Monster Podcast Update
Mutant frogs with chainsaws, the Ukrainadian election, xenopolitics, the Word of Power, and influencer warlords
So, this thing completely blew out of control. I don’t like to bombard your inboxes every time someone invites me on a podcast, so I usually save a few of them up for a sort of podcast digest post. Usually it’s three or four of them, but this time there are eight of them.
The first few are from a couple of months ago, and I just sort of ... didn’t get around to sharing those. Sorry about that. Then, over the last month, several people invited me onto their shows. These days it seems like I end up going on about one podcast a week, but throughout April I was backpacking around and largely staying in hostels, which were either too noisy to record, or didn’t have sufficiently good Internet, or both. The result was that I kept sending my hosts rain checks, the invites built up, and over the last week I’ve been doing almost nothing other than podcasting.
The content here is pretty diverse. A few of the discussions centre around Canadian politics, due to the recent election and the ‘trade war’. Others wanted to discuss other things I’d written – the Involution of the Liberal Mind and the Shiloh Hendrix affair being popular choices. One of the discussions is about ayyyyys lmao. The first, which may be the most entertaining, isn’t political at all – it’s just me getting drunk and watching a B movie.
1. Mutant Frogs With Chainsaws
thecapitalismo and mikeofpol had me on their show Drive Time Movie Night with Cap and Mike, which is a sort of MST3K for very online shitposters, to watch an unexpected gem: Hell Comes To Frogtown. This is an absolutely, gloriously terrible low-budget 80s B movie that somehow manages to be extraordinarily meme-worthy, and not only because of the mutant frogs. The backstory is that there’s been a nuclear war, hence the mutant frogs, and as a result of the war almost everyone is infertile. The hero, WWE wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper of They Live fame, happens to be one of the last remaining virile men. He’s taken prisoner by the government – personified of course by a salacious alpha grrlboss scientist – his man parts requisitioned in the interests of national security, and taken on a hunt for breedable females.
This movie was entirely too much fun. The practical effects are surprisingly good. There is pole dancing. There are blood rituals. There is a rocket launcher duel. There is a frog with a chainsaw.
And yes, the lady scientist eventually takes her, uh, glasses off for him.
Cap and Mike don’t label their episodes, so this took me some digging to find, but I did eventually find it. My third world Internet connection was causing problems near the beginning of the episode, so I kept dropping in and out, but it’s mostly fine.
2. Canadian politics
usually covers financial and investment news, which is something I know nothing useful about aside from that those subjects exist. Nevertheless, he was looking for insight into Canadian politics, and had me on to explain the particularities of the Canadian political system, political culture, its historical development, and the internal tensions that are constantly threatening to tear the country apart. He also took the opportunity to pick my brain about my most popular essay from last year, Academia is Women’s Work.
3. Is America the Enemy of Canada?
Popular YouTuber
invited me onto a panel with well-known streamer J-F Gariepy and to address a question many have been asking lately: is America the Enemy of Canada? Being on a panel with Gariepy was a trip.As with the second podcast in this digest, this was aimed at an American audience, so we spent some time explaining Canada’s political and cultural landscape, before getting into our opinions on the country’s future prospects (grim).
4. Xenopolitics and the Three Body Problem
I think my first podcast appearance, shortly after I started writing here, was on
’s excellent MindMatters show. You can watch that first appearance here, where we talked about ‘science, psychology, spirituality, philosophy, politics, sci-fi - whatever ideas have the explanatory power to help describe and understand the world we’re facing. At a time when we’re being barraged by the weapons of ‘cognitive conquest’ nothing is more important than communicating the ideas that could provide a good sword and shield, and a means with which to face the future.’As the name implies, MindMatters isn’t a political show. It’s hard to nail down exactly what it’s about, because Harrison has very broad interests – different episodes will discuss consciousness, neuroscience, psychology, panpsychism, paranormal phenomena, psychopathology, vaccine mandates, pathocracy, Jungian shadow work, artificial intelligence ... all subjects I find every bit as fascinating as Harrison does.
The show went on hiatus for the last year, but Harrison recently brought it back, and I was honoured to be one of the first guests. This time we talked about alien invasions, starting with a discussion of Xixin Liu’s Three Body Problem – which Harrison fascinatingly recounts is rumoured to be required reading in the national intelligence circles that deal with UAPs – and build on that to speculate about why the subject is shrouded in secrecy, whether the high strangeness surrounding encounters is due to psychic phenomena or advanced technology, and whether these entities are likely to be benevolent or hostile.
A word of warning, from Harrison’s podcast notes:
Carter was broadcasting from Mars, which is practically a third-world country when it comes to signal quality. Apologies for any resulting difficulties in auditory comprehensibility. If it's too much, we created a somewhat hilarious AI upscaled version of the talk, which you can view here
The AI upscale is really more of a downscale. The problem is that my audio would sometimes cut out, which might be a third world Internet issue, but is also quite possibly because I was sitting on my balcony and there was a bit of background noise that the Zoom algorithm compensated for by silencing me. The AI can’t fill in the blanks (uh, yet...) so it settled for making me sound like I was underwater.
In related news, my friends are now cyberbullying me in the group chat to get a microphone.
Anyhow, this was a really fascinating discussion about one of my favourite topics. I hope you enjoy it.
5. The Normies Aren’t All Right
Popular YouTuber
had me on his livestream to delve into the question of why The Normies Aren’t All Right through the lens of this year’s most popular essay, The Involution of the Liberal Mind. That one really seems to have resonated with people, racking up almost 40k views since it was published (though, unfortunately, that didn’t translate into very many paid subs ... hey, I get it, times are tough...)Towards the end we got talking about how to comport yourself at cocktail parties with annoying liberal ladies, and whether it is appropriate to ruin their anticipatory enjoyment of the agitprop they’re about to read or watch (it is, it always appropriate, they have ruined the good things in life and we must return the favour by removing the joy in their lives).
6. Ukrainadian Election Post-Mortem
Last summer
invited me onto his show to discuss the aftermath of the Southport riots, which I wrote about in Through the Chilled Years Ahead. We got caught up again recently, this time building on my Ukrainada piece and my Post-Mortem on the Canadian Election. After reviewing how Canada got to its present absolute state, we briefly discuss the best and worst scenarios for Canada moving forward: status quo, fragmentation, and unification. There are a lot of pitfalls ahead for Canada ... and not really a lot of hope on the horizon.
7. The Word of Power
of the Astral Flight Simulation podcast had me on at the very last minute for a very timely overview of the Shiloh Hendrix affair, which I’d just written about in Stripping the Word of its Power. This was a short and sweet podcast, a marked departure from Astral’s usual three-hour deep dives into pop culture semiotics, as it is intended for normies to get caught up on the bare facts of the incident.As of the time of this writing Shiloh is up to an eye-watering $774,000 (which she’s started receiving, incidentally). Somewhat amazingly, the amount of money raised by her GiveSendGo has been tracking the number of likes on Stripping the Word of its Power (currently at 773) at a 1000:1 ratio more or less since the essay was published. This is kind of a weird coincidence, though it also feels like something of a synchronicity. I can’t imagine it’s because of whatever small influence the essay had on the fundraiser: several hundred of you clicked through (which is all I can see, I have no idea how many of you actually donated), but assuming even half of you donated (which is incredible), unless some of you were donating absurd amounts of money I can’t see that being even one percent of the total.
8. Influencer Warlords
Finally,
invited me to sit down with him for the inaugural episode of his podcast. We started out discussing Shiloh, because of course, but soon pivoted to his own essay, Fuck It Let’s Invade Haiti, inspired by gentleman adventurer Lord Miles’ call to, well, invade Haiti. If you missed that incident, it was rather fascinating: thousands of Lord Miles’ followers responded with an explosion of enthusiasm. Patriotism has been all but smothered to death under the pillow of managerial globalism, with Western countries struggling to recruit the young men they’ve alienated to their shrinking militaries. Are the influencers of the attention economy going to give birth to a new age of charismatic warlords, ring-givers, and piratical kings?
I hope you enjoy these discussions. As always, thank you for your attention, and a big thank you, especially, to those of you who support this project. As always, I’ve got a number of irons in the fire, which I hope to get out soon. In the meantime...
Chinese author writes a novel about how to, as an alien force, use people afflicted by misanthropy to infiltrate and colonise their home world.
What an excellent way to put ideas into the heads of others, without them realising what they are being primed to accept.
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The above I put there because there's no way of writing something warning about something, without that warning also being an ideas-level "how-to" guide at the same time.
Also, there's no way to warn about an idea (a meme as it's called nowadays in this age of pictogram and petroglyph resurgence as the main means of communication) without the warning containing the idea.
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And the above paragraph is of course an example of itself; I'm trying to warn that a novel written by a Chinese, a novel that's been through the censorship-process and is thus party-approved for publishing, may well be intended as memetic weapon to introduce ideas into Western minds that said minds would otherwise reject if the packaging had been different. A historical echo: none of the dystopian classics were well-received when they were first published. Often, they were censored (Yevgeni Zamjatin's 'We', the novel used by Orwell as a template for '1984' f.e.) or publicly mocked and reviled or simply ignored ('The Iron Heel' f.e., by Jack London) by their contemporaries. If it was a question of "hitting too close to home" or something else, we can't know.
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Just felt a compulsion to add something at least a little tangentially related to something in the post: I generally don't listen to podcasts since I read so much faster than people talk (yes, even Ben Shapiro), so can't comment on those.
Downloaded several. Looking forward to them.