Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the podcast, the Lotus is for Monday the 25th of August 2025. I'm joined by Josh and Bo. And today we're going to be talking about the flags and how the battle lines have been fully drawn at this point, Trump's retribution arc, and how Japan has decided, you know what, we do need hundreds of thousands of Indians and Africans, because that's something that's not been tested yet, and it's for the GDP.

But you might be wondering, why are we back on YouTube?

Like this is a strange thing. It's been a while, hasn't it? Why are we streaming to YouTube?

And so for anyone who's

not one of the sort of OGs, you know, the originals from back in the day, we actually used to

stream on YouTube all the time. And then YouTube back in like 2020 got really, really, really political.

First things, the first thing that really struck us was the um the joe biden election uh you weren't

allowed to question that and youtube had rules about that and we got strikes for that and then of course

there was the covid pandemic which also uh they had a narrative to protect and so we decided you know

it's we want to discuss these issues but it's just safer to do it off

of youtube than on and now those issues are pretty much over they're gone and youtube not only have

not only the issue's gone but youtube has released the reins on them as well a lot so we're actually

at a point well why can't we just stream to YouTube again if

YouTube aren't going to strike us for wrong think, which hopefully they're not going to.

It was very arbitrary as well in that when a lot of their sort of punishments towards us

were enacted, we hadn't actually done anything.

Yeah. They didn't actually have a specific video in mind that they took exception to.

Yeah.

Well, there were certain ones, but like, it was more just, it was not, it was an opinion

and policy, an opinion on the fact that we were getting struck for.

That's what it was for.

It wasn't like we had actually, like, done something horrible or something like that, but then they incorporated this in the term of service and blah, blah, blah. But hopefully this is not something that's going to cause us problems now. So let's begin because we've got a lot to go through because a lot's been happening. But before we begin, go and get your copy of Islander 4. It's a link in the

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