Surviving The Madness Of 2022 - Carl Benjamin - #427

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Carl Benjamin. He's the YouTuber formerly known as Sargon of Akkad, a political commentator and host of The Lotus Eaters Podcast. Every year, we don't think that the world can get any weirder, and then every year, reality manages to exceed our expectations. I had to get Carl back on to try and make sense of just what's happening. Expect to learn Carl's thoughts on Jordan Peterson getting called out by Ethan Klein and Hasan Piker, how society has lied to young girls, whether the Pope should have told pet owners that they're selfish, what Carl predicts for the future of mainstream media, why family values are under attack, and much more. In case you missed it, next Jordan Peterson interview is coming in two weeks' time. I'm flying out to Texas with video guy Dean, and we are recording in person with Jordan. And the only way that you can make sure you will not miss that episode when it goes up is by pressing subscribe. So take your thumbs for a walk and press the subscribe button on wherever it is that you are listening. Plus, it makes me very happy indeed, and it supports the show at no extra cost to yourself. I thank you. But now, please give it up for Carl Benjamin.
Carlos, welcome to the show.

**Carl Benjamin** (1:29)
Thank you very much.

**Chris Williamson** (1:31)
I am very happy to see how well you're doing with Lotus Eaters at the moment, man. It's really impressive. The team's massive.

**Carl Benjamin** (1:38)
It's huge, isn't it?

**Chris Williamson** (1:39)
It's mad.

**Carl Benjamin** (1:39)
It's like 13 people in the office now. We're waiting for the next, in the office next to us is the transport police that you saw when you came down. We're waiting for them to leave so we can expand into their office, because they've got a huge office, and we're just going to essentially just take it over. So I'm looking forward to it. Get another set.

**Chris Williamson** (1:57)
What does it feel like going from being just some blokey YouTuber to now a proper company media team research?

**Carl Benjamin** (2:05)
Yeah, it's exciting, because before, I could feel myself getting wearied by right now, I'm going to have to read these things and do this, and you have to do all the back end stuff, and it was just tiring, and it's sent the motivation to do the things. But now we've got two people who do the video production, and then we've got other people who are doing other things.
It's lots of other, because we're all in the same office, and I've been very insistent, we work in the office, you get lots of different ideas being thrown into the ring, and it's not just me having to think of everything myself, and have to do everything myself. And so it makes it a completely different environment, and the office is a really chill place, and everyone seems to have a good time there as well. And so everyone's being very creative with what they're doing. It's turning into quite the little think tank. I'm very, very happy with it. And it's definitely a good idea. And I'm so, I knew it would be, I had this instinct that was like, yeah, that would probably be a good thing to have, and it would be nice to be able to bring other people in to do stuff. And I'm glad that that was correct, a good instinct.

**Chris Williamson** (3:17)
Yeah, man, it doesn't surprise me. I went down, the atmosphere is cool. I mean, you've got your own servers and shit in there as well. You're as protected as you can get. It's, you know, what you guys do is the closest thing I think we've got in the UK to the Daily Wire. And that's one hell of a fucking operation.

**Carl Benjamin** (3:34)
Yeah, I mean, we're nowhere near the scale of the Daily Wire, but, you know, we get something like seven or eight million views a month on our YouTube channel. You know, 200,000 on the website, which is not that bad actually, because offensively.

**Chris Williamson** (3:46)
Seriously, man. Speaking of YouTube dramas and people that are worried about losing their business, what are your thoughts on Ethan Klein's recent spat with Jordan Peterson?

**Carl Benjamin** (3:58)
I think that what we're witnessing is the inevitable radicalization of Ethan Klein because of his Twitter usage. Ethan obviously used to be a sort of anti-social justice commentator. He used to mock all of this and little by little, and I think it's because of the natural environment of Twitter having purged so many conservatives and suppressing conservative viewpoints, that essentially just makes it seem like the only and most sensible and common viewpoint is that of the far left. I mean, it's written in Twitter's terms of service. You can't misgender people and things like this. And there are so many, the political environment is so skewed on the platform, that it becomes a sort of water in which you swim. And I don't think Ethan Klein is the smartest person in the world. And so I don't think he recognizes that. And I mean, take for example, the way that he disavowed Jordan Peterson. He was like, you did something transphobic. You said something like this, you said that. And essentially, it was just a list of crimes against progressivism. But I mean, that's the same as an imam coming to me and saying, well, you've eaten bacon, you've had, you've drunk alcohol, you've fornicated before marriage. I'm like, okay, but I'm not Muslim. These are not my standards. I don't, I don't agree that these are things I should care about. And Ethan Klein has adopted them unthinkingly because other people on Twitter, these are the things that the big Twitter, viral Twitter threads and tweets highlight. And so it's put it into his mind that these are important things. But are they important things or is there something more important in Ethan's life, like his wife and children, perhaps, you know, rather than a very tiny fringe minority of which he probably knows very few people. But this is, this is the thing. This is the problem with Twitter. And so, and you can see this, this dramatic leftward shift in his content. And now he's hosting a podcast with a guy called Hasan Piker. For anyone who doesn't know, he's a, he's a literal communist and the kind of communist that one would call a tanky.