In this podcast episode, the hosts delve into the catastrophic failures of recent 'woke' video games and explore the puzzling absence of a supportive woke audience. They discuss the severe underperformance of high-budget titles like 'Concord' and 'Dustborn,' theorizing why these games failed despite being heavily marketed to woke ideologies. The conversation expands to analyze the broader implications of wokeism in the culture, video game industry, and corporate environments. They also consider alternate theories about why woke signaling doesn't translate into tangible support and how this might signal a larger cultural shift.
[00:00:00] can we activate , a woke user base? If we just go pure woke, be creative, go story heavy. Like, is that something that can be done?
Right. Answer appears to be no. And so this is genuinely a little perplexing to me. Because my interpretation of the current American electorate or body is about 15 to 20 percent of America Genuinely hold some form of woke ideology.
Yet this faction is not buying anything. And the question is why now I there's, I'm going to go over the generic theories that people make, right? One is to say, well, the mistakes that these companies are making is that they are listening to people who are very loud online, which is predominantly people without anything else going on in their lives, i.
e. [00:01:00] unemployed people. Who don't have the money to go out and buy games. And it's like, that's an interesting theory. But the problem with that theory is I can just look at the donations from , the famed tech company. And like, 98 percent of , Facebook is going to The Democrats or I can look at the very fact that Sony even thought to produce this day.
Clearly, there's a large technocratic faction in America that works in large well paying bureaucracies that is Or at least signals that they are woke, right?
Would you like to know more?
Hello, Simone! It is wonderful to be here with you today! I am excited to be chatting with you, and the reason I am excited to be chatting with you today is Something happened in the video games industry, which is this last week, which is going to change American culture and world culture going forward.
That's a big statement. [00:02:00] The consecutive and catastrophic failure of one, a AAA title and then two, a really big and, and sort of emblematic woke game. And so in this podcast, I think many people have missed the core mystery of what's happening here. What they focus on is the wokies are trying to be like, Oh, you know, horrible right wing.
Boycott caused us to lose, blah blah blah blah, right? You know, that's their take on this. And then the right wing is looking at this and saying, Oh my god, this is amazing, look at them suffering, look at them seething, like, Things are gonna definitely have to change here. And I think what's being missed between these two interpretations, Is where is the woke audience and when I say this, I mean this in a real sense.
I'm not saying the woke audience is smaller than woke people expect it [00:03:00] to be, right? I'm saying it appears the woke audience. Is virtually non existent and where this is really made clear to me that was on a slide scholars episode right now and the other guest was a a former college professor and he was talking about all the woke stuff that was happening on his campus And I was like wait, wait, wait, we cannot be here gloating About how no woke people exist to buy these products while at the same time talking about this woke oppressive environment on college campuses.
Yeah. Right. Where is the woke customer? There's a discrepancy at play, right? So first I want to talk about why this is so big. Okay. So there have been video game crashes in the past, which permanently transformed the industry like. The E. T. game for people who are familiar with that. Actually, I want to quickly look up how many copies sold at that.
Yeah, but very famously, I think, what, in the late 80s, that was supposed to be one of [00:04:00] the early biggest investment video games ever. I think it maybe had record amounts of investment in its development. And it also obviously was associated with extremely successful IP in the form of the E. T. movie. The video game came out, massive flop, nobody wanted to play it.
And it goes down in video game history as a massive failure. This, apparently, was worse than that. Well, so, let's, let's, let's give an idea of how much worse than that it is, okay? Oh my gosh, okay. So the OOP D video game was developed by a single developer, okay, a single guy made the game, okay? Oh. It sold 2.
6 million copies. It flopped so hard, it destroyed the video game industry and forced it to remake itself. This is when the video game industry was in its infancy. Today, the video game industry makes more money than the TV and movie industries combined, in terms of cultural impact. [00:05:00] Yeah, the consumers are there.
So anything, even shitty things, should be making a decent amount of sales. Right. So, remember, 2. 3 million is what it had sold, right? 2. 3 million. Okay, so, Conker. This is a game that was a flagship title for Sony, alright? This was a game that had 100 to 200 million dollars in development, a large team working on it, and it was in development for over 8 years.
How can something cost that much money? Consider it like a movie budget or something like that.
So, Sony had so much faith in this game, they acquired the studio that was making it. They made controllers that were themed to go with the game. They made Sony devices. Like, what are those called again?
Playstations. Playstations themed to go with the game. So this game was released about a [00:06:00] week ago at this point. To great fanfare, apparently. To great non fanfare, yes, but yes. It, right now, concurrently on Steam, has 68 players. Huh! The game peaked at 697 concurrent players on Steam. Um, Oh my god! I, so to compare though, like, what's, what's a normal, like a, non, maybe we'll say a boutique game.
You know, made by an independent developer. How many concurrent players might they have on Steam?
Okay, what's a game that you've heard of that's what I can use a game from a while ago that I've heard of Skyrim Grand Theft Auto Dead Red Redemption because it's tough. I remember like a billion years ago
skyrim, concurrently, right now, has over 2, 000 people playing it, and it came out decades ago at this point. Red Dead Redemption 2 here 000 players right now. This came out like five years ago. 26, 000 players. Okay, how about the Harry Potter game [00:07:00] that everyone was like, let's cancel it, because that was an anti woke game. Yeah, okay. We'll see. Let's look for something that recently came out like these, because this is still going.
Yeah, except, well, why I like the Harry Potter one was because I know it's still on shelves, because we saw it this morning. And two it was supposed to be a game that people who were woke would not play for political reasons. Okay Harry Potter Just like people who were woke would play Concord for political reasons, theoretically. Okay, Hogwarts Legacy. So this game is at That looks fun. 13. 5 thousand right now. Okay. And like, back to Concord, how many concurrent players at its launch? At its absolute peak, it was at 697. Oh! Oh, lord almighty! Okay, now see, that has the impact I was looking for. Remember the other game I told you ET sold 2. 3 million copies of Rivermaster fluff?
Concord sold About 25, 000 copies across all [00:08:00] platforms. 25, 000. Wow. It's sold about the same number of copies as there are concurrent players of Hogwarts legacy today, even though Hogwarts legacy came out forever ago. Yes. Wow. That's a good comparison. Wow. But it wasn't the only instance of something like this happening recently to just, you know, be confusing here.
So another one was a game called Dustborn. Right now, I'm actually listening to the entire story of the game Dustborn. I'm watching a full walkthrough that was like, I want to see how these people think. It is a game. Where essentially you play oh, sorry, I should note before we go further, how woke this other game Concord was.
Because I think there's a few important things to note here, which hide some of the coverage that people will say. People will say, first I'll just explain the style of the game. It's basically an Overwatch clone. And people will say, well, we have enough Overwatch clones. And it's like, yeah, but the reason you have so many Overwatch clones is because people keep playing them [00:09:00] whenever they're released, right?
That's why you have so many Overwatch clones. And people are like, well, Overwatch clones are there's free versions of Overwatch clones. And it's like, the core way that Overwatch clones work is they charge you to interact with additional characters often. You know, you get the new characters and stuff like that.
That's how many of the free to play Overwatch clones work. And a new game launching could just be thought of as new characters that people could try and play with. The it already exists on the market is not a good explanation for bombing this hard. It would be a good explanation for a mediocre launch.
It would not be a good explanation for almost nobody buying it. And it was so bombed by the way that it has been removed from the stores. Everyone who bought it is being refunded and it's being shut down. It's Saturday the 6th, which is tomorrow on the day of filming this, it will almost certainly be all the servers shut down by then.
We literally tried to buy it at Walmart this morning, and we got them to unlock a [00:10:00] shelf to give us the game, and they refused to sell it to us. The machines wouldn't let them ring it up, even though they didn't know that it was supposed to be taken off the shelf. So that was sad for us. Sad day. Yeah.
And so to understand how woke this game is. If you look at it, it apparently has, of the 16 playable characters, one of them is a white man. That's impressive. You know? And the white man is, from what I can tell, I think when they say a white man, it's a green alien character. Oh. Who uses a white person as a, skin? Yeah, I'll put it on the screen here. Wait, so it's a green, it's an alien wearing white face. No, no, no, it's, it's, it's just like a white actor of that's what they mean when they say it has a white character in it. Oh, it has a character based on a black trans woman being one of the leading characters.
Okay. It has an overweight. Black woman character. It has [00:11:00] no attractive female characters in it, of course. It is, it is, it is so woke that when you open up the game to like, look at your character bios, above the bio, right next to the level of this character for you, and under the name. So the most important thing is their pronouns.
That is the way that they introduce characters. Wow. God forbid you misgender a fictional character. Right? You gotta, you gotta make absolutely sure that people get this. So, this game completely flops, right? Then another game came out recently called Dustborn, which was woker than Concord, but it was actually trying to sell specifically to a woke audience.
In a way that Concord wasn't. Concord appeared to be woke policies overlaid on a big budget game development. Okay. Dustborn is different. Dustborn is a character where like Triggering someone is like a [00:12:00] superpower and like the main character, a sassy black lady, can like manipulate people's emotions and, and literally gaslight them and stuff like that, for example, to gain power over them.
And she's quite a bad person for what I've seen in terms of watching this so far. They have these fantasies where they are going around and manipulating people using their words or whatever.
Alright, here we go.
We ghost. Now here's what I'd say about just for Dustborn is an interesting game for a few reasons and if I agreed with the ideology I would buy it.
I actually think that the ideology of dustborn should be selling copies of the game Because it's teaching people how to support the cause by being manipulative No, Simone, I'm just gonna tap this and tell me to make sure it's still coming from here Yeah, [00:13:00] no because it's an interesting world. So it takes place in a near future alternate reality Where the Conservatives have basically taken over from their perspective.
The United States is divided into two factions, both of which this core band that looks like just classic DEI trash heap, right, is fighting against. And one of them is a militaristic post American government called like the, I think the, the Patriots or something, or the Nationalists. And then the other which controls the other half of America is called the Puritans and they're a techno utopian faction.
the shadows of and I'm like, well, this is cool. It's this world where the Puritans, the techno Puritans are out chasing these people with their clean sleek drone things. That sounds like us. Okay. Yeah, no, but I am What I I love that the wokes are like secretly afraid of like this evil puritan techno faction.
I'm like, yeah, I [00:14:00] like that Be afraid malcolm. They know they know they know. So, I I I like the world building. It's interesting to me. It's like, okay This is this is an interesting like you're clearly trying to set up a new world here if I didn't find your politics so repellent, I might be interested in seeing what you're trying to construct with this.
Mm-Hmm. In addition to that, the game looks visually pleasant to me. Okay. So the characters aren't got like based characters? Oh no. The character, the main characters are all ugly, but I mean, other than the main characters it's done in like a borderlands style. But what's interesting about it is the way that they did gameplay, because watching the walkthrough I'm seeing this, they have combined elements of Guitar Hero and Beat Em Ups and sort of word based choose the right dialogue option, use your powers within dialogue to achieve certain endings that I could see be appealing to people.
Yeah. But here's the problem. So this game came out [00:15:00] pretty recently. It's Current player count was around 28 for the day in terms of players for today. 28, 000? No, 28. And it's top ever was 83 people playing it. It sold fewer than a thousand copies. And likely had between 2. 25 and 3 million behind it.
Oh dear. Okay. Big loss. Huge loss. Ouch. Yeah. I mean, not as big as the other one in terms of the financial impact, but this one is also interesting to me because this one is like, can we activate a yoke, a woke user base? If we just go pure woke, be creative, go story heavy. Like, is that something that can be done?
Right. Answer appears to be no. And so this is genuinely a little perplexing to me. Why? Why, when the whole message for years has been go woke, go broke, why does this surprise you? Because my [00:16:00] interpretation of the current American electorate or body is about 15 to 20 percent of America Genuinely hold some form of woke ideology.
Yet this faction is not buying anything. And the question is why now I there's, I'm going to go over the generic theories that people make, right? One is to say, well, the mistakes that these companies are making is that they are listening to people who are very loud online, which is predominantly people without anything else going on in their lives, i.
e. unemployed people. Who don't have the money to go out and buy games. And it's like, that's an interesting theory. But the problem with that theory is I can just look at the donations from like, the famed tech company. And like, 98 percent of like, Facebook is going to The [00:17:00] Democrats or I can look at the very fact that Sony even thought to produce this day.
Clearly, there's a large technocratic faction in America that works in large well paying bureaucracies that is Or at least signals that they are woke, right? The second thesis could be, well nobody's actually that into woke ideology. Like a lot of people will signal it but nobody's really that into it.
Or it could be that the proportion of America that is into woke ideology has almost no overlap with the portion of Americans who play video games. I think no, because it's pretty clear that people play video games in droves. I do think that the video games that men and women play are a little bit different and that women are more progressive.
So that just certainly has something to do with it, but I think your second theory resonates, and this could be a really good Natural experiment or piece of natural [00:18:00] evidence that suggests it is, it may be right, meaning that being woke or espousing progressive values works really, really well for signaling, but it doesn't work really, really well in real life.
So people signal it to get tactically ahead in conversations and social hierarchies within bureaucracies, but in their actual life, they don't leverage it because they either intuitively or logically understand that it will produce bad results if they adopt it. Does that make sense? No, explain. In other words, I will at work use.
pronouns and ask people for their pronouns and express, you know, my, my discomfort with the historical land use of my region or whatever, and use all that to signal that I belong to the correct group and that I'm doing the right things, but then when I go home, I'm not going to. Consume woke [00:19:00] media. I'm not going to refer to the correct pronouns.
I'm not going to live that life behind closed doors because it doesn't produce Mental flourishing. It doesn't yield the best products. I'm going to disagree really strongly with you here. Okay. I think that there is a portion of Americans who go home and their houses are woke prisons for the less woke of the family.
I have read about this. I have seen it on forums. I just do not think that you are right on this point. I think that there really are a lot of genuinely woke people. Families that like to, because the social technology, the reason why people lean into it is because they can use it to emotionally manipulate others.
I guess including their family, right? So they use it to emotionally manipulate their families. The kids use it to emotionally manipulate their parents that this is In these families where you have these kids transitioning at like three and like eight Do you not think that wokeism is [00:20:00] dripping from every single wall of these houses?
No, not necessarily because think about it this way. I could see parents being terrified about the state taking away their child one, if they don't support their child in their exploration or teachers ratting on them or high schoolers who are transitioning. I'm talking about the people transitioning between like three.
I know. I think a lot of that may also have to do with. Existing or pending divorces and one parent using youth gender transition to get on a kid's side or examples of it happening outside of divorces. Yeah, I think that you're struggling to model that people can be this petty, but this was actually really interesting of me when I was watching the, the just born game, because I got to see in the game, the social interaction of the characters.
And to see what they think normal social interaction looks like. And [00:21:00] it was incredibly tedious. Oh. Every single conversation was like, you hurt me by hiding this from me. You, oh talking about feelings and sharing grievances. You hurt me by doing this. And then the conversation would get shut down by one of them that had emotional manipulation.
Powers manipulating the other. The general loop of the game that I'm seeing so far. They think this is normal for all social interaction. Oh wow, okay. So clearly this is happening in their home. And the second thing I want to shut down here is the idea that gamers, there's no woke gamers. Right. You get, I, I agree the majority of gamers are not woke.
But if you look at things like the GDC before the gamers developers conference, where all the game developers went out in your ablative fields and yet screamed at the sky, like, like spaz is about all of the right wing influences that were ruining their industry. Right. You do not get more woke [00:22:00] than that.
Yeah. The screaming at the sky. Yeah. I am going to pause it. An alternate theory to the theory we've been discussing. Yeah, I'm lost. So, don't take anything you've got. Okay. So I think it's a combination of two things. I think the people who signal woke tactics within an office environment are using similar woke tactics within their households and within their relationships.
However, I think that they are actually the minority of people within these office environments. I think most woke people who are signaling to you and everyone else that they are woke they are of their own mental landscape and prisoners of the world around them. So it's like people in the cult who go along with it because they just don't want to get hurt anymore.
Yes. They're just like, okay, stop hitting what they know they could lose their job. They won't be able to support their family anymore. They won't be able to, If, if they don't have a, a strong internal [00:23:00] moral compass, they have no reason to dissent. And due to the way cognitive dissonant works, they passively.
begin to believe the woke things, but they don't actively believe the woke things. They, to your point, aren't actually doing the woke signaling at home in the way other people are. They are not the woke police outside of Their spouse says something and they're like, Hey, you shouldn't say that because it could have these effects on our family.
You shouldn't say that because of wokeism. Right. You know, but like, don't you know, we live under a totalitarian state that's constantly policing and everything that's being heard and said. So I think that this is one faction. Right. And then I think the other faction. Which is not insignificant, right?
Like if they bought things, they could be a real powerhouse in terms of buyers. And this is what's getting me when they're like, our game bombed because it was [00:24:00] boycotted by you know, right wingers, right? It's like, but if the woke audience existed, a right wing boycott shouldn't have affected your sales numbers this much, right?
Apparently you weren't just boycotted by right wingers, you were boycotted by a woke audience as well. How did that happen? I think that these woke people live in a state of mental internal turmoil that is so high that they struggle to do basic day to day functions and most of their day is really spent in these Apology spirals in these online fights and in these so you're saying, oh my gosh, you're saying that woke people are so dysfunctional that they cannot even make time in their day to play a video game.
Yes, it is. It is not that they don't have money because clearly some of them do. They're involved in the [00:25:00] manufacturing of these games. They're involved in what's coming out of Hollywood these days. Wow. They live in a state of mental impoverishment and spiritual impoverishment that is so great that they probably cry multiple times a day.
They probably see a therapist like once a week. They probably are just barely holding things together. I guess if you go through what actually is required of being. A true believer within the progressive movement. Now it does involve so much self victimization that it could be self victimization to the point of complete dysfunction to your point.
But think about like, try to model the relationship of people. Like when I try to, you know, you may disagree with this, but like Jen from Fundie Fridays and her husband, because I'm able to see both of them and how they interact. These individuals come across. In terms of the [00:26:00] lack of vitalism that's left in them, after all the signaling and after all the fighting, that's clearly part of their day.
I was actually recently watching a Amanda, a famous Antinatalists right, who's also very woke. And when I looked at what was left of her as a, as, as sort of a residue of humanity.
She reminded me of almost one of those shadows that's left of somebody after a nuclear explosion. Like a ghoulish reminder of what was once human but is now Nothing but residue.
Their, their core vitality and inability to feel any happiness or engagement with the world has been genuinely blasted from them. And now every moment is dedicated to self flagellation. And a, and a form of self flagellation. So people who don't know this, [00:27:00] If you look at something like the Opus Dei, and we're going to do an episode on them, this is a Catholic sect that's famous for various forms of self flagellation and like mortification they're actually pretty happy people, because they have a moral mandate to be happy, because you control your emotions and the self flagellation and all the other mortification techniques are meant to give you more control over your emotional state, which is something I agree with.
The Wokies are the exact opposite. All of the self flagellation is to feel and to bring up as much despair as possible. They almost have these like despair feedback loops around things like the environment or any of the other things they want to feel sad about, where the amount that you are wailing and despairing increases your status, which creates this environment in miasma of constant despair.
That is wild. Hypothesis. I have a secondary hypothesis, which I think is further deflating the numbers. Oh, yeah, I mean, of [00:28:00] course, this could be several factors, and there is no doubt a portion of the population that is so mentally dysfunctional that they can't even get themselves to play a game, but there must be other things at play here, so let's go for it.
What is it? The, the final factor is In the 90s, if a movie I just liked released a video game, I wouldn't play it. You know, I knew that video game movies were bad. This was like a thing in the 90s. Everybody knew And, and movies made about video games were bad. If a, somebody makes a movie of a video game, you just don't go watch it, it was bad.
Now, this was not true in the early days. There were a few good early video game movies, like the Street Fighters original movie and the Mortal Kombat movies, those were fantastic. Oh, and the first Resident Evil movie was great. And then sort of after that era, there was this era of bad video game movies.
Everyone knew, don't go watch video game movies. Even if you like the video games. Because they're almost always bad. Okay. And what we might be seeing here is [00:29:00] people have come to associate even woke people, any game that signals any degree of wokeness with, this is going to be terrible. And one of the questions is, I mean, we all know this.
We know that woke movies are just like worse than non woke movies. When you get to the woke Marvel stuff, when you get to the, you know, the video games, when you get to the Woke Indiana Jones. When you get to that, you're like, okay, this is going to be bad because I saw some woke stuff with a question.
Well, how do you know that? Why? Why is there such a correlation here? It's not that they get less money or attention. And the answer is. Is the more woke stuff that is coming through in terms of the advertising and the plot and the character design, the more is being implemented in terms of hiring. And what is woke hiring?
Woke hiring is hiring based on social signaling and not ability. And so basically we know when I see something that's signaling wokeness, That it [00:30:00] wasn't made by competent people who were, it was made by idiots, basically. That's always my take. It was made by idiotic bureaucrats who knew how to signal.
Who were not hired for merit. Yeah. Who were hired for signaling and not merit. That's scary. And what this all comes down to at the end of the day, like the reason this could change culture so much is when you talk about how important the video game industry is to culture, if the video game industry does walk back from all of this and begins to see releasing a game that's signaling wokeness like as bad as releasing a game that's signaling blatant racism, because, I mean, it is signaling blatant racism, but I mean, like, what they would consider racism.
They understand you have to be afraid to look woke. Is where we're entering now. If that happens, that's going to have a major cultural shift. And I think the people who came out ahead of all this are going to end up looking really good. One of the things I mentioned to you recently, and [00:31:00] I think Zuck is going to go anti woke soon.
Yeah, he's certainly entering his new era, the fro and chain era. But he's not getting cred from the anti woke audience, because I mentioned this on a, you know, another anti woke influencer. And they were like, yeah, but like, it's not hard to do that now. Like everyone knows to go anti woke now, right? You know?
And I hope they made the costly signals early, like Elon, really people remember that he lost a lot of money. Trying to fix things. Or the people who are like, oh you want such a No, honestly, I think anyone who has this like mindset that, oh, Elon, he didn't really make his money or he didn't really do this.
You've got to understand there is an entire apparatus out there that is dedicated to try to brainwash you into believing. Well, and Elon Musk is broadly a very progressive person who also cares deeply about climate change. So there is that too. And [00:32:00] he helped his child transition. A lot of people don't know that he helped his child transition.
He sent the child to all the gender reforming stuff. He got the child the gender transition hormones. He got the child everything He was far in the progressive camp before he made his transition and he made the transition when he had Nothing to benefit from it and that requires an incredible amount of mortal fortitude and so when you look at all of these people who are like, Oh, he just wants to be popular or he just wants whatever.
I would consider it in the context of the sacrifices that you cannot ignore that he has made. To make this transition early. So I hope that, and I hope that people like ourselves who have been positioning ourselves against a lot of these woke overreaches are able to, as the winds change, benefit from this.
However, and as I've said before, the one thing I can't account for is this isn't a normal cultural change. [00:33:00] Wokeism is a memetic virus, which is very good at targeting and entrenching itself. Within bureaucracies. Yes. And no matter how hard they try, you know, you might try to remove it from a bureaucracy.
It's going to be very difficult. Very, very difficult. Yeah, unless you just recreate the organization. I mean, if anyone tried, like tried to cut out the cancer, you'd end up cutting out like 89 percent of the company or more, right? Like, that is what happens when you're cutting out the cancer. You know, it is really deep and profuse.
And if you want the host to survive, you have to be willing to make costly decisions, which is very difficult for a large company like a Microsoft or a Sony to do. You know, Microsoft not long ago doubled down on some of its woke stuff, right? You know, in terms of its employee training and [00:34:00] everything like that.
So, like, how, how do you, how do you fight against it when these companies no longer care about profit maximization anymore? And my answer to this is I think we need to start having this societal frameshift that wokeism is bigotry. And to call it bigotry and to say I don't like this problem because it is woke and bigoted.
Every time, like I think we should, every time we use the word woke, say woke and bigoted. So that people remember. And, and I love the word bigotry and bigoted because it's one of those words they forgot to redefine. They redefined racism. They forgot to redefine bigotry. So yeah, you hit it with that and they're like, yeah, I guess it is definitionally a bigoted thing to do.
Now there was a final point. Oh yeah. And if anyone here is like, well, my company is infected by wokeism. What do I do? Like if you're a CEO or something like that, if you need somebody to come in and do consulting on this, I thought about doing a little bit about this on this side just let me know Stanford MBA.
Background in private equity [00:35:00] company management and venture capital. So I'm pretty qualified for this stuff. Oh, and I wrote a bestselling book on governance. You're just really good at thinking through complex problems. So I love it. Yeah. Happy to come in and help. And I'd also note to these individuals that this could be a legal risk to your company after the Supreme Court decision the Harvard decision.
It has now become a active legal risk to any company that is employing systemically woke policy IE, any policy that is bigoted against individuals based on their race or sexuality, which wokeism intrinsically is. Yeah. Well, how do you score that though? With all of the existing government policies that obligate organizations to favor certain classes, like minority owned businesses, women owned businesses, et cetera.
A lot of those have been rolled back. I'm, I'm knee deep in RFP still for our business that we run. And, okay. Well, so this stuff is going to be [00:36:00] rolled back based on lawyers going forward. And you wouldn't believe it. I was actually in an RFP call this morning. And like some of the other businesses. One was literally called diversity travel.
I'm not kidding you. Diversity travel. Diversity travel. Yeah. Wonderful. I, I, I, I, I like, do they win RfPs? I'd be interested to see. Presumably. Yeah. I mean, anyone that was in that call and I made a list of everyone, like I always do to see what our competition is like. Presumably has a significant portion of their business that is dependent on RFP based travel, meaning they work with universities and state agencies and organizations like that.
So what I'm just saying is that it is it is deeply entrenched within our government, which makes up a significant portion of the GDP of the United States, because we are largely a socialist country. Okay. That you have to discriminate based on race and [00:37:00] gender and other forms of, of status. And that status is not based on reality, by the way, it's based on specific certifications that you gain and have to apply for and have to pay to apply for.
Like I couldn't just say, this is a woman owned business. You would have to be certified and have your application and fill out the paperwork. So this sorts for not true diversity, but rather, you know, like if I were to, if I were to try to correct for systemic bias in society, proactively as like, Empress of the United States.
Like if I had to, cause normally I'd be like, let these things kind of correct themselves or let the market recover. I wouldn't, I wouldn't favor things like the government does now where it says, okay, well you have to discount the cost presented by any business that meets this status so that you give them an extra boost.
I would rather say, [00:38:00] okay, we'll invest in extra resources, like extra mentorship, extra. Startup funding, low interest loans for businesses that meet these qualifications, but don't make it easier for them to sell to clients. Like if they should go out of business, they should go out of business. Don't artificially change their pricing in the eyes of everyone who works for the government and with government funds, because then it's just going to be very inefficient.
What we, I mean, the only way to fix this is. for Trump to win, for us to campaign, to get in his administration, and then set up a department just looking for, it'd be very easy to get, even at the state level, these laws erased. You just do like the government did to ensure like a standardized drinking.
Easier said than done. No, it's, it's not hard. What they did to standardize. the marijuana laws. And w tie federal funds to the you have to get rid of po we just get them all once they're erased, it w bring them back because I So unpalatable these days [00:39:00] the idea that you would have these sorts of policies, especially when you put on how much they cost the taxpayer.
And when I say cost the taxpayer, the way I would word this is how much they are preventing from going to the homeless. So you don't focus on how much extra in taxes you pay. You focus on how many millions of dollars aren't going to homeless people because these policies exist with the assumption that instead of that policy staying with the taxpayer, it would all go to the homeless.
Yeah, I mean, I, I'm more focused on how much of your tax dollars are wasted on paperwork and bureaucracy when these things are utilized. Right, you care about waste because you're a human being and not a voter. Well, no, it sucks if I give a dollar to the government if like 75 cents of that goes toward nonsense paperwork that makes my life more miserable as a taxpayer.
Yeah, that would matter to me. Yes, but you're not a normal voter. I don't know, people can say in the comments. Who, what, what, what? I don't think normal voters are in the comments. . We have, I They are, I have. We have very normal people in the comments. Normies, [00:40:00] normal people watch our show. Not weird people. This is very true.
Our Discord server literally has more intellectual conversations than we have on this podcast. We have a. Really intelligent, weirdly skewed audience of, of very smart and engaged. You know, they're not smart. They're normal people. Simone.
We're just normal men. What do you mean, normal men? We're just innocent men. We're playing from htq a little bit later on. So if you'd like to
I have worked very hard to build a normal audience with normal, not weird people.
Okay. They are, they are normal men. Simone, our audience is normal men. Just like they say on side scrollers. They, they, they're, they're, they're. They are just trying to live a normal life, okay? Like Trump and J. D. Vance. J. D. Vance swears he's not weird.[00:41:00]
He is the weirdest. I, I, I, I like him. I wish they would just like embrace the weirdness of their thing. I love our Revenge of the Nerds episode on this, because that's the way I feel about like the left right now.
Democrats and the Harris campaign now deploying a new adjective to blast the Republican ticket. Some of what he and his running mate are saying, well, it's just plain weird. Get those nerds! I mean, on the other side, they're just weird. Nerds! It's not just a, a, a, a weird style that he brings. Nerds! Nerds!
Nerds! Nerds! Where are they? I think they're talking about us. No way. Oh no! Ah! Ah! Ah!
When they're like, you guys aren't following the new social norms we created. Anyway.
Love you to decimum. Have a spectacular day. Oh, and something I'd also note about diversity in these games, just before we hop off, because you and I were talking about [00:42:00] this recently, is what quote unquote diversity is depends on how the cult is evolving and doesn't represent real diversity. So if you look at modern diversity And you can look at this and shows basically hispanic people don't exist like hispanic people should be there should be if you're trying to be like accurate to the US population to hispanic people for every black person.
But no, huge over representation of black people. Almost in hispanic people but then the other thing that's really interesting is the disabled group, right? So I was watching the magic school bus recently and there's a little kid in a wheelchair And I was like, oh, yeah a little kid in a wheelchair like I remember you you play basketball And do lots of cool wheelchair tricks And no engineering you all know the guy he was in everything for a while in the 90s Yeah, But kid in a wheelchair disappeared.
He is not part of diversity crew anymore. There is no more kid in [00:43:00] a wheelchair. Yeah, that's yeah. What's the word for that? Ableist. Yes. It is very ableist, racist and ableist, I guess. Racist, enablist bastards. Yeah, what, what did happen to the wheelchairs? That is very odd. I, I, I kind of want to make Ken in a wheelchair like a new conservative thing.
Like, put him in a wheelchair and American flags. Have him, like, paying his b ball. Because he could always do the cool b ball things. Wheelchair could big MAGA flags on it. Like what's up with those MAGA pickup trucks? You know what I'm talking about, right? We're random weekend days. You'll just see a MAGA truck driving by and there's not a progressive equivalent.
There's just the MAGA pickup truck. I don't get it. Well, because progressives aren't really proud of their party. I mean, look, they didn't even vote for their own candidate. It was chosen for them by a secret cabal of party elites. Like progressives have no say. It's follow the cult or be taken out [00:44:00] back and shot basically.
Like that's where the progressive party has gotten at this point. And I love, I like still see progressives who like say things like Donald Trump is more fascist than Kamala Harris. And I'm like, the level of brainwashed you have to be to believe that is Astounding. I mean, aesthetically, Trump loves, he's, you know, No, no, aesthetically, but like in terms of their actual actions and policy.
I don't, here's, no, but look at this. Everyone's saying that the United States of. General election campaign is run on vibes right now. This is about aesthetics. And I don't know if people are even aware of anything beyond aesthetics these days, or at least a lot of mainstream. I remember I was talking to one progressive about like, I was like, well, at least with Tim Walz, you know, you must have to have like issues with the fact.
that he kept everyone in their houses during COVID and then had a tip line where you could report your neighbors for leaving their house to have them arrested. Like [00:45:00] you don't see that as like a little fashy. And they're like, no, everybody had COVID policy like that. I'm like, did they? This is, this is getting 1984 level here.
I don't know. I loved, I loved Peru though, where they were like, girls go out today, boys go out today. That was, That was just great. That's how they did in Parola. That's how they do it. Yeah. So, we're gonna end here. I love you to death, Simone. And I hope you have a spectacular day. Same. Which one do you want to do next?
We could do one on that shelf.
By the way. I saw what you left with my love with thyroxine prescription. What is this? Field of screams. Is this a call for help? Malcolm? This is a call for our family to do some fun Halloween stuff. At these prices? Scream pass, 40 to 55. Triple combo, 38. The extreme blackout. Is 60 multiple ATMs on site.
What, what is this? But a terrifying [00:46:00] way to lose money vacation. I said, we need to go on less vacations and do more things at home. The only thing that's scary about this is just how hideous everything looks. Okay. The zombie fun run does look really fun. It's zombie fun. You saw that one? And there's just like random wholesome, like corn event where they're like, Oh, it'll be fine.
Bring your kids. It's not that scary. But then on the cover, don't forget. But don't you want to terrify our children, Simone? Like, wouldn't it give you some joy? I, I have them sit right at bedtime and watch videos of bears killing other animals so that they don't go running outside every night. And, What do they do, but wander in two hours later in the pitch dark?
Mommy, can I see a bear video again? There's no stopping these savages. I don't I love, I love Octavian telling Torci, A bear will bite you and rip off your skin. Wow! Yeah, I mean, at least they understand it, I guess. My [00:47:00] concern is if we actually take them to one of these things, they'll think that they actually have license to try to kill people.
And I don't know how effective they'll be. Little concerned. Do you think the kids will? I mean, I wouldn't put anything past them. Would you? Actually, yeah, what, they, they might, you know? You gotta make it clear to you know, not kill the actors. If they thought they were being attacked. All right, I'll get started here, okay, Simone?
Please, yeah.
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