00:00:00.000It feels like every controversy now is so like weird and it has this like sheen of like apocalypse and it's so like end timesy like I don't know Kat and I were just talking about Britney Spears the other day as as usual and it's like when you think back to the controversies of the Britney Spears aughts and it's like did you see how Britney Spears installed her car seat like she's an unfit mother and now it's like your favorite British pop star from the 80s.
00:00:30.000is making a robot Zionist fight song that's being upheld by officials within Netanyahu's
00:00:37.720government. It's just like everything feels so end times. Oh, yeah. Fully in hell. There's like
00:00:42.700a sheen of AI psychosis to everything. Feels bad. There's only up from here, though, right?
00:00:48.360hello hello and welcome back to a bit fruity i'm matt bernstein thank you so much for being here
00:01:03.720so this all started for me a couple months ago in a little podunk corner of the internet called
00:01:10.960my own Instagram. Let me tell you a story, my dear listener. On May 5th, 2026, a synagogue on
00:01:20.080the Upper East Side of Manhattan held something called the Great Israeli Real Estate Event,
00:01:26.260wherein Jewish New Yorkers, and only Jewish New Yorkers, can come, check out, and plan to purchase
00:01:34.580property not only in Israel, but also in the illegally occupied West Bank. It is a land expo0.80
00:01:43.200for New Yorkers to move onto stolen Palestinian land. And yes, this is an episode about the British0.92
00:01:50.800pop musician Boy George. Just hang on. I went to a protest of this real estate expo where outside
00:01:59.020protesters, many of whom were anti-Zionist Jews like myself, by the way, clashed with Zionist
00:02:06.240counter-protesters who were supporting the expo. It was a dizzying scene, to be honest, and somewhere
00:02:12.960I perhaps naively did not expect to get recognized, but I was. One of the counter-protesters noticed
00:02:20.300and began berating me, saying things like,0.99
00:02:23.520what's up man how are you i said do you want to suck mandani's and here i was thinking that i had0.99
00:02:29.620to go to gaza to experience homophobia fascinating anyway i made a short instagram video about this0.98
00:02:36.940whole ordeal on which rosie o'donnell god bless her left a comment of support i've never spoken
00:02:44.320to rosie o'donnell but i think she's really cool if she happens to be listening to this rosie hit
00:02:50.940me up. So you can only imagine my double shock when in response to Rosie O'Donnell's comment on
00:02:57.900my Instagram post, British pop singer and longtime queer icon Boy George commented at Rosie. What are
00:03:05.740you cheering here? He continued in a second comment. They are not right speaking to you like
00:03:11.800that. But there is a serious lack of nuance in your own point of view. I don't see you protesting
00:03:17.380Putin over Ukraine are standing up for LGBTQI people in Africa. I mean, the list is endless,
00:03:25.320but you chose a country that would absolutely not accept you and likely kill you. Also,0.98
00:03:32.420ignoring October 7th, young people like you, peaceful people dancing who were raped and
00:03:38.000murdered. I don't get why anyone thinks you are brave, especially Rosie. He got you.
00:03:46.440why was he was like he got me but he was really pissed that like rosie o'donnell had something
00:03:52.100nice to say about this something about rosie o'donnell makes all these men go crazy we're
00:03:58.280missing some important context here like i feel like these two had some interaction and like in
00:04:04.020line for the bathroom like 20 years ago i i really appreciate rosie o'donnell because she seems to
00:04:10.280have a singular ability to make donald trump go completely insane like something about rosie like
00:04:17.940he's just never been able to get over the fact that rosie o'donnell doesn't like him it's funnily
00:04:21.680enough it's it's sort of a similar thing to what deborah massing had over donald trump for a very
00:04:25.900long time because the apprentice and oh god two minutes in and i'm talking about deborah messing
00:04:33.260oh here we go but okay so similarly kathy griffin yes hates kathy griffin but funny lore with deborah
00:04:41.620messing and donald trump is that the apprentice and will and grace aired on the same channel
00:04:47.660during the same time period and so donald trump and deborah messing kind of knew each other from
00:04:53.260behind the scenes donald trump according to one book i'm gonna throw it up on the screen because
00:04:58.180I forget the title, had a crush on Debra Messing, which was not reciprocated by her.
00:05:04.380And then for a while during the 2010s, when Debra Messing would criticize Donald Trump
00:05:08.600a lot, of course, she doesn't anymore, he would get really upset because he still had
00:06:03.180It's so like there are hungry people in Africa.0.54
00:06:06.560But anyway, it's weird for someone like Boy George, who does feel so intimately part of my own personal history as a makeup wearing femme boy adjacent queer person,0.54
00:06:20.060to be, as they say, coming for me. But, you know, here we are. Boy George has, in the months since0.67
00:06:28.000this ordeal, which of course only I noticed, made a lot of headlines globally, chief among them for
00:06:33.640his release of an AI-generated reggae pro-Israel fight song. None of those words are in the Bible.
00:06:42.280today i want to talk about what i perceive to be boy george's very strange spiral one that deals
00:06:50.620in geopolitics yes but perhaps even more so in artificial intelligence insecurity about relevance
00:06:58.580anything else that rhymes there and i'm so excited to be doing that with two of my great friends
00:07:04.180pop culture and political twitch streamer caroline kwan and journalist writer of the
00:07:10.800excellent newsletter spitfire news cat ten barge welcome back to the show my leading ladies
00:07:17.220i am excited once again to dive deep here with you both and i already said this before the
00:07:24.660episode started but i have never been so deep in real housewives tea and lore as i have in
00:07:30.160preparation for this episode because it's all connected the web is huge i feel like there was
00:07:35.960a part of me that knew this was this was always coming really i couldn't have put words to it but
00:07:40.620it just makes a lot of sense to me that like after i saw boy george attack you all of those
00:07:45.900months ago i was like this story can only get weirder and worse from here that's a very nice0.83
00:07:53.960way of calling me like a very vindictive gay man who's who's only sword is to wield as a podcast0.64
00:08:00.920a three hour deep dive into the mess i honestly i wasn't gonna do it though i wasn't gonna do it0.80
00:08:09.180I was like you know what let's just like just let this one go like it's fine but things have
00:08:14.060just gotten so weird what was the thing that made you think maybe this is not worthy of a deep dive
00:08:33.680and then what changed your mind well to be honest i get a lot of weird instagram comments
00:08:40.100and you know sometimes from like strange corners of celebrity universe like this isn't the first
00:08:46.480time this has happened like i remember getting a comment from what's the tiger king guy's name
00:08:53.380joe exotic joe exotic who did give us the line it's all corrupt girl and i was like i thought
00:09:00.480you're in prison he is that's literally where it's all corrupt girl came from was like how are
00:09:06.680you tweeting from prison it's all corrupt girl but but i'm like i can't you know i can't nor do
00:09:12.700i want to like sit down and make an episode about my own beefs every time someone leaves a mean
00:09:18.220comment like it's just who cares like this isn't that interesting to people however the more that
00:09:24.080i learned about boy george's past and also the more that he continued to do in the months since
00:09:29.920this little skirmish with rosie o'donnell my instagram comment section the more i was like
00:09:35.400no maybe actually there is meat on the bone that is interesting to people this isn't an episode
00:09:40.880about me and my beef like i don't think anyone cares about that and and for the record i don't
00:09:44.760have beef with boy george what am i saying oh my god let's start let's just start the episode
00:09:54.840I think, too, if you have been kind of peripherally paying attention to Boy George in the corner of the Internet he's on prior to this song release, there have been a couple of things he did that were so bizarre, but also very reminiscent of this growing boomer conservative, like people feeling much more comfortable in the second Donald Trump era to be very openly conservative.
00:10:22.660he wrote a post that was crying over charlie kirk oh yeah that boy george did that and then
00:10:29.840also on like the when the chapel roan oh the latest global hate campaign happened he of course
00:10:35.880was piping up there so he has definitely been chiming in on the hot tops we have a lot to talk
00:10:42.120about and not to spoil my own thesis but i do think that sort of like disgruntlement with the
00:10:48.280changing world around him, combined with an excessive use of AI, just is not a breeding
00:10:56.220ground for a healthy state of mind. But we'll get into all of that. Now, what do we all know
00:11:02.600about Boy George, barring all of the stuff we're going to talk about today? Because I feel like
00:11:06.760he's extremely famous, but also more famous for people who are maybe our parents' age. I feel
00:11:13.340Like if my dear listener does not know who he is, their parents definitely do.
00:11:18.320Before all of this started happening, I literally only knew him for the song Karma Chameleon.
00:11:23.940And now it's been stuck in my head for like the past three days.
00:11:43.340so I do believe that your experience has been deeper
00:11:49.020there was a moment where I went this is too much Carol you're you have sent approximately
00:11:55.78020 messages in a row this is too much and that was only the tip of the ice I responded in the
00:12:03.100morning my understanding experience with boy George so when I started to get into David Bowie
00:12:10.140I became very interested in that entire scene in the 70s and the 80s in the UK.
00:12:16.620And that was how I started to discover artists like Boyd George.
00:12:20.640And I was very fascinated with like the political and social time period and the new romantic era, which is what Boyd George came up in.
00:12:28.900And this real emergence of queer culture in the 80s, which was in contrast, of course, to the Margaret Thatcher conservatism in the UK.
00:12:37.300So a lot of like a lot of pop culture and political history that I was very interested in, but also because my family listened to George Michael.
00:12:48.040So I remember being confused when I first realized that there were two gay icons in the 80s in the UK, both like soul pop singers.
00:32:42.160There's like a couple different like biases that come to mind
00:32:45.700that were like at play throughout this
00:32:47.800because on one hand you have the like nature of sexual violence
00:32:52.660against sex workers, which is common and leads to, I think, a lot of sort of attitudes that like,
00:33:00.820well, if that person showed up and they were being paid as a sex worker, then the person who paid
00:33:07.280them like has a right to like do what they want. And obviously that's not the case. Like consent
00:33:13.060still applies in these situations. But you can imagine that not just that bias coming into play
00:33:20.140as you know this person tries to get justice also the bias against like being a queer person
00:33:25.700in general and unfortunately you see this fairly frequently in the lgbtq community where it's like
00:33:31.480these forms of sexual violence are no less severe really no different and a lot of the language of
00:33:38.480trying to excuse and deny that the abuse happened is eerily similar um to like what happens when men
00:33:45.640abuse women but in this case like you have so many different stigmas to go up against and one of them
00:33:52.340is like people struggle to hold two things in their mind that someone could be a queer icon and
00:33:57.620could also abuse another queer person and so it can lead to this desire to like oh we don't want
00:34:02.900to talk about that because we don't want to tarnish this person's legacy or feed into a stigma that's
00:34:07.760harmful to the entire community but in the process what happens is that this poor person gets
00:34:14.140re-traumatized over and over and over again and of course like there's the classic you know boy
00:34:20.620george is acknowledging that something happened he's attributing it to you know substance use
00:34:25.920and he's denying certain elements of this to try to like lessen the severity but he's not denying
00:34:32.680that this happened we know that something happened that night so it's just like a lot of really tired
00:34:37.820victim blaming tropes coming into play and the thing about addiction too which is an illness in
00:34:43.740its own right and you know one that i'm extremely like sensitive to but you also i mean one of the
00:34:50.000things about addiction recovery which boy george has been sober since 2008 is that you have to
00:34:54.880take accountability which is something that boy george uh is refusing to do still look at his
00:35:02.040exchanges with random people on twitter and you know tell me if you think it's accountability
00:35:06.060another terrible thing here is that boy george prior to his arrest and conviction
00:35:09.500he had talked openly about how he pays for sex workers like open in not being ashamed to
00:35:19.680say yes I pay for sex work and he even had said in an interview two years before this incident
00:35:27.280he said sex work is the oldest most respected profession and then two years later he turned
00:35:36.320violently abusive towards a young sex worker. Yeah. George told the court in East London at
00:35:45.880the time that Auden was lying to the police, to which Auden responded, quote,
00:35:50.860do you think I would put myself through all of this for the sake of a few thousand pounds?
00:35:56.560George was ultimately sentenced to 15 months in jail for false imprisonment of a male escort,
00:36:02.940a sentence of which he served four months of before being released on good behavior.
00:36:10.040Auden says that he was in therapy for eight years because of the incident.
00:36:14.540In 2016, how many years is that later?
00:36:18.060Nine years later, Boy George was cast as a judge and mentor on BBC One's The Voice,
00:36:24.160for which he earned a rumored salary of ÂŁ300,000.
00:36:27.900pounds. Upon the announcement of his casting, Auden Carlson told the UK Sun, quote, my life was
00:36:35.660ruined by that attack. I spent eight years in therapy. I only finally stopped three months ago.
00:36:41.980I thought I was moving on until I saw him on TV. I felt sick. It has put me back again. TV presenters
00:36:49.340are supposed to be role models and he clearly isn't one. He has never once apologized or shown
00:36:55.200any hint of remorse and another six years later in 2022 when boy george was cast on itv's i'm a
00:37:04.180celebrity for which he was paid an alleged 500 000 pounds out and said to the irish mirror
00:37:10.140quote every time i see him i feel it all over again i have a permanent back injury two or three
00:37:17.600times a year i get a slipped disc i have not used dating sites since i can't meet anyone because i
00:37:23.820get too anxious. I get skeptical about people because I don't know what their intentions are.
00:37:30.980It's basically just like every few years when Boy George gets cast in some huge high profile thing.
00:37:38.040This man who's now in his 40s comes forward to give like a single interview to be like,
00:37:44.880you know, this thing happened to me and I feel like nobody cares about it.
00:37:48.580And I feel like my attacker's professional life hasn't suffered one bit as a result of it.
00:37:53.820And that's why, you know, I said it's like, I don't really like true crime as a genre. But it does seem like this victim feels that he really has never gotten any justice for what happened to him. I can only imagine how it feels to see this person who attacked him like continually get propped up by various communities, various entertainment platforms now once again all over the media. And so I felt like, you know, that we should talk about it.
00:38:20.420Yeah. Yeah. It's also like the details that he shares are so just like saddeningly familiar to
00:38:27.760the stories of so many other victims who I've spoken to, both of people who are very famous
00:38:32.860and even of people who are not, because it's like people like to think of this type of attack as
00:38:38.280really just lasting for the duration of the incident itself. They don't see the lifelong
00:38:44.260consequences. They don't see the fact that you can have physical injuries from being assaulted
00:38:49.600that will continue to like pain you and cause you like costs throughout your life.
00:38:53.960They don't see how much of an enormous like financial loss it is to be assaulted because
00:38:58.540you need to pay for therapy for eight years and then any time you see this person's face
00:39:04.200again, the victims can't move on like psychologically, financially, mentally, they don't get that
00:39:10.400opportunity and like even in these cases where boy George did go to jail, it's like he served
00:39:16.660a four-month sentence, his victim will be serving this sentence for the rest of his life.
00:39:22.300Also, in 2023, he wrote his third memoir. He has three. And this one is called Karma,
00:39:30.340My Autobiography. And within it, he writes about his prison stint, his recovery. So much still,
00:39:40.680though, of course, from his perspective has been on how this was a terrible time for him because
00:39:48.880it was so drug fueled and just a lot of the trauma that he had had from growing up in the 80s and
00:39:57.220these really, really turbulent times and being a pop star and turning to drugs. Anyway, I just
00:40:02.680imagine, too, there is a unique position that you inhabit when you are a victim of a celebrity
00:40:10.260because there's such a power differential there.
00:45:01.860but so is being ignored and told you're a has-been.
00:45:06.000life is always now and i think chapel looks great but cheer up girl the world is at your feet
00:45:12.700stop kicking it it takes so much more time to say no to a picture or signature boundaries are
00:45:20.240boring break them with the magic of kindness oh you look better when you smile also like
00:45:29.040of course somebody who is convicted for falsely imprisoning a sex worker would say
00:45:41.280boundaries are boring at least he's consistent i just have to say too it's like yeah boundaries
00:45:48.920were boring when you were coming up in the 80s and the rules were no rules express yourself to
00:45:55.340the fullest extent that's not the same boundaries that chapel roan has advocated for in hey don't
00:46:02.380stalk me and my family please you're not a fan you're a parasocial obsessive stalker and it's
00:46:08.660scary yeah and you know i understand the anger towards what he's writing here but i also read
00:46:16.080it and i just felt sad he wrote the trick is to own your fame yes it's annoying at times but so
00:46:24.440is being ignored and told you're a has-been and i'm like ooh rejection he's just envious that
00:46:32.180chapel ron is receiving paparazzi attention at all and sort of projecting his own frustration
00:46:38.500with lack of relevance onto her in a way that is so obviously unfair but also like
00:46:44.240pretty transparently sad every single time one of these figures goes down this like right wing path
00:46:50.860at the root of it almost like 99.9 percent of the time is personal grievance and an insecurity
00:46:57.600and an anger at the world because you feel like you didn't get what you deserved in reality i'm
00:47:03.200like boy george you're lucky you didn't get what you deserved you deserve a lot worse for what you
00:47:08.320did than like getting a bunch of bad reviews but also i mean boy george what is his net worth
00:47:14.200well i mean google says his net worth is 50 million dollars oh i don't think so you don't
00:47:20.320think so this gets into the whole financial mess that then involves pk kemsley boy george's
00:47:27.900longtime manager bff who has borrowed against boy george's brand who is against culture club
00:47:35.020yes wait he has used those assets as collateral which then gets into the whole divorce and asset
00:47:44.240mess with dorit kemsley who pk is currently going through a very contentious divorce with
00:47:51.080and her team is trying to file a restraining order on the assets here because they're saying
00:47:57.260that he has taken out personal loans against boy george and culture club which means that those
00:48:03.140are the type of loans where the banks the financial lenders get first right in having that money paid
00:48:08.880back so that money then is no longer part of the marital assets which would then go to dorit i'm
00:48:14.120just saying this is all allegedly i have literally no idea what you just said
00:48:21.960what does that mean it's a mess what does any of that mean1.00
00:48:30.380it's a fucking mess oh caroline your brain is so crazy0.99
00:48:37.860i think this is actually a good place for you to elaborate on everything that you just said1.00
00:48:43.760but i i want to tee you up for it okay okay can you please uh spell out for us who is pk kemsley
00:48:50.340and what he's doing with boy george's career and finances okay so pk kemsley is an english
00:48:57.820businessman he's worked in property development and he's a talent manager and he has managed boy
00:49:05.980george on the talent side for a very long time and they are very very very good friends in fact
00:49:13.460Boy George performed at P.K. Kemsley's wedding to Dorit, the housewife, real housewives of Beverly Hills fans will know P.K. and Dorit from the show, which Boy George has also made many appearances on because he was such a close part of their life.
00:49:31.560But in the wake of now what is a very messy, very contentious divorce between PK and Dorit, Boyd George has come out and made a lot of statements, of course, fully supporting PK, saying that Dorit is the problem here, pushing back on her and her team's claims of like economic abuse, claiming that PK is a fraudster who has borrowed all of this money against Culture Club.
00:49:57.200There is a long history here with P.K. Kemsley filing for bankruptcy at multiple points.
00:50:05.120He filed after the 2008 financial crisis when he left England.
00:50:09.800I think he had acquired something like a $50 million loan.
00:50:14.220I'm just going to say allegedly to all this.
00:50:17.640Yeah, very alleged because I don't think he's afraid of litigation.0.94
00:58:14.080But that is, I mean, he's just, he's a celebrity engaging with an AI chatbot publicly in the way that like normal people oftentimes do privately when they're in vulnerable situations.
00:58:25.520which is like, I need this chat bot to tell me that I'm right about everything and that everything
00:58:31.000I do is perfect and innovative. And it's this yearning for relevancy and I think the ability
00:58:37.840to reinvent, as well as some shoddy business advice that led Boy George and his manager PK
00:58:45.040to start their new company, Artist Included, in June of 2026. Now, what are the first letters
00:58:54.860of artist and included? AI. Wow. That is a level of creativity that I could not possibly attempt.
00:59:06.560Off the charts. Now, what is artist included? Literally off the charts, like not on the charts,
00:59:15.540not charting. Sorry. The purpose of artist included is to help artists re-record their
00:59:23.180own music using AI to create new copies of the songs that the artist can own the masters to.
00:59:31.120Boy George was basically like patient zero to both test and push the idea that this could be a viable
00:59:37.320solution to predatory record label contracts. Boy George and Culture Club have never owned their
00:59:44.300own masters, including the masters to that of Karma Chameleon. And Boy George wanted to use
00:59:51.880artist included, to revive his younger voice in the context of these reviews letting us know that
00:59:58.200he can't really sing anymore makes some sense, to create near-identical new recordings in sort
01:00:05.620of a similar style to the way that Taylor Swift re-recorded her own music, except that she can
01:00:10.840actually sing the same way she sang. And she's rich enough to just buy back the original masters.
01:00:15.540And then she just bought them back anyway, so you know, good for her. Kemsley told The Hollywood
01:00:20.620reporter that the idea for artists included came together after a recent licensing deal for karma
01:00:26.440chameleon netted four million dollars he said quote four million dollars changed hands george
01:00:33.920didn't get anything at all i mean i think like a lot of things that people talk about like oh we
01:00:39.820should use ai to do this we should use ai to do that like there's a real problem here that i think
01:00:45.280you could critique which is that like people who are not artists people who have nothing to do with
01:00:49.940the music are able to make so much money off of like selling and reselling these songs it's the
01:00:55.740same problem nfts tried to solve exactly that's the thing is like these new tech advancements
01:01:02.500like big air quotes around advancements can't actually like solve these base issues they just
01:01:07.860contribute to an industry that itself is like perpetuating issues like plagiarism and making
01:01:13.280bajillions of dollars off of other struggling artists work like you cannot use this technology
01:01:20.160I don't think to fundamentally solve the same problems that belong to the AI industry itself
01:01:25.760yeah it's identifying a very real predatory ongoing issue and then trying to slap on a
01:01:34.420solution that brings its own set of issues I also just don't really understand the company
01:01:40.800and this could be on me having a limited understanding of like how different AI tools
01:01:45.220work but wouldn't AI at the rate that it's progressing ultimately just make a company
01:01:50.620like this itself obsolete well yes because like couldn't couldn't anyone soon enough just
01:01:56.520make their own re-recordings that sound exactly like the original recordings couldn't anyone
01:02:00.940just do that without using artists included to me it just sounds like such a scam which
01:02:05.740I don't know knowing the situation that Boy George and PK Kemsley are in sounds like something they
01:02:10.460would do yeah it's hard to say how much of it here is from boy george's perspective him genuinely
01:02:17.940trying to have control over his sound and is uh really wanting to kind of tap back into the
01:02:27.380nostalgia that has been propelling him for years now and how much of it is like him and pk going
01:02:32.780we need money and that's what a lot of people who are like ai entrepreneurs are in the position of
01:02:37.960doing. And it comes back to the argument that boy George was
01:02:41.060making where he was like, I Yeah, it's like sucks that people
01:02:43.780are using their losing their jobs. But like, you need to just
01:02:46.540like learn how to use AI. And we hear this all the time from
01:02:50.060people who are like pro AI adoption, like learn how to use
01:02:53.360it or get left behind. And it's like, I despise this argument so
01:02:57.960much, because it's like, taken to its logical extreme, AI is
01:03:02.240gonna take your job, whether you learn how to use it or not.
01:03:05.220like that's literally the whole point of it and in fact by using it and like training it and helping
01:03:10.540it grow you're just speeding up the timeline for ai to like quote take your job because if anyone
01:03:16.720can make a boy george song then anyone will and he's not going to get any of the money from that
01:03:21.360exactly the first product that artists included put out is the art the artist included version
01:03:29.760of karma chameleon it's very funny how much of this is modeled i think after taylor swift because
01:03:34.420it's literally called like karma chameleon in parentheses artist included and very like
01:03:39.180taylor's version but the ai version it's uh it's weirdly flat compared to the normal song i can't
01:03:45.860play them here for copyright reasons but you can go listen to them if you want or don't i don't
01:03:50.300really care you know to an untrained ear i think it sounded like not bad to me some people might
01:03:57.880disagree with that but i you know the bottom line is in six months it could sound i think probably
01:04:02.820very good at the rate we're going with no regulation, no breaks, no anything. But what's
01:04:08.880more interesting to me when considering all of this as a business model, in the two months since
01:04:14.920its release, the AI Karma Chameleon has received 150,000 streams on Spotify. In that same period,
01:04:23.300the human version of Karma Chameleon continues to receive 350,000 streams per day.
01:04:30.980yeah so without a devoted fan base like taylor swift's that really like streamed all of the
01:04:39.360taylor's versions of her songs because they wanted to support her they were you know deeply attuned
01:04:44.220to the politics of their favorite artists management disputes and master's ownership
01:04:48.760without that though which almost no artist has the ai reclamation model all ethics of ai aside
01:04:55.500To me, I don't think it works. The main draw here, according to Boy George and PK, is that the artist will be able to reclaim the money that they're losing out from on their old hits. But people don't want to listen to the AI version. And that's if they even know it exists.
01:05:14.000Also, he has at many points mentioned Taylor Swift saying that she's his inspiration in how her business acumen and drive to have ownership over her music is. I know that they had met at one point like a decade ago and took a photo. So he very much has explicitly pointed to Taylor Swift and her battle over the control of her art.
01:05:38.220yeah and like it's fucked up that a song like karma chameleon that the rights to that song
01:05:44.580can be sold for four million dollars and that the people who made the song receive none of that0.77
01:05:51.080but creating this like shoddy ai solution it just it doesn't work and i don't know so much of this
01:06:00.220marketing that these like weird random ai products are gonna are gonna fix all of the wrongs of the
01:06:07.140world of business of science it just instead of addressing the reason that the problem exists
01:06:12.280itself which is like greedy record label contracts and stuff like that it just i don't know it feels
01:06:17.880like putting a band-aid on a pipe to make more money off of a system that's just going to keep
01:06:22.840breaking and getting worse unless we actually deal with it like you should have made that money you
01:06:27.340should have made that four million dollars you're never going to make it with this i feel like for
01:06:31.680this system to get more ethical for artists there would need to be some sort of collective action
01:06:36.520among artists in order to like force change from the industry itself. But Boy George's politics as
01:06:42.800of late do not seem to be in line with collective change in service of the greater good. So I don't
01:06:48.820think that's going to happen for him. Well, let's talk about Boy George's politics as of late. In
01:06:54.560July, Boy George, through posts on Twitter and Instagram, releases his new song called We Will
01:07:02.420dance again. It is a pro-Israel reggae fight song generated by AI. I don't know if I can post it
01:07:27.960in the podcast like does this have a copyright claim on it i guess it doesn't because it hasn't
01:07:33.520been released by a record label well that was a part of the problem here well so maybe maybe i
01:07:40.020can put it in and maybe i don't know uh either way listen to it or don't i don't care he wrote
01:07:45.800on threads quote the song was created using ai i call it ai for good truthfully i would struggle
01:15:30.520Boy George just revealed he is losing friends and business partners
01:15:33.720because he chose to stand up for the Jewish people.
01:15:37.280Thank you, Boy George, for choosing moral clarity over fake friends.
01:15:42.040He didn't drop out of a show and he didn't lose business partners.
01:15:46.640He excused himself because boy George is currently unable to release this quote unquote song on streaming apps like Spotify for reasons that are not entirely clear to me.
01:21:12.040And then rolling out the red carpet for Boy George's AI-generated song, which has been celebrated by outlets like the Jerusalem Post, the Times of Israel, and Jewish News Syndicate, and by, of course, Debra Messing.
01:21:29.940Now, the irony of all of this being that in December of 2025, less than a year ago, Boy George tweeted,
01:21:40.700When I found out David Icke was following me, a big smile erupted on my face.
01:22:00.220But David Icke is a very prolific British conspiracy theorist.
01:22:05.080he his like chief belief is that the world is run by like shape-shifting lizard people
01:22:10.860think that sounds like something pretty close to garden variety anti-semitism it is he is a vocal
01:22:19.540supporter and pusher of the protocols of the elders of zion an anti-semitic book from the
01:22:25.840early 1900s that alleges a jewish plot for global domination and is basically the handbook for
01:22:32.700modern anti-semitism david eich has cited the protocols of the elders of zion in not one but
01:22:39.560two of his own books the robots rebellion from 1994 and the truth shall set you free from 1995
01:22:46.500which led publishers to reject him as a client and he's published all of his own books since then
01:22:53.020by the way by the way by the way this isn't like niche information david eich is like oh he's so
01:23:00.280well-known. He's well-known as a conspiratorial anti-Semite. He is fully banned from countries
01:23:06.540like, uh, Netherlands. He has been banned off of just about every social media platform. I don't
01:23:12.440know if he's back. And during COVID-19, of course he was out there spreading very, very, very
01:23:19.480dangerous, uh, disinformation and contributing to the rise of people disbelieving public health
01:23:28.940organizations and rejecting vaccines on his wikipedia page the section for accusations
01:23:36.600of anti-semitism is longer than the entire early life and education like section yeah yeah this is
01:23:45.960who i guess makes boy george smile according to his his own words but like this is the thing that
01:23:52.760gets me, right? This is the thing that really gets me. All of the, I guess, like mainstream Zionist
01:23:59.780sort of institutions, publications, influencers online are like hailing boy George as like so
01:24:08.220brave in the way that he's standing up. And many of these same people, you know, including the
01:24:14.000author of that essay I mentioned some minutes ago, they call me like a self-hating Jew. They'll call0.69
01:24:20.020me an anti-Semite. They'll say that I've turned my back on my people, yada, yada, yada, yada,
01:24:26.200yada. Like we've, you know, we've heard it all before. And this isn't about me. And it's like,
01:24:29.760at the end of the day, it's like, who cares? But it gets me the way that someone who tweeted this
01:24:36.600in December of 2025, like really, really not that long ago, it gets like just treated amazingly by0.99
01:24:45.140these people for his one like fucking bullshit ai reggae song you know it reminds me like0.98
01:24:51.940clavicular like i said you know he not that long ago he was in a club in miami singing0.99
01:24:58.220heil hitler by kanye west and then he like took a trip to israel probably as image rehabilitation
01:25:06.020for that scenario and to their credit not all the zionists were happy i was like i was like
01:25:13.240in zionist influencer content spheres and there was a lot of argument over like should we or
01:25:18.740shouldn't we welcome clavicular into our holy land and i'm like what a conversation to be having
01:25:23.820you know how bad you are yeah if they won't take you like i don't know about this one guys i guess
01:25:31.920it just like this is where i'm just like no you guys like actually anti-semitism and anti-zionism0.79
01:25:37.500and Jews and Israel. We not the same, not the same at all. Because if you can publicly celebrate
01:25:43.980David Icke, and then be called like a hero to the Jewish people less than a year later,0.54
01:25:49.280what a joke to insist that these things are, you know, the same.
01:25:53.380To add to the point that he's literally just doing it for engagement as well. Like when I
01:25:57.760glance at his Instagram account and look at him posting about anything that isn't Zionism,
01:26:02.740he's getting like maybe a few hundred maybe like a few thousand likes at most but when he does post
01:26:09.540about how he's being oppressed because of his love for the Jewish people he's all of a sudden
01:26:14.540getting engagement that's like in the tens of thousands of likes and it's just so like cheapening
01:26:20.000like it's like he's doing this for attention not because he actually has any like he doesn't I
01:26:26.260don't even think he actually believes in in Zionism I think he might like I think he's in
01:26:31.100a Debra Messing algorithm and has been for a while actually. Okay. I guess what I would say
01:26:35.500more so is with this AI song, I think one, it has to do with the company that they are trying to
01:26:41.480direct attention. It is a, it is a marketing tool for them. They decided to choose this format of
01:26:48.980generating AI slop around the genocide of Palestinians because PK Kemsley is a Zionist.
01:26:55.920In that conversation, the ongoing conversation I've been having with my source who was close to these people a few years ago, I feel so TMZ being like a source close to the subject.
01:27:08.120This person did tell me that one thing PK Kemsley is very good at is ginning up outrage and turning it into business.
01:27:14.880So I would not be shocked if that allegedly could have also played a role in Boy George's putting out this piece of audio.
01:27:23.540But, you know, I want to talk just like a little bit to cap things off about the sort of continued spiral Boy George seems to be making into the land of AI, especially in the wake of all of this.
01:27:38.400A cursory scroll through Boy George's social media accounts amidst his latest controversy reveals, I think, a troubled person who is obsessively using AI to feed their own worst impulses.
01:27:52.560and cat you asked if boy george has identified as a victim of cancel culture well wouldn't you
01:27:59.760be happy to know that he has put out a follow-up hit to we will dance again
01:28:05.900it is an ai generated song called cancel that cow
01:29:04.560you get the point i feel like part of that song is plagiarized from like a bonnie tyler song
01:29:26.960like there's like a tiny part of the back like it sounds like a bunch which granted this is what
01:29:31.180you mean an ai generated song that has scraped other artists work off the internet yes exactly
01:29:36.660like it's like it's just they're pulling different pieces from other songs and then
01:29:40.140splicing them together and i'm like oh it's bad as someone who has voluntarily listened to many
01:29:46.180like a youtuber's failed album music career like they all greatly surpassed whatever that was
01:29:53.300I honestly think this story we have told over the last two hours is the encapsulation of so many things we talk about all the time.
01:30:06.620And to see Boy George as really, you know, exemplifying a once famous, once iconic, once barrier breaking, boundary breaking artist to really an aged now conservative boomer mess where he is absolutely looking at the current environment and going, what are ways to gain relevancy?