"Mark Sargent's video doesn't even acknowledge existence of nonstop flights. In fact, he says they don't exist! So now it becomes clear why so much of Flat Earth is pointless fluff or speculation about who must be in on it. They have to avoid making quantifiable claims because otherwise, when you put it in terms that can be proven or disproven, there's a chance that your ACTUAL reasons for believing what you believe can be OPENLY demonstrated to be wrong. 'The Earth can't be a globe because there's no nonstop flights across countries in the Southern Hemisphere! Oh, wait someone Googled it and it turns out there are?" FUCKING OOPS!'"
"What's most fascinating about this comment is that this is the closest I think I've ever seen someone come to admitting that they've lost. If I'd made even a minor error that was easy to debunk or respond to in my 30 minute long video, Paul would have done that, wouldn't he? He'd have gone in so hard on me! Just rough and uncensored! He'd have just gone to town on me with his SOY-ENCRUSTED TONGUE! But appears I owned him so hard with such bulletproof reasoning, that he daren't even mention me or my video directly, despite the fact that we have mutual friends, so I know he's seen the video, and I know it really pissed him off."
— Nice Try, Paul
, the follow-up video to Soy Boys: A Measured Response
, the follow-up video to Soy Boys: A Measured Response "One of my favorite paintings is "The Lacemaker." Johannes Vermeer painted a loving, accurate, and detailed rendition of a girl making lace. Vermeer celebrated real people doing ordinary things; he offered the radical idea that you didn't have to be special or important or magical or legendary to worth being painted or thought about or remembered. So it turns out there are two ways of explaining history. We can be like Geoffrey of Monmouth or the early Romans and invent these magical, wondrous, brilliant people who gave everything to us: a wizard made Stonehenge all by himself, a man called Romulus invented Rome out of whole cloth and took part in every major historical event required to fulfill his amazing design, Don Bluth made "Dragon's Lair." Or we could be like Vermeer: a bunch of ordinary everyday people built Stonehenge just by working together and putting time and effort into it, a bunch of ordinary people make video games by working together very hard for hours and hours and hours and days and years to make it, a bunch of regular, ordinary people built Rome over the span of a very long time, contributing to what would later be remembered as the exploits of one man. This way is nowhere near as magical as the one we like to imagine put our world together. The truth is often very mundane. But maybe that's okay."
"No, [Ctrl+Alt+Del] is merely a particularly silly and vulgar expression of a broader set of bad ideas that continue to go largely unexamined by the people who hold them. Tim Buckley's disjointed personal philosophy and lack of skill didn't come from nowhere. We don't get to pretend he's just some random guy. Blaming one man for the flaws of a broken economic system is making the same mistake as blaming Tim Buckley for accurately presenting the culture in which he exists. We just have to learn to accept that there might be a lesson in things we hate about us, that even if it's bad and we don't like it, we have more in common with it than we want to admit, and can even learn something from it. CAD turned out to be reflective of the cultural reality that produced it, and people are only angry at it this much because they don't like what they saw in the mirror."
— The coda to Ctrl+Alt+Del | Serious Lore Analysis: 3
"The depressing thing about charity is that no charity should exist, the things charity advocates for should just be built into the system."
— During the Donkey Kong 64 stream.
"You know, there are lots of shows with, like, fun fights to watch like JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, which I brought up earlier, but the thing about those shows is, even when I remember the really cool fights, I go back and watch entire episodes, or arcs, of the show again. I don't just go, like, 'Oh, remember that fight? That fight's good. Let's just watch that out of context—' like no, the storytelling is part of what accentuates those scenes. Fights in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure feel meaningful because they've been built up to by the plot. Monty's fights are still some of the coolest fights, but they're never gonna have the impact they could have done, because either due to a lack of planning of what the story would be, or very poor writing choices being made in connecting his action sequences, the story these fights should have been a part of is practically non-existent, and honestly, it just seems like such a waste, you know?"
"Like, if you wanna see how to make a Fallout game, there's a lesson here. Don't rehash the iconic stuff everyone already knows. Come up with something completely new, like a faction of robot security guards who answer to a Pre-War ultra-capitalist businessman. Don't ask what the Fallout setting can bring to your creativity. Ask what creativity you can bring to the Fallout setting."
"At the end of all of this, I ask the eternal question asked of every major fraudster in history: 'how could someone do all this?'. Cause all this fear and doubt that has led to real, tangible harm against your fellow human beings? Why would someone do that?"
[Beat]
"Uh, money. Thank you for watching."
"'Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.' That's a quote commonly attributed to Winston Churchill, but he was actually probably paraphrasing George Santayana. [...] But here's a corollary I came up with all by myself: 'Those who let hucksters write the history they're trying to learn from are doomed in some other horrible way.'"
"I do worry there are people out there who will never get the chance to become who they are because they're too busy trying to be like someone else who, at best, has it figured out for themselves just a little bit. I feel like I know who I am and how to live my life, and that makes me feel happy and somewhat complete. And I don't think I'd have ever found myself if I was trying to chase someone else's sense of completeness. Basically, no one knows how to live your life. And you might not either. But the only person who's gonna figure it out is you. You can only be the first of whoever it is that you are."
"I think people tend to fool themselves. People think they’re good at what they do, and they don’t question their practices. Because James [Somerton] and [co-writer] Nick both thought they were experts on the topics they talked about, they bumbled into so many blind alleys. I mentioned making this video to my friend Todd and he independently started watching James, and fell down all these rabbit holes, and made a video about him as well. It’s the Dunning-Kruger effect, when you’ve managed to stay at the top of the curve so you think, "I must be an expert", and you never do any work that can disconfirm your hypothesis. It’s scary how easy it is to do that."
