which is interesting, I
didn’t do that on purpose.

Doing any sort of sort of
parkour without warming up first.

Parkour with no injuries, no
ankle twists, no stretched muscles.

Like I have done workouts
where mid-workout,

I’d warm up properly
and still pull to muscle.

I would like to see some parkour guys just
kind of hit a ground and just lay there.

Just like, ah, my ankle, ah, my
back, my shoulder, my something.

A parkour is one of
those things, I get, again.

You’re doing it to be acrobatic and cool.

Let’s throw just a sweet
salt of reality in there

and just have someone just
every now and then twist an ankle.

It would actually be a little
bit more high tension for me,

knowing that in this reality
they can’t actually get hurt.

‘Cause once they start doing parkour again,

they’re sort of
magical inability to have

injuries, sort of pisses
me off after a while.

I think this might be me getting old.

‘Cause I can’t do those
things even if I do warm up,

so it’s not fair that you
can do it in the movie.

Now we’re getting into
some pretty clear ones.

Stopped hearts being
restarted with the

fibrillators, that’s not
how the fibrillators work.

They get your rhythm back on track.

They do not restart
something that has stops.

So once your heart stops, unless you’re
using magic or something else, you’re dead.

I think that’s just the way it goes.

Something I learned from,
was it the locksmith lawyer?

It was on TikTok or YouTube.

It’s the guy who uses
very simple tools to

pick locks and he picks
them really super fast.

He actually will hit some
locks with another lock,

and if you hit it in the
right spot, it just unlocks.

He didn’t experiment where
he was shooting a gun at a lock

like they do in a movie, and
it just deformed in the lock.

It actually made it impossible.

It wouldn’t unlock anymore,
essentially it was what would happen.

And you couldn’t hit the bar, I’m
thinking one of those classic locks

was just a square with a
little rounded bar on top.

If you hit the bar, it would deform
the bar but not actually break it.

If you hit the actual body of it,

it would actually just lock
into place and never open.

You’ve actually made it
harder to break that way.

So they just start using the locksmith
lawyer, lock picking techniques in the future.

So you run up and just hit it
with something and then it opens.

But shooting it is
actually a really bad idea.

It actually would make it
harder to open in the long run.

A chloroform, I don’t actually, I
haven’t seen chloroform in a long time.

So I guess that’s one’s pretty forgivable.

Chloroform, they used
to put it over someone’s

face and they would
just instantly fall asleep.

Chloroform in reality takes
about five to 10 minutes

to work and it depends
on how big your body is.

So I’m 200 pounds, six foot.

You’re putting chloroform on me.

It’s gonna take let’s say
seven minutes before I go under.

And that’s if I’m breathing deeply
while you hold that thing over my face,

which I’m not going to do
because I’m gonna be very annoyed

that you’ve just stuck
something on my face.

‘Cause I’m first question is ’cause
we have you washed this cloth.

Like is this a clean cloth
covered in chloroform?

That’s what I would wanna know.

And then if it’s not, now the flight is on.

It would take a very large
volume and a minimum

of five minutes to
actually take effect.

So I’m saying, again, we want
creative solutions to these problems.

In this case, what you should
do is just create a new chemical.

So it’s not chloroform,
it’s chloroform 2.

0, it’s a new chloroform,
it’s chloromax.

Whatever, just so that it
does go on the person’s face

as this is instantaneous,
the problem is if it’s something

that’s instantaneous
and I’m carrying it around,

I’m probably breathing
in those fumes as well.

You gotta be careful about that.

I don’t wanna see someone carrying something
that knocks you unconscious instantly,

and they’re just like,
have it in their hand

and they’re breathing it
and they have no problem.

Every new thing you create
also might create new problems.

You have to think about
it all the way through.

The pulling out a grenade
pin with your teeth,

I haven’t even seen that in
years and years and years.

I think that was like a really old trope.

It’s very obviously not
something that comes out easily.

They don’t want grenade
pins to just pop out

simply, so a real grenade,
apparently if you put it

in your teeth and you pulled your
teeth would come out before the pin does.

So it takes a great amount of force,
and I thought actually would be great

if you came up with a more
creative ways to pull the pin.

So the teeth looked
cool, I’m okay with that.

But realistically speaking,

you can only do that
once or twice before

everyone’s like, okay,
we get it, it’s kinda silly.

But hooking it on something and
pulling it and then throwing the grenade,

racking your gun with the
grenade pin to pull it out

and then throwing the
grenade and then shooting,

I could come up with three
or four that don’t require

unrealistic scenarios
that could still look cool.

Like I don’t want things
to not look cool anymore.

I just want them to look cool
in a new and more realistic way.

I want them to take
actual physics into account

when they’re making
their cool action scenes.

I think that would actually be more
visceral and more exciting for most people.

‘Cause it’s almost like you
wouldn’t know it was real,

but deep down inside you would
kinda know this was more realistic.

Like you can kinda feel when something
is more realistic than something else.

And the last one, it kinda
happens in John Wick as well.

Silenceers.

Silenceers dampened sound.

They don’t silence.

I guess you could
come up with magic new

silence or that does
actually make the sound.

But yeah, if I’m in a room and you
assassinate someone in the room next to me

with a silence rod,
I’m still gonna hear it.

So I’m gonna know what’s going on.

So I’d be okay with that.

Like you assassinate
someone, they’re in their bed.

If someone else is downstairs,
they would hear the good, it

wouldn’t be like, then people
next door might not hear it.

But me downstairs, I would hear it.

And then I come up and then
we can have our action scene.

And then you’re using
a silencer appropriately.

I saw a guy on YouTube
and he was shooting a silencer

indoors already a lot of
questions going on there.

But he was like, you could
see like there was the smoke,

the big cloud of smoke,
so you’d be able to smell it.

Even if you hadn’t heard
it, there was a lot of noise.

And there was a lot of sort of
like, almost blast came off at like,

it shook the room around it because
he was in a hallway shooting into a room.

Yeah, I think we could ease
off the silencers a little bit

and that would actually make it
again, more exciting because, okay,

we’ve not alerted maybe the
whole compound of terrorists,

but we’ve alerted the
compound, the terrorists

in the next couple of rooms
and we got to deal with

them quickly enough
before they raise the alarm.

Now I’ve added another layer
of tension to the situation.

I am thinking, is there a way
to turn this into a drinking game?

Because I think every
one of these individually

only happens once or
twice in a movie anyway.

It’s like even if you’re
in the movie scenario,

it wouldn’t be enough to be
a drinking game on its own.

But I’m trying to come up
with a way to make this into it.

Maybe a bingo card.

We make a bingo card of all those things.

And then as you watch
the next five or six movies,

the ones that come up, you
check off and whoever gets bingo,

they get a prize in
your little friend group.

They are the coolest movie watcher ever.

Or you could just have this list and
then when one of these things happen,

if you don’t call it out,
you have to chug something.

Something that probably is too much
for you to drink, you shouldn’t drink it.

I don’t know how to end that fuck.

I had a, it was a good idea.

I don’t want to encourage,
like, binge drinking.

Drink responsibly, make movies responsibly.

(upbeat music)

♪ After the mind of the Academy ♪

♪ Shocked my big chest ♪

♪ Where the bastards of philosophy ♪

♪ Drinking at lunch ♪

♪ Brings above our skills ♪

♪ Like a soccer punch ♪

♪ Won’t come to see what my big ♪

♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah, oh see what my big ♪

♪ Yeah, oh see what my big ♪

♪ Yeah, yeah, oh ♪

More Murder in Japan: The Yuka Takaoka Story

(upbeat music)

Now, this story starts back in 2019.

And back in 2019, I followed
this story very closely.

It was not because it’s a
murder or it’s a salacious story.

It was actually the interesting part to me

was how the internet
reacted to this heinous event.

So the basic story is that back in 2019,
this girl attempts to kill her boyfriend.

She gets sentenced to attempted
murder and she goes to prison.

The internet reacted unusually
because she was attractive.

And that was the main reason.

You have someone who’s
committed a horrible act

and is getting treated very differently from
other people because they’re attractive.

The reason this is
sparked interest in me again

is because just recently,
she was released from prison.

And on Tokyo reporter,
they released a transcript

of the trial, some of the
questions and answers from 2019,

which is sort of an insight into
Japanese courts that we don’t normally get.

So I wanna go over a bit of the history of
the story, then we’ll read the transcript.

And just remember the
whole time Japanese men

on the internet are
white-niting this girl

so hard, they’re saying
that she’s innocent,

she shouldn’t be punished
because she’s too beautiful.

If she had been with me,
this wouldn’t have happened.

That was always the
part that was rolling around

in the back of my head, is that this
woman attempted to kill another human being

and they were willing to let
it go because she was cute.

And I think what made it one
of the things that made it worse

was the media was calling
her a real life yandere.

So that is the character in anime who
doesn’t show outward expressions of emotion.

She gets very jealous on the inside.

She loves very passionately.

In some anime, they would make it that
she would kill for the person she loves.

So they’ve made it already,
like she’s a character

in anime, appealing
to these anime nerds.

These guys who way, way overreacted.

And again, these people
who started making fan art

and started doing stuff on the internet
to say, she’s amazing, she’s wonderful,

she shouldn’t be punished
because she’s beautiful.

And she was just doing
this wonderful thing.

She was killing because of her jealousy,

but her jealousy was an
indication of how strongly she loves

and if she loved me, then this
would never have happened.

Let’s get back into reality,
characterizing someone

as an anime character would
certainly increase your interaction

rate on the internet, which is
what these people really want.

But it also puts up this
strange sort of relationship,

the meta relationship,
the internet creates,

where these people are like truly going
forward and attempting to defend her.

They set up like a GoFundMe style thing
to try to get her money for her defense.

They were trying to get her not
punished for attempted murder.

And the media didn’t help by creating this
atmosphere around her of this character.

And she had an Instagram
and that of course got blown up

because everyone wanted to
see more pictures of the pretty girl.

And in that, she did cosplay
of Yandere characters.

And they’re like, wow, this is just her
showing who she really is on the inside.

So I think really the thing
I was interested in was

all the bits of the story,
of course, because we’re all

interested in these sort
of like real crime stories.

But then there was also the
secondary aspect of this crime

and the person who committed it
were being fetishized the whole time.

And the internet audience was eating it up.

So you have Yuka Takoka, she
was working in a bar, a girls bar.

She became a manager, so she
was obviously quite good at it.

Girls bars, basically guys
come in, they pay money, they

pick a girl, the girl will
sit with them, they’ll talk.

That’s the base standard.

I mean, it implies a
certain level of sexuality.

There’s all these other like
other aspects to the relationship

of a hostess club where, you
know, you’ll go out on dates.

The dates are nonsexual,
but the man is expected to

give presents and pay money
and buy expensive things.

One of the scams, I don’t know if it’s a
scam because the people are going for it.

They kind of know what happens as well.

Is that on my birthday, let’s
say, I would go to the five men

who love me the most who come
to are my most regular customers.

And I tell them, I want
this very specific watch.

I want this very specific bag.

And I get five of those and then
I can return four and then keep

the one and say, “Oh, look
at this bag, you gave me.

I love it so much.

” But then I also got the cash
money for the other four bags.

So this is the kind
of relationship that is

created within the
hostess club atmosphere.

This is also what happens on the host side,

which is men basically manipulating
women into giving them money

for the exact same thing
that sort of may fake meta

love relationship, which
is what her boyfriend did.

Her boyfriend’s name was Phoenix Luna.

I can’t be his real name, but
that’s actually a pretty good name.

You know, I’m going to
name an anime character.

I might name him Phoenix Luna now.

Both the men and the
woman in this relationship

had this job where they
created relationships with

other people in order to
extrapolate money from them.

They moved in together.

Now, she was looking, this
is the version of the story.

She was looking at Luna’s
phone while he was in the shower

and she found pictures of him
with other women at the bar.

Now, remember, that’s his job to go
to the bar, talk to women, sit with them.

They take selfies, whatever.

They try to put on this great atmosphere.

They just do this all the
time because that’s his job.

His job is to make these women
actually fall in love with him

so they will come back more, spend
more money, give him more money.

That’s how he makes money.

She does the same thing.

Maybe it’s at a manager level.

She doesn’t do it so directly anymore, but
she teaches the other girls how to do it.

She tries to develop these
relationships so that the

bar makes more money, so
she can make more money.

Like, this is not something
that should be a surprise to her,

but she immediately connected if
she’s taking pictures with these women,

then he must be sleeping with these
women, and she got insanely jealous.

This is another part of
the Yandade character,

attributes that
everyone was playing into,

thinking this was so great that she was
fulfilling this fantasy character so much.

So, in Takahoka’s mind, this meant
that he was having sex with them.

So, she waited until 350 in the
mornings that he would be dead asleep.

She got a knife from the kitchen,
and she stabbed him in stomach.

He woke up and he struggled, and he managed
to get to the elevator before he collapsed.

She, for some reason,
brought him down to the lobby,

so she must have actually pulled
him out of the elevator as well.

There’s a bit in there that’s sort of
unknown, but basically it was discovered.

He was laying on the floor, bleeding out.

She’s sitting on the
floor, smoking a cigarette,

and talking on her cell phone in
sort of pajamas and like slippers.

She, her legs and her
arms were covered in blood.

There’s blood all over the lobby for.

She wasn’t calling the police.

She wasn’t trying to save his life.

She was just sitting
there talking on the phone.

I don’t actually remember if it
was revealed who she was talking to.

A passerby came and saw all
the blood and called the police.

So, that is how this was
discovered in the first place.

The photos in the lobby
are what made her famous.

Now, the most famous picture is her
sitting on the lobby floor on the phone.

She’s wearing sort of a black shirt
and not much else, some slippers.

And so, of course, the fetishization
of this person began immediately there

because she has her legs
out and she’s covered in blood.

And it’s exciting and sexy and dangerous.

And that’s the bit everyone wants to see.

And she’s just ignoring
the police at this point.

So, she’s sitting there
talking on her phone,

ignoring the police
officers who are there.

The shocking bit to me was the
boyfriend is sitting in the background.

He’s just bleeding out.

Like, he’s going to die if someone
doesn’t take some emergency action.

The police don’t seem to be making
any moves to actually make that happen.

I don’t actually know what
the proper procedure is there.

I assume separate the two and immediately
start performing first aid on the man

and arrest the woman since
she seems to not be injured.

We don’t know what happened
at this point if you’re the police.

You don’t know if he attacked
her and she fought back.

You don’t know if she attacked him.

So separate them and start giving
the person a news injured some first aid.

But that’s the picture
that set off the internet.

It set off the story.

It set off this because
she’s an attractive woman.

All these sort of white
night guys coming in.

Crowd funding her defense to
try to get her off this very clearly.

She’s guilty of attempted murder.

Her statement was I intended to die
after watching him die from stabbing.

Basically her statement
was once he died on the floor.

So this is where my
actual question comes in.

Why did she take him to the lobby?

If she was just waiting for
him to bleed out and die.

Once he died, she
was going to kill herself.

There didn’t seem to be any
reason to take him to the lobby.

And it seemed weird that she
started calling someone on the phone.

That is all information that
is lost to history at this point.

Then the article started
coming out and they

started calling her the
two beautiful criminal

because she’s cute. And by Japanese
standards, she hits sort of ticks every box.

She’s cute and sexy.

And that’s sort of this whole
atmosphere of attractiveness.

And then they add on
this other layer this yandere

sort of anime thing
they’ve thrown into it.

Again, the media threw
this into it right away.

They leaned into this
hard, setting off this

whole crazy fetishization
of this person.

So this was published on Tokyo
Reporter and Seemic B is a podcast.

So of course, I’m going to read it to you.

But if you’re on the YouTube
channel, you can read along with it.

What follows is a transcription of
some of the questions by her lawyers in it.

Readers learned the details of the
innocent how it happened, how it ended,

and her later regret
reports news post seven.

This is back from December 9, 2019.

Let’s go back to the time of the incident.

After Runa arrived at around 3 p.m.
on May 23rd,

we put up the curtains
together, talked and had sex.

What did you talk about?

Apparently, he had made a
reservation at a hair salon that night,

and his boss had asked him why he
was meeting with me outside the bar.

Now, this is one of the things
about being a host or hostess.

If you meet outside the bar and you start
dating or forming an actual relationship,

that will actually take
money away from the bar.

So they want you to keep the customers
coming into the bar as often as possible.

So having these relationships outside
can actually be very dangerous for the bar.

Maybe you form a real enough relationship
that you stop working at the bar,

and then he loses two
streams of income because

you’re not there to
attract more people,

but then also, the people aren’t
coming in to give the money.

Why would your boss say something to
you if you met Takoka outside the bar?

Because if I meet him outside the
bar, I would stop coming to his bar.

Well, that’s actually what I just said.

After that, he fell asleep,
so I went to the kitchen,

and my desire to kill him
and die remained the same.

So I grabbed a knife from
the kitchen and went to him.

So again, this is, she saw pictures
on his phone of him doing his job,

sitting in the bar, talking to
other women, taking selfies,

and she immediately
extrapolated that they must

be having sex as well,
so he was cheating on her.

What was that knife?

On the morning of May 23rd, I
bought it at Don Quixote in Okubo.

After work for household purposes,
I had no intention of killing him.

I just bought it for household purposes.

How did you hold the knife?

This is again, that bits that, for
me, isn’t outside are very interesting,

because I don’t know what kind of
questions they ask in a Japanese court.

I don’t know what is
important, what is not important,

when they’re talking about an attempted
murder, because this is all new to me.

I held the knife in both hands and stabbed
him in the stomach as he was sleeping.

What was he wearing?

He was wearing a pair of pants.

Where were you positioned?

I was standing in the middle
of Runa’s torso on his left side.

How did you hold the knife?

So he’s asking it again.

I held it with both hands.

What direction was the blade facing?

I don’t remember.

I stabbed Runa in the stomach.

What angle was the blade at?

He was a right angle to him.

How many times did you stab him once?

So this is trying to make sure
that all the details are accurate.

So there is some, perhaps,
suspicion that maybe she’s just

saying this, maybe she’s
covering up for someone else.

So she has to get all the
details right to actually prove

that she was the one who
actually tried to kill the guy,

even though she’s admitted to it
very directly and very obviously.

After you stabbed him, he tried to get up.

So I got on top of him to
stop him from getting up.

And he tried to let me go by choking me.

So he tried to get her
off of him by choking her.

What kind of conversation
did you have with Runa?

He said, “Okay, I love you.

So let’s stay together forever.

” So I said, “I love you.

So let’s die together.

” He put the knife
under the bed and said,

“I won’t tell the police,
but I’ll call an ambulance.

” So I took his mobile phone.

So he’s now in a strange negotiation phase
where he’s trying to, he’s been stabbed.

He’s trying to get away from
her so he can get to the hospital.

He’s saying, “I won’t
hold this against you.

I won’t call the cops.

” We’ll just say it was an
accident, something like that.

She doesn’t believe him.

She just wants them both to die.

Why did you put the knife there?

When I stabbed him in
the stomach and saw the

pain on his face, I
felt really regretful.

And by that point, I think I had no
longer any intention of killing him.

So this is in the moment when it’s real.

She suddenly thinks this was a bad idea.

I regret it.

I had this must actually happen so much.

What happened after you
took the mobile phone away?

He got up and went to the front door so
I chased after him, telling him not to go.

He hit me, punching and kicking
with his arms, legs, and face.

That’s when my contacts came out.

So I went to get my glasses.

I also took my cigarettes and
cell phone and chased after him.

That is a strange detail.

But again, very realistic
because I bet every time she

leaves the house, she grabs
her cigarettes and cell phone.

That’s just a natural thing.

I always just reach for and grab my keys
to the house before I walk out the door.

And I bet even in an emergency situation,

I would instinctively
just do the same thing.

So I think that’s probably
why this panic, the stress,

she just did what she always does,
grab her cigarettes and cell phone.

The lawyer asked the same question though.

Why the cigarettes?

I don’t know.

But I found myself holding a cigarette.

I found Runa lying at the entrance.

I was so regretful
that I called the police.

Now, that may not be true.

This is her testimony from 2019.

It’s actually said that she
isn’t the one who called

the cops, that it was a
passerby who called the cops.

Now, I, again, I’m getting all
my information from the internet.

It’s all secondhand.

I have no idea what is actually accurate.

Why did you call the police yourself?

When I saw Runa’s blood
and how he looked and pain,

I really regretted it and realized
that I had done something terrible.

I didn’t want him to die and I was so scared
of him dying that I called the police.

You told the police something different.

You said to them, “I heard a woman scream
when I was going down the emergency stairs,

so I knew I couldn’t
die with him.

” I was really panicked
at the time and I said

yes to what the police
and prosecutor said.

But what I really regret
most is having stabbed him.

So she’s saying, in the
moment, she called the police.

She just started saying whatever she
felt she needed to say in the moment.

I think that’s a very
realistic answer, to be honest.

Please tell us about
when you called the police.

They first asked me if it was a crime
or an accident and I answered crime.

It seemed like they
thought it was a prank, so

I told them the same
thing over and over again.

This is an interesting reaction
because I think in other countries,

if you say I just stabbed someone,
it’s never going to be taken as a prank.

But Japan being such a generally saved
country, the police probably are like,

“We want to make sure this is real
crime before we take our time on it.

” What happened?

I told the my name, Runa’s
name, that I had stabbed him,

that I was at the entrance, and
that we needed an ambulance.

I explained what I had done and
made sure everyone asked me.

Why did you stab him?

I liked him and I wanted to be with him.

I’m sorry.

I did something selfish.

When did you start to
think this around June?

I thought so after hearing
about Runa’s situation

from my lawyer and hearing about
my mother and father’s situation.

So Runa was in a coma for five days
and it took him five days to wake up.

He’d been stabbed.

He’d actually pierced his liver
and so he wasn’t able to eat.

He was actually having a lot of trouble.

So there’s a lot of rehabilitation.

At this time, he was probably
still just starting his rehabilitation.

It was very tough recovery.

He did do a full recovery though.

What was Runa’s situation?

The scars were deep,
reaching all the way to his liver

and he had been in a coma
for five days without waking up.

What about your parents?

When they came to
visit, they were very thin.

Their hair was turning gray.

They were crying and
with so many media outlets

at our house, they
were almost neurotic.

So again, this was a massive news story.

Everyone wanted as much
information as possible.

They were trying to make
this as grandiose as they could

because this pretty
woman with this yandere

atmosphere, we want to
create the story of the century

so they were just all over
everybody in the story.

The parents, of course, are
going to be hounded by the media.

Is that both your father or mother?

Both my father and mother.

As time went on, I became
more and more scared

that I had done something
so horrible and I felt so sorry,

so scared and so sorry that I
had nearly taken someone’s life.

I also caused trouble for my parents.

What about Runa?

I wrote a letter of
apology to Runa in June.

I said I was truly sorry that I
would no longer be involved with him

and mentioned compensation and
had it delivered through my lawyer.

And what about while you were in custody?

I was thinking about Runa and my parents,

making sure they were eating
properly, getting enough sleep.

My mother came over at
least three times a week,

but my father was busy with work,
so he came about twice a week.

What did we talk about?

We talked about a lot of things,

like the incidents, the procedures
from moving out of the house and our cat.

What about Runa?

I heard they settled for five million yen.

Five million yen is not very much money.

Like it would be the average salary for a
year in Japan is four to five million yen.

So it’s the upper end of a
very average salary in Japan.

I heard that they had submitted a petition.

What about the five million
yen settlement money?

My mother prepared it for me.

This is interesting because
I’ve actually read the story.

I reviewed some of the details.

After Phoenix had made his recovery, he
actually came out with a statement saying

he didn’t have a grudge against her,
he didn’t hold anything against her.

He wasn’t necessarily saying
he was going to get back

together with her, but he was
saying I’m not holding a grudge.

I’m not angry at her for what she did.

What kind of exchange did
you have with your mother?

She told me I prepared it for your future.

Your desire to return the
money is enough for me.

You don’t have to pay me back.

What did you think?

I want to work and save five
million yen, earn more money,

pay it back, and make my
mom and dad’s lives easier.

How did you spend your
time while out on bail?

I took a training course called
initial training for care workers.

I want to be useful to
someone in the future.

I took it because I wanted
to be like my mother.

My mother is a certified care worker.

She’s a great person and
I want to be just like her.

Is that a qualification?

It’s a qualification equivalent
to a second class helper

and allows you to work
in homes and the like.

How often did you go about three days
a week for about six hours each time?

The lectures were really fun.

I learned a lot of new things
and it was very educational.

I want to take practical
training and study

become a certified
care worker in the future.

Did you get the qualification?

Yes.

I heard that you need practical experience.

So what will you do about finding a job?

I would like to find a job through
Hellowork and start working.

Hellowork is sort of a very
normal job search place.

I don’t know if it’s from the government,

but it’s a search.
It helps you find jobs in Japan.

When you enter society, you will probably
find people who know about the incident.

How do you plan to respond to them?

I haven’t thought about how
to respond in any particular way.

It’s a crime that I committed.

Should I just let it go?

Rather than just
letting go, I think about it

deeply and make efforts
to a tone for my crime.

Can you endure?

I will endure.

There’s a little bit more
listening to your mother’s story.

It really broke my heart seeing
my mother crying so much.

I didn’t know how to
apologize, even though

this crime couldn’t
possibly be the fault of

a parent, so no matter how
much it was painful for me,

I decided to stay with her so
that I could make her life easier.

And what about Runa?

No matter how much I apologize,
I can never apologize enough.

It’s a crime I can’t a tone for
even if I spend my entire life doing it.

I don’t think I’ll be
forgiven even if I apologize.

It may seem strange and weird for me to say
this, but I’m really glad that I’m alive.

I’m truly sorry.

I am doing a very Canadian story now.

Didn’t realize that.

Now that I’m actually listening to myself
speak, I realize just how Canadian I am.

So she got three and a half years in
prison and she just got out recently.

She’s still active on
Instagram, X and YouTube.

What does she do on Instagram and YouTube?

Well, her YouTube, the most recent
one, she has 10,000 subscribers by the way.

The most recent one is her
doing a variety of different cosplays.

So it starts out with
her with not much makeup

on and how to put the
makeup on and then it’s

applying more makeup and then some
wigs and stuff and this is two hours long.

So I don’t know if she’s
going to be making enough

money off this, but
again, the people who are

watching this, it’s a question of are
they interested in her as a cosplayer,

as a beauty influencer
or are they interested in

her because of his dark
criminal background that

makes her attractive in a
different and unique way.

She’s not doing care work. So what she was
saying in the transcript, who just read,

it’s not that she was lying.
She didn’t follow through on what she said.

I think in that thing, she’s trying to
say, “Look, I want to be a better person.

I want to help society.

” That’s not necessarily a
bad thing that she didn’t do it.

I think again, I have a negative
view of influencer, which is

ironic because I make podcasts
and YouTube videos and stuff.

It’s interesting that the guy has
no grudge or he says he doesn’t.

I’m sure he hasn’t met her again since.
So I guess it’s easy to say,

you’re not holding a grudge
if you just never plan on

seeing someone again, just
how I live most of my life.

So for me, the salaciousness of the
murder wasn’t enough to get me interested.

I read about murder all
the time because I read

about the news all the
time and there’s a lot

of real-life crime in the news all
the time. I think it was the immediate

fetishization of her as a character.
Not even as a real person as a character,

but the fact that she
was a hostess played

into it, the fact that
her boyfriend was a host

played into it, the fact
that all these people

on the internet inserted
themselves into that

relationship, so many of
the guys on the internet

saying that if it was me,
this wouldn’t have happened.

I’m wondering now that she’s built her
influencer sphere. She’s on the Instagram,

she’s on YouTube. Are
the people there holding

out that small hope that
they could be the one

that’s actually with her
in the future and that

her yandade love, that
strength of love, that they

actually in a weird way
admire and want because

you want that sort of
level of passion directed

towards you, that they
would return it and then

they would end up having the
perfect relationship with her.

It’s interesting to see where she
will go from here because in Japan,

they have a weird
relationship with fame, so

she’s now gotten famous and she can probably
hold on to that fame for a long time.

There’s a story. I don’t want
to go into the whole thing.

I actually think I may have done this
story on an old Velocipod cast episode,

but there was a guy,
a Japanese guy, and he

was in France, and he
killed an eight a woman,

and because of the rules,
he wasn’t a French citizen,

they were like, “Okay,
we’ll send him back to

Japan,” and they will
punish him, and then

he was sent back to
Japan, he was extradited,

and then when he ended
up in Japan, they’re like,

“Well, he didn’t actually
commit a crime in Japan,”

so the Japanese didn’t
persecute him, so he

ended up basically
just getting away with it,

and then, based on his
reputation as a cannibal,

started doing restaurant
reviews and became

a really famous restaurant
reviewer in Japan, based

purely off a crime that
he’d committed in France,

one of the most heinous
crimes you could actually

ever think of, killing and
eating another human being,

so there’s this weird
disconnect almost with the

fantasy and the reality
in Japan, and you see

this in a lot of different
aspects, but I think

in these situations, it
shows so clearly and so

really that people
don’t have a connection

between what’s really
happening and what they’re

seeing sort of in media,
because they’re living

the dream, they want
the dream to happen,

they think this could
be real, but the reality

is, this is a convicted
attempted murder,

or, God, that’s a terrible sense, convicted
attempted murder, as way easier to say,

all these guys on the
internet living out a

fantasy that isn’t real,
because the character they

gave her in the media
isn’t her real character,

and she may play into it
now because that’s how

she’s going to capitalize
on that fame, but that’s

just as fake as the love
she may have shown people

while she was working
in a hostess bar, while

her boyfriend was
working in a host bar,

while they were getting
money from other people

pretending that they
actually were into them.

It’s a skill, it’s a skill I don’t have,
you can tell by this ending right here.

[MUSIC]

Examines the Morality of Skeletor

[Music]

It was with my friends online, we’re playing
video games and we start talking about

Skeletor, something I
do more than I should.

I like fictional
characters and I like

thinking about them thoroughly. Skeletor
is an interesting character because

Skeletor, well the question, let’s put
the question out there that started this

whole thing off, which led me to a
point where I went and did some actual

research about Skeletor. Skeletor is
a very buff man. I have to make sure

because I don’t know how much my
audience would actually not know Skeletor.

I know that show has been rebooted
multiple times, but none of those are

super popular. Do you know who he
men in Skeletor is a question? So I will be

explaining stuff that if you know it,
hit the little fast forward button on your

podcast player, but if you don’t,
you know, you do need an explanation.

He man, hero of attorneya. My apologies.
I should have said Adam, the milk

toast version of human pre-transformation.
Goes around, he’s like this guy who’s

really sort of Faye, but very buff. I think
he would be. He’s not a twink. He’s not a

bear. He’s a very buff man who’s
clearly a bottom. Then he gets out his big

sword, holds it in the air, and says by
the power of gray skull, and then turns

into a top. I’ll tell you that right now.
His clothes change, he gets a big

sort of strappy thing on, and he’s still
jacked. He’s jacked in both instances,

but his attitude changes. Let’s just
put it that way. He becomes he-man.

Skeletor, this was back in cartoons when
they basically had one body, and they like

repainted it in the cartoon. So he-man
was a white dude. Skeletor is a dark

bluish color. He actually lightens up
in later reboots, which is interesting.

The problem is, Skeletor has a
skeleton head, and so what is he? Is he a

skeleton with a buff body, or is it some
kind of like it’s a human with a skull head

for some reason? So what happened?
What is he? So the original, oh, and so the

question that came up was, would it be
appropriate for Skeletor to have intimate

relations with a corpse? Because if
he’s a dead body, because he’s a skeleton,

then him having relations with another
dead body wouldn’t be morally offensive,

or is he a buff dude with a skeleton
head and then him having relations with a

corpse? He’s not acceptable, morally
speaking. But then we would have to talk

about his morals, and this led me
down sort of a rabbit hole of how, what is

Skeletor, and where is his morality?
And that was an interesting question.

So what is he? In the original toy, so
this is back in the 80s when they made the

toy first, and then
the cartoon was

essentially a 30 minute
advertisement for the toy.

If you bought the toy for Skeletor,
and any of the he-man products and

the original toys, you got a little sort
of mini comic with it, which gave you

some sort of background on the character.
It’s not like a Pokemon card with

just like stats. This was like a little
story, little background. Now Skeletor’s

story, just basically said he’s a demon
from another dimension and then started

talking about how he hated he-man,
how he hated attorney. I wanted to suck the

magic out of the world, wanted to
take over the world, that kind of stuff.

Demon from another dimension wasn’t
explained very deeply, but it would justify

him having a skull head and a very
buff human body. But there are reboots of

the story, and they sort of alter it.
So basically the people who made the toy,

the people who made the cartoon and
the people who made the reboots, had an

inconsistent canon, and this is very
frustrating, because then we have to figure out

like what is true. Because one story
is that he was actually Hordok, which is

Shira’s enemy, the Horde,
invaded from another dimension to

Eternia and left Skeletor behind. Now
they took Shira from Eternia back to the

dimension they come from, which is how
Shira ended up there. So Shira is he-man’s

cousin I believe. But that meant that
Skeletor was left behind or abandoned by the

people who brought him here. He then
ends up being angry at both the people of

Eternia who rejects him for who he
is, and angry at the Horde who left him

behind because they were supposed
to be supporting him at all times.

This was essentially his family abandoned
him. There’s another story that he’s

actually the next in line of succession,
but the king didn’t want him to become

king because he has blue skin, racism,
and so pushed him aside and made his

son the king who became he-man’s father.
So that would make Skeletor he-man’s uncle.

In one of the reboots they have
someone throw acid in his face,

but that doesn’t give you a skull head.
Maybe he did some magic to repair it

because magic is real in this universe.
So that’s something could be done to stop

it or, you know, put an extra, I
guess a shell on the outside of his face.

I didn’t notice while sort of looking
at clips of the cartoons that the skull

exterior of Skeletor is vaguely flexible.
And this is how they give some expression.

So he can look sad because his
eye sockets will turn down. He can

look happy because his teeth will go up
and his cheekbones, sorry, his cheekbones

will go up. So he has the skull that
is resting above his incredibly buff

body is vaguely flexible. Now I don’t
know if that was on purpose because it’s

not really bone or if it’s just because
we have to give him some sort of

expression in his cartoon and nobody
cares until like 20, 30 years later when

some dude does a podcast and he
clearly cares because of inconsistencies

piss him off. So he’s going to go
through all the inconsistencies and try to

figure out what the fuck Skeletor actually
is. This was a time, Star Wars, when

all the bad guys were somehow vaguely
related to the hero and it was like a

big surprise. I don’t remember it ever
being revealed in the show as being

cannon or factual. So this is like
someone had this idea. Hey Darth Vader was

Skywalker’s dad. Let’s make Skeletor, he
man’s uncle and because there’s actually a

clear line of succession in the he man’s
story. So he can’t actually be his father.

He could be his uncle but they
never seem to have actually dealt with

that in any real way. Also I have very
bad allergies. I get allergies every year.

It’s very frustrating. Take a
lot of medication for allergies.

The interesting part about Skeletor is
that there was once the time where he

created monsters and then he man used
some magic to turn those monsters into

flowers and Skeletor was defeated
because of a severe pollen allergy.

So all the flowers started like shooting
pollen out and then he got such bad

allergies. He actually had to retreat.
So he was defeated by allergies. I actually

know how that feels. But that would
imply that within the skull on Skeletor’s

head, their error sinus cavities that
are like mine full of mucus and liquid

and they overreact to pollen. So
that to me implies that there’s a skull a

fleshy part and then a skull on the
outside. So there are some depictions of

Skeletor where the skull is floating
above the body and then there’s some where

there’s the body and then like a
little orange link between the skull.

So usually he has a hood up and you
can’t see into the hoods. You can’t see how

that skull is connected. So if it’s just
floating above it, it would just be magic.

But then if it’s just a skull, he
wouldn’t have allergies. You can see

the problem where I’m getting into.
I get into the minutia of this and the

more minutia I get into, the more conflicts
that come up. So what they need for

the whole he-man thing is me to sit
down and be like I will be the arbiter of

what is true for all of eternity and I
will make your stories consistent from

now on and I will take facts from previous
episodes and I will blend them together.

But I can tell you that there
is fleshy stuff inside there or he

wouldn’t have allergies. But we actually
have found is that he’s inconsistent.

We don’t know what Skeletor is.
So the morality of Skeletor having intimate

relations with a corpse is very difficult
to determine based on his physicality.

So we have to go into his morality. So
then I looked at some of his plots to see

where his morality falls. We know he’s
the bad guy. And this is the 80s and in the

80s they were not exactly subtle
what they’re bad guys. They’re bad guys.

We’re all just the cliche. I hate
everybody. I hate everything. I want to

destroy everything. I want to be the leader
of the world. Even if I have to destroy

the world, there’s no world left for
me to be the leader of which I as I grew

older realized that was really stupid
because what’s the point of being the

leader of a world that no longer
has anything in it that doesn’t exist.

That is always bothered me about
the I want to destroy everything. It really

bucks me. I can resident evil and the
tea virus thing because the tea virus kills

98% of the thing of the stuff in the world.
But the umbrella corporation is a

company. They need people to sell
product too. I’ve actually gone off on this

rant multiple times. It frustrates me to
no end because like, you know, parasites

don’t make sense because they kill the
host. So if you kill the host, you can’t

survive anymore. Umbrella is essentially
like the parasite. It’s killing off

the human population, but it’s a
company with no audience to sell to.

No consumer pool is no longer a company.
So what was the point? Now, I know there’s

science and evolution and stuff
that all goes into the tea virus as well.

But The president, so the company would be
like, let’s cut this research off because

we don’t want to kill everyone on it.
If they were going to create the virus

and then sell the vaccine, that could
work out. But I don’t actually remember

that coming up in any of the stories.
Some of Skeletor schemes. So to judge

his morality, we have to look at some
of the schemes he came up with. One of

them was that he created half size
Skeletors. So if Skeletor six feet, I don’t

know, they’re buff dude. So like you
could either imagine they’re like giants

like seven foot tall or being sort of
weightlifters, they might actually be

quite short. So let’s just call him six
foot so that we can do the math or easily.

He created three foot mini Skeletors,
a whole bunch of them. And his

plan was to have them overrun eternia.
The small ones, all the problem was the

small ones all had his singular attitude
and that they should be the leader.

So as soon as they started interacting
with each other, like who’s going to be

the leader of like the world once there’s
only Skeletors left, even if they’re

mini Skeletors, well, they all thought
it should be them. So they started

infighting. Now the full size Skeletor
was like, well, it’s obviously supposed

to be me because I’m the creator. None
of the little Skeletors agreed with them.

So he needed to actually rebreed
them to have a new sort of more

subservient attitude. But he didn’t think
about that at the time. So, but he was

willing to create a horde of little
Skeletors that would take over the entire

planet. And I don’t know if they were
going to kill everybody, but they were

certainly going to make it so there
were no food supply. So he was willing to

sacrifice little versions of himself. Now,
the Skeletor we all know is very selfish.

So sacrificing other versions of himself
as long as it’s not himself is fine.

That’s a very normal sort of 80s standard
attitude. So I didn’t take that too hard.

He once dropped fireworks
spiders on the capital of Eternia.

They were easily dispatched with
one hit. So that actually just was

to me showing he’s not very smart.
He started a volcano to destroy Eternia.

So he’s just trying to like destroy
stuff. I think that’s maybe the

underpinning is like he will do anything
to try to destroy stuff. Now, those

aren’t too bad. They’re very cartoony
kind of plans. He regularly mind-control

people. He had no problem taking over
people’s mind so that they would fight he man.

He summoned demons from another
dimension so that they would fight he man.

The problem was he never actually
figured out if he needed to come to

some sort of agreement with the demon.
So he would summon a demon. Sometimes

they would work with him. He would
summon a demon. And sometimes he couldn’t

control them. So this happened multiple
times. And he never actually thought it

all the way through like if the demon
wouldn’t do what he said, what was the point.

So a lot of us again, I think, have
the idea like if you go through the

ritual of summoning a demon, there is
sort of an inherent understanding that the

demon is going to do what you say.
We all have the monkey’s paw problem where

there’s a level of interpretation there
where maybe it doing what you say could

come back on you in a negative way.
But really summoning a demon just means the

demon is now in your world that doesn’t
necessarily mean the demon’s going to

do what you say. So that’s a very
important point for anyone out there who’s

listening right now who’s thinking about
summoning a demon. Just make sure

go through the rule book. See if there’s
any sort of like little script or anything.

And does the spell that you’re going to
use to summon a demon into your dimension?

Actually talk about whether or
not you will have control over the

demon because if you don’t, you might
want to rethink your process so that you do

get some sort of caveat in there in the
contract with you and the demon to make

sure the demon does what you say to a
degree. He did try to drain attorney of all

magic. And this meant every magic user in
the world would slowly and painfully die.

So we’re not talking about genocide.
I don’t know what you can imagine. He was

willing to commit murder on a massive
scale to gain power. So that’s where we see

his actual morality. Life doesn’t
seem to have any real value to him.

He is reckless in how he is willing to
use and spend life. He’s willing to create

life. He’s willing to use life just to
further his goals. The most messed up thing

though was he created a baby to raise.
Now the created a baby was a very vague

statement, but he basically got a
baby that he wanted to raise. So he could

marry her later and this turned out to
be Tila. Tila is a main character. She’s

sort of a love interest. I think for him.
Man at arms, sort of the leader of the

army of attorney, kidnapped her back,
I guess, I don’t know if it’s kidnapped, I

guess in that case, it’s rescuing, rescued
her from Skeletor and raised her as his

daughter. So she’s adopted. So we
do have this now like weird web where if

Skeletor created Tila, so we’re going
to go ahead and go with magic, not any

sort of other gross thing that I would
have to talk about, that she, if married to

Skeletor would be he-man’s aunt. As the
love, it just, is it problematic that she

is sort of the love interest of he-man?
I don’t think it is because they’re not

related, but if your uncle creates it,
is she his cousin? Like that’s actually

the problem because the creation aspect
is so vague is, are they actually related?

Because she’s created by magic,
right? I don’t know. That’s tough one. I’d

have to get more details on the creation
process, like did Skeletor use any of his

own flesh, let’s say, to create the
flesh that created the baby, that kind of

stuff would become important. But
he is a groomer, like that is 100% what’s

happened here. He’s going to raise a
child to become his wife. He is a groomer,

a Skeletor is a groomer. So that’s
the level of morality we’re talking about,

mass murder and grooming all on the table
as far as he’s concerned. Later on, he’s

willing to sacrifice her to want to be
aforementioned demons to get the demon

to come in. So his actual feeling about
the thing he created, this woman that he

was going to create to become his wife,
he was willing to sacrifice her without

question to get a demon because the
demon might be more powerful. So all that

being said, I think 100% the idea that
he would have a problem with having

personal relations with a corpse is
absolutely on the table. He doesn’t seem to

have any morality at all. He seems to
be doing whatever he needs to do in the

moment to what he considers perceived game.
Of course, every one of those plans

fails because he man generally throws
a rock at it. I mentioned the volcano,

he started volcano. He man threw a
rock into the volcano and plugged it up.

I don’t actually think that’s how volcanoes
would be stopped, but I think I would

just create more pressure and
create a bigger explosion. The writers of

He Man, not only were they inconsistent,
they didn’t actually spend a lot of time on

physics. Probably the most interesting
aspect of He Man as a character back in

the 80s. I didn’t actually watch any of
the reboot, so I don’t know, is that he

wasn’t allowed to hit anyone with his
sword. So his sword was used exclusively

for breaking items, usually doors or walls
or rocks. Someone threw a rock at him,

he would cut it in half. So there was a
door he would smash it with his sword,

but he never hit another individual
with his sword because of the rules of

kids TV at the time. He had a shield.
He often would use the shield to block.

The shield was kind of useless. Most
problems in He Man were actually solved by

He Man picking up something large and
throwing it. Now it may have been a rock to

plug a hole. It may have been picking
up a person and throwing them away, but

that actually seemed to be most of the
problems and how they were solved in the

He Man universe. But if he man ever
came across some of these actual real, very

diabolical plans, I think it
would have been time to

pull out the sword and
actually do some real damage.

[Music]

I just watched my viewer
count drop from three to one.

I think the phrase “scaling
to our having sex with

a dead body” maybe
turned a couple people off.

Examines Murder in Japan

(upbeat music)

So on Ninja Ninja Japan, I
don’t generally talk about things

where people die, because the feeling of
the show is supposed to be very flippant.

Like I make fun of whatever
I’m talking about, I give advice

to criminals and stuff, so I
don’t tend to talk about murder,

but that doesn’t mean murder
doesn’t have an inch of pen.

See me be on the other hand, this
is where I talk about whatever I want,

it’s experimental, I do
weird things, that’s great.

There have been two
murder cases recently in

Japan, and I thought
they were very interesting

and getting into the details
of these have been kind

of fun, so I thought it’d
be worth talking about.

In 2021 in November, at midnight, a
man made a call to emergency services.

And he said, there is a centipede in the
room, and someone isn’t serious condition.

And what he meant was, in Japan,
there are centipedes in their poisonous,

so if you actually get bit by one,
most of the time is not gonna kill you,

but there are people who have
reactions to any sort of venom,

so like people who are
allergic to bees and whatnot,

it can kill you, so this is
stronger than most other things.

So this guy was saying, I
have a friend in the room,

he’s in bad shape, he
was bitten by a centipede.

Paramedics arrive, there are two men
in the room, one who’s in cardiac arrest,

and then the other one who was the caller,
who claimed to be Diesuke Numba’s brother.

He had both health insurance cards, and
he showed them to the ambulance group.

Now health insurance cards in
Japan, they’re just a blue card,

they just have information on
them, they don’t have a picture.

So it’s not like a driver’s
license, it is sort of

identification, but it’s not
quite the same identification

as like a driver’s license or something
else, because it has no picture on it.

So it’s very hard to
connect this to people.

They took the patient to the
hospital, and then they called his family.

Pretty reasonable thing to do.

So the family shows up, the mother comes in

and they want them to check
on their son who it has died.

And the mother says,
immediately, this is not Diesuke.

So there’s already now a
significant suspicion in the case.

Numba had taken a
600 million yen insurance

policy out on himself
a few months before.

The victim, his name was Ando, and they
had met through religious solicitations.

So this Ando guy came to his house
and said, like, come join our religion.

There’s actually a lot of
sort of small cults in Japan,

so there’s actually kind
of thing happens fairly

regularly where they come
and they come to your house

and they say like, “Hey, just come
out and hang out, have a good time.

” It doesn’t mean much.

And then they find out you
want to paint everything white.

There is a group in Japan, and they
believe that the solution to every problem

would be to paint every surface,
including all of nature white.

So if you paint all the trees
white, they’re not going to die.

Everything will improve afterwards.

So that was one of those ones that’s
been on the fringe as far as I’m concerned.

They were hanging out.

They became friends.

The articles I read refer to them
as brothers and they’re not brothers.

So I think they were
brothers in the religious sense,

but not brothers in
the actual familial sense.

So this guy came up with a plan.

I’m going to take an
insurance plan out on

myself, and then I’m
going to have myself die,

and then I’m going to
collect the insurance plan.

Well, wait a minute, that doesn’t work.

I’m going to need something
else to happen here.

There was a lot of other
things that were also suspicious.

So this Ando guy, when they do the autopsy,
they find like he’s full of liquor.

He didn’t drink.

The police think that while Ando wasn’t
conscious, he was injected with vodka.

So it seems like they had had
some sort of drink or something else.

He’d put sleeping pills into the drink.

The guy’d fallen asleep
while he was unconscious.

He injected him with
vodka, which is why he was

essentially, his blood
alcohol level was so high.

The death was unrelated
to a centipede bite.

So there’s another sort of
question that actually didn’t

answer was, was there a
centipede in the room at all?

So did the actual, did
the guy actually get bitten?

Did he go through all the steps?

So he wanted to make it
look like this was an accident.

Like a centipede had bit this guy.

He had a negative reaction and he died.

He’d clearly hadn’t done the research.

And this actually comes up in the
court case that comes up very soon.

Because first of all, you
would want a centipede there.

You would want a centipede bite.

You would want to make
sure that the reaction looked

like an actual centipede bite
for this plan to go through.

You also would need to make sure
that they don’t immediately identify

it’s not your body if
it’s your insurance plan.

The reason he wanted it to be a
centipede bite was because for some reason,

the insurance would go
from 550 million yen to 630

million yen if it was a
death by centipede or wasp.

So there was some claws in there.

If it was like a bug bite that
kills you, you get more money.

Pay out from the insurance.

This plan was sloppy.

We can actually say this pretty fairly

because the judge actually
called it a sloppy plan.

Number was found,
the guy I actually did it.

So we’ll go back to my other point.

He wanted to make it look like the guy
had been bitten by a centipede and died.

So he injected him with vodka.

Anyone who’s watched CSI,
which I watched like 13 seasons

of that, you would know that
injecting someone with vodka

isn’t going to show up
as like death by centipede.

Having a bunch of sleeping pills in
your system is also very suspicious.

Doesn’t imply death by centipede.

What he would need to do was go and find
out what does death by centipede look like,

what does it do to your
body and try to recreate that?

The sleeping pills actually
would have been fine.

‘Cause you say, oh, well, he
has a lot of trouble sleeping.

He took some sleeping pills.

He went to sleep and
then the centipede bit him.

You could get away with that.

Injecting him with vodka is
not going to have any effect

like you would actually want if you
wanted to mimic a centipede bite.

The police did a search of his computer.

It was found to have a search
history of identity switch, life

insurance, autopsy, sleeping
pills, double murder, untraceable,

wasp, death, insurance
payout, alcohol, lethal dose.

So I don’t know if those were exactly
in order, but when the police searched,

they actually just found
like essentially a grocery list

of if I want to fake a merch, if I want
to murder someone and make it look

like something else,
here’s the laundry list.

Here’s the list.

It’s the difference between
a laundry list and grocery list.

I shouldn’t have said that.

Now my brain just went to that.

But his search history
was essentially a list

of all the things you would
need to search for to try to

fake death by something else
after you’ve murdered someone.

The suspiciously close
timeline of getting an insurance

policy also would have tricked
the alarm bells across the board.

This guy clearly did not
come up with a good plan.

He bought the insurance plan.

He didn’t have any plan to change the face.

So I’ve seen the movie face off.

It’s a pretty old movie.

But like that’s the thing.

Once the body goes into the hospital,

they’re going to get someone
to come in and identify the body.

Like let’s not just ignore
it, like you can throw his

wallet away so there’s
no like picture ID and stuff.

They’re gonna get a family
member to come in and say,

yes, that’s my son or
no, that’s not my son.

So if you’re going to do it, if you’re
gonna try to pretend that you just died,

you’re gonna need your mom, or
your husband or wife, your partner,

or someone in your family, to
come in and vouch that this body

that is not you is you for
this plan to even move forward.

But if your mom comes in and
immediately goes, well, that’s not my son,

then you’ve already hit
your sort of first roadblock.

And that actually shows
like how sloppy this plan was.

I do enjoy that the judge called it sloppy,

and that’s why that phrase
is kind of stuck in my head.

He was assigned to 30 years in prison.

He wasn’t given life
because he wouldn’t have

received the payout
because the plan was so poor.

So essentially his sentence was
brought down from life in prison

to 30 years because he was
so bad at planning a murder.

And he was never gonna get the money.

Japanese legal system
is different philosophically

from the ones in
the West, that I know.

I don’t know much about the
UK, but I know America from TV,

and I know the Canadian one from
living in Canada for a very long time.

They would never pay like emotional damage.

So you see all these cases
where it’s like this happened

and it caused my first thought
was the McDonald’s burn.

So the lady put the cup of
McDonald’s coffee in between her legs

and she drove away
and spilled it on herself.

She got third degree, like super bad burns.

And then she sued McDonald’s.

Now the suit in Japan would have been
for the injury, and barely anything else.

The suit in America,
millions and millions dollars

for the emotional damage that was done
because you were burned and now you don’t feel

safe going to a McDonald’s
or something like that.

So that’s one of the
differences between the court’s

illegal systems is that if
you sue someone in Japan,

you can get your money,
you can get the base funds,

you can maybe get a little bit more
for the trouble you went through.

But at the end of the day,
that’s all you’re gonna get.

So the payouts in Japanese
court are much, much

smaller than they would
be in other countries.

So it’s something to be aware of.

And that sort of helps
with understanding

this punishment of
30 years instead of life.

Because he’s like, he
wasn’t gonna get any money.

He wasn’t gonna get any
of the stuff he was gonna do.

He wasn’t gonna be successful.

30 years in prison for
the murder itself, that’s it.

But as I’ve sat on Ninja
Ninja’s Japan when we do

almost any crime story, planning
is the most important part.

And this guy was clearly
just not a good platter.

That’s not the only murder
that’s happened in Japan.

There was a girl, she’s about 17 years old.

She takes a picture and a
ramen shop and she posts it online.

One of the girls in the picture
who’s like 2021 at the time,

she’s angry that this other girl
posted a picture of her that’s online.

I saw the picture, it’s
not particularly offensive.

It’s just her slurping noodles
and some guys around her.

You know, flash in the
peace sign and being goofy.

Basically just being young
adults and having a good time.

She was very angry about this.

And she said this was an unauthorized
picture that she had posted online.

So she started contacting this
girl, essentially threatening her,

trying to bully her, trying to get
her to come and give her 100,000 yen.

So she demanded 100,000 yen
compensation for the picture.

She tried to get her to transfer the
money electronically, but that failed.

A lot of things have like a limit.

So I wouldn’t be able to
from my phone transfer,

let’s say more than
50,000 yen at a time.

So they ended up meeting
at a roadside station

that were three girls
together and the victim.

There was a 20 year old, a
19 year old, and a 16 year old.

The 20 year old is the leader.

She’s actually known as
kind of a local gang leader,

or she at least has
influence in these circles.

They put the 17 year old
into a car and they drove

her to a remote area
with a suspension bridge.

They get her out on the
suspension bridge and then

they start taking videos
over her with her phone.

And they get her to get down and do
the kneeling bow as a, say, I’m sorry.

This is a very Japanese thing.

You get down on your
knees and you do a bow.

You say I’m sorry.

She’s crying.

She’s terrified.

They make her take off her clothes.

They get her to balance
on the suspension bridge.

So she’s basically
sitting on the edge of the

suspension bridge with
her legs on the outside.

There is no indication that
she was pushed, but suspension

bridges, I mean, they’re
essentially just ropes.

So she’s balancing on that, precariously.

And then she falls.

She falls to her death.

And then they throw the phone after her.

And I think this was an
attempt for them to try

to get rid of the evidence
that they had filmed

of them making her strip
down her clothes, making

her get down and do the
bowings to say I’m sorry.

Then they disappear.

Now it turns out there’s a
whole other side to this story.

So you got detectives.

The detectives, you know,
they got a decompress.

We’ve all seen the movies with detectives.

There’s cop bars.

And so cops in Japan aren’t that different.

They all have cop bars.

There’s a lot of bars in Japan.

So there’s going to be a
lot of people going to bars.

There’s going to be bars
close to a police station.

A lot of cops go to that bar.

A lot of bars in Japan, they hire
young attractive women to flirt, talk to.

This is a very normal thing in Japan.

So there’s a bar that’s
very popular with the police.

And there’s a detective that goes there.

And he starts to drink with
a young 20 year old woman.

He starts having a good time with them.

And they get intimate.

And this is married man, has a family.

But this 20 year old is offering
him a whole level of excitement.

Maybe he doesn’t know in his life.

Now, the fact that there’s a
bunch of cops go to this bar.

And this guy is getting very, very
personal with this 20 year old girl.

So it’s clearly struck
a chord with someone.

Like someone was like, “Ah,
something’s a little off here.

” So someone videoed him
drinking with the young girl.

Now that itself, she’s 20.

That’s legal drinking age.

There’s not actually a problem there.

But it’s suspicious in one of the
cops is like something’s off here.

So I’m going to film it.

Now, this 20 year old, it’s not by
accident that I’m talking about it.

This is the girl, this girl from the bar
is the girl who committed this murder.

Now, how it works in
Japan is the first division

of Japanese police,
investigates murders.

The second division
investigates financial crimes.

This case, this murder
case, was assigned to

the second division,
the financial crimes,

with the detective in
charge being the detective

who just happened
to be hanging out with

this random girl at the random
bar where the police hung out.

So that was very suspicious already.

It’s actually weird that they even got this
far before someone actually said something.

It makes me think that Hokkaido,
this all happened in Hokkaido.

Hokkaido being its own
individual island and being so small.

It makes me think it might actually
have its own sort of internal set of rules,

and it’s sort of like the police
protect the police and stuff.

So the second division,
which investigates financial

crime, was taking care of in
charge of this murder case.

Now, what is actually happening
here is, is the guy covering it up?

Well, he’s not really able to cover up.

They found the smashed phone, and it
has video of the girl being stripped and

being forced to
apologize, and it seems like

they threw it off to try
to destroy the phone.

So there’s too much
evidence to actually deny it.

But putting this detective who has a personal
relationship with the 20 year old girl

in charge of the case means
it’s now at risk at court.

So in court, it could all
be thrown out because

this guy essentially
has tainted the case.

This girl might get off because
she helped this cop get off.

And it’s very, very weird sort of situation
because every single step of the case,

every single step of this thing is like
you would go like, how is this not noticed?

How is this not become an issue right away?

How is that guy who
doesn’t investigate murders?

How has he even put in charge of a murder?

He does financial crime.

Why has this happened?

Why didn’t no one asked why this happened?

So I think there was a lot of
cops keeping their mouth shut.

But then there was at least
one who was like, uh, this is

already just him drinking
with his girls already a lot.

And then the murder comes out.

Now it’s all blown up.

This case is ongoing right now.

So I’m actually trying to keep track
of this to see where it actually ends up.

If the policeman actually
gets in trouble, if the

girl actually gets arrested
and gets in trouble,

if she actually gets punished for her crime
or if this whole case just gets thrown out

because she had an intimate
relationship with a police officer.

But then it also means
that that police officer

probably went out of his way
to get that case assigned to him.

So he’s clearly he should go to jail too.

I actually think he
should be punished almost

to the same degree as
the girl who murdered

because he’s trying to cover
up the murder and get her off it.

I keep using the phrase
get off and I gotta stop that.

[MUSIC]

Examines Japanese Folklore

[Music]

It’s Japanese folktales. I came to Japan. Of course
I want to learn how to speak Japanese. I want

to learn how to read. I want to learn how to be
a better person. I want to be able to interact.

When I was learning how to read it first, I wanted
some heated gamma books. I got really interested in

them. I really enjoyed them. This is how I started
learning some Japanese vocabulary that I didn’t know.

I thought folktales would give me a
little insight into the culture. I wish I

hadn’t done that because the insight
into the culture was absolutely terrifying.

Japanese folktales are just off the chain. They are
just insane. The kid’s folktales traditionally are.

If you get the old original versions are always
horrendous stuff. It’s always people getting torn in half.

I would say in the European tradition, the Western tradition that they are
generally trying to teach you something. So, Hansel and Gretel is like, “Oh,

be your parents. Don’t go into the forest. Be careful of strangers.” A
little red riding hood is like be cautious of strangers, that kind of stuff.

There is, despite the horror of
the story itself, a lesson you’re

trying to impart upon children.
Japanese fairy tales or folktales.

They go hard and I spent years trying to
figure out what the actual moral of a lot of

these was. It turns out the moral of most
of these seems to be revenge as in get some.

The first story I read was the crab in the
monkey. I’m going to tell you the bridged

version of this. I started doing research
on these, trying to learn more about these.

It turns out, you know, this is an oral tradition, so
there’s multiple versions of the story. The interesting

one on this is what gets used in the final revenge
plot, kind of changes depending on where you are.

I bet it’s actually just local
stuff gets used so it’s more

familiar to the people who
are actually hearing the story.

I’m going to tell you the story
and then we can do a little

bit of analysis. I got three
stories to tell you today.

If you find a rice ball, don’t eat
that rice ball, that’s not good for you.

The monkey comes along and
sees the crab with the rice ball.

Don’t eat the rice ball.
Give me the rice ball and I’ll

give you this persimency,
persimines are a fruit in Asia.

The crab’s like, that’s a bad deal. I
got this one in the hand right now.

I can eat it and I’ll be satisfied. I
don’t know if crab’s eat rice. Sure.

I’ll go with that crab’s eat rice. I
think everything needs rice. If you have

a rice ball, I don’t use any animal
that would actually refuse to eat it.

Okay. I got a knot tangent. This might be
the hardest part for me. Discipline-wise.

The monkey convinces the crab
says, I’m going to give you the seed.

You can grow the seed
into a persimine tree.

The persimine tree, therefore, will provide
you with persimines for a very long time.

It’s a much better deal. It does take
patience and the crab’s like, you know what?

The crab’s just, you know, inherently patient animals. I will do the
exchange. So gives him the rice ball, gives the monkey the rice ball,

takes the persimine seed, goes off and plants at the monkey’s like,
aha, I got a rice ball, eats it right away, you know, disappears.

X amount of years later, I assume, they dose
kind of just jump, cut, smash, cut to the

next part. The crab plants and grows the tree.
It produces a lot of fruit, but it’s crab.

The crabs don’t have famously long arms and
they’re not particularly good at climbing.

Don’t tangent. I can’t. I’ve seen videos
online of giant crabs climbing up walls.

Okay. That’s not what’s happening here.
This crab cannot climb. God, I’m going

to ruin this. It’s not like I was going
to make it good in the first place.

This crab cannot climb the tree to get the persimines and the monkey is in the tree and he’s
like, aha, he takes a persimine, he starts eating it and the crabs like, hey, dude, those

are my persimines. You can’t have them without my permission. You need to like, at least give
me the persimines. You shouldn’t be eating my persimines. There’s a lot of argument there.

The monkey, being a little bit of
prick, takes an unripe and persimines so

very hard and throws it down and
kills the crab. This is straight up murder.

Now, there’s a couple of verses in this story. One is
very graphic rate like cracks its carapace and then

the thing suffers for a long time and dies and then
others is just throws it down and just kills the crab.

Now, this crab had babies.
Again, they grew this tree for years.

I don’t know how old these babies
are but I don’t know how long crabs live.

Crabs one of those animals that just lives
forever until it dies, which I guess is

every animal. What I mean is there are like
animals that have sort of a finite lifespan.

There are people who think that like lobsters
are immortal, like something has to kill them

but basically they never get sick or anything.
I don’t know if crabs are the same as that.

I know a couple people listen
to this, it’s like double speed.

This might be very
confusing for you. I’m sorry.

The earliest version of this is when
the persimine hits the crab to kill it.

It actually gives birth in
that moment and then dies.

So it was carrying
babies inside or something

but all the versions
the crab has babies.

Then the baby crabs are
like let’s get some help and

they don’t really explain
what the help is for yet.

It’s almost like a question of
is there inherent knowledge that

the babies are going to go get
revenge or is this like a reveal?

It’s actually something I should
ask some Japanese people.

After learning every one of these stories,
when I read these stories initially,

I went to some Japanese co-workers
and I asked them questions about it.

They were always very befuddled
because they couldn’t answer

any of my questions because
they were like too nitpicky I guess.

So they go and they want to get to the
Japanese folktale version of the A team.

We’re like we’re going to
go get the best of the best.

So they get a chestnut, a B, and an Usu.

Now an Usu is usually a tree stump
that’s been hollowed out and what they do

is they put rice in there and they get
a big hammer and they pound the rice.

So you probably if you’ve watched any video
on Japan, seen the guys, the guy hits it

with a giant hammer and then the other guy
mixes it and then he hits it with a hammer.

And there’s a rhythm to it.
So they want to go fast without

actually hitting the guy’s
hands with a giant hammer.

So there is a rhythm kind of
thing you can see if you want.

That’s not important.
You got to know what it is.

It’s really, it looks like a giant heavy
pestle. Heavy is the important word.

And a cow poop. So as a person listening to this
story, I did have issue with the anthropomorphization

because before we were dealing with monkey and
crap, both animals, they could talk to each other.

I’m accepting that. Okay, now it seems like the
author, the creator of this folk tale, is just like,

well, what do I want in this story? I’ll anthropomorphize
those, but not necessarily everything else.

Got to take a little deep break.
See how many spins he does.

Three. Four. Come
on, buddy. Five. Six.

Holy is a lot. Oh, he on the
seventh one. He’s down. Okay. Good.

So I take a little Dave break
there. Everyone enjoys a little Dave.

So my problem was, yeah,
anthropomorphizing cow poop.

So the B makes sense. It’s in the animal
kingdom, just like the crab in the monkey.

I’ll accept that. The
chestnut, that’s pretty tough.

How do we have a single sentient chestnut? The Usoo is
something carved from a tree. It seems like if you’re

going to anthropomorphize trees, when it’s an Usoo,
the tree had to be cut down. It would be dead by now.

But we’re just going magic, but
the poop was a bit of a stretch.

I was like, why do
you have to do a poop?

And I’m like, oh, it’s Japan.
Japan loves putting poop in stories.

Japan is, I believe, the culture that
popularized the ice cream swirl poop.

And so now if you draw that, people think
it’s poop and not necessarily ice cream.

So this group gets
together. You have the crabs,

the chestnut, the B,
the Usoo, and the poop.

And they’ve teamed up and
they’re going to get that monkey.

They go to the monkey’s house.
The chestnut gets in the fire.

The B hangs out around the
water pail. The cow poop hides in the

dirt floor outside the building
and the Usoo gets on the roof.

Now I explanation to how anything’s
happened. The Usoo, since it’s

sentient somehow, could get on
the roof, we’re just accepting it.

You can see what they’ve set up
is a root Goldberg machine of death.

They’re creating a elaborate
way to torture and kill the monkey.

Which, again, this is dark.
Like when you actually

think about what’s happening,
this is very, very dark.

So the monkey comes
home and he goes to the fire

to warm himself after a
hard day of monkeying.

And then the chestnut pops and
the pop, you know, that little bit

of fire jumps out and hits him
in the arm and it burns his arm.

So he runs outside and he
puts his arm in the water bucket,

which is not sentient, which
actually I just thought of just now.

He puts his arm in the water bucket and
then the B stings him. And then he runs and

he slips in the dirt on the cow poop,
which essentially would kill the cow poop.

I don’t know. I don’t know. They
could have just had the crabs

bring the cow poop over. It didn’t
have to be sentient, but it was.

It’s a character in the story.
He slips on the cow poop and he

falls down and then the Usoo
falls down on him and kills him.

So this is like home
alone. This is like full on

construction of A to B to C
to D to death. Now home alone.

I don’t believe they
killed anybody, but that’s

because it was a kids
movie. This is a kid’s story.

The imagine the large trunk
of a tree falling and crushing

if not the whole monkey, at
least enough of him to kill him.

I don’t really like how
complicated the plan is.

I don’t think you should
do overly complicated plans.

If you’re going to do murder
and stuff, you’re going to do that.

It has to be simple and direct so
you know it’s going to be effective.

This relies on lock if you
hadn’t fallen in the right place.

If the burn hadn’t been strong
enough, the plan fell apart right there.

So the plan was overly complicated.

I think this is supposed to
be the entertaining aspect of

the story for the kids, the
complicated nature of the plan.

But then if you’re going to do that, make it way longer.
Maybe that’s some of the other stories that I didn’t

read is that it is way longer and that is actually the
entertainment is how stupidly complicated the plan is.

But every element of the
plan furthers torture the monkey

before his death. That’s
something to keep in mind.

So I, when I read this story
the first time, went to my

Japanese coworkers and I said
what is the moral of this story?

And most of them could not really
explain it because it’s not forgiveness.

It is clearly and exclusively, you killed my
parents, I’m going to kill you and I’m not just

going to kill you, I’m going to make it painful
and maybe even last as long as possible.

Now, someone else in Japanese society kind
of came to a similar realization as me.

There was a guy named Ryunosuke Akutakawa.

He rewrote the end of
the story so that the crab

children were all arrested
and given the death penalty.

So this guy thought ah,
there is a moral lacking in this

story where the baby crabs
get revenge for their parents.

They need to be punished by the law
because they’ve committed a murder.

So I’m going to give them all the
death penalty so no one survives.

I mean, they actually make
it sound in that way that the

poop and the Usu and the bee
are irrelevant in the chestnut.

Maybe the chestnut, because it’s in
the fire, like it would be dead, right?

The bee, one of bee’s things, you hit dies.

The Usu is the only thing that
technically could have survived

this whole process because
the poop, you slip in the poop.

Yeah, anthropomorphizing those
was a bad idea because you have to

hurt them or kill them to get
them to participate in this plan.

And somehow they agreed to it.

No Japanese person I met could ever
explain to me the actual moral of that.

It was like don’t do bad things.
Like the monkey did a bad thing.

And that’s why revenge
wasn’t acted upon him

so the monkey shouldn’t
have done bad things.

So don’t be bad.

But I was like, is not a
complicated murder also a bad thing?

And that’s where they ran into
problems because it is hard to

deny that the murder torture
saw a movie at the end of this story.

This story is an acceptable way to behave.

I do like that the guy
who rewrote the end

actually also gave
everyone the death penalty.

Like that’s not actually better.
There’s no reconciliation.

There’s no anyone becoming a
better person out of this story.

It’s just death and murder.

Which brings us to our second story,
which is the rabbit and the Tanuki.

The Tanuki is a raccoon
style animal in Japan.

You probably know that.
I don’t want to make any

assumptions about what
people do and don’t know.

But Tanuki’s are famous
in Japan as shapeshifters.

There’s the War of the Tanuki, which
is like humans are encroaching on.

It’s like a jibbly movie or something.

Humans are encroaching on their land.

There’s one scene where
they use their testicle sacks

as they stretch them out
and use them as parachutes.

Other cultures are wonderful
and exciting to learn about.

I did enjoy that. It was very funny. It was
very funny to me because it was so weird.

This is apparently just
part of the Tanuki mythology.

Anyways, let’s get into it.

There was a Tanuki
stealing food from a farmer.

Pretty normal thing for an animal to do.

The farmer caught him and
tied him to a tree, the Tanuki.

He says, “I’m going to come
back later and I’m going to kill you.

” The Tanuki starts to
cry, so we all feel bad.

The farmer’s wife comes
back and she feels bad.

And the Tanuki apologizes
and says, “I won’t do it again.

I’m not going to
steal anymore foods.

” So the old lady in her
kindness unties the Tanuki.

So what does the Tanuki do?

If you haven’t already gotten sort of
the theme of what’s been going on so far,

the Tanuki then murders the
old lady and shapeshifts into her.

So when people come
back, they’re going to see

the old lady, but it’s
actually the Tanuki.

The Tanuki takes the
old lady and brings her

into the house so no
one can see the body.

He then cuts her up and prepares her in
a meal for the farmer when he comes back.

I’m just going to let
that one sit for a bit.

Everyone makes a big deal
about the South Park episode

where he feeds the kid his
own parents or something.

This way, way back.

Hundreds of years ago, the Japanese were
like, “Yep, this is what’s going to happen.

We’re going to have a man
do unknown cannibalism

as part of our folk tale
to teach kids morals.

” Again, it’s just a
revenge story, bud.

So the farmer comes back
and he sits down and eats

dinner and they don’t say
whether he enjoys it or not,

but I’m going to go ahead
and assume he thinks this

is a great dinner because
that just makes it worse.

Then the Tanuki sort of does
the big reveal and says, “Haha,

you’ve just eaten your own wife
and then books it out of there.

” Man, yeah, I don’t know
where to go from there.

There was forced
cannibalism as part of this

story if you really
stop down thinking it.

The farmer is understandably upset.

His friend, the rabbit comes by and
goes, “Hey buddy, what happened?

” He goes, “Well,
I just ate my wife.

” The rabbit vows revenge
on the farmer’s behalf.

There’s a few versions of this story,
but I’ll share the common element.

So I’m only going to use
the common elements

of this story when I
am telling it to you now.

Like the previous story, the
different versions, really all

they do is add more elements
of torture to lengthen the story.

So I’m going to give you the base version and
understand that every other version you could

hear has more aspects or elements of torture
in it before the actual death at the end.

The rabbit befriends the Tanuki.

Then, while they’re one
day while they’re out in the

forest, the rabbit drops a
beehive on the Tanuki’s head.

And then the Tanuki, of course,
gets stings all over his head.

So the rabbit treats the stings
with pepper to make it hurt more.

The Tanuki is carrying kindling,
so this must be on another day.

He’s carrying kindling on the
way back, and they’re walking by.

This story is actually called kachi
kachi yama, which is kachi kachi mountain.

And he’s carrying kindling, and he’s
walking along, and the rabbit’s behind

me and lights the kindling on fire,
setting the Tanuki on fire from behind.

And as soon as he’s like,
“Hey, do you hear that sound?

” Sounds like kachi kachi
kachi kachi is the sound of fire.

And then the rabbit looks
and goes, “Yes, that is

because we are walking
close to kachi kachi yama.

Kachi kachi yama is kachi
kachi kachi mountain, I guess.

” And that’s why you —
famously, you can hear the kachi

kachi sound of fire when
you are close to this mountain.

Of course, it burns his back. It burns
the Tanuki’s back, but it doesn’t kill him.

But that’s when the Tanuki realizes
the rabbit isn’t really his friend.

So then, he challenges
the rabbit to a contest.

I don’t really get this part.

He says, “Let’s race across the lake,
so we’re going to build our own boats.

We’re going to
race across the lake.

” The rabbit carves a boat
out of a tree trunk, so would.

The Tanuki makes his boat out of mud.

I think you can see a
flaw in the Tanuki’s plan.

As they start going across the lake,
the Tanuki’s boat starts to dissolve.

He starts to drown, and the rabbit
hits him on the head with an ore.

This is the weird part of this revenge,
because the revenge part of this —

if you had just left the Tanuki to his
own devices, he would have killed himself.

Like, he wouldn’t — you wouldn’t
actually have to commit murder.

Like, some of the other attempts could
have been considered murder attempts.

This one, he challenged you to a race.

He built an inferior boat.

That inferior boat started to sink.

He went down with it.

He couldn’t swim very well.

You could just let him drown, and
then claim a certain amount of innocence.

But, the rabbit takes it
always that step further.

Like, this is it, the
protagonist, or the hero.

These stories always
takes it that step further

to make sure that they
actually kill the thing.

So the killing blow is the — or
hitting the Tanuki in the head.

Then the rabbit goes back
to the farmer and tells the

tale of his revenge, and I
guess everyone satisfied.

And this is not an eye for an eye.

So, like, you killed my
wife, I’m going to kill you.

That would be an eye for an eye, I think.

This is always —
there’s another element of

I’m going to torture
you before I murder you.

So, it’s an eye for an eye, plus more.

It’s almost like your enemies must suffer.

And then I asked some
Japanese people about this story,

and their version of the
moral was don’t do bad things.

And then when you come
back to them and say,

“Well, is not torturing
someone also a bad thing.

” They’re like, “But that’s
as a result of your actions.

” So, if you hadn’t
committed those actions, you

wouldn’t have been
tortured in the second place.

So, that’s one of the weird
issues of these stories.

We have one more story.

Now, this one is not
about torture and murder.

Those two shared a theme.

And I read them very
close to each other, and

when I asked my Japanese
friends about them,

I never got a satisfactory
moral to this story.

Essentially, they would just
say, “Don’t do bad things.

” But I’m like, “But the
result of you doing a bad

thing was a very complicated,
awful, evil revenge.

” The last story I’m going to do,
though, is called the Boy and the Turtle.

And it’s just — it’s like someone did some
— found some LSD way, way back in the day.

So, there’s a little boy on the beach.

And he’s walking around
and he sees some other boys.

And they’re bullying a turtle.

I don’t know what that means.

I think I guess that just means they’re
playing with a turtle in an unkind way.

Maybe hitting it or
turning it out on the back.

Doing bad things to a turtle.

And I think at that point,
everyone is on the turtle’s sides.

Like, “Don’t do
bad things to turtles.

” Turtles are cool.

This is why the straw
industry suffered so

much when the straw
went up that turtle’s nose,

because when you heard a
turtle, the world unites against you.

So, you know, I don’t use straws.

I legit don’t use straws anymore.

I will only use paper straws.

And it’s because of that turtle.

Because turtles don’t hurt anybody.

Don’t hurt turtles.

Okay.

So, he chases the boys off.

He says, “Don’t
bully the turtle.

” I don’t know if he’s
a scary person, but

anyway, he gets the
kids to leave them alone.

And then she goes, “Thank you.

Come with me under
the sea to a magical world.

” That’s a great invitation.

It’s almost like Disney should make a
song that sounds very similar to that.

So, they go.

So, the boy in the turtle
go together under the sea

and they go down to this
like undersea castle world.

Somehow the boy can breathe,
not asking any questions.

It’s magic.

This is magic.

The undersea kingdom is magic.

So, I’m perfectly skeptical
of what’s going on here.

The boy attends a
three-day party and he eats

food and he does like
what Japanese people do.

They talk to fish.

He eats.

The thing is, if his Japanese
kid was probably eating fish

and talking to fish, that’s
got to be very uncomfortable.

It’s not exactly the
cannibalism from the previous

story, but there is like
an uncomfortable element

if you’re eating like a similar species
while having a conversation with someone.

But he’s having a good time.

He’s having a party or maybe
they’re just eating a lot of seaweed.

It’s been three days.

It’s time to go.

You can only party for so long.

So, the queen says come here.

I want to thank you for
helping our turtle friend.

Here’s a box.

Don’t open the fucking box.

Already that’s a bit weird.

It’s weird as a present.

Like, don’t open the box.

Here’s a box.

Don’t open the box.

That’s it.

Now, get out.

There’s no explanation as to
why you should open the box.

That is to me the biggest
problem with the story so far.

So the weird present is given to
the boy without any explanation.

It’s just the only thing
that said is here’s a box.

Don’t open the box.

I’m assuming it’s a very nice box.

This is a gift from the queen.

He goes back to the beach
and he’s like, I think it’s different.

This is feel different.

The beach looks different.

Maybe some of the buildings in
the background kind of changed.

That’s weird.

And he figures out
that time in the undersea

kingdom and time in
the world he comes from.

Past differently.

It’s almost like
interstellar black hole kind

of like time, fractioning
gravity situation.

I’m not going to explain it.

We’ll just, again, it’s magic.

But he understands that now
three days under the water in

the underwater party kingdom
equals 300 years in the world.

Which means everyone he
knows, his family, his friends,

everyone he’s ever, you
know, everyone’s ever existed.

They’re all dead now.

Like 200 years ago at least.

They’re dead.

And so he has no home.

He has no life.

He has no sort of world to support him.

Because again, this is not
an adult who made this choice.

This is a child.

And that’s another element that
I think gets forgotten very quickly.

This is a child whose entire support system
in the world is now gone 200 years ago.

He sits down on the
beach and starts to cry.

And then he decides to
do the only logical thing.

Maybe there’s something
in the box that can help me

in this dire situation
that I have been put into.

So he opens the box.

And when he opens the box, he
immediately ages 300 years and dies.

What is going on?

So the box was somehow
holding the difference

in time between the
real world and the boy.

So once the box was open,
that whatever magic was released.

And so his aging, it must have been
incredibly painful for a few seconds.

Like he aged 300 years,
and they don’t give a

time frame, but I’m
going to say very quickly.

But that aging process
must have been incredibly

painful and then just
in a sudden death.

The only thing I can
come up with is you have

a short-term reward,
but at a massive cost.

But the moral of the story actually
seems to be don’t help people.

Because if he hadn’t helped the turtle and
left the boy to just bully the turtle more,

he wouldn’t have gone
under seas, he wouldn’t

have spent those three
days ergo 300 years.

Which means his family
wouldn’t have died and

he would have been
able to live a normal life.

He would have, he lost
his life for helping this turtle.

And I cannot for the life of
me figure out any aspect of this,

of having any sort of moral
that makes any sort of sense.

And then the other question
that I have more than anything

else is why didn’t the queen
give him any sort of explanation?

If she had said, “Hey, look,
time passes differently here.

” So if you go back home and
you open this box, you’re going to

age in the difference the 300
years and you’re going to die.

So don’t open the box.

Then he would know
what was going to happen.

She could have explained that to him.

But then he would have had the question
of, “Well, why did you keep me here for

so long knowing that everything in my
world was going to change and disappear?

And all my family was going to
die, and I’m not going to have a life.”

And then it would have made more sense for
him to just stay in the underwater kingdom.

Like there’s no, all the questions lead
to you helped a turtle and lost everything.

The queen maliciously?

Because I don’t think
there was any ignorance.

She knew, she knew to
say, “Don’t open that box.

” So she knew what was going
to happen if you opened that box.

She didn’t give him any
way to go back to the

real world and actually
have some sort of life.

She just dumped him
and left him on his own.

So is that punishment for
coming to the undersea kingdom?

Was that punishment for helping the turtle?

Was this whole thing
some kind of weird strategy?

But that seems like mental torture
for the kid as he sits there and realizes.

300 years ago, everything
I know is no longer existed.

I don’t have anything
in this world anymore.

I have no life.

My world has ended.

I went and asked some
Japanese people what this means.

Like what is this story about?

And they said, “Well,
it teaches you nothing.

It’s just a fanciful story.

” And it’s like it’s a
fanciful story with one

of the most horrendous
endings to his story.

For someone who has tried to
be a good person, the whole time.

Doing good things
might have short-term

benefits but lead to
the loss in the long-term.

I spent months and months and months trying
to figure out some kind of lesson or story

or moral or point to this
boy in the turtle story.

And I’ve never been able to do it.

If you have an idea, please
post it in the comments.

Please send me a message.

ChunkmyVHS.gmail.com or something.

Because I got nothing.

I’ve asked Japanese
people, “They got nothing.

” They’re just like, “Oh,
it’s just like a fun, weird story.

” I’m like, “No, it’s not.

It’s horrible.

” And it makes me question everything
I understand about Japanese culture.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Examines the Open Office Concept

Blind Tiktoking

(upbeat music)

Okay, so I want to tell a little
story and then get into the main topic.

The way I tell stories
tend to take a lot of time,

so this actually, who knows
how long this is gonna be.

I am warning you now.

There is some off-putting elements.

I have over the last few weeks
when I’m trying to do podcasts,

being complaining about the fact that I
cannot read my right eye, it’s gone fuzzy.

So about three weeks
ago, I was getting headaches

sort of in the back of my
head and behind my eyes.

I looked it up online, not a good place
to seek out your medical information.

And it said these were cluster
headaches and this was kind of migraine.

But I actually had a similar pain before.

It’s when I got punched in
the face on the other side

and I felt a similar kind of pain and
it’s ’cause my eye was actually swollen.

So I thought, you know what?

I’m gonna go to the
eye doctor just to check

’cause just regular aspirin
isn’t taking care of this.

I go to the eye doctor and he starts giving
me stuff and it’s all working out fine.

And I say, so what’s wrong with my eye?

And he goes, “Well, this is the
same as what you had last time.

” And I go, “Well, last time I got
belted in the head “by a giant angry man.

“This time I didn’t do anything.

“Like, nothing happened
to my face or a head.

“No impact of any sort.

” So what caused it?

He’s like, “Oh, well, this is just
swelling “and swelling could be caused.

” Cause of anything.

And he kind of did like
a little shrug most drip.

He kind of did a little shrug gesture,
like, you know, life happens sometimes

and sometimes that swells up.

So I was like, “You know,
give me some details.

” He’s like, “Well, it could
be an injury, an infection,

“stress, any of number
of things could cause this.

” So if you go online, he
literally looks at me and says,

“If you go online,
you’ll see a long list.

” And I was like, “Okay.

” So basically, he’s
saying, “You don’t know.

” This is the doctor’s way of
saying, “I don’t know what caused this,

“but at least we
can start treating it.

” He gives me some medicine and
the pain in my eyes starts to go in.

I start to feel pain in my cheek.

And now that is where
one of your sinuses is.

And he said infection.

I thought, “Oh, maybe
because of my allergies and stuff,

“every now and then,
I get a sinus infection.

” “Every now and then,
I get a sinus infection.

” Every now and then,
I get a sinus infection.

Every now and then,
I get a sinus infection.

That’s happened a couple times in my life.

So I go to the nose doctor.

He’s your tube doctor.

He goes to your nose, mouth,
and ear, something like that.

So I go to him and I go, “I
think I have a sinus infection.

” He doesn’t even
really check much.

He just goes, “Okay, it
gives me a huge thing of pills.

” There’s one morning.

I have to take the pills for my
eye and the pills for my nose.

So there’s one day.

I remember it was a
Wednesday for some reason.

I had to take the variety of pills for my
eye and the variety of pills for my nose.

And in total for
breakfast, I had like 15 pills

with me, which made
me feel incredibly old.

Okay, whatever.

Sinus infection goes away
because that starts to feel better.

And then I realize, like, you
know, I’m not seeing as well.

I have always worn glasses, so
my eyes have always been poor,

but I think something’s
right, I go back and he’s like,

“Oh, the back of
your eye is still swollen.

” So he’s giving me
these steroid eyedrops.

He’s like, “Well, the steroid
eyedrops aren’t gonna get back there.

” So what we’re gonna
do is give you an injection.

And I was like, “Huh,
an injection from my eye.

” Well, I guess, you know, powerful
medicine is often injected into your body.

So that’s not a thing.

And then I’m like, “Wait, he
means an injection in my eye.

” So this is like
horror movie stuff.

And I am just taking my
deep breath and I’m going,

“Okay, yep, yep, let’s do that.

” Okay?

He’s like, “Right now.

” So I don’t know if this
was a technique or just,

this is how fast he moves, ’cause
this is a clinic they just do eyeballs.

It’s all service, like,
you wanna get glasses,

contacts, eye infection,
anything, this happened.

Pink eye, whatever,
they take care of it there.

So they have everything,
all the facilities, one clinic.

And so they have me
sit outside for a minute

and then like two minutes
later, they have me go in

and they have the chair
that you light on your back.

And I am, that two minutes was
enough to get me like, worked up.

I was like, “Okay, yeah, okay,
I’m gonna get stabbed in the eye.

” I did this in Dead
Space, I believe, was the

video game where you had
to aim it at your own eye

and then push the button, didn’t hurt then.

I’m not gonna hurt now, but I
mean, this is like horror movie stuff.

They line me down.

I’m gonna go through
the whole process for you.

So they line me down
and then Igor comes in.

Igor is not the guy
putting it in my eye, I hope.

Because the first thing Igor
does is he walks in the room.

So I’m lying down, flat on my back.

Already kind of like a vulnerable position.

He bumps into a couple of things.

And my first
thought, “Oh, fuck no.

” Fuck no, this guy is not
going to put a needle in my eye.

He can’t even walk straight.

Then he’s the guy who’s gonna put a couple
of drops in, probably to dilate my pupil,

and then a couple other drops
in, which is gonna be anesthetic.

So he puts a couple drops
in, boop, boop, he misses.

It goes on my cheek and I’m like, “Oh,
fuck, he’s not putting a needle in my eye.

” This guy, if this guy
gets the needle, if this guy

doesn’t put the needle in
my, I’m gonna just get a leaf.

I can’t, I can’t.

I have no confidence.

He takes like three shots to get
the first set of drops in my eye.

And I’m like, “Isn’t this all you do?”

Like, as the nurse in an eye clinic,

isn’t this literally one
of the only things you do

is drop, put drops into
people’s eyes and you’ve missed.

And then he gets the other one.

He goes, “This isn’t
anesthetic in Japanese.

” And then he puts those
drops in, also misses a couple.

And I’m like, “At least
he’s being generous.

” He’s kind of like nay palming my eye
area, knowing that someone will get in.

So he just floods that.

And I’m just like, “Oh no, oh no.

If someone else doesn’t come in real
soon, I’m gonna panic, I’m gonna leave.

” And this is, you know, you can
feel yourself working yourself up.

That’s the problem.

So the doctor then walks in and I’m like,

okay, doctor then
immediately starts filling

with a machine, but
not in a confident way.

Like, when I work with OBS, which I’ve
worked with a lot or I try to put graphics up

or something, like you
can tell when I am just

setting stuff up and when
something’s not going right

and I’ve kind of messed
it up and I’m trying to fix it.

And then he’s asking Igor for helping.

What does Igor do?

He bumps into some more stuff
’cause the dude is clumsy as hell.

And I’m like, this is just the
wrong guy for an eye clinic.

Eyes are incredibly sensitive.

This is not the kind of
thing you want happening

right before someone
stabs you in the literal eye.

Igor goes out after they fix this thing.

And then the doctor
has very soothing voice.

He’s actually a very good doctor.

They put in those clamps
that keep your eyes open

and a hugely bright
light right in your eyes.

You can’t see anything.

And it’s like, I keep mentioning
the movie but then every time

I tell this story and then I
forget the name of the movie.

So they clamp your eyes
open and you can’t see anything.

No, the doctor says, look up.

I’m lying on my back and I
look straight towards the ceiling,

which was at that point
straight forward out of my face.

And the doctor goes, no, look up.

And I’m like, well, this
is not the time to argue

but I’ve actually had this
argument with a coworker.

Up is a function of gravity.

So down is towards the
center of the earth and up is out.

When you’re in space, there is
no up because things do not fall

because you fall down
therefore you rise up.

So if you’re lying on your back,
up is still away from the ground.

That is, people don’t think of it that way
but up is actually a function of gravity.

If there’s no gravity, there is no up
because if up is towards the top of my head

then if I lie down,
I just start sliding

towards my feet because
I would be falling down.

So I look up straight at the ceiling,
straight into that light, so I’m blind now.

And then he goes, no, no, up.

And he taps the top of
my head and I realize he’s,

oh, you don’t mean up.

You mean towards up my eye.

I’m trying to think of the
phrase he could have used

to make that happen
more efficiently because of

course I think he’s stupid
but he thinks I’m stupid.

It’s one of those situations.

So look up towards the top of your head.

That maybe would work.

So I look up and then, because of
the anesthetic, I don’t even feel it.

I feel something kind of touch
my eye and that actually would

have been the insert of the
needle and he does it real fast.

I mean, this is, again,
Kudos to the doctor.

He’s very good, he’s very
fast, he’s very efficient

and this took no time
and all he would do.

He said, sorry, this might hurt.

They always say that in Japanese
before they give you a needle.

Is this kind of standard thing?

I actually think it makes it worse.

They should just be like, boop.

And then he squeezed
it in, it was a steroid,

pulls it out, didn’t
even notice really.

I felt something touch my eye.

I don’t know if that was
it going in or coming out.

And then he goes, that’s
it, he takes the clamps

off and then I’m sort
of blank a few times.

If I’m being honest, physically,
I basically felt nothing.

But the adrenaline and the
terror I felt was untouchable.

So I go out into the waiting room
’cause I have to pay for this experience

and I start sending my
friend’s messages on my phone

and I’m like, I just got my eye
stabbed, I just got a needle in my eye.

This is like a nightmare fuel.

And I realized my hands are shaking.

And it’s because I’m coming down from the
adrenaline for like five minutes straight.

I’m just sitting the
going, it was terrifying.

That was last week.

I’m now I’ve gone back again.

He’s giving me some oral steroids.

It is slowly getting better.

But basically when I do
these podcasts and stuff,

I have notes and
basically I try to hide the

notes under the
camera so I’ll stick it up.

It’s actually now right in front of
my face, but it’s below the camera.

Now if I hold it there,
I’m incapable of reading it.

And my writing is incredibly
messy, so I can’t read the writing.

That’s the problem.

So I did an engineer’s Japan this morning.

I have my notes up and I’m gonna
have to look at it a little closer today.

That is gonna be just a problem for the
next little while until I can see again.

The thing is, again,
I’ve worn glasses since

I was 16, so my eyes
are garbage anyways.

At this point, if they
wanna put me up for

experimental, let’s replace
your eyes with robots.

I’m on board.

I will absolutely replace my
eye with a robot at this point.

I’ll clockwork orange, that’s the movie.

At the end of clockwork
orange, they reprogram the guy

and they block his eyes open like that
and make him watch propaganda videos.

That’s stuck, that image stuck with
me, even though I’ve saw that movie

when I was like five, 10
years old or something.

Should not have been watching that movie.

You just became Isaac from Dead Space.

(laughs)

That was one of my first mentions.

I did the thing in real life
that happened in Dead Space.

That is actually was my first thought,

like, oh my God, I’m
doing the Dead Space level.

But in Dead Space, I think
if I remember correctly,

you’re aiming it and then you have
to push it down with the two joysticks.

It’s like a dual joystick thing.

But I think the idea,
the concept is that you’re

doing it to yourself, if
I remember correctly,

and then you have to
press a button to stab

it in and if you miss,
you failed that level.

But that’s the only thing I
remember from that game.

So I was super impactful.

Like, if I’m being really
honest, that’s a bit, I remember.

I hated that in Dead Space.
I think you were
supposed to hate it in

Dead Space, which
actually means it was good.

If we’re being honest, if it
was supposed to be gross

and off-putting and terrible and
you felt that way, it achieved its goal.

Horror movies, if you
walk out of the horror movie

and feel, ah, that’s
actually, they’ve done a

good job, which is, you
know, counterintuitive.

‘Cause if you walk out like I had
a great time, that was really fun.

That’s not, that’s not a good horror movie.

Just letting everyone know that my
eyes all messed up, I can’t really see.

If now, though, if I mess
up something in a video

game, I can actually
claim it ’cause I can’t see.

As you go, ’cause I’m,
ah, I didn’t see that side

of the screen ’cause you know
nothing on this side works anymore.

I’m going to play the intro song again.

So I’ve done a lot of
scary things in my life.

Like, again, I fight people for fun.

I’ve ridden motorcycles and had crashes.

I crashed a car.

I’ve put myself in dangerous situations.

I got in trouble with the Korean
mafia a little bit when I was in Korea.

All scary.

Nothing compares to the mental
terror you put yourself through

when someone’s like, I’m going
to stick a needle in your eye now.

Let’s get to it.

That’s, that’s actually
what it came down to.

It wasn’t a terrible,
dangerous, awful thing,

but the mental thing
you do to yourself.

So let me play the intro song again, and
then I can edit this podcast much better.

(upbeat music)

♪ After the mind of the academy ♪

♪ Shocked my pictures ♪

♪ Where the bastards of philosophy ♪

♪ Drinking the clutch ♪

♪ Rings of upper skills ♪

♪ Like a soccer punch ♪

♪ Won’t come to see in my feet ♪

♪ Yeah, yeah, oh see in my feet ♪

♪ Yeah, oh see in my feet ♪

♪ Yeah, yeah, oh see in my feet ♪

I’m very excited to have my own theme song.

Having your own theme
song changes the feeling

of your podcast, if you go through
the trouble of actually making a podcast.

We’re talking about TikTok.

So the TikTok band in America is kind of
gone through, it’s actually not finished.

Did you commission it?

Ah yes, there’s a whole other story.

DX Man, you’re just going to
get all the stories out of me.

I had a presentation to do at work,

and it was a very boring
presentation, and my boss was like,

you have to make this
get people excited about

this thing that we’re
doing, and it’s not exciting.

And he’s like, get people excited.

I’m like, that’s not gonna happen.

There’s nothing I can do to get excited.

So I was like, well, what can I do?

And I go to chat GPT, and I put
in all the criteria for a rap song.

So I put in the criteria for
this thing we’re introducing.

It’s just a course, and
then gave it criteria

for the different
elements of a rap song.

And a produced one
I put in digital editing,

now went online to try to find someone
who would do a beat and sing it for me.

You can find lots of people
who do beats and lots of

people who do songs,
that will do like rap for you.

But they won’t do both.

You can find five real,
find people who do beats.

On five real, find people who
will do a track, a rap for you.

But they won’t do both.

So I ended up going to a different site.

I think it was Upwork, and I found
a guy’s name who will do both.

And so he’s from Zimbabwe, his name
Stones Mojo, and I sent him a message.

I was like, I want a song
for this presentation.

I made a music video for it.

He will do both parts.

So I was really excited.

I got him to do the song.

I put the song.

I cut together a little video.

And it was all like from
free clips from websites,

like copyright free stuff.

And if you search in like urban
dance, you get a very specific look.

So I put all those together,
and I cut in some little joke bits,

and then I played it, and
people at the company loved it.

I mean, that’s what it came down to.

And so then I was like a
couple months later, I was like,

I’ve had this theme song for
this podcast for a long time

that doesn’t fit the tone
of the podcast, because it

was like heavy, which I
like a lot of heavy music.

But when I’m sitting here
talking, it’s actually quite relaxed.

So that quite relaxed atmosphere
didn’t come through in the music.

So I was like, you know what?

Dude, I’ll commission another song.

I gave him the lyrics, so my friend
wrote, “Enter the Mind of the Academy,”

’cause I have the chunk of beef
chest Academy of martial arts t-shirts.

I wrote, “Drinking at lunch brings
verbal skills “like a sucker punch.

” And then he said,
“Welcome to Seamick Bee.

” And that was it.

And I gave him like a feeling,
like an old diggable planet song.

And in like two weeks later,
suddenly this song pops up

and I got this new theme
song for my podcast.

It’s great lyrics.

Yeah, I mean, again, it
was sort of a community

effort, which actually
makes it better as well.

‘Cause my friend wrote a line.

We only, again, a
theme song can only be

like 30 seconds long
before it gets annoying.

So yeah, I listened to it one more time.

So you can actually hear what he says.

It’s, again, he’s from
Zimbabwe, so he’s English.

He says, “I love, he doesn’t
say Seamick Bee like I do.

” He says, “See
y’all, walk beep.

” (upbeat music)

“Enter the Mind of the Academy.

” “Shuck my beef chest
where the best is a philosophy.

” ♪ Drinking the lunch brings
up a skills like a soccer punch ♪

♪ Won’t come to see I’m my beat ♪

♪ Yeah, yeah, oh, see I’m my beat ♪

♪ Yeah, yeah, oh, oh ♪

So yeah, enter the Mind of the
Academy where the best is a philosophy.

Yeah, no, I really like that.

I really like that he doesn’t
sound like I would sound

if I sang it, which, in my
opinion, makes it better.

But we’re talking about TikTok today.

I like TikTok.

I’m an old dude, but I like TikTok.

I use it a lot.

I take clips from the
podcast and put on there.

They don’t get any traction.

That’s fine.

I don’t care.

I’m there to have a good time.

And if one person comes from TikTok
and watches some more stuff, that’s great.

For me, the most
interesting elements of this

is what is actually the
issue they’re talking about.

‘Cause when you’re
talking about politicians,

the things they’re saying are
never the actual issue at hand.

So what is the actual issue at hand?

I’ve done a couple of episodes of
Seamig B now on Senate hearings

and the Senate hearing is
never what they’re talking about.

Like they say, the last one was
about child safety and social media.

And almost every conversation they had

with the CEOs of these
really big tech companies

had very little to
do with child safety.

They kind of grilled
Zuckerberg on it in Facebook.

When they got to the president of TikTok,

all they really talked about is whether
or not he was Chinese or from China.

That’s now a very
famous clip on the internet

because they ask him in about three
or four different ways are you Chinese?

And he’s like, no, I’m from Singapore.

No, I’m from Singapore.

I did military service for
two years in Singapore.

I am not Chinese.

If China invaded Singapore, I
would get called up to fight China.

But you can see what is him having
to do, having his connection to China.

How does that help or detract from
child safety and the usage of TikTok?

It doesn’t actually mean anything.

So this is one of the more
interesting issues for me

is what they’re talking about
now is not the actual issue at hand.

And to me, when I talk about
America and when I think about America,

the fundamental beliefs of
America is a capitalist system.

I’m from Canadian.

I’m actually from a socialist republic,

which means social
services are inherently a

part of the political
system where I come from.

I live in Japan, which
is not a republic as such.

Japan is very socialist.

It must be a socialist
democracy, regardless.

Social welfare is a big issue in Japan.

They want social services.

They want to take care of people.

When I got my needle in my
eye, the entire thing, so we’re

talking about drugs,
examination, and needle in the eye.

So all those procedures and
stuff, I paid 1,600 yen, which

is about $15, probably less
now with the exchange rate.

So we’re talking about going to a doctor,
like a visit, some actual treatments,

all in the span of an hour,
and I’m paying less than $20.

And that’s socialized health care.

In America, they talk about
capitalism, capitalism, capitalism.

And I’m always interested
in the true reality

of what happens in America is
not really capitalism as they claim.

So what they’re talking about with TikTok
is that this company is a national threat

because the Chinese are collecting
data, or they can collect data.

Now, my issue with that version of the
statement is, every app we use collects data.

Now, you could specify which
kind, but at the end of the day,

Google collects a ton of data
that you don’t want them to collect.

Facebook collects a lot of information
that you don’t want them to collect.

YouTube collects a lot of information
that you don’t want them to collect.

It is ridiculous, or there’s the other side
that this bill, if it comes into effect,

because they don’t
mention TikTok in the bill.

TikTok is the reason
they’re putting it

forward, but they don’t
mention TikTok by name.

It just says apps.

So you have two possibilities.

One, they ban TikTok, and they
just stick to what they’re saying.

Or now they have the ability to ban
and control social media in America.

So if YouTube steps out of line,
you’re collecting too much data.

That’s the reason we use.

Now we can shut down
YouTube or ban YouTube.

Now we can ban Facebook.

Now we can do whatever we
want to show through media sites.

The most interesting
prospect here is that with

Biden in control right now,
if this law goes through,

he could shut down
Donald Trump’s truth social,

because it’s an adversary
to the current government.

And that’s one of the
lines they put in there.

They want it to be an adversary
to the government collecting data.

So since Donald Trump is
collecting data, because all apps do,

and he’s an adversary to the
American government in its current state,

Biden would then be
free to ban true social.

I don’t think they’ve thought that through,

but that is actually one of
the implications of this bill.

And it goes back to sort of
the Patriot Act, where these like,

if we think you’re a terrorist,
we can do whatever we want,

and now we’re just going to classify
anyone we want to attack as a terrorist.

That’s the kind of logic
that might be happening here.

We’ll use TikTok as the example.

That’s the terrorist that we’re attacking.

But then we can classify
other things or other

people as terrorists,
so then we can do that.

So now we can classify
other apps as adversarial

so that we can attack
them in any way we want.

They can make a blanket
ban on all companies

that are collecting data
and they can level that.

They could do this.

They can say companies
are not allowed to collect data.

This would trash Google,
it would trash Facebook.

But they can say, look, let’s make it fair.

Let’s make it a level playing field.

You’re just not allowed
to collect data anymore,

or we’re going to specify
what data you can collect.

And the thing is, one of the
things in the Senate hearings

with the president of TikTok
was he was like, it’s all voluntary.

Like you click and agree before you sign
up to TikTok that we can collect this data.

So why are you angry
about the data you’ve

agreed to let us collect
us collecting that?

They’re angry about it going back to China

because they’re not
really sure what they

can do with it is I
think actually the issue.

So Trump came out recently.

This is interesting as he says, he
wants to stop the ban on TikTok.

He says, I hate, I think
it’s because he hates China

more than anything else at
the moment, but he doesn’t

want them to ban TikTok
because Facebook would then grow.

And Facebook helped
rig the previous election.

The data doesn’t even go to China.

The database is in America.

That, I don’t know if that’s true.

I actually have a clip I need
to find and I want to insert.

And it’s propaganda on TikTok’s best.

They created a script and it has two
creators reading the exact same script.

It’s very natural.

I’ll be able to find that because I know
I’m shared it with my friends in Discord.

So I’ll actually throw
that up on the screen.

It’s this is not a one-sided thing.

Like there’s no good guy here.

TikTok is not the good guy.

The US government is not the good guy.

TikTok’s an abusive
app as is every other app.

I mean, no joke.

They all are exactly the same.

But if you understand that,
you know how to take care

of yourself or teach your kids
how to take care of themselves

and stuff like that.

But if you’re going to put limits on
one, you gotta put limits on them all.

That’s just, I think, the
easiest way to do things.

‘Cause again, it should
just be fair competition.

This was an interesting TikTok that came
out because they’re trying to defend TikTok.

These are TikTok creators.

And you would think because
of the very natural feeling

they present that this is just off the
top of the head, this is off the dome.

But how quickly this becomes
a script is really interesting.

You recognize that they can
take TikTok and change that.

They can pretty much
call any type of Chinese.

Because it’s parent company.

Right by it isn’t it’s in a Chinese code.

No, they are incorporated in the cake.

TikTok is incorporated
in the sake of the course.

They’re seeing a goal,
they’re seeing a goal.

We look at the ownership of the company.

16, we’re looking at the
ownership of the investors.

That’s what you’re saying is
over by international investors.

The vast majority of the majority
of the American are allied nations.

Again, the vast majority of the
company is owned by the employee.

Again, the vast majority
of which are not in Chinese.

And the other Chinese is
owned by the American user.

Only one of which is in Chinese.

Now, TikTok does have a
headquarter stored in Austin, Texas.

Now, but not only does it have a
headquarter to come in mainland China.

But not only does it have
a headquarter company.

TikTok has a headquarter ability.

Actually, it was the daily show
that used to do this or John Oliver.

And they would take local news stations,

would usually be given a script of
something to say to talk about an issue.

And this is not an uncommon strategy.

This is propaganda.

So they want to explain to TikTok users.

This is obviously from TikTok.

This is a script they’ve written.

I love that they dropped an F bomb in there
to make it seem more authentic and natural.

Makes you wonder.

Oh, no, no, it’s not wonder.

TikTok actually at like 100% pays
these creators their popular creators.

They gave them a script.

They say, we’ll give you this much money.

Read the script to make
it as natural as possible.

Those guys did a great job.

They gave you the basic facts.

They were like, oh, yeah,
the servers are in Austin.

It’s owned by this many people.

It’s incorporated in the Cayman Islands.

They’re done an incredible
amount of research.

Like, if you think about
what I’m talking today,

I read about 15, 16 articles.

And I’m going to give
you a very shallow view of

what this TikTok ban is
in some of the implications.

But there are people that like TikTok has
an investment in this not going through.

So if they can get the facts to the people
who watch TikTok and they have them believe

those facts, well, then
now they have ammunition

to go to the government and say, well,
you know, it’s not a Chinese company.

So a bunch of Americans
now go to their Congress

people and say, it’s
not a Chinese company.

The servers are in Austin.

Yeah, 100%.

That was provided by
TikTok to those creators

so that they could read it and
they just have a very natural flow.

And maybe that’s the kind
of content they do already.

But immediately I was
suspicious of why does that

guy have so much information
squished together that well.

I actually, the thing I
was wondering the most

is did they read it or memorize it
because they’re pacing was pretty similar.

Like they had overlaps a couple times.

That was pretty cool.

But we’re still talking about really
the ban on the government side first.

Trump said that he doesn’t, he doesn’t want
TikTok ban because then people will go back

to Facebook and
Facebook helped rig the last

election and I think Donald Trump,
he might be a little out of touch.

I think that’s pretty
fair to say because if

people leave TikTok,
it’s mostly young people.

The fact that I’m on there, I’m already one
of the oldest people on TikTok probably.

They’re not going back to Facebook.

They would go to another app.

I actually think this, the worst
case scenario is that TikTok dies.

But then a new app takes its place
that does almost the exact same thing.

And that’s where young people go.

The interesting thing
about Trump though, in

2020 as president, Trump
signed in an executive

order for ByteDance to divest itself
from TikTok so essentially to sell TikTok.

At this point, the
recording was actually

interrupted and I had to take
care of family emergencies.

So we’re actually picking up
on the next day, which is why

it doesn’t sort of link directly
to what was said before.

So there’s a couple other
different views you can take of this.

One of them is, what
are the Chinese things?

The Chinese Foreign
Ministry spokesman said,

Washington resorts to political tools
when U.S. businesses failed to compete.

They’re saying because
TikTok has become so

dominant and capitalism
has failed that these

Western capitalistic
companies can’t compete

with TikTok, that the government now has
to step in and shut down the competition,

which is completely
an anti-capitalistic idea.

I find that one very interesting.

I don’t tend to take
the Chinese Communist

Party’s opinions very
seriously because they

just tend to say
things that are very pro

China, but of course,
when they do take a shot

at other countries, it’s
always very entertaining

because they always just
like lay into them really hard.

It is interesting to
look at how the votes

were done because 15
Republicans voted against the ban.

They said, look, we should
absolutely warn people.

We should tell people that this
might be a data security issue.

This might be China
collecting your personal

information, but if
they know that and they

still choose to use the app,
that should be acceptable.

I actually kind of agree with these
Republicans, because that is capitalism.

Give people all the
information they need to

make their own decision,
but then you have

to allow people to
make their own decision.

That’s freedom.

That’s in America, part
of freedom of speech.

You should be allowed to say these things.

People are supposed to be
able to make their own decisions.

This does sort of imply that the bill
isn’t actually about TikTok the company.

It’s about apps that can be banned if
they’re being labeled a security threat.

So this means like any other app, as I was
saying, jokingly before, it’s true social.

It’s owned by an adversary to the current
government, so it could be shut down.

If you wanted to like
broaden these rules,

Facebook had all that Russian
influence during the elections.

That could say it’s being attacking America
and they could shut down that down if they

want, Elon Musk, when
he took over Twitter,

absolutely destroyed
the security basically,

fired everyone who had
any sort of knowledge there.

So he just ripped apart the
security aspect of Twitter.

At that point, it’s no
longer a secure website.

It could be banned.

So you can see keeping the bill vague as to
what it actually would define as a security

threat means that you could then broaden
it and attack any media outlet you want.

So then we get to
Congressman Mike Gallagher,

and he said TikTok is becoming the dominant
news platform for Americans under 30.

So I got that clip, so
let’s play that right now.

So in this clip, he’s
trying to assure people

that this isn’t about
just banning apps

that they disagree with, that
this is a very focused thing.

But then we learned what
it’s actually focused on.

The only impacted sites
are those associated

with foreign adversary
apps, such as tiktok.com.

It can never be used
to penalize individuals.

The text explicitly prohibits that.

And it cannot be used to censor speech.

It takes no position at all on the content
of speech, only foreign adversary control.

Foreign adversary
control of what is becoming

the dominant news platform
for Americans under 30.

This is a common sense measure
to protect our national security.

I urge my colleagues to support
this critical bipartisan legislation.

So what he’s actually
done in there, and I think by

accident, is tell you what
he’s actually worried about.

He’s saying that
this is about a foreign

adversary, this is about the
apps and security and stuff.

It won’t go under,
won’t be going after free

speech, but then he
immediately says TikTok

has become the primary news
source for people under the age of 30.

So people are getting their
information from TikTok.

They’re not getting their
information from the apps we influence.

They’re not getting
their information from the

apps we maybe have a certain
amount of control over already.

They’re getting their
information from this app that is

controlled by a company
that is from a different country.

If I start an app in
Belgium, which is not

a foreign adversary,
but then I start saying

a lot of anti-American
stuff, how quickly would they

change the parameters
that it’s a negative influence?

And so this is, I think,
what it really comes down to.

They have less influence and
control over the news media.

And as sort of traditional
media, like news shows

and stuff become less
popular with people under 30.

I mean, most people I know under the
age of 30 don’t watch television at all.

They will stream stuff, they will
pick and choose what they watch.

And when it comes to
news, it is going to just get

filtered into them through
an app they watch like TikTok.

They’re saying we
have to take that news

source away from them so we can put them
back on the news that they like it out.

I think the reality
would be that they would

just find a different
news source that they

also don’t have control over because that’s
going to be part of the appeal of this.

And it’s all about control.

So we had the clip previously
of the two guys reading the

exact same script that was
obviously provided them by TikTok.

We have the senators
saying like we’re losing

control over the
news, over what people

actually take into their lives,
how they get their information.

We need to stop that.

We did get to the last little bit.

It was a Democrat, Congressman
who got very famous on TikTok.

He has 2 million followers and
he voted for the ban of TikTok.

So basically TikTok
made him famous, put him

into Congress and then now he’s in
Congress and he votes to ban TikTok.

He comes out and he
says like, oh, I’m so sorry.

This isn’t really what you think it is.

He essentially said I voted
to ban TikTok because

I didn’t think it would
go through through.

I apologize.

I did not handle this
situation well from top

to bottom and that is
why I have been completely

roasted on this app over
the last 48 hours and I get it.

If I were in your shoes, I would
probably feel the same way.

I would see someone
who used this app to build

a following and then
appears to have voted

against it and I would
be upset and I would

feel like I deserved
more of an explanation.

So here goes.

I like this app.

I’ve been able to
reach a lot of people and

hear directly from
them and it’s been great.

I’m also in Congress and
I’ve been a part of some

briefings about this app
that were genuinely alarming.

When I was reading the bill, the part I
agreed with was the part that tries to force

a sale because I
figured this would just be

a better app if we didn’t
have to worry about

the stuff that comes
with it being potentially

controlled by an
adversarial government.

The part I didn’t like was
the part that threatens a ban.

After the country is on
this app, it has become

a force for good in the
lives of millions of people.

So I weighed those two
things and the reason

I voted for it was
because I genuinely believe

the chance of a ban is
practically zero for a lot of reasons.

Financial, political,
geopolitical, I just

don’t think there’s any
real chance of a ban.

I still believe that, but
maybe I got that balance rock.

On the one hand, I have information
about this app that isn’t public.

On the other, the language of the bill
was going to upset millions of people.

My thinking was, I
could reconcile those

two things by just making a video
that said, “Hey, here’s the situation.

” And that was a total disaster.

I really overestimated my
ability to do that in a really hot

moment when millions of
people were laser focused on this.

Some of you have said, “I must
have been bought by somebody.

” Well, that is exactly why I don’t
take any corporate pack money.

Not from TikTok, not from
Meta, not from any corporation.

That doesn’t change the
fact that I screwed this up.

I did.

I apologize and I will keep you busted.

I don’t know what he was
actually thinking, but he absolutely

was not thinking like, “I’m
going to do a protest vote.

” This is actually
weirdly Brexit logic.

So when Brexit went
through, they interviewed

a bunch of people who voted for Brexit,
who actually said like, “Oh, I voted for

Brexit because I didn’t
think it would pass.

” And the interesting thing, it
shows that votes actually matter.

So you can’t do protest votes.

You have to vote with your
own best interest at heart.

Other wise, you might
end up actually getting

what you voted for, even
if it was a protest vote.

There was a lot of
people with Brexit who

said, “Oh, I didn’t think it would
go through, so I voted for it.

” And it was just to
show how angry I am.

But now you’re not part of
the European Union anymore.

Now you’ve actually
gotten what you voted for.

So how do you feel now?

I have no idea how far this is going to go.

It wouldn’t surprise me either way.

It wouldn’t surprise me if this just died.

It needs another vote,
I think, in the Senate.

And it wouldn’t surprise
me if it died right there.

It wouldn’t surprise me if this was
considered unconstitutional in some way.

I think divesting the TikTok from ByteDance
isn’t the worst thing ever, if I’m being

honest, because I don’t
care about the company.

I mean, I’m doing this topic because
I’m interested in all these processes.

I’m interested in the votes.

I’m interested in how the companies and the
government are fighting back against each other.

I’m interested in what
this is really about.

And the core issue that
has come up again and

again is this is about control of the news
and the news that young people take in.

And TikTok is a very liberal website.

It’s a very liberal place where
people express themselves.

And so a lot of young people
are finding their voice there.

And I think that liberalnessness is what is
actually scaring these Republican senators.

The fact that this
app is being provided to

them from China just
makes it that much worse.

But clearly the thing
is that they’re saying

it about, like every
other Senate hearing

I’ve dealt with on
Seamig B, it’s not actually

the actual issue isn’t what
they’re actually talking about.

I don’t have a big
investment in TikTok.

It’s not a big part of my life.

I don’t really care for social
media if I’m being honest.

So what happens isn’t going
to impact me in any great way.

But I am interested
to see the justifications

and the lies and the back and forth
and the propaganda and all this stuff.

And then the thing
is, if ByteDance divest

itself of TikTok and he
gets taken over by one

of the Shark Tank guys
or something, because

those are the guys who
actually interested in it.

I bet that would
destroy the company.

I bet TikTok would collapse or the people
who really love TikTok for what it actually

is right now would leave
for some other version

of TikTok would come up
with a different company.

We’re going to offer you what TikTok used
to be right out the gate, here’s a new app.

And then we’re already at a point where
young people coming up right now, they don’t

want to use an app that is what older people
use, even if it’s like five, ten years.

They want their own app.

And that’s actually to me
how social media is going.

It’s a generational thing.

And the younger generation
that’s being coming

into their own right
now and getting into

social media, they don’t want
to use someone else’s app.

They want their own thing.

It was actually my
theory of every generation

has their own, it’s
almost like yearly.

There has to be like a
summer love song and

you can’t, you can like
or appreciate or enjoy

the love songs that came
before, but it’s not your love song.

So you need that one summer, that one song
and that’s your song that you associate and

that becomes you, it
represents you as a person.

It’s the same thing with apps,
it may be a five, ten year period.

But in that period is
when that becomes your

app, the app you
associate yourself with.

And that’s what you grew up with and that’s
where you came to maturity with and that’s

where you learned a
lot about the world from.

And so I actually think
TikTok only has so

much life in it left
anyways because there’s

going to be something that
comes up that replaces it fairly soon.

These apps and stuff
are getting so big, so we

talk about Facebook,
Facebook has been around

forever and it’s
like, oh, it’s not going

to go anywhere, but it’s
just not as popular as it was.

And young people now,
they don’t use it anymore.

Instagram I would say
it’s already on its sort

of death nails, it’s kind
of going the same way.

Twitter has gone through so much.

I mean, I don’t think anyone even
considers it particularly relevant anymore.

So we are waiting for the next app to
come in and sort of take over this space.

So I think the loss
of TikTok, I think the

loss of any one of these social
media companies is not a big deal.

They grow so fast and they
become dominant so quickly.

People think, oh,
you’ll never be able to

crush these companies,
but the natural process

is speeding up and
something’s going to come

up and it’s going to
be popular with young

people and then other
people are going to get on it

because that’s where you
have to be to be trendy.

It’s where you have to do to make your
deals, so where you have to go to be popular.

And I’m going to miss it, but that’s where
things are going to happen in the future.

And this cycle, it’s going to continue.

So this life cycle is
interesting, but now

with the government
trying to interfere, trying

to take control
over it, I don’t know if

that’s going to speed
it up or actually make

it hang around longer
because there actually

may be more resistance
to it going away because

this people actually
care about it and people

love fighting back
against the government.

But we should all know
there’s really only one platform

you should care about
and that is the beef nation.

What up, beef nation?

I am going to commit myself to trying to
say that more often in sound, more sincere.

When I say it so
that sooner or later it

actually just happens
to actually where I just

come on and go, hey,
what up, beef nation?

How am I chung stealing?

After the mind of the
Academy, shot my big

chest, whether best
is a philosophy, drinking

a clutch, brings rubber skills like a soccer
punch, won’t count to see how my feet.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ruining Religion

(upbeat music)

So there’s a town in Japan called
Chingo, it’s in the prefecture of Almodi,

that’s sort of the north part
of the main island of Japan.

And I’m trying to figure out
how this story came to be

because my supposition is that
there was a Japanese Christian

person and they wanted
to bring Japan sort of

more into focus as part
of the Christian story.

So there is a claim in this town that
that is where Jesus is actually buried.

Now that’s a pretty big claim and
it has some massive implications

on the Christian
religion, which I personally

believe they didn’t think
through when they started

fermenting this story or
trying to put this story out.

And then there’s a question
of do other Japanese Christians

believe this or did they
just go along with it?

Like I don’t know where
this originated from

because I’m not practicing any
sort of religion in any real way.

So the only things I
know about Christianity

would be like what the
average person would learn

or know absorbing
information about Christianity

through popular media.

So the story of Jesus, as we know
it, it’s kind of the New Testament.

It starts when he’s in his 30s, which was
a great opportunity for someone to rewrite

or write what happened in
his 20s ’cause there’s really

no mention of him until he
hits that sort of 30 year age

when he becomes the
prophet that we know about.

So what was he doing in his 20s?

Now the actual assumption
is because he was a carpenter.

He was probably doing carpenting.

He was working.

He was a apprentice, something like that.

And people don’t really tend to question

what did Jesus do in
his 20s in the wild years?

Well, this story claims that he went to
Japan because Jesus is obviously a weeb

and he wants to come to
Japan and learn Japanese stuff.

I don’t know.

I mean, what are you gonna say?

He grows up in the Middle East
and he travels all the way to Japan.

I mean, never mind the inherently
xenophobic nature of Japan as

a country back then that a
foreigner just entering the country

would have been an
incredibly difficult thing to do.

Now he is supposed to be Jesus.

He’s got the God on his side.

So we’re gonna have to give
him that Jesus as a character

is so charismatic, so
powerful, so influential

that the Japanese
people just took him in.

But then why wasn’t
Christianity a big part of Japan,

Japanese culture in
the history in the past?

And the claim is Jesus came
to Japan to study theology.

So at that time he was
probably either studying Shinto

or Buddhism or probably
let’s just say both.

He was studying both Shinto and Buddhism.

So then he goes back to the Middle East and
starts preaching about the Promised Land.

Now the Promised Land, I think we
generally interpret that as being heaven.

Well, in this case, it’s not heaven.

The Promised Land is
Japan, which is why again,

so many weebes think like when I get to
Japan, I just gonna be like heaven for me.

Everything’s gonna work
out my life would be better.

That’s what Jesus was
preaching to people at the time.

He wasn’t saying you
should live a good life

and then when you
die, you’ll go to heaven.

He’s saying you live a good life
and maybe you can go to Japan now.

So we get the New Testament
and New Testament happens.

We kind of know this story.

So he is crucified and
then three days later,

he rises and he ascends
to heaven or did he?

Because according to this story,

they had to rewrite a bit
for him to be buried in Japan.

If he ascended to heaven,
either his spirit ascended

to heaven and his
body still in the Middle

East or his body just
fully ascended to heaven.

So that doesn’t work if you want the story
to end up with him being buried in Japan.

So the story continues as when it was time
for Jesus to be crucified, he just bailed.

He dipped out, he just wasn’t there.

He left his little brother there,
Esukiri, to take the fall for him.

Now, Christ in Japanese is crystal.

So because of the Japanese
pronunciation, and the Romanization

of names and stuff, the
name is gonna sound different.

So that’s taking the
name Christ from English

and putting it into sort of
Japanese pronunciation is crystal.

So Esukiri would
have to go back.

So we had to actually find out what
the little brother’s actual name was.

But I, again, very shallow knowledge.

I don’t remember there
being a little brother.

Like they mentioned Mary,
they mentioned Joseph.

They mentioned Jesus.

They don’t mention any siblings.

And you think a sibling to
Jesus would be a pretty big deal.

Like it would come up in the Bible.

They’re probably, there
probably would be a story or two

of Jesus interacting with his sibling,
either in a positive or negative way.

Like maybe the sibling betrays him.

Maybe he teaches the sibling
how to be a better person.

Who knows?

But I mean, it didn’t, it seems like

it seems like the character of Esukiri

was inserted into this story
because someone needed

to be crucified to the
cross and it couldn’t be

Jesus because Jesus
had to get back to Japan.

So that Japan could become
the center of Christianity.

So Esukiri is crucified in Jesus’s place.

So that does not explain
who goes into the cave

for three days and then
who ascends to have it.

So if we say it’s Esukiri, again,
there are significant implications

on how that changes the
sort of story of Christianity

because is Esukiri the son of God or
is Esukiri the son of Joseph and Mary?

Because maybe after God had a
baby with Mary, immaculate conception,

maybe Joseph and Mary
decided to have their

own baby as well that
God was less involved in.

So this needs a lot of explanation that
just does not exist, it’s just not there.

So Jesus returns to Japan and
he does what any sensible person

doesn’t Japan, he starts a garlic farm.

And that is tough.

He gets married, he marries a woman
called Miyuki and he has three children.

Therefore, direct
descendants of Jesus and

Miyuki live in this
town shingo in alamori.

Direct descendants in
this town still live in alamori

and they will say that, oh,
that’s that family right there.

They are direct
descendants of Jesus Christ.

Jesus dies at 106.

I assume of natural causes
and then they bury the body.

That’s the end of the story, but it
actually opens up so, so many questions.

The first question I had was
why would Jesus go to Japan

to study theology if he has
a direct line to God himself?

So he doesn’t need to study
something if he knows the truth.

Like if he knows there is a God because
he can communicate directly with him,

there is no need for him to study religion.

Because he knows
inherently what religion is.

So if he comes back to
Japan, he studies shinto.

Shinto is polytheistic, which
means there are a multitude of gods.

Now, the Bible says, I think
it’s one of the 10 Commandments

says, like you won’t
worship God’s other than me.

So the whole shinto religion
is out of bounds for that one.

Like you shouldn’t be
worshiping these gods.

Now maybe Jesus wasn’t
worshiping these gods.

He was studying it.

He was studying the philosophy,
he was studying theology.

But why would he need to do that?

Because he knows the truth,
he can share you the truth.

He can tell you the truth.

He can give you everything you
need to know direct from the source.

The other sort of major religion
in Asia at that time is Buddhism.

The then diagram of Buddhism
in Christianity is a little difficult

because it’s like, be giving to
others, which is a very Jesus idea.

Care about the people
around you and be aware.

Then there’s also like,
there is the aspect of

Buddhism that there is
no God, that we are God,

which is very antithetical
to the Christian religion.

I would need someone
with a lot more knowledge

to actually explain the differences,
the comparing contrast of that.

But realistically speaking,
we’re still in the same situation

was why would Jesus
need to study that at all

if he’s in a situation where
he can tell you the truth

and he knows what the truth is because
he’s directly connected to the truth.

There’s another question.

So I did already say like, it
seems like not mentioning

the little brother is a really
big oversight in the Bible,

but if Jesus took a decade
to go to Japan to study,

it would have made a lot of sense if
when he returned to the Middle East

and started preaching, he
mentioned Japan by name.

But that never shows up.

They do talk about the Promised Land

and again, we interpret the
Promised Land as heaven.

But if he’s talking about Japan, you
think he would have had a name for it,

the name that they
actually used in that country.

So maybe he wants to use the Japanese

and have some version of
Nihong would show up in the text

or in the story in the Bible,
but that doesn’t happen.

And certainly there’s
Anglicization of the word Japan.

That doesn’t show up, but the core,
the crux for me more than anything else.

It’s that Jesus is crucified and basically
letting someone else take the fall for him

doesn’t fit my image of Jesus Christ.

He doesn’t seem like
the kind of person who

would let someone
else suffer in their place.

He doesn’t seem like the kind of
person who would let someone else

be crucified for something
he was being accused of.

It seems like the whole
Jesus mythology is based

around the fact that he would
sacrifice himself for others.

That’s actually the
crux of the crucified

arguments is that he
is sacrificing himself for

the average person for the population to
absolve us of our sins, which takes us to,

to me, the most important oversight in this
story that was created after the Bible is

that if Jesus was
supposed to die in the

cross for our sins and he didn’t, that
means he didn’t absolve us of our sins.

We are still in a state where
we cannot get into heaven no

matter what we do, because
that absolution has never happened.

He just was like, well, you
know, screw the human race.

I’m going to go off to Japan and farm
garlic for another 70 years until I die.

That is fundamentally changing the
entire nature of the Christian religion.

If you’re going to take this
story in any way seriously.

So it seems like
Christians in Japan who I

don’t know if they
believe this story or not,

but if they believe this
story have to do a lot of

filling in gaps to be able
to make that story work.

I honestly think that the
person who made up the

story wasn’t thinking through the fundamental
consequences of what they were saying.

And they were just
again trying to make Japan

a central aspect of
the Christian religion.

And it’s kind of been
done so that this little

town could have a
little cloud in the world.

Now this isn’t the only
story like this in Japan.

So oh, that’s actually
talked about the

descendants, the actual
supposed descendants.

I saw internet video online, internet
video online is actually almost redundant.

But I saw an internet video.

It was kind of a documentary and
they were talking about this story.

I’m actually interviewed
one of the supposed

descendant, direct
descendants of Jesus Christ.

And the guy says the interviewer says, are
you a direct descendant of Jesus Christ?

Do you believe you are a direct
descendant of Jesus Christ?

The man they’re speaking
to is very uncomfortable.

He has this kind of rye smile like,
I know what I’m supposed to say.

And I know what I believe and
those two things don’t match up.

So if you ever want to see that
face, that is where it’s going to happen.

When someone says, are you
the descendant of Jesus Christ?

And you have to say yes or no.

So he does a very, very diplomatic
answer, which I loved very, very much.

He says, it’s good for the town.

And that’s actually the reason he might go
along with this, because there is a certain

amount of tourism that’s going to come
in to see the burial spot of Jesus Christ.

And the claim that there
are direct descendants,

they can say that
family over there, that

house, that is where the direct
descendants of Jesus Christ live.

And it’s good for the town
for a certain amount of tourism.

I’m assuming Japanese Christians go there.

But then there’s people
like me who hear the

story and I kind of
want to go there just

to see the place they claim as the
final resting place of Jesus Christ.

Knowing I’ve been
damned to hell and there’s

nothing I can do about
it because he never

absolved me on my sins by
getting crucified on the cross.

The man is very
uncomfortable, but he’s kind

of doing it for the
good of everyone else

in the village, which is a
very Christ-like thing to do.

So you actually think he
probably doesn’t believe he is, but

he’s going to sacrifice his
pride for the benefit of the town.

That’s kind of a sacrifice he’s giving
for others, which is very Christ-like.

So that turns my
opinion around a little bit.

Maybe there is a
little touch of Jesus in

this guy and he is a good guy
and he’s doing the right thing.

I would be interested
in what his religion is.

Is he Christian?

Because it would be very
awkward for someone who

is supposed to be a
direct descendant of Jesus

Christ, to go to a church
and listen to sermons

and have being told
about the religion that

essentially you are, like they should just
be inviting him up to the front and go like

to say whatever you want to say
because whatever you say is the truth.

But like I said, this isn’t
the only story like this.

These Japanese
Christians clearly really want

Japan to be the centerpiece
of the Christian religion.

There is another area.

It’s a little further away.

I wasn’t able to find
the exact spot on

Google Maps, but they claim that
Adam and Eve are buried there.

Now I think what they
wanted to do was connect

Adam and Eve who live
in the Garden of Eden.

So if they’re buried in this area, this
area must be close to the Garden of Eden.

So they’re inadvertently trying to
claim that Japan is the Garden of Eden.

But since the actual story is that Adam and
Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden,

what you’ve actually
established is that

Japan is 100% not the
Garden of Eden because

that’s where they ended up,
which was not the Garden of Eden.

So this is their final
resting place, their

final resting place would
not be in the Garden of Eden.

There’s a place called Ishikawa.

It’s kind of the north side
of the main island in Japan.

There’s a mountain called Hodatsu and
they claim this is where Moses’s tomb is.

And so what they’ve done is
taken all the central figures.

And again, my level of understanding,
these are the people I’ve heard of them.

There’s so many
personalities, people in

the Bible that if you quiz me on, I
wouldn’t even have a clue who they are.

But they’ve picked all the
ones that everyone would know.

They got Jesus, main character.

They got Moses, had his own movies
and Adam and Eve, which is the first story.

And they’ve taken them
all and tried to transfer

them into Japan as this being a
very significant place in their life.

So the realization
there is that by trying to

alter the story to make
Japan more important,

what they’ve fundamentally
done fundamentally

is undermined the
Christian narrative that

goes throughout the
Bible and taken away all of

the significant benefits because
the sacrifice of Jesus didn’t happen.

Japan is not the Garden of Eden.

This being where
Moses’ tomb is, I don’t

know what the
implications of that would be.

But certainly the
implication is that Japan

is the most important
place in the Christian

religion and just the rest of the
world hasn’t caught up with that.

If you’re ever in Japan, I would
recommend do a little side detour.

Head up to the north part of the
main island, find a place called Almodi.

Find a little town
called Shingo and start

looking for the signs
that say the burial site

of Jesus Christ or take a little tour
through Ishikawa, find Mount Haudatsu.

But if you can find
the final tomb of Moses,

and then you can start
your own Indiana Jones

adventure because we
all know how well that

worked out, I mean you
got five movies out of it.

[Music]

Surge Pricing

[Music]

I am enjoying the new theme song.

That’s the second time
we’ve done the theme song.

I’m pretty happy about it.

I think just having a theme song with
my own name in it makes a big difference.

That is Stone’s Mo-Yo,
a rapper from Zimbabwe.

He will essentially write and produce
the entirety of the song for you.

So if you have a
project that you need a

little rap song to, reach
out, look out, search

for Stone’s Mo-Yo, you’ll get
his Facebook and some other stuff.

Very happy about that.

I got him when my friend Nigel
made a song for the old podcast.

I kept forgetting to
say him and his things.

I was like, I got to do this right
and give credit where credit’s due.

Stone’s Mo-Yo.

That’s not what we’re talking about.

In his new Japan story a
couple weeks ago, there

was a story about the
Coke is going to start

testing vending machines
that have surge pricing.

Surge pricing to me is the
new subscriptions of the future.

So we, I did an episode
a while ago and it was

about how everything is trying
to be a subscription service.

That’s their way of getting a little bit
of money from you all the time forever.

You end up with a billion
subscription services

you don’t need, but
you forget to cancel

them or they make it really hard to
cancel or any other number of things.

The end of the day, you’re subscribing
to things you don’t need or don’t want.

Coke is taking it a slightly different way.

I think surge pricing is the model
they’re going to have going forward.

If it’s a busy time, the price goes up.

So this is essentially
just speculating this

is this is just stocks only
it’s with every day item.

So you want to buy a Coke.

You can’t buy a Coke during a busy time
because the Coke’s going to be 200, 210, 250

yen, whereas if you
wait till it’s like four

o’clock in the morning, that price is
going to drop down to 150, 140 yen.

And so you’re really just going to be,
what is the best time to short Coke?

Because I’ll buy Coke’s
and then resell them

to people at a slight
profit out in front

of the machine again
or something like like

people made jokes
about this on the internet,

but this is exactly what is going to happen
is people will buy Coke when it’s cheap and

then sell it for a small profit when it’s
expensive and make money off the Coke’s.

This came up last week
because of Wendy’s and

I used to like Wendy’s
I used to have a very

fond feeling for memories
of Wendy’s and it’s

because Dave Thomas founder of Wendy’s
was a significant influence on my life.

You might be like, well, that’s
weird and I’m like, yes, it is weird.

When I was in high school,
it was grade 11, grade 12.

So sort of those
initial proper rebellious

years, early rebelliousness
years, I think you’re

like 15, 16, 16’s when I
got my first motorcycle.

So I’m driving motorcycles.

I think I’m pretty cool.

And again, amongst 16 year olds, having
a motorcycle does make you pretty cool.

I really was like a tiny
125 CC motorcycle

that I rode to and from school, but $5 of
gas would last me for the week and more.

So it was like a great thing
to have as a young teen.

It’s also meant it
was the time when my

friends and I were
skipping a lot of school

and there was an
McDonald’s and a Wendy’s.

McDonald’s was the
big company and Wendy’s

wasn’t even though Wendy’s
is still a massive company.

Wendy went there
regularly to spend what little

money we had on the
dollar menu for lunch.

So one day we’re skipping school.

We’re in Wendy’s, it’s about
five blocks away from our school.

We could walk there.

This man walks up to our table
and he says, hey, boys, how’s it going?

And it’s Dave Thomas,
founder of Wendy’s and

he wasn’t, she needs
to us because we were

clearly skipping school
and he just sat down

and he actually sat down
on a table next to us.

He goes like, so what
do you guys want to do?

What are you thinking
about and asking about

our lives and stuff and
talk to us like equals?

Or at least it seemed
that way to us at the time

because every other
adult had talked down to us.

So Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy’s is
having a very nice conversation with these.

He goes, you know what?

I’m Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy’s.

Why don’t you go up to the
front, get whatever you boys want.

And we’re 16, 17 year old even
eating machines, we’re like, what?

We’re going to go up and
it like as a joke, we’re like,

we’re going to go up and order
one of everything on the menu.

And Dave Thomas founder of Wendy’s looks
at us and goes, I think you should do that.

And so I think there were
three of us at the time.

I remember me and my
friend Chris were there.

There might have been another guy
with us, but Chris was a football player.

He was gigantic at 16
years old and he could

have eaten the whole menu
two, three times over, no problem.

So we go up to the front
and we say, Dave Thomas,

founder of Wendy’s said
we could get anything

we want off the menu
and the poor staff behind

the place is looking
at us like, if Dave

Thomas founder of Wendy’s says that
at a Wendy’s, that is pretty much true.

So what would you like?

And we’re like, well,
as a joke, we said, we

want one of everything,
which would be two

of everything on the menu to take back
to our table and we’re going to eat it.

And she said, well, if
that’s what Dave Thomas

founder of Wendy said,
that’s what’s going to happen.

So over the course of an hour, they
just brought us food and food and food.

And again, eating
machines, we ate all of it.

And we actually felt like obligated and the
whole time Dave Thomas founder of Wendy’s

was sitting next to
us telling us that we

should, you know, not
in a harsh way, but saying

like, we got to take school
seriously, school is very important.

Dave Thomas, founder of
Wendy’s didn’t finish high school.

He opened his Wendy’s and then
he made this company and then he

finished high school, then he
went to university as an adult.

And so he valued education.

So I, from that
day, it wasn’t a quick

change, but there was
a click, a little switch

or something in my head that had me going,
I’d want to graduate university and I high

school, and I actually, I think
I want to go to university.

And I think if Dave Thomas founder of
Wendy’s hadn’t sat down for basically an hour

or something plus in
an afternoon and just

talked to some high
school boys, I don’t know

if I would have gone to university or not,
I would have done something else, maybe.

I don’t know how my
life would have turned

out, maybe better, maybe
worse, but education

became a valuable thing to me because
of Dave Thomas founder of Wendy.

So when I see this
kind of behavior from

Wendy’s, it makes me
feel less about that fond

memory I have, or like they’re sullying
what Dave Thomas founder of Wendy’s.

Take a shot.

Every time he says
Dave Thomas founder, if I

just say Dave Thomas, Dave
Thomas is a relatively bland name.

It’s like my name,
my actual name.

If you said it, it’s almost has no meaning.

So it has to be Dave
Thomas founder of Wendy’s.

That’s who he is.

He’s Dave Thomas.

He’s not just Dave Thomas.

He’s Dave Thomas founder of Wendy’s.

No, I’ve never said his
name without putting

founder of Wendy’s on it because
that is how he introduced himself.

Hey boys, I’m Dave
Thomas founder of Wendy’s.

Yeah, you could do a drinking game.

If you give me a talk
about Dave Thomas founder

of Wendy’s, I will
always say the entirety

of his title, Dave Thomas
founder of Wendy’s.

There are certain
people that if you say

their name, you want
to say the whole thing.

If I was ever on the Joe Rogan
podcast, I would say Joe Rogan.

I would never say Joe.

I would always be like, hey, Joe Rogan.

I don’t know why.

I don’t even like
particularly like the guy,

but that’s just the reality
is Joe Rogan is Joe Rogan.

He’s never anything
but Joe Rogan.

And Dave Thomas founder of Wendy’s is
always Dave Thomas founder of Wendy’s.

Dave Thomas founder of
Wendy’s proposed surge pricing.

They had like a stockholder call thing.

They’re talking about their profits
and how amazing they are as a company.

They’re trying to get people to
give them more money to invest more.

So this is about stakeholders and
they said we got this a great idea.

We’re going to get these new digital menus
up and these digital menus mean that we can

change the prices very easily,
which means we can do surge pricing.

We can have an algorithm,
some people in place.

They’re going to make sure the
algorithm doesn’t go too crazy.

But when it’s busy, we
can increase the price

when it’s not busy,
we can lower the price.

Now a Baconator,
which I guess is now the

standard Wendy’s fair, is
$12.24 in New York City.

My feeling was surge pricing
always has a floor, but no ceiling.

So they’re always going to get a minimum.

And that minimum right
now is going to be $12.24.

If I go to a Wendy’s
at four o’clock in the

morning, if with this surge pricing,
I could get a Baconator for $12.24.

But if I go during
lunchtime, dinner time, it’s

going to be $13.14, $15, who knows
how much in demand the Baconator is.

But that’s what the surge pricing is.

It means one of the
jokes that was on the

internet was I could
literally be in line and

the Baconator up on
the screen would say $12.

24 for the Baconator
plus a set or something.

And then by the time I got to the
register, the price has changed to $14.

So that put a sort of bit of
into everybody’s, what is it?

Something in your crawl.

I don’t even know what a crawl is.

But there’s another example
of how this doesn’t work.

And it was the Canadian dollar
versus the American dollar.

So I’m Canadian.

I grew up in Canada
and every book in Canada

has the American price
and the Canadian price.

And the Canadian price was always,
let’s say, let’s say it’s a $10 book.

The Canadian price would be, so
it would be $10 US, $12 Canadian.

And you got used to it, $5
book, American, $750, Canadian.

There’s always kind of like
two bucks, something like that.

And they said the reason for this
was because of the dollar exchange rate.

Now, they couldn’t
fluctuate, but they’re

like, we always add
on, let’s say, $2 to the

price of a book for the Canadian exchange
rate so that these people make their money.

I’m not against publishers
or writers making money.

I am against gouging.

Now, the thing is, there
was a very short period.

I think it’s when I was
in university, where

the Canadian dollar surpassed
the value of the American dollar.

I think it lasted for about a week.

And during that week, they
didn’t switch those prices.

It didn’t alternate back and forth.

When the Canadian dollar was
more valuable than the American

dollar, they didn’t lower the
prices of books in Canada.

The only reason I know it was books because
that was like, it stamped on the book.

It’s a constant.

And they didn’t go
into bookstores and like

put a sticker on them all,
making the American price $12.

50 and the Canadian price $10.

No, they just took all that extra
money and tried to run away with it.

And that’s again, where
consumers are cautious

or concerned or see that
surge pricing is price gouging.

And that’s the other thing
that people are actually calling it.

The surge pricing isn’t surge pricing.

It’s price gouging.

What this company, what Wendy’s is hoping
is that because you’ve gotten used to this

idea because of Uber,
you’ve gotten used to

this idea in certain
situations that’s become

normalized enough that they can try it
and you’ll just think it’s a normal thing.

This is something you talk about
like a microtransactions in video games.

When I grew up, there was no such thing.

DLC was already a very suspicious thing.

I bought the DLC for
rock star games for like

Grand Theft Auto games because
that was always worth the money.

But like a lot of DLC was not
worth the money, so I didn’t buy it.

And then microtransactions were introduced.

My kids have grown up with microtransactions
just being part of every game.

So for them, it’s
normalized so they don’t see

it as a disgusting
horrible thing that I do.

I’m very anti microtransaction
because I didn’t grow up without it.

So what they’re hoping
is they can get surge

prices into place and
get people used to them.

When people are used
to them, they won’t

actually question that surge
pricing is actually price gouging.

Only 2% of consumers
consider that dynamic

pricing, which is the
way they actually call

it, is actually just some
form of price gouging.

And like I said, this
is the normalization of

subscription services,
which is the thing I was

complaining about, I don’t
know, maybe two months ago.

The most offensive
version of that right now

is Hewlett Packard
is actually making use,

or wants you to,
subscribe to your printer.

So let me get the details up
and actually read the details.

It’s called the HP all-in-one plan.

It’s essentially an
extension of HP’s instant

ink, so instant ink was
when you subscribe to ink.

So when the printer gets
low, they’ll send you more

ink or they’ll just send
you ink on a regular basis.

It was just the price they’re charging like
per print was actually the bit I was most

shocked by.

You have ink sent to you as
you approach empty, but unlike

it, your monthly fee also
covers the printer itself.

So the HP all-in-one
plan, you get a printer

and ink that you do not own, you are
subscribing to you, essentially renting it.

They started $6.99 per month
for 20 pages worth of prints.

So you can do the math.

I mean, technically
you’re getting the printer

and the prints, but you
only get to print 20 pages.

So there are some
months I would print nothing

at home, but then
there are some months

if I was going to print something,
it’s going to be essentially a book.

The HP envy model, sorry, it goes up
to 30, 30, it goes up to 35.99 a month.

They can get you an office
jet pro and 700 pages of printing.

But if you go over your
page, a lot of my HP

will add more for a dollar
per block of 10 to 15 pages.

So basically, if you print
your maximum and you

go over, you now have
to pay another dollar.

You get like 10 more pages,
20 more pages, that kind of stuff.

So if it’s a busy month, you’re going
to end up accidentally paying more.

That’s fucking disgusting.

I don’t know where printer
companies got the balls to do all this.

Each plan has a two year rental.

So it’s not a lease to own.

So you don’t own it at the end.

So at two years, you have to give it back.

And if you decide HP
only one isn’t for you,

after all, you’ll have
to return the printer

and go back to rubbing
elbows with everyone else at

FedEx or whatever, do
you want your print stunts?

It’s fucking ridiculous.

Because I’m still at that point where when
they want me to buy printer ink, I will

sum like I actually
had this problem where

buying a new printer with ink in it was
cheaper than buying more printer ink.

Where they got the idea that
this was going to work long

term, because it’s actually
worked longer than I expected.

And that’s the bit
that I actually think it

sets me off, is that how
has this gone on for this long?

I want to own a printer.

I barely use it.

I use the scanner a lot
because I’ll scan stuff

in, but again, we’ve
hit this digital point.

And I get, they’re
trying to squeeze out the

last dollars from the
idea of physical printing.

But because they’re
being so aggressive about

it, it actually would
turn me off printing more.

That’s likely to print
from this point going

forward in the hopes that
I don’t need a printer at all.

It’s a whole thing.

There’s software
that runs on printers at

offices to keep people
from printing too much.

Because at my job, I have to, like, when
I print stuff, it’s for a hundred people.

So it’s one sheet for a hundred people
and sometimes it’s two, three sheets.

I have no choice because
we have a hundred employees.

I might have to give stuff to you.

I worked at a school
where instead of giving

out new ink, we just
replaced the printer.

Yeah.

No, that’s exactly what I mean.

Like, I had a printer
and I could pay, it was

like four, five thousand
yen for replacement ink.

And then I was on
Amazon and it was like three

thousand yen for a
printer with ink in it.

So whenever they tell me,
like, how much it cost to print my

first thought is there’s no
way that’s what it actually costs.

I mean, that might be what you’re being
charged, but that’s not what it costs.

Then the meeting that Wendy’s has, sort
of leaks that we have this dynamic pricing.

We have these new digital
boards up on the wall.

We’re going to be able to change the
prices essentially from a home office.

We’re going to have an algorithm do it.

It’s going to be amazing.

Then that gets out one day later.

They start walking it back and
they start walking it back really hard.

Actually we never said that.

We just wanted, we were just saying
that the boards give us more flexibility.

The flexibility, I assume,
would actually be on the pricing.

The one thing they talked about.

This was misconstrued.

This was misconstrued by media outlets.

We have no plans to
do that, that being the

search pricing, and
would never raise prices

when customers visit
us the most, which is the

most fake corporate
statement I’ve ever heard.

So here’s Wendy’s full statement.

Earlier this month,
we issued our fourth

quarter and full year
2023 earnings results and

included an update on investments
we are making in our digital business.

I was like, “I should do
this in like a regal voice.

” Oh, sorry.

Dave just got it.

Dave just went a little absent on my lab.

Earlier, there’s
two, so if I do this in

different voices, it actually
changes the tone of the message.

I could just read it
normal, but this may

be, I got to try out
some voices and I think

I got to start doing
some voices, especially

because this is primarily
an audio podcast.

It’s actually video
is not a big part of it.

Earlier this month,
we issued our fourth

quarter and full year
of 2023 earnings results

and included an update on investments
we are making in our digital business.

One initiative is digital
menu boards, which

are being added to the US
company-operated restaurants.

We said these menu
boards would give us more

flexibility to change the
display of featured items.

This was misconstrued in some media reports
as an intent to raise prices when demand

is highest at our
restaurants, it was ridiculous.

If I read that same thing in a hillbilly
voice, it actually sounds way more sincere.

So that’s the first thing he said is like,
“Hey, when we said we could change stuff

on the board, we weren’t
talking about prices

even though we did definitely
say dynamic pricing in that call.

” That’s not what
we were talking about.

We were talking about the things
we wanted to display, promote upfront.

We would never, we would never as a large
corporation, large corporations don’t think like that.

When people come to us most, we want to be
most generous with them and hear the thing.

Dave Thomas founder
of Wendy’s probably would

think that way because
I believe Dave Thomas

founder of Wendy’s is a good guy because I
met him, I spent time with him, very short

time, he had me ensnared in his, his loving
gaze, he, he made me want to be Wendy.

But back to our, uh, sycophans, we have no
plans to do that and we’d never, we’d never

never know what to raise prices
when our customers are visiting us most.

Any features we may
test in the future would

be designed to benefit
our customers and

restaurant crew members,
never us or the shareholders

or stockholders or
investments or anything like that.

Those people are disgusting.

Digital menu boards
could allow us to change

the menu offerings
at different times of

day and offer discounts
when value offers to

our customers more easily,
particularly in the slower times of day.

We would never raise prices when it’s busy.

And we would only
lower when it’s not that

busy ensnared in Dave
Thomas founder of Wendy’s gaze.

Yeah, I might actually
end up writing that book.

They did the, the KFC romance novel.

I still want to actually kind of get a copy
of that and read it, but Wendy’s has always

been about providing high quality food,
already a lie, the food is pretty rank.

The only reason I went
there is again because

of my fondness for the
men and the reminiscence

and the memory that I
have and frosties, frosties.

I don’t know what’s in them.

It’s probably just sand and ice
cream, but they are awesome.

Have you played?

I love you, Colonel Sanders.

I have seen it.

I have not played it.

I should play it probably
Wendy’s has always

been about providing
high quality food at

great value and customers continue to
expect that from our brand conclusion.

Always be suspicious of companies.

That statement cannot
be taken at face value.

That statement cannot be taken
at face value because he is lying.

He is lying because
consumers were angry and

he didn’t want Wendy’s to
look bad and lose market share.

That’s the only thing
that matters, but it does

demonstrate that
consumers do have a certain

amount of power that they
probably don’t think they have.

Not going to Wendy’s, punishes
Wendy’s for practices we don’t like.

Not buying things, punishes
companies we don’t like.

I have said I did it podcast years and
years ago and was about how to break telecom

corporations and
essentially the concept was,

I don’t remember the
name, there’s two big

ones in America and Canada, they have two
companies that basically split between West

and East and they’re
technically not monopoly

because they don’t
cover the whole country,

but obviously it’s two
companies that essentially

price match, so they’re always charging
the same so you can’t get a better deal.

Anyways, a giant
telecom, if everyone would

commit, there you go,
tell us is the example

I will use, tell us is
a giant telecom, if

everyone, and everyone
would commit to going

a week without internet
without phone service.

So we just choose a
week in the year, maybe a

holiday, something like that, a
really inconvenient time for them.

Everyone start canceling
their service during

the same week and I don’t mean like a bunch
of people, I mean literally everybody.

They would start
changing their price to get

everyone back as quickly
as possible and they

make it sound like it’s
impossible, they make

it sound like they can’t
make improvements,

they make it sound like the network
can’t be upgraded or something like that.

The amount of service,
the amount of discount

they would put forward to get you to not
quit, once they hit a 30, 40% loss rate of

customers, like we don’t
even have to get everybody

is just as that number
climbs up day to day, as

people see the momentum,
they would change prices.

This story shows,
nothing actually happened,

they said, hey, we’re looking at dynamic
pricing, surge pricing, people were like,

fuck Wendy’s, Wendy’s
is fucking disgusting,

the next day they’re
in there going, oh no,

we never said that,
the pions misunderstood,

the media outlets lie
to, we at Wendy’s, we

are trustworthy because
we do not cut corners.

That’s the thing, when they have square
patties, Wendy’s we don’t cut corners.

Be aware, I went, fuck,
I should just end there,

I don’t, I don’t have a
conclusion conclusion,

but we can’t fuck
companies, but the thing

is we need to fuck
companies together, which

sounds really dirty, but that’s
maybe dirty is where we need to be.

[MUSIC]

[BLANK_AUDIO]

Senate Virus Party

(upbeat music)

So last week I talked about
how I enjoy Senate hearings.

My immediate thought was like, whoa,
I’m a boring person who does boring things

and I have a boring life.

But then I think anything
that pretends to be one thing

and then is another thing.

I sort of an inherent entertainment to it.

As you scrape away the layers
of the onion and try to find

the truth therein, this week
they did a Senate hearing

and it was the CEOs of
social media companies

and it was supposed
to be a harming children.

And this was to me,
pretty significant issue.

This is an important thing.

If social media is found
as be harming children,

should be protected, I
think that’s a pretty fair thing.

I immediately thought about how, if,

you really wanted to
turn this whole Senate

hearing on its head,
the first step would be,

if a social media company is responsible
for a child’s harm, as a result of these,

a host of media, this
primarily online bullying.

So kids use a social media
site to bully another kid,

that other kid harms themselves, the
social media company is responsible.

If we take that, that
was the Senate’s stance

in the way they were
primarily attacking these CEOs.

I don’t have a lot of sympathy for CEOs.

If you’ve listened to a
bunch of the most recent

Seamick bees, I’m not
a pro-CEO kind of guy.

I don’t mind if these guys
get their comeuppance.

But I also have the same
feeling towards politicians.

So I was like, first thought is, how do
I turn the Senate hearing on its head?

If the CEO of a social
media company is responsible

for the harm committed by
a user towards another user,

would not therefore then,
would not then therefore,

would not therefore, a
gun manufacturer president,

be responsible for the
harm of a gun being caused

by one user towards, in a very broad
sense, the end user of the weapon.

Now, ’cause most of
the people attacking this

were Republicans and they’re
very pro-gun anti-social media.

It’s an interesting dichotomy

because if social media is
dangerous, guns are dangerous.

And then one is more
viscerally factual sort of

in your face because
what they’re talking about

is the possibility to get harm
and mental wellness and stuff.

They’re suddenly
pretending to care about that.

It’s interesting,
whenever they try to argue

against gun control, they
talk about mental health.

Mental health in America would
fall under the purview of socialism

because it would have to
be a government program.

Suppose states could do it,
but then it would still be like,

taxes go towards the health care of people.

They need to come a long way
before they can resolve that dichotomy.

I don’t think I use the word
dichotomy correctly anymore.

I think I just use it
whenever I mean something

that doesn’t agree
with something else.

That might be the correct definition.

I had a couple cocktails at lunch.

Had a bad day at work yesterday.

Came home, had a couple cocktails.

We woke up, did a news
news Japan completely sober.

If you listen to the two episodes,

you probably might notice
a difference in the way I talk.

One, I’m now leaning way
forward into the microphone

in my eyes or about half open right now.

Whereas in the news Japan, I’m fully aware

and trying to try to try
to actually do a good job.

Not to say I’m not trying
to do a good job now.

I just don’t care as much.

I kind of wanted to just
talk about happy stuff.

No, whatever.

So what I actually was
interested in in this Senate hearing

is how the Senate
hearing is about child safety

and how little they
talk about child safety.

They really ran Zuckerberg
through the ringer on

this one, which I found
that kind of interesting.

But we get to Mr. Chu,
he’s the CEO of TikTok.

And I kind of like this guy.

I don’t know if TikTok is good or bad.

I’m pretty sure it’s bad.

I think all these things are bad.

But I think of the tech CEOs, I
don’t know if he’s the best one,

but he’s probably the smartest one

or the one I would most be
amenable to speaking with.

It’s very hard to say.

This is the way he handles himself
and these things is interesting.

So I thought it’d be
interesting if we went through

just a couple of minutes of the
most famous bits of testimony

that have absolutely
nothing to do with child safety.

I think they then had the
lawsuit and it was overturned.

I can’t remember that.

No, no, it’s the other kind of– Biden
administration that reversed those sanctions

just like, by the way, they
reversed the terrorist designation

on the Houthis and Yemen.

How’s that working
out for them? Do enjoy.

So this is Senator
Khan, he’s a Republican.

He has now taken one
issue unrelated to child safety.

Connected it to a second separate,
unrelated issue to child safety

to try to take a shot at
the Biden administration.

Not a terrible thing to do.

I mean, again, I don’t really have
any feelings one way or the other,

but none of what was just said
has anything to do with child safety.

But it was sanctioned as a
Chinese Communist military company.

So that’s interesting
because this is the opening

of the door to where he’s
going because he wants to.

Just like in the last hearing,
they wanted to prove that,

I think, ByteDance was a
member since a Chinese company

that then equates to TikTok,
which I believe they’re partners

or ones like them, but the
parent company or something.

TikTok is basically based in Singapore.

Mr. Chu is based in Singapore.

He’s Singaporean.

But they desperately want
to connect him to China

so they can then say that TikTok
is a Chinese communist conspiracy,

something like that.

And then they can attack him on that front
still has nothing to do with child safety.

So you said today, as you often
say, that you live in Singapore,

you said today as you often
say you live in Singapore,

it’s going to be surprisingly
self-evident as to where someone lives.

Because it’s going to be the
place that go to most often.

I would say that is pretty much
the definition of where you live.

So it’s not like a supposedly,
it’s not like a possibility.

And I am what I want is the person
who’s being haranged on one of these

Senate hearings to talk back or explain
what the disingenuous senators are doing

and see how they react,
because if you pointed it

out, I think again, this
puts it all on display.

Really, all these Senate hearings are
about let’s make speeches on behalf of my

party to try and gain political points.

They don’t often seem to be
trying to solve any actual problems.

Of what nation are you a citizen?

Pretty self-evident.

You would actually know that
going into this if you were smart.

Singapore is it?

Are you a citizen of any other nation?

No, Senator, have you ever
applied for Chinese citizenship?

Senator, I serve my nation as Singapore.

No, I did not.

So that’s pretty definitive.

He says he served his nation.

What he’s actually saying is that Singapore
has two years mandatory military service.

He’s done military
service in Singapore.

Korea has the same thing as a few
other countries that have the same thing.

It’s a pretty significant commitment
if you literally go into the military

for your country and then to turn around an
accused of being a Chinese communist agent.

I mean, I’m not to say
it’s impossible, but Mr.

Cotton, the Republican representative
here, he’s stuck with thinking that if he

keeps asking directed
questions that eventually

Chu will make a mistake,
but Mr. Chu is not.

He’s just going to say no, even
if he’s lying, even if it’s not true.

He’s smart enough to go,
no, I’m not a Chinese citizen.

Do you have a Singaporean passport?

Yes, and I served my military for two, two
and a half years since you have any other,

do you have any other
passport from any other nation?

No, Senator, your wife is an American
citizen, your children are American citizens.

That’s correct.

Have you ever applied
for American citizenship?

Not, no, not yet.

See, Mr. Cotton believes that, you
know, everyone wants to be American.

Everyone given the opportunity
would become American.

He doesn’t realize there’s a broader
view in the world that maybe the American

passport isn’t quite as valuable
as you might think of me.

Okay.

That okay, I love.

I’m finding that one of the more
satisfying aspects of this whole thing.

Okay.

I asked you a bunch of questions.

You said no to all of them.

Pretty pretty effective deflection.

I wasn’t ready for that.

I actually kind of want to go
back and hear that little, okay again.

Not, no, not yet.

Okay.

Have you ever been a member
of the Chinese Communist Party?

Even if he was, he knows enough.

He’s smart enough to say no.

Senator, I’m single poet, no.

Have you ever been associated or affiliated
with the Chinese Communist Party?

No, Senator, again, I’m single poet.

Let me ask you some hopefully
simple questions you said earlier.

In the thing, if you’re
listening to the audio version,

Mr. Chu, the CEO of TikTok, is
basically laughing at this point.

He’s like, this is ridiculous.

How do you keep saying like, you’re saying
vaguely different things in the hopes

that at one point I’ll
mess up and go, yes, I am.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

You’ve gotten me, I’m a communist.

And there’s foster question that what
happened at Tiananmen Square in June of 1989

was a massive protest.

Anything else happened in Tiananmen Square?

Yes, I think it’s well documented.

It was a method.

I love that.

I think it’s well documented.

Like, we all know what happened, even
though it’s like Chinese state media leaked

that we all know what happened in
Tiananmen Square, it’s well documented.

So he was really hoping
he would deny the massacre.

And he just comes out
and says there’s a massacre.

Tim and Square in June,
Chinese Communist Party.

No, Senator, again, nice thing to play.

Let me ask you some hopefully
simple questions you said earlier.

Hopefully simple questions.

The sarcasm that
everyone puts on is amazing.

I actually think that is one of the reasons
I enjoy Senate hearings is because these

guys do sarcasm, but they’re
not actually good at sarcasm.

In response to their
question, that what

happened at Tiananmen
Square in June of 1989

was a massive protest.

Anything else happened in Tiananmen Square?

Yes, I think it’s well documented.

It was a massacre.

There was an indiscriminate
slaughter of hundreds or thousands.

So, Mr. Chu has just said there was a
massacre and he’s trying to reiterate it.

Like he didn’t just say that.

Let me ask you this.

Joe Biden last year said
that Xi Jinping was a dictator.

Do you agree with Joe
Biden as Xi Jinping a dictator?

Senator, I’m not going to
comment on any world leaders.

It is interesting that he says he
will not disparage any world leader.

And he’s not going to
disparage any world leader

because that would
actually make it harder

for him to sell his product,
TikTok in this case, in that country.

And he’s not going to
cut off a billion potential

customers to satisfy
one senator in America.

Now on to lighter news.

I don’t know if this has
turned into a new show.

I don’t really know what I’m doing anymore.

Since I’ve had cocktails,
this is kind of drunk news.

I had some, you know, good stuff set up.

I’m wondering if I’m doing a disservice
by doing it in this state of mind.

If I should just talk about
something else that’s a bit sillier.

This.

Fuck me, it’s science fiction, it’s
science fiction and it’s terrifying.

A Chinese lab has created a
mutation of the coronavirus.

It’s called gx_p2v.

Already, what the fuck, guys, come on.

You have the
coronavirus and you’re like,

let’s, let’s mutate that
and see what we can do.

I mean, they’re, I understand
they’re not going to go as

simplistic as just straight
up calling it the T virus.

But why would you make a new
mutated strain of coronavirus?

The more terrifying aspect
of this new mutated strain

of coronavirus that they
created in this Chinese lab

was it causes 100% death in humanized mice.

So then we get to the second, what the
fuck, what the fuck are humanized mice?

Are we killing Stuart Little?

Is Stuart Little running around in a
little, little cage and then the Chinese

scientist coming up and like,
hey, we have this new coronavirus.

Would you like to take it and
Stuart Little being innocent,

goes, oh yes, I’d love
to help out and then they

give it to him and then he gets sick
and dies because it has a 100% death rate.

Why would you want to create
a virus with a 100% death rate?

This is bad science fiction
writing science fiction.

Like when they talk
about anything in science

fiction, they always
has to, it has to be like

perfect 100% murder death stuff.

T virus infects 98% or
99% of the people and

they turn into zombies
and then in like few

1% mutate into a higher
species or something.

That’s not a good idea.

I mean, from any aspect
scientifically, it’s not a good idea.

Economically, it’s not a good idea.

If you’re a company
president, it’s not a good idea.

Don’t, don’t do that.

Stuart Little, I have to think, I actually
have no problem with killing Stuart Little.

Stuart Little is a piece
of shit and I hope he dies.

The reason though is back
when I was young, I went

to San Jose and I went,
I flew down to San Jose

from Vancouver for a job fair and I
actually been lied to by a recruiter.

So the recruiter said, come on
down, we’ll be able to get you a job.

Of course it’s not that simple.

So I fly on down, call the recruiter,
I’m like, I’m here and they’re like, what?

I’m like, I’m here.

You said, if I came down,
you’d be able to get me a job.

Recruiter then just ghosts me.

So I’m going around San
Jose trying to find something,

but the level of depression
is super deep at this point.

Then the second day, I’m only in
there, I’m only in San Jose for like three,

four days because I’m supposed to be
in my mind doing a series of interviews

like day after day after
day, did not happen.

The second day there’s a
chemical plant that has a leak.

The chemical leak, we
get a message with the

motel, not fancy hotel
stuff because I’m poor.

We get a message in the motel that we’re
not really allowed to go outside anymore.

So I have to stay inside a motel.

Now this is back when HBO was
a new channel, HBO at that time.

Basically for about 24 hours, we would
put on two or three movies on repeat.

So within the order of 26, 30, 40 hours, I
don’t know, however long I was essentially

locked in that room so that I wouldn’t go
outside into the toxic wasteland that was

America and get poisoned to death,
I watch Stuart Little multiple times.

Weirdly, I can remember very
few details about Stuart Little.

I don’t know a lot about
what happened Stuart

Little despite the fact
that I can honestly say

I’ve seen it at least four
times, probably five or six.

I know that my brain
has reorganized itself.

So I’ve put a block on the
time that Stuart Little existed.

So as far as I’m concerned, Stuart
Little is only pain, it’s only suffering.

Stuart Little, if it had never existed, I
think my life would be better somehow.

So I blame weirdly Stuart
Little for most of my problems.

But back to China, GX
underscore two P2V, a corona

related virus found in a
Malaysian Panagolins in 2017.

So they’re hunting
around, they find panagolins.

These are these cute little
bird things from correct.

Actually, I’m going to look that up to
make sure I’m not just talking at my butt.

My butt does do a lot of talking though.

Sorry, it’s a little armadillo-like thing.

So I need to back up.

In 2017, I thought they were little birds.

In 2017, these Chinese scientists
found in Malaysian Panagolins, a new virus.

And they’re like, we’re
going to take that virus.

It’s like a cousin to corona virus.

We’re going to mutate
it, fuck with it a little bit.

And we’re going to
make it so that it kills

every humanized mouse
it ever encounters 100%.

And then we’re going to make it the freakiest
fucking science fiction we can make.

All infected mice died within eight days.

Why are you hunting for
armadillo-like animals and

extracting stuff and trying to
see what viruses they have?

Why?

This is maybe a question of science.

There are lots of things
that I can understand.

Why do we do something?

It seems difficult to comprehend
to the average lame in like myself.

I’m a lame and I don’t
understand a lot of stuff.

I’m kind of dumb.

Let’s find new viruses
and mess around with them

so that they are
designed to kill everybody.

Seems like bad science.

It’s, again, I think we’ve
gotten to the bad guy

in a James Bond film
level of ridiculousness.

When we’ve hit that stage.

All infected humanized
mice still freaks me

out every time I say that
word humanized mouse.

Died within eight days.

Their eyes became completely
white the day before they died.

Which is literally the most
science fiction shit you can get.

It’s almost like the Chinese government
went to these scientists who were like,

find a disease that is the most sci-fi
thing horror movie shit you could ever find.

And make it real.

Why? Again, nothing.

I don’t know.

There is a gentleman, a Francois Balois.

He’s the University College of
London Genetics Institute said,

“I can see nothing of value or interest
that could be learned from force infecting a

weird breed of humanized
mice with a random virus.

” Now, when I say it, it doesn’t
have a great deal of impact.

This guy, it does.

He, he, he studies this stuff.

He’s dead serious about viruses
and he’s like, I don’t see the point.

When I say I don’t see the point,
you’re like, well, chunk, read, chest.

You’re too stupid to see the point.

Why can I actually have it backed up this
time by saying, no, this guy, Francois.

He doesn’t see the point.

Me and Francois were on
the same page and he’s smart.

Conversely, I could see
how such stuff might go

wrong, which is the most apocalyptic
statement a geneticist could make.

And then this, this severely
fuels the conspiracy theory.

So like I heard about all the theories at
the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic,

that it was a virus designed to kill off
old people to stem the aging population

in China or Japan or something like that.

That it was designed
to kill people to a degree.

If you have a disease and now you’ve made
it that it’s 100% fatal to humanized mice,

it’s really fueling that
conspiracy theory a little bit more.

And you might, just as a general
thing, maybe just PR, not want to do that.

Feel bad stories.

Maybe that’s where we are today.

The other story that caught my interest
this week was a 40 year old English man.

It was in Thailand, you
know what, 48 year old

English man in Thailand
do, they have a good time.

So he’s living the life.

And then of course like
every 48 year old man

who doesn’t have a job and is
just in Thailand, he ran out of money.

So he calls up his family and he says,
hey, can you send me more money?

His family’s like, fuck off.

That’s the short version.

I don’t know how the
actual conversation went,

but I’m betting it was
something either British.

So piss off might have been
more the phraseology they chose.

So of course what he
did was just packed it up

and he went home and
he got a job and he lived

a quiet life or he could
do something more exciting.

He could pretend he got kidnapped and then
it tried to extort his family for money.

Now before I continue
with the story, can you

think of all the ways
this could go wrong?

Because I did reading
the title of the article.

I was like, I can see how
this does not work out for him.

Because if you are a 48 year old man and
you spend your time in Thailand partying,

you haven’t really sort
of set a stabilized aspect

of your life so that you look
towards future consequences.

That’s what I’m going to say.

I’m going to predict that for this man.

He really committed to the plan though.

And that’s actually something I
complain about criminals on the industry.

Not committing to the
plan or not following through.

We’re not doing all the things.

This guy, he did it.

So he has three friends and he has those
three friends beat the shit out of him.

So he has bruises and stuff all his face.

If you’re one of these
guys friends, this is

probably the best night
you’ve had in a while.

It’s like, hey, we got this guy.

He’s in the friend group.

I don’t know if he’s a
friend, but he’s in the

friend group and he
just literally asked us.

To beat the shit out of him.

So he looks like he’s been kidnapped and I
would be like, you know what? I’m on board.

I’m going to call Dave.

I’m going to call everyone else.

We’re going to show up.

We’re going to beat this guy.

It’s going to be a great night.

We’re going to have cocktails after them.

Then they need deposes gangsters
and demand money for his release.

So they do some FaceTime videos.

They record some videos.

They send to his family
of him looking beat up

with guys in the
background saying he’s been

kidnapped, send money or
they’re going to finish them off.

The family does what I would consider
the most logical and obvious next step,

which our gentleman friend, the
hero of the story, had not considered.

They called the police.

The police then call Interpol
because this is an international

police issue because it’s
between multiple countries.

Interpol.

I don’t know enough
about them in real life, but

I know what I’ve seen in movies
and they do not fuck around.

Actually, most of the Interpol
movies are a bit ridiculous.

So I bet that’s not very realistic.

I spend a lot of, they spend
probably a lot of time on

computers, following money
trails and stuff like that.

But realistically, when Interpol says we
need a SWAT team strike team or something,

I bet they get what they
want and it’s pretty hardcore.

So the family is called the police.

The Interpol then track
him down at a hotel.

They don’t say what that means.

I would be interested
to know what that means.

Maybe he’s credit card
where he was staying.

They have a strike
team and breach the door.

Now, when you use the word breach,
as opposed to break down or kick in,

you know there was a small explosive
involved, which again, I do love.

I love that how far this has gotten
out of hand with him, not even realizing.

At this point, the
guys in the room, he

thinks my family’s going
to send money any day

now and we’re going to be able
to keep partying for however long.

And then I’ll just do it again.

I’ll just recycle my kidnapping scheme.

My family keeps sending money.

They’ll never catch on because
he thinks there is dumb as he is.

The police breach the door.

They do not find him kidnapped.

They find him drinking and doing
drugs with the supposed kidnappers.

Who are all his friends?

The arrests are going
to include illegal firearms.

So the ex-ed guns, which is surprising,
illegal ammunition, a variety of drugs,

possession of drugs, doing
drugs, whatnot, and expired visas.

Most likely he’s actually just
going to get deported to the UK.

The interesting thing to me is now
to think about the aftermath of this.

So he’s been deported to the,
so he’s faked his kidnapping.

He’s been arrested by
Interpol who’s probably

going to charge him,
if not for a crime,

for the money that it costs to, you
know, get the strike team and save him

from his fake kidnapping.

He has to go home to
his family because I’m

going to guarantee this guy
doesn’t have his own place.

He doesn’t have a job. He doesn’t
have, he’s not taking care of himself.

He was using other people’s money to
go party in Thailand. He’s 48 years old.

He’s not got a
handle on his life.

He’s not, you know, figured
out how the world works,

especially because he thought
this scheme would work in 2024.

I’m trying to imagine.

I don’t know his family, the first
night home where he’s having dinner.

Realistically, they should probably
disown him and not let him in,

but they’ve obviously like fostered
this kind of behavior in the past.

So I actually bet he comes home for dinner
that night, which is just off the chain.

This is like just buck wild stuff.

Now, yeah, I mean, conclusion.
I didn’t write a conclusion.

Doing multiple stories, I want a
conclusion that ties them all together.

So this is going
to be a new skill.

I’m going to have to work on, and I
shouldn’t work on it on four drinks.

Let’s put it that way.

Senate hearings need to be
focused on the actual issue at hand.

Don’t make viruses
that are going to kill

everybody on the planet and
don’t fake your own kidnapping.

Is that where I am? That’s
a very weird place to be.

And here we are. This is where we are
in the world. So having heard that though,

at least you know
you can do better.

And if you’re feeling like
you’re not doing a good job,

you didn’t fake your
own kidnapping this week.

You didn’t create a virus that could
potentially kill the entire planet this week.

And you didn’t do a
fucking weird Senate hearing

where you didn’t even
focus on the issues this

week when you were just
like political grandstanding.

You woke up and you
did your job and you

tried to be a good person and you tried
to live your life. And I appreciate you.

I don’t appreciate senators who
are just political grandstanding.

I don’t appreciate
scientists who are

creating megaviruses
that are in kill everybody.

And I don’t appreciate
fake kidnappings.