Has it always been like this? Or was it like there was some kind of shift?

It's fairly new in the metal scene.

And by fairly new, I'd say the past 15 years.

Left-leaning hardcore bands go way back.

Back in the 90s when I was getting into metal bands and stuff like that, you would go to a show and it would be like Earth Crisis who were straight edge vegan environmentalists and Snapcase who were also straight edge.

And there'd be like Food Not Bombs.

They'd set up their stuff.

Start your show today at Spreaker.com. Spreaker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it.

Then it got put down to like just under the ticker, like my my little ticker on the on the podcast here, you know, and then people just like out of sight, out of mind, you know, and people started caring less and less.

Well, I think some of that has to do with just how long, you know, not just Afghanistan, but how long Iraq kind of dragged out.

But like when it comes to what you're saying, talking about the schools and stuff, that's all by design.

There was this guy named Paulo Freire in the 80s or in the 70s that wrote a book called The Pedagogy of Oppression.

And it's basically a...

the way that people see the world and that made made a lot of inroads in in um in academia and colleges and the people that teach teachers so the colleges of education the people that go to school to become teachers to teach young people like those people started being started receiving instruction in this basically a marxist framework and so Once that kind of filtered out, they go through college in the 90s.

And once that kind of filtered out, those people started graduating, a couple classes or a few classes graduating with that kind of instruction.

And that brings us to what I've been wanting to get to with you for the whole conversation is let's talk about what inspired your 2024 op-ed, The Silent Crisis, Why Society is Failing Men and Boys.

It's not necessarily tied to, like, scientific advancement.

I mean, it depends on who you're, who you're talking to.

I think that the job market stuff matters.

I think that the COVID stuff, it really kind of made people very, very skeptical of any kind of authority or any kind of establishment stuff, and that the, the, that is essentially what people think of when they think of big pharma companies.

I'm not anti-big pharma.

I get that people don't like big pharma companies and stuff, but there's so many things that people take for granted, take, that big pharma has provided, has, has done.

Like, so many drugs that are basically miracles-

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

You know, not democratic socialism, which is different.

Um, but the people that are running for office in the DSA, they are taking advantage of the ignorance of the voters, of the young people, and they actually do desire policies like getting rid of the Senate, getting rid of the Constitution, because that's the only way you can get rid of the Senate.

For you guys out there that are, are unaware, I'm gonna let you in on a little secret.

There's only one thing in the Constitution that cannot be changed by amendment.

That is the Senate.

That is the right of the states to have votes in the Senate.

I think-

Also, Phil is gonna fill- uh, is going to fill us in on how Ultron has been brought to the real world, 'cause an AI was in a training scenario and it escaped.

It's true.

Uh, OpenAI had a model that basically was in a sandbox where it's supposed to be limited.

It's not supposed to be able to access the outside world.

And it escaped the sandbox through multiple zero-day exploits.

So a zero-day exploit is one that is built in the first day.

So like in the, in the basic programming of, of whatever software or whatever, [smacks lips] uh, the, the bug is there, uh, right when it's released.

Yeah

How did you begin and were you nervous at first?

So I've always been on, like I'm, I'm, I was a guy that was, you know, around before the internet.

And as soon as the internet kind of became a thing, you know, I found myself on websites that were talking about music generally, but I ended up on the message boards and I would talk about politics.

People were what have you.

And I would, I would either push back or I'd say I agree or what have you.

And, and And that was just in, I mean, there was this one site, lambgoat.com, that I used to be on all the time and would talk politics there.

And this is in the early 2000s, you know.

so is that how we do it just by saying yeah we're rebelling against the system by being normal being a father and having a nine-month-old son

Mm-hmm.

And then Adam was like, "Do this, do this, do this," and he produced the crap out of the record.

And it ca- it turned into a good record because of it.

The follow-up to that was The Fall of Ideals.

We knew, we knew how to wri- write songs by then, and so we were like, "All right." We showed up with the, with the songs, and he was just like, "All right.

Sounds good." But you find someone that knows how to do what you wanna do, and then you listen to them.

And I'm gonna, I'm gonna relate a little story here.

It's grounding yourself, yeah.

But data centers are a completely separate discussion.

Yeah, so people don't like the idea of a big building with data centers in it.

A big building with thousands of GPUs inside it.

They think that it's going to cause their electricity to go up.

But what's happening is a lot of these companies are starting to... starting to build their own power plants in addition to the data center.

So when they build a data center, they're going to build a power plant to power the data center.

And one of the downstream effects of that is you're going to see a lot of the populated areas that are near data centers, they're going to see their prices for electricity go down.

Because when you do that, you cease to need to exist.

Go for it.

Do you want your art democratized? What gives you the idea that democratizing art is going to produce better art, right? Like, the artist that has the vision is the one that should be deciding how the art is created.

The, the artist that has the vision is, is the, should be the one that's actually producing it, and everyone should get on board with the artist's vision, right? You don't want to democratize art.

You don't want art through a committee.

You don't want art through, you know, p- ... proper channels where everyone gets a say about it.

That's literally what people complain about in the music industry when they say, "Oh, well, you know, the record label has to listen to it.

The record label has to say this is okay, that's not okay." That argument against record labels, against big corporations, has been the, the argument forever.

Mm-hmm.

But that sucks.

Well, I mean, yeah, but that we used to have a generally unified country, right? We had a country where everyone believed that America was generally good or at least enough people where the people that had outlying views were not the center of attention.

They were not getting the focus.

You didn't have media that was constantly focused on them.

Now, the population is so split between the United States is good or the United States is bad.

And that that's part of why it leaks and everything, because at the end of the day, the political arguments that they're making really are based on whether or not you think America is a net good or a net bad.

The people that have injected this kind of consistent political discourse, they're the people that say that the person is political.

Napster and all that stuff?

(laughs)

Absolutely.

I mean, it, it, it should be obvious that he gets sent home.

But I think that these are...

The fact that they've arrested, you know, two judges now, the judge and his wife, and this other judge, is...... is good for, uh, good for the American people in that they see that there are repercussions.

They see that the administration is not just talking about stuff.

They see that the things that Republicans have been saying for the better part of a decade, they see that there's actual movement on this stuff.

I-