The Carousel Podcast

EPISODE 10: Self-made millionaire Pine Baron comes on to discuss the absurd new Inflation Reduction Act AKA The Inflation Will Continue Unabated Act of 2022.Pine Baron is a financial marketer and founder of new investment research brand Wealthpin. Like me, he is a small business owner. We both pay our taxes in full, and spend quite a bit of money on accounting in order to do so. Yet we’re both concerned about this bill…Topics include:* The middling bureaucratic bugworld of top-of-funnel brand marketing versus the savage masculine enterprise of direct response marketing.* How to beat the TikTok algorithm.* Financial marketing’s perverse incentives, particularly in a recession. * The Orwellian “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022,” and how its plan to spend $80 billion to shake down small business owners for $204 billion will only end up harassing the middle class and making inflation worse.* Around 50% of people don’t pay taxes at all. * Around 60% of people are employed by small business owners.* The private equity / hedge fund class—which is also being protected by this bill in other ways for e.g. continuance of the carried interest loophole—can afford to make it unaffordable for the IRS to audit them at all. * Thus, who is this $204 billion in inflation-fighting “profits” going to come from? Middle class small business owners. * Further proven by the fact that an amendment to protect households making less than $400k a year from auditing failed in the senate with every Democrat voting against it.* Why the IRS is susceptible to the Principal-Agent Dilemma.* The Biden Administration’s propaganda fight around the definition of “recession,” which Pine Baron says we are most definitely in.* Why, despite this new bill, starting your own business is the solution to your problems. Thanks for reading The Carousel!Follow Pine Baron on Twitter, and sign up for Wealthpin on its website, or follow on TikTok!You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecarousel.substack.com/subscribe

EPISODE 9: Katie Kahn joins me to critique Alex Lee Moyer’s new documentary on Alex Jones, Alex’s War. She attempts to convince me that it doesn’t go deep enough and largely succeeds. We also chat about dissident culture, inevitably gossiping about Red Scare, which is like the Godwin’s Law of 2022.Topics include:* Katie’s personal knowledge of Bohemian Grove.* Alex Jones’ strange cast of supporting characters including protege Owen Shroyer and chief bullhorn operator Ali Alexander. * The stories the documentary omits, like Alex’s supplement shilling, alcoholism, new wife, recent divorce, and legal framing as a “performance artist.” * Comparisons to Netflix’s Get Me Roger Stone, which explored Stone’s penchant for orgies.* NYC and San Francisco reuniting after decades of cultural separation. * Osama bin Laden and why we had foreknowledge about 9/11 before it happened (Also mis-stating that Dar Es Salaam is in Sudan; it’s in Tanzania.)* Werner Herzog’s ability to reveal complex characters by letting the camera linger, and why Alex’s War doesn’t do that. * Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza’s ridiculous intellectual justifications: “efilism” and “eulavism” as discussed by Default Friend.* Sam Hyde’s recent massive trolling of YouTube dork iDubbbz.* Peter Thiel peoples’ transformation from the khaki-wearing uncool kids of San Francisco to the edgy culture warriors of NYC.Follow Katie Kahn on Twitter or Substack. And here’s a cool article she wrote about Red Scare v. Call Her Daddy.Watch Alex’s War on YouTube, Apple, Amazon, Google, and many other platforms. You can listen to this podcast on Apple or Spotify.Thanks for reading The Carousel! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecarousel.substack.com/subscribe

On episode 8 of The Carousel Podcast I chat with restaurants veteran Michael Nemcik about shifts in mainstream culinary propaganda. He began his career as a line cook at Hooters Orlando and worked his way up to manager/beverage director at some of the best restaurants in LA. He possesses encyclopedic knowledge of food and wine and has as close to perfect taste as one can get. Recent trends have him concerned about the industry he knows and loves. Including…* The overwhelming inaccuracies and “snowflakery” of the hit Hulu show The Bear. Nemcik recently moved to Chicago where the supposedly gritty slice-of-life show takes place. * The James Beard Awards are the Oscars of the cooking industry and, like the Oscars, recently shifted its primary mission from celebrating excellence to achieving inclusion. Nemcik, as a person of color, discusses the cheapening effects of a more propagandistic awards.* The achievements (and demographic realities) of asians and Hispanics in the kitchen seem to go unrecognized by media like The Bear and the James Beard Awards. Thanks for listening. You can watch a video version of this episode if you click back to the main Substack feed. You can also listen on Spotify and Apple. Thanks for reading The Carousel! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecarousel.substack.com/subscribe

“The idea of the outsider in the sense of brand identity versus being truly on the outside, not having any group at all.”Writer Caleb Caudell plays outsider to an outsider movement. In this episode of The Carousel: * There’s grifters in any movement. How do you identify them? Should you?* The scrubbing away of human longing and its replacement by branding and products.* Individual freedom as a poor substitute for freedom of association.* The faux localism of multi-use commercial spaces in small American cities. * My sh*tty former editor at LA Weekly condemning my “voice of otherness.”* Condoms as “they.”* Body builders as Beautiful Ones. * Zero HP Lovecraft and the Passage Prize.* Mocking the insiders in the outsider group you’re in.Caleb on TwitterHis bookHis blogYou can also watch this episode on YouTube.Happy Independence Day from Montana! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecarousel.substack.com/subscribe

Dan Baltic and Matt Pegas of New Write Podcast join me to talk about the advertising industry, why it’s so hard to break into, why it’s reviled, and why we should take it seriously.In the second half, we discuss literature, specifically Matt’s awesome book Dragon Day, Terror House Press, Michel Houellebecq, and whether books should be judged by their covers. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecarousel.substack.com/subscribe

In this podcast, I converse with legendary dissident writer and author Delicious Tacos. We talk about a whole buncha stuff including… * Delicious Tacos’ brand or lack thereof.* What’s hack and what isn’t. * How to think about Twitter.* Whether marketing people should all be killed.* The future of men and women.Here is his website. Here are two of my favorite things he’s written: Mark, Autopilot. Here is his latest book: Savage Spear of the Unicorn.enjoi This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecarousel.substack.com/subscribe

As a raw milk drinker, I try to avoid pasteurized milk in my coffee. Oat milk so effectively replaced it, there had to be a catch. Indeed there was. Spin around a box of Oat Drink Barista Edition and you’ll find it’s made of rapeseed oil, AKA canola oil. Imagine guzzling canola oil straight from the bottle—totally disgusting, no matter how cute Oatly’s copywriting might be. Originally developed as engine lubricants, seed oils like soybean oil, corn oil, rapeseed oil, grapeseed oil, cottonseed oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil are unhealthy for many reasons.Once you’ve been redpilled, the rabbit hole goes deep. At a bar in Athens a couple of years ago, I talked with a guy who sold industrial seed oil expellers. He explained that expellers are responsible for all the soy cake and seed oil that form the basis of globalist serf cuisine—“sustainable” meat and cheese replicas we’re supposed to eat to show how much we care. Business was booming. The soy boy concept owes a lot to expeller pressed seed oils, as does “You WILL eat the bugs,” a mocking rallying cry against the World Economic Forum’s apparent plan to preserve “our global resources”—like meat, oil, and land—so the elites can have more of them.Among the poison and propaganda, a hero arose. Last November, a young doctoral resident created a Twitter account. As a budding doctor already obsessed with the seed oil problem, he had toyed around with memes before. “I had made the decision for myself that seed oils were going to be my main intervention,” says Twitter influencer Seed Oil Disrespecter. “This is the most significant change in diet. This is the primary food change that has led to so much disease and this is what I need to do for myself and for my wife and my daughter. And then I saw it hit Twitter.”It was time to enter the fray. “A lot of people were making accounts saying, ‘Oh I'm a hiking enjoyer and I'm a nature respecter.’ So I just married the two and wrote Seed Oil Disrespecter. And within the first 24 hours I had 1000 followers. I was like, ‘Oh wow, this is branding!’”As his meme-craft improved, Seed Oil Disrespecter’s account grew past 40k followers. Vice, propaganda spreaders on behalf of those who want us to eat the bugs, of course painted him as a paranoid conspiracy theorist. Katherine Dee covered him in Unherd, and Killstream had him on as a guest. His wife built a following as Healthy Oil Respecter, offering a more normie-fied, mommy-blogger version of the same message. On Killstream, he admitted to being vaxxed and having heterodox politics, which disappointed some factions of his growing following. Rumors started that he was in fact a corporate shill; an astroturfer for Silicon-Valley-insider startup Zero Acre Farms. Zero Acre Farms— “Let’s Give the World an Oil Change”—plans to disrupt big seed oil with creepy fermented oil of its own (the exact product details remain unclear). Did Seed Oil Disrespecter hijack the authentic anti-seed oil movement on behalf of the very corporate overlords it opposed?I ask about these accusations and much more during the second episode of The Carousel podcast. I will admit that the audio is worse than seed oils because I’m still working on my setup. So if you can’t stand it and want to skip to the part where he talks about how to spread your message, it’s at about 42:00. And here’s his advice in easy-to-digest listicle form: How to spread your message according to Seed Oil Disrespecter!Hijack Humor. “What are people already laughing at? Be new and funny. The -er at the end of Disrespecter is kind of wrong. Having little mistakes here and there is funny [right now].”Move with the Memes. “Memes are punk rock. Make sure you're not too stale and always switch things up. I'm a meme guy, so what do I do? I just steal other memes and reword them. Or I think of something new. It's very simple stuff.”Use the In Between Times. “I do it in between things. You just look at your phone, I look at memes, I see one and I go, "Ooh, I can change that to a seed oil meme." I do it. I repost it. Done. It'll be minutes.”Save Raw Materials. “As a meme person, I always save raw materials. I’m always thinking, oh, I can use that later. You just download it and open it in the Photoshop Express app.”Make it Sticky. “Is it something that people remember? Does it stick to the wall? SeedOil Disrespect is a sticky name, it's funny. But the more you look into it, you're like, holy s**t, it's true. People around the world are saying, ‘Disrespecting seed oils,’ and they might not even follow my account.”Build a Squad. “My wife knows nothing about Twitter, right? She's not a meme war veteran and she doesn't get Pepe. We're married a little over 15 years. That first year of marriage, we were like buying vegetarian Morning Star nuggets and trying all sorts of different stuff. But within a year or so we learned about paleo, right? So that first year of marriage, we made a lot of changes. So one of the big changes we made was changing the oils that we were eating, the fats. So I told her, I got this thing going on, right? My Twitter is exploding. I was like ‘Hey, I'm the Seed Oil Disrespecter.’ She was always doing something on Instagram. Never anything too big. You know, you get 10 likes or whatever. Your bangers get 30. Because we were into this stuff, we're talking about this stuff, I was like, I'll make you an account. I said, Healthy Oil Respecter, but that was taken, or too long. So I was like, Real Oil Respecter. And it worked. So we both had these accounts, we're both doing it. And we just blew up.”Make Lists: “We have the simple six [good oils], which is tallow, butter, ghee, coconut oil, real avocado oil, and real olive oil.” Don’t Gatekeep: “I’m getting messages from people that are like, ‘Hey, you know, I'm not right-wing, and I've seen that the people are associating this with that.’ But you know, it's just food, right? And that's why I made posts today, like you can't gate keep this stuff.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecarousel.substack.com/subscribe