00:05:55.120In this day and age, a new political party, right?
00:05:59.240We want Canada to go not left, not right, but forward.
00:06:02.040We think it's time for politics that's focused on being brave, being evidence-based and delivering results because if democracy doesn't deliver, then people are going to lose faith in it.
00:06:12.380We're seeing that right now with the liberals who are trapped in the politics of the 1990s and Mr. Polyev who perhaps is trapped in the politics of the 1930s.
00:06:19.940We want to talk about Canada moving ahead with clear, decisive plans for dealing with some of the big challenges that bluntly Mr. Polyev and Mr. Trudeau are simply not being honest with Canadians about.
00:06:30.080you could probably get your average person anyone below the age of 30 is more likely to join a
00:06:38.920militia right now if you gave them the if they saw that on the corner they would join that no
00:06:43.080one wants a political party i think i can't i don't think harper ever had the type of grassroots
00:06:47.920support that polyev has right now like i don't know this is such a total miss to think that
00:06:53.200people are afraid sorry rather to think that conservative voters are afraid of polyev
00:06:57.960To most conservative voters, he's viewed as a savior at this point.
00:15:33.600I would definitely, fuck, I'd subscribe to the Fraser Institute.
00:15:36.900The study compared the three worst periods of decline in Canada in the last 40 years, the 89 recession, the 2008 global financial crisis, and the post-pandemic era, which is also the era we're currently in.
00:17:16.420I'll just lay this out in a nice chain.
00:17:18.460New York Post says U.S. inflation hits 2.9 in July, paving way for Fed to finally start cutting rates.
00:17:25.920Cat Turd says, nice fake number, but I live in the real world.
00:17:29.860My grocery and pet food bills have doubled under Biden and gas prices have more than doubled.
00:17:35.800James Sirwicki, prestigious man, says, if you think your grocery bills have doubled in the last four years, you do not live in the real world.
00:29:56.020So I'm just going to read the bit here. It says, Mexico has elected its first female president. The 61-year-old of Jewish extraction holds a PhD as an energy engineer and currently serves as the mayor of Mexico City represents both a serious divergence and a concerning continuation of policies.
00:30:12.620The current president of Mexico, Andres Manuel LĂłpez Obrador, both presidents vowed to work with the United States on the issue of mass immigration.
00:30:24.460We can say with some certainty that she will be no better on the issue than the president was, and he has been quite the disaster.
00:30:31.120He consistently reneged on promises to America to stop the migrant inflow.
00:30:36.080He once demanded more than $20 billion in foreign aid for Hispanic countries, as well
00:30:40.900as demanding that 10 million Hispanics in the United States be given legal status.
00:30:45.580More recently, that former president's administration said we refuse deportations carried out by
00:30:50.760the state of Texas, regardless of the proven identity of deportees, because said deportations
00:30:55.920would violate the rights of Mexican citizens.
00:30:58.980I never really thought about this much before, because I always operate under the assumption
00:31:26.440the government viewing their own population
00:31:29.440as a bioweapon against their neighbor.
00:31:31.520because that's what mexicans are treated as hispanics are it's like i'm going to inflict these
00:31:37.460these people upon you yeah i don't want them back and for like someone of european extraction
00:31:42.640there's this idea of the homeland you know this is my nation or my city state whatever it might be
00:31:49.480and if i leave i could understand being deported my government has an interest in having me here
00:31:57.340to be part of this system but i've never i don't know i never really thought about before how
00:32:02.400strange it is that mexico is hurling its own population at america and saying no take backs
00:32:09.120that's one part of it too and then the other part of it is um that a lot of the people especially
00:32:14.020lately that have been coming over are not not only not mexicans they are south american and
00:32:18.660then even recently they're not even south american they're like african indian chinese
00:32:22.140and they're using the porous border with mexico as a way of getting in and you gotta think that
00:32:28.460like mexico has the ability to stop this at any moment it's much easier for them to stop it than
00:32:34.960for the u.s i mean look either country could stop it if they had the will but certainly it would be
00:32:38.340easier for mexico to stop them from coming into the first place because they're not fucking mexicans
00:32:41.840so this is like a feature of mexican immigration policy is we will take as much garbage as we can
00:32:49.200and dump it on the other guy's lawn like it's like you're importing garbage to dump it on somebody
00:32:55.320else's lawn like as it's like it's like an arms trade if your people are bioweapons you're gonna
00:33:00.120get more bioweapons from other worse countries like it's just it's crazy and that's why whenever
00:33:06.240we have the discussion about reshoring or friend shoring and manufacturing coming back to north
00:33:11.880america it's really coming back to mexico i'm like mexico i it's hard for me to imagine a more
00:33:17.640hostile neighbor than mexico this is a strange thing to say but it is like having a foreign
00:33:24.280nation as your neighbor by which i mean in the world island of asia you can kind of see a gradation
00:33:31.200of nations like you can kind of see the gradation of scandinavia through europe and eastern europe
00:33:37.740and and that's sort of like an asiatic buffer zone you know what i mean but it's this is like
00:33:43.500if you plucked mongolia and then planted it next door to america but you can see a gradation from
00:33:49.860like america to canada throughout the west right they're kind of similar but i'm like like across
00:33:55.180europe mexico is like like a fucking african country you just fucking put there and it has
00:34:01.720no interest in engaging with you in any way outside of just open hostility and that's the
00:34:08.260government because below that there is a even more nightmarish hostility of its decentralized
00:34:13.320cartel structure which given the chance might nuke you yeah if they if they thought they can
00:34:19.380make a dollar doing that because they're they would do it for fun not even they do it they
00:34:22.820literally do it for laughs and so i'm looking at that i'm like you know we talked about the idea
00:34:28.300of turbo america we talked about you know america as an empire going forward indefinitely and what
00:34:35.500tools are at its disposal to do that and one of those um strategies was incorporating more of
00:34:41.620mexico into the american empire and south america but i'm like maybe even south america in some
00:34:48.020sense but not mexico like what what can you do with mexico right and like the story of the
00:34:55.500american south is just always being at odds with that there would be like like white people in
00:35:01.240canada working with aboriginals like on very rare occasions your interests can align but like
00:35:07.200there is such a gulf between these identities and interests and like there is no there's no
00:35:13.960symbiosis it's a fluke of geography that mexico is above the equator so we call it north american
00:35:19.060it's part of latin america it should be you know anglo america and lat am they're the northern
00:35:24.980most state in the latin american group but they're not really north american we're north american
00:35:29.720they are so much more similar and again like i don't i'm not i don't hate mexicans outright
00:35:35.720Right. But I don't really want to have anything to do with them. And I certainly don't want to I don't consider our industry, our factories closing in the Rust Belt and going to fucking Guadalajara.
00:35:47.080I don't consider that friend shoring. I would almost consider it friend shoring if it went to fucking Ohio. Why? Because I can move to Ohio.
00:35:54.800Ohio looks exactly like my town and they speak the same language, right? Guadalajara, my children will be sold. So, uh, it's not, it's not the same fucking thing. It's much more like, you know, pick one, Guatemala, wherever.
00:36:10.200this is an idea that I'm still working on right now
01:06:07.700drop is on him you know a couple crackheads get him and they just one of them makes him suck his
01:06:12.720dick and then that just happens you think someone's going to come in in a show that makes sense
01:06:19.440the backup's going to arrive but then backup does arrive and they knock and then they leave
01:06:24.900and he just has to suck this crackhead's dick and then beg for his life after and then i'm two
01:06:31.960episodes later and you're just watching a guy who was raped and he's like being mean to his wife
01:06:37.140it's just like you haven't come home it's like i'm busy like he can't do he can't how do you what
01:06:43.860do you do what do you do when you're the chief of police and you got you had to suck someone's
01:06:48.420dick at gunpoint you can't tell anyone who do you tell and he's just like being uncomfortable
01:06:54.380around everyone's like you're weird lately what's going on with you i'm like what the fuck is this
01:07:00.480show this is the greatest show i've ever seen yeah that's pretty great watching him just do
01:07:05.700paperwork with his hands trembling i know that my good friend tyler hamilton he and some guys
01:07:16.860they did a retrospective on the shield a few episodes they went season by season and josh
01:07:23.600neal's in there jefferson lee's in there they're probably going for two hours deconstructing it so
01:07:29.560my deconstruction was you know the boss got his fucking throat fucked and then you gotta just
01:07:35.080I had this article here I wanted to talk about just to set up the book that I want to discuss, but this article got me thinking in relation to this book.
01:07:50.500I'm going to explain why in a little bit, but I'm looking at the sub-stack of Luke Burgess.
01:07:58.700Luke Burgess, the title of this is The Scandal of Financial Nihilism.
01:08:03.840uh the subtitle here is the wheels keep on turning and the anti-memetic brakes are breaking
01:08:09.680so financial nihilism what does he mean he kind of opens it with something interesting here he says
01:08:15.380nobody has a precise idea how much wealth anyone else has there's a good chance you don't even know
01:08:21.900your own we're all engaged in an elaborate game of assumptions even about our own future
01:08:26.940beneath the narratives people are silently crying crying out for order a link between cause and
01:08:32.520effect or some indication that hard work still matters or the assurance that they will be
01:08:38.140rewarded for good decisions and not just for reckless ones. He's talking about a lot of
01:08:44.900things there. He's talking about, for example, the crypto market. A lot of people make a lot
01:08:49.980of money on crypto, but there is kind of an understanding that it's not really related to
01:08:56.680anything that makes sense you kind of just it's it's like surfing a wave you just kind of get a
01:09:03.180vibe from something or like there's nothing to research really into what will go it's either
01:09:09.060you pump it up yourself and manipulate it and then do a rug pull or you kind of spread it out amongst
01:09:15.460a bunch of shit coins but you know people who say they know what they're doing with crypto i think
01:09:20.920are kind of lying um in the sense that it doesn't follow the same rules of the stock where you can
01:09:26.500research the company or anything i think the nft market was an interesting example of that you know
01:09:31.820i don't know where people stand on nfts but it seems that that craze is over would i be wrong
01:09:37.240in saying that or it seems it seems that way to me i keep seeing new places that are offering it
01:09:43.080but they're usually it seems like now they're packaging it like it comes with a real product
01:09:46.800or rather the the product is an actual product but there's an nft package with it or like there's a
01:09:51.620game but the tokens within the game have associated nfts or something like that but
01:09:55.900the days of like the apyot or whatever it was where it's an nft unto itself and it's worth
01:10:02.260a million dollars i think those are somewhat over it's a game you can not master but you can learn
01:10:09.580the rules you know like you can recognize a pattern a lot of a lot of the way people make
01:10:14.300money is they just recognize patterns and data but it's not tied to anything else it's just this
01:10:18.680sort of free floating game he says when you make or lose a lot of money quickly without the ability
01:10:24.180to see exactly why and how the windfall or bust happened it can lead to financial nihilism when
01:10:30.820you see or think you see other people doing the same it can lead to financial financial nihilism
01:10:35.880as well when you work very hard and do all the right things and then proceed to lose most of
01:10:41.220your net worth in the course of a month due to unexpected circumstances it can also lead to
01:10:45.940financial nihilism um he says uh one of his friends here is referred to it as quote a philosophy that
01:10:52.940treats the objects of speculation as though they were intrinsically worthless i think that's that
01:10:59.760really spoke to me as well it's like yes we can master the rules of the game of how to make money
01:11:06.100but there is this kind of understanding that there are no rules per se like it's not tied to anything
01:11:11.880it is worthless it is a game that we're playing right yeah um it's not tied to any value it's a
01:11:17.680currency it's this you know we've heard these arguments before but it is basically worthless
01:11:21.680you know unless we give it worth unless we our participation in this is what gives it worth
01:11:29.040which is sort of the magic behind bitcoin that's the magic behind crypto absent people giving it
01:11:34.420value it has no value but when we say that that means we've decoupled it from the understanding
01:30:20.540Like, he's saying that, okay, because the spine, because you can stand erect, you can view the world and understand your relationship with the world more differently.
01:30:31.100You can kind of stand outside and above the world more than an animal can, which gives you a different perspective of the world.
01:30:38.620That different perspective grants you the ability to sort of create an internal mindscape, right?
01:30:45.060And he says, and he's talking about Immanuel Kant here, the great philosophy says, it is only by generating its own limits, imposing its own rules upon itself, that knowledge becomes possible. For us, Kant argued, merely having a perception is not the same as being justified in believing one's perceptions, voraciousness.
01:31:03.700It is a most fundamental lesson of Kantian purism.
01:31:08.700A rational actor, insofar as it is rational, can only respond to rational arguments.
01:31:14.480So both the cerebrospinal ensconcement of saman tentagic englobant are legible as thresholds of an inward collapse that was initiated about 600 million years ago with the evolution of nervous architectures.
01:31:29.620he says here importantly when comparing global space which is the four-dimensional space we
01:31:36.400inhabit to rational space kant couldn't help but muse that although we comprehend the terrestrial
01:31:42.220magnitude schopenhauer would later assert that consciousness is the mere surface of our mind
01:31:47.620and of this as of the globe we do not know the interior but only the crust furthermore given
01:31:54.360that chronoception is itself a product of mindedness a corollary implication is that time
01:32:00.640itself has a history that's interesting and indeed the phylogenesis of time receptivity
01:32:07.920can be recounted it is a neural saga that is legible the ossified memory of the reorganizing
01:32:14.560and segmented spine so what's he saying there he's saying that time itself in a sense can
01:32:22.740manifest physically he has this really interesting uh thing later on where he says or he points out
01:32:30.180correctly that humans seem to be birthed through every stage of their evolution you know when uh
01:32:38.260during conception shortly after conception you know you are a fetus you almost you evolve like
01:32:44.600humans evolved from these single cell organisms up into a multi-celled complex organism even the
01:32:50.040point where at at one point during your uh gestation you have a tail then you get rid of
01:32:55.780the tail obviously like you you must you must proceed through every step of evolution
01:33:01.120you know sequentially you're not you're not just formed as a human you're formed as like a proto
01:33:06.880human first in the womb and then you know by extension interestingly if you ever wanted to
01:36:07.120and anticipatory responsivity to hazard.
01:36:11.700So everything, and this is what's kind of interesting
01:36:14.860about this, but this is something I find
01:36:18.140a lot of the Marxist and post-leftist think.
01:36:22.180Marx, appropriately, he had his conceptualization
01:36:25.940of the surplus as sort of a free-floating thing.
01:36:29.480When we covered Marx's capital and the concept of surplus as a product of the Industrial Revolution was given form as a sort of organism.
01:36:45.720When he speaks of surplus, it becomes this entity that free floats above all of the productive processes as an entity in itself that seeks to perpetuate itself.
01:36:55.860And that's what they're dealing with. And the bourgeois were sort of a manifestation of that class. It's something that has no relation to labor or work, but it just exists to perpetuate itself. Jacques Ellul talked about this as well in technological society when he's talking about technique. There's this thing called technique and technique seeks to perpetuate itself.
01:37:17.700You'll hear Marxists often say that Hegel was the last true philosopher.
01:46:31.440Time here is seen as analogous to a biological secretion of the central nervous system.
01:46:36.800The spine is a symbol that expresses its object not by conveying it, but by manifesting it.
01:46:43.700Becoming aware of the future necessarily leads to conquering it.
01:46:48.160What then is the spinal column, if not a megalith, raised to the mineralizing trace of the organism's diaspora into its own self-entaglement, dorsally fulgurating our cephalotical axis, an outward memory of inward collapse?
01:47:10.320So that's kind of what he's talking about when I said that our consciousness is always kind of collapsing inward. Everything is collapsing inward. And it's that collapsing inward that explodes consciousness and understanding and even existence outward.
01:47:24.880so that might sound like a dialectic to some you know that's where the leftist and post-left
01:47:31.820ideology comes in that reality itself is the dialectical tension caught between exploding
01:47:42.140collapsing inward and exploding outward and here's a paragraph that sounds kind of trippy
01:47:49.020but it ties it all together so bear with me he says capturing the fallibility of one's perception
01:47:54.320forces one to reflect on the distinction between oneself and the world it's kind of what we were
01:48:00.240just talking about it's how we came to think like a planet it's why the sun's downward onslaught
01:48:07.540of insulation triggers synapsing spines to tenduously rise for the uphill struggle inherited
01:48:14.980by all negantropic systems is simultaneously and illicitably also a falling inward so
01:48:23.720so it's like the struggle against the universe the struggle against the punishing
01:48:30.120you know radiation and toxic energy of the sun just like the planet has given us form as we
01:48:39.100struggle against it and that struggle against it causes us to think inward and contextualize
01:48:46.860yourself against our environment even more so it's a constant exploding outward of growth
01:48:52.560plus an implosion inward of self-consciousness and analysis.
01:48:59.840It says here, the more conversant you are with time,
01:49:03.380that is to say, the more time inhabits you,
01:49:16.500as the sort of the fulcrum of this entire thing.
01:49:20.980Like the spine is, the spine and the skull are the two fundamental components of humanity.
01:49:29.580In fact, he says later on that, you know, the perfected human may in fact be just a head with a spine trailing behind it, like a giant chattering sperm.
01:54:04.340but that supercluster complexes, galaxy walls, filaments, and voids
01:54:09.140coarsened and distorted space-time through back reaction.
01:54:14.360He claimed likewise applied when mapping our bodies as clustered
01:54:17.620of relations within macroevolutionary morphospace so you're finding you know correlations between
01:54:24.940the human system and the galactic system right here and he furthers that here by saying organic
01:54:32.560development is just the future arriving early organic structure is just the retention of the
01:54:38.900past and our experience of time is nothing but movement within this morphospace the implication
01:54:45.940mean that if time is emitted by central nervous system architecture then there are other possible
01:54:51.920receptivity problems other workable organizations of time organizations from within our current
01:54:58.040complex nervous system architecture can only appear to us as instances of time travel as
01:55:04.500contortions of unlinearity precocious futures or recidivist pasts basically what he's saying there
01:55:12.200is that our like time is something created by us that's kind of what he's saying like our
01:55:18.720conception of time kind of explodes outward and it's complete and total subjectivity in that
01:55:25.540sense there is no truth there is no such thing as objective truth there's no such thing as
01:55:30.660objective reality there's only like this concept of time which is being generated by the central
01:55:36.300nervous system itself which is itself just sort of a physical manifestation of traumas and trying
01:55:44.860to predict trauma you know and this is it reminds me of um remember we were talking to jf carepi
01:55:51.020about um you know his biological background not his biological background his background in biology
01:55:57.660and specifically DNA and how one could view the human body as just a giant machine to help DNA
01:56:06.900move through time and withstand entropy. We are something that our genes have generated to make
01:56:15.840it so we can survive a bit longer and optimize itself across generations. So this entire thing
01:56:22.400we inhabit is a machine it's a biomechanical machine so if you view this from that perspective
01:56:29.200then that biomechanical machine is also emanating time from it so there is a way to frame this where
01:56:38.620you know the genes themselves create the universe he goes into even further here it says provoked
01:56:47.440by the unstable compromise between absolute idealism and natural history, this obsession
01:56:53.480with developmental repetitiousness became the core tenet of Goethezeit natural philosophy.
01:57:01.220It promulgated the conviction among many practicing naturalists that the entire external
01:57:06.960universe was simply the fossilized museum of various arrested stages of evolutionary
01:57:13.160development relics or abortions from mind's unconscious voyage unto self-unconsciousness
01:57:20.800so that what appears from within this constraint as a unified present moment or window into
01:57:28.040simultaneity is revealed instead to be as an exploded view cross-section of radically
01:57:34.460disarticulated moments of total time each internal organ or external species a piece of suspended
01:57:41.660historical shrapnel now it's difficult to kind of grasp what he's talking about there
01:57:48.380but you know when we imagine ourselves as entities moving through linear time
01:57:55.660that's a very familiar and historical way of looking at us and i think that's important
01:58:01.160the the certitude of linear time rather than sort of amorphous cyclical time i prefer the linear
01:58:10.280time however it tends to make us view time as just one direction whereas he's trying to get you to
01:58:17.400view time as like a web of intersections it's almost like various times intersecting at once
01:58:24.880like you understand that the present is but a snapshot that there is a past and there is a
01:58:30.720future and this this moment is very very fleeting right so it is an intersection of reality into
01:58:39.100your perception in a sense and that's why I always found interesting about that book
01:58:43.820the Langoliers by Stephen King that the past was a space that you could inhabit that's what the
01:58:49.980book is about the book is about a group of people on a plane who of course go through a storm and
01:58:56.540they end up trapped in the past or they end up like just out of step with the present moment
01:59:03.140And they end up somehow inhabiting a past where there's things, there's earth, and they're on a plane, and there's trees and water, but there's no people.
01:59:13.380So people, in a sense, are part of time, but they're apart from it.
02:02:01.400That's a pretty deep thought, actually.
02:02:03.540Spinal catastrophism takes this essentially tragic lesson to heart.
02:02:07.520The conditions for reason, enlightenment, and face-to-face speech are also the enablers of pain, perversion, and exodus from any home on the horizon.
02:02:20.420He kind of develops that a bit here and explains the retreat inward from that.
02:02:24.680He says, it was the intuition of the 20th century philosophical anthropology, then, that our species, spinely exiled from any determinant topos, compensated for its biotropic vagrancy by retreating into the inward ramifications of sequentially cryographic, mythical, artifactual, cultural, industrial, and computational exoskeleton.
02:02:49.540And this is where he talks about the spine and the head existing on their own.
02:02:55.660He says, sooner or later, some eminent physiologist will have his neck broken in a super-civilized accident or find his body cells worn beyond capacity for repair, Bernal quipped.
02:03:07.520The solution? Get rid of the body below the neck.
02:03:10.240In short, Bernal anticipates that the communistic Prometheans of the future will be cerebrospinal systems surgically emancipated from the rest of the human frame.
02:03:20.820The Promethean human is a brain trailing a spinal tail, the loosened tendrils of which, Bernal projects, will be repurposed as the connectors for various plug-and-play sensory and motor appendages that can be switched in and out according to need and desire.
02:03:36.160He kind of summarizes a bit more here.
02:03:38.040says spinal catastrophism's conception of time is one essential to modernity itself the lock-in
02:03:46.000systems that cause their own furtherance and exaggeration creates a sense in which the future
02:03:52.760drags us towards it the future is not passive it actively creates its own emergence via such
02:03:59.840circular causality when something causes itself to cause itself time seems to flow backward
02:04:06.580and the more the future flows backwards towards us in its way the more we feel that our present
02:04:12.840is in the grip of the past that is utterly retrograde and is no coincidence if it was
02:04:18.940just at that point when temporality began compressing and coiling in this way that
02:04:23.420adnaskan psychiatry diagnosed the first illnesses of time it is still accepted that schizophrenia
02:04:30.100affects time perception so it's appropriate that discussion of schizophrenia was so central to the
02:04:35.820genesis of modern psychiatrics so he's proposing that schizophrenia is sort of like a time disease
02:04:41.980that we get and and that's the relationship with time that you know nick land and these other
02:04:47.140advocates of hyper hyperstition were talking about that the future the present is the future
02:04:53.400creating itself in a sense and that's where you know the idea of linear time starts to break down
02:04:59.540as the future we are we are the past speaking into the present and the future is dragging us
02:05:07.060towards it and the closer we get to the future the more time becomes compressed
02:05:11.380and one last part here because i know we need to end soon he says
02:05:16.700a theory of spinal catastrophism demands an ethic of soteriological therapizing as a barker well
02:05:26.060new priest and suicide our solemn task is thus to become the universe's way of killing itself
02:05:33.580for we can't just destroy ourselves is our duty to destroy everything he's saying that the intellect
02:05:41.180is essentially a perfectly engineered virus with the purpose of destroying everything because the
02:05:49.420universe is a wound it's an it's an engram and the mind of god we must become ground zero for
02:05:57.540infinite negations entrance into finite time our extinction therefore cannot be primitive it must
02:06:03.640be superlative we cannot go gently into the cosmic night we must go out with a bang big enough to
02:06:09.300somehow become self-propagating it is our solemn duty to enact a negation so superlative that it
02:06:17.340cannibalizes existence from within is our strictly and an augustic duty to remove not only our own
02:06:26.360no inception but to remove the potential for any future nervous systems anywhere and that's where
02:06:34.780i think you start to see the nihilism start to peek through that beneath all this very impressive
02:06:40.880internally consistent logic there is the a dark beating heart you know this is
02:06:50.020an understanding of reality that is necessarily based based on trauma i think there's some truth
02:06:55.680in that a rebellion against trauma a rebellion against the darkness but also the understanding
02:07:03.740that everything is interconnected through that trauma that's interesting okay but he goes into
02:07:11.420detail there with the belief that it is our duty to end in a suicide glorious enough that we cause
02:07:20.280our own creation that the ultimate form of creation is the most the most astounding destruction
02:07:28.120possible total annihilation is the only gestation for creation and i'm not i'm not sure i believe
02:07:38.100that and i'm not sure that any other end point can be reached if your starting point is you know
02:07:45.000the the human entity is just a document of trauma propagating itself against the universe
02:07:53.280but despite all that there is something inspiring there and i'm sure it's unintentional
02:07:58.360from the standpoint of the author but he is talking about the body yes it is a record of
02:08:05.220trauma but it also it is it is a manifested memory it's a memory of your genes moving through time
02:08:13.220and there is something inspiring about that and uh maybe i just don't believe that the
02:18:06.060You're used to, oh, Sea Org was their ship where a lot of the crazy stuff happened, but it seems to be more important than that.
02:18:14.540But also, I wanted to start with the question, does it seem to you, from your perspective, as a perspective of an expert, that Scientology has fallen from prestige, or is it just as big and powerful as it always was?
02:20:57.660People say it about Jehovah's Witnesses and so on.
02:20:59.340But some of the best people I've ever met have been Scientologists.
02:21:03.160And I mean, dedicated Sea Org members. The person who springs immediately to mind is the officer who I knew as Chris, who was the course supervisor at St. Hill during my time there.
02:21:13.580And he was just a wonderful, kind, gentle, patient man and who was invested with a real mission.
02:21:22.100You know, he believed in what he was doing. He believed he was saving the world.
02:21:25.560And he lacked the kind of the kind of focused aggression that's typical of a lot of Sea Org members.
02:21:32.780he was he was just a lovely lovely guy uh the sea org uh officer in charge of the the church in my
02:21:40.940hometown she was a wonderful person we we spent many nights you know listening to opera music and
02:21:47.240and and drinking drinking bad coffee as we try and sort out the central files and just so many
02:21:53.140good people that i've met but uh that's the thing and scientology i think there's a there is a lot
02:22:00.300of good in it. And it's a fascinating subject. It's perhaps the most elaborate belief system
02:22:06.820to ever originate from the mind of one man, L. Ron Hubbard, who is himself an enigma. You know,
02:22:13.120I could talk about this for hours. But just back to the nitty gritty. So I dropped out of university
02:22:18.000after my first year, never finished my degree, and my mental health wasn't in the best of places.
02:22:24.640So there was a period of time, let's call it four or five years, where I really struggled to hold
02:22:29.600down a job and I had an awful lot of free time on my hands that was the period in my life where I
02:22:33.720was perhaps the most introverted and where I I most fit your sort of typical characterization
02:22:38.700of a basement dwelling you know internet person and uh I've always read and I had a few charity
02:22:46.820shops that I used to go to and then one day I found a copy of Robert Kaufman's Inside Scientology
02:22:52.560which uh is a critical book written by an ex-scientologist so it's it's a it's a guy who
02:22:58.780was from the beat generation he he joined Scientology in its early days and it drove him
02:23:03.500insane and then he left the church and wrote this book uh about his experiences and this was kind of
02:23:10.720my first encounter with the church of Scientology and the the the beliefs and the practices that he
02:23:16.240was describing inside it just sounded so out of this world and it occurred to me that for someone
02:23:22.660to sincerely believe this stuff they fundamentally inhabit a different world than I live in you know
02:23:29.600and my world wasn't particularly enjoyable at that time and it's almost like the isekai anime
02:23:36.060thing you know it's like by learning about this stuff I can see the world through their eyes and
02:23:40.900I can I can explore this different world and maybe it'll be more exciting than my own
02:23:45.180and I later kind of generalized this to include a lot of niche new religious movements I kind of
02:23:52.420went along with every cult I could find. My best friend described it as Gonzo Anthropology. That
02:23:58.520was my big hobby for quite a while. I would just join cults. But I never took the plunge into
02:24:04.280Scientology. Scientology was kind of the last one. I saw that as very much the final boss.
02:24:09.880And I did. I went along one day. I took the free stress test, the Oxford Capacity Analysis.
02:24:15.520I had them reg me, short for registration, where they basically describe everything that's wrong
02:24:21.840with you and prescribe the solution which of course is scientology i knew this was going to
02:24:27.360happen you know i knew this was the the ball game but i just instead of talking to my wife yeah
02:24:33.760yeah so i deliberately went along with it i was like right okay let's see where this rabbit hole
02:24:39.480leads let's be a scientologist uh and i ended up on the on the staff uh briefly in the org in my
02:24:45.680hometown and then i spent a couple of months down in east grinstead in saint hill getting trained
02:24:51.640up for my staff position uh which was in the hubbard communications office um which division
02:24:58.240one this is all inside baseball it'll mean nothing to you but i like how um often do individuals who
02:25:05.520kind of just enter into the organization get allocated to the staff like that uh not very
02:25:10.780often but uh I'm I'm me I've always had a I've always had a way with people and uh you you know
02:25:18.540my boundless enthusiasm anyone who's been in the chat when I've been on a vacuum cleaner kick
02:25:22.680can attest to how passionate I can speak about subjects and and how I can I I've kind of got
02:25:28.160the gift of the gab you know and you can go so far in life just by being curious about people
02:25:32.920like by asking questions and being really interested in the answers and as I said these
02:25:38.640people lived in a different world to me and I wanted to see the world through their eyes so I
02:25:43.160think by coming at it with this kind of open honest real curiosity uh that was that was how
02:25:49.620I managed to become quite important quite quickly in in the org in my hometown uh and from volunteering
02:25:55.940to help tidy up the central files uh that that kind of led to me being appointed in the Hubbard
02:26:01.840communications office and being sent down south to complete my staff training. Once that was all
02:26:08.460done, I passed what's called the student hat and my basic staff hat and the hat for my post at the
02:26:15.540org. By that point, I'd been in Scientology for a year and change, and I'd been down south for
02:26:23.200much longer than I intended. My best friend was planning a rescue mission. He was going to come
02:26:27.920down with his brother and pick me up from just outside the barracks at night and drive me back
02:26:32.320home but it was it was getting a bit too hard to explain to my mother where I was going and where
02:26:36.600I was spending my time and it was getting a bit too deep I felt myself getting too sympathetic
02:26:40.800because there's a point where what you do the way you act becomes who you are after a while you know
02:26:47.760if you fake it for too long eventually you'll make it and I didn't want to make it I am not
02:26:53.520a Scientologist you know uh so I got out I got out I wrote a disconnection letter which is a
02:26:59.520procedure that the church uses to kind of excommunicate people and I deliberately
02:27:04.740excommunicated myself from the church and I emailed it to as many officers and and people
02:27:10.000that I knew of and I've never been bothered since you know and I was always quite sad about the way
02:27:15.840that I left you know but it is what it is it was a clean break I got what I wanted from it
02:27:20.600and i like to think they got what well they certainly didn't get what they wanted from it
02:27:24.600you know they wanted but i i like to think it was a good time for all involved you know
02:27:29.920also how long ago was this and have you kept up with the the status of those offices because i
02:27:38.020like i said before i'm very curious to see over time you know how that would be like keeping up
02:27:43.480with north korea you know it would be like a north korean defect to keeping up with how things are
02:27:47.340going at home the church is its own hermit kingdom and you really can't believe anything
02:27:52.720that it puts out about itself you know um it's it's yeah it operates in its own little closed
02:27:59.920world it it of all of the cults and all of the movements and organizations i've been associated
02:28:06.120with over the years and and that there has been a few in that period of my life you know it was
02:28:11.180my biggest hobby. The church of Scientology is the closest to being a completely different world
02:28:18.780that you can step into. It's a modular replacement. It's a drop-in replacement for whatever your
02:28:25.140current worldview happens to be. They have Scientology equivalents of everything, you know,
02:28:30.180and I have no means of contacting the people who I left inside, you know. I have no means of
02:28:35.780getting back into it. It was very much step through the portal and the portal closes behind
02:28:40.300you sort of dealio you know but this this wasn't too long ago this was i remember um
02:28:48.140scientology criticism experienced a big renaissance around the release of the going
02:28:52.380clear documentary and uh a number of former church officers like mike rinder and um marty
02:28:59.900what's his name i want to say marty phillips but it's probably he's not marty phillips um yeah yeah
02:29:04.940a number of guitarists right yeah i think so the author too yeah he's the author again uh
02:29:11.340look west or something like that anyway something along those lines yeah and in the wake of going
02:29:15.820clear you know a number of these blogs were launched and scientology criticism experienced
02:29:19.900another big renaissance and and i was in the church before that so if you like i was i was
02:29:24.940a scientology investigator before it got cool again so but it's big right now especially with women
02:29:31.420and I my sense is that it's not a sexy cult because to be interesting to women it needs to
02:29:39.420actually have a rapist figurehead like they they love documentaries about pervert cults
02:29:45.580yeah so Scientology might be too legitimate to be cool right now but I also remember um when the
02:29:51.260master came out that was I think another surge of interest from the mainstream because that was if
02:29:56.300you can believe it I still haven't seen that everyone's been recommending it to me all this
02:30:01.260i think you should just because it's uh one of paul thomas anderson's finest movies i think it's
02:30:07.260one of the keen feet like i'm a huge philip seymour hoffman fan so i saw it just for that reason
02:30:12.460but um even if you divorce it from sight because it doesn't outright even say scientology wants in
02:30:17.820it um it's it's very vague about the organization itself it's just about these characters but it's
02:30:25.020that movie takes a lot out of you it's really really good so ah we'll have to check it out i
02:30:29.900i am a i am a bit of a cinephile um yeah so uh scientology the the thing of it is it can be
02:30:37.960approached from so many different angles uh not the least of which is the the character of l
02:30:42.180ron hubbard itself uh and also if i could just interrupt you for a second to give my perspective
02:30:46.960just as oh yeah sorry outsider and a lay person like growing up uh my experience now looking at
02:30:53.260it was i remember seeing tom cruise on oprah or no it was he was with mike interviewing like
02:30:59.400mike wallace or something and it was about psychiatry and tom cruise was speaking very
02:31:05.280thoughtfully and very critically about psychiatry and i remember the consensus at the time was look
02:31:10.160at this madman what's he doing what's he saying looking back now if you look at that interview
02:31:17.020again everything he said made perfect sense he was warning about psychiatric drugs ssris about
02:31:23.900you know we reviewed the therapeutic state by thomas zazz on the show like all that stuff was
02:31:28.280coming out of his mouth but i don't think people were ready for it which recontextualized all this
02:31:32.440stuff i started looking back and saying okay i was told my entire life that these people are crazy
02:31:37.780and they're fascists and everything and that's what made me just look at it again like okay i
02:31:42.900don't think it's that sensational as as people have been saying so that was my view entirely so
02:31:50.240so i i kind of get where you're where you're coming from with that but like i i'm not here
02:31:56.020to tell you that it's not crazy like i've i've just outlined that it is a it is a completely
02:32:00.660different world um and i hope i can maybe give a bit of insight into how true that is but like
02:32:08.240yeah and also yeah is it what do we call a cult or like the next step of a cult because it's not
02:32:15.200i wouldn't even i wouldn't call the religion no but no it's like a it's a new thing it's a 20th
02:32:22.460century american creation the scale of which i don't think has really existed before i don't
02:32:29.340know what to call it and i guess it's it's it's its own thing the the the only thing i can compare
02:32:35.020it to is something like north korea you know where you go to north korea and you it's a divine right
02:32:40.380monarchy but it uses all of these communist sort of motifs uh as an aid to its legitimacy
02:32:46.140it's a spirituality that started off by making itself a state yeah if that makes any sense
02:32:53.900no absolutely and and bear in mind when we say state it has its own corpus of law
02:32:58.780you know there is a scientology equivalent for everything i suspect that nobody no no right no
02:33:05.960single writer in the english language has been as prolific as l ron hubbard just based on the
02:33:10.000sheer number of hco bulletins which you don't know what those are we'll get into that hco policy
02:33:15.260letters again you don't know what those are we'll get into it but when we say that it's a 20th
02:33:21.180century phenomenon just how true that is so L. Ron Hubbard used to control the church through its
02:33:25.820network of uh telex uh teletype machines you know the these ancient things before computers where
02:33:32.220you could um type a message on one keyboard and then a keyboard on the other side of the world
02:33:36.500would type the message onto a piece of paper you know that's a that's a teletyper uh and they they
02:33:41.800they still send internal communications by telex it's it's just emulated they use like a terminal
02:33:48.340emulator to to emulate the function of sending a telex because email is non-scientology ron didn't
02:33:55.160write about email he wrote about telex so they've implemented an electronic version of the telex
02:34:00.020system often very important miss missives and bulletins and directives and things i'll have
02:34:06.760the word re-mimeo at the top which stands for re-mimeograph when you receive this put it through
02:34:12.880the mimeograph machine and send it along to the next door you know like a chain letter kind of
02:34:17.480thing because it's it's in the days before photocopiers so you you never make a photocopy
02:34:21.820in scientology you you you mimeo something you you because ron didn't write about photocopiers
02:34:28.060knowing our guys we're talking about homesteading i got guys talking about building mesh networks
02:34:33.560of communications again i bet there's a lot of guys listening that like we should get into that
02:34:38.060yeah yeah and it's uh yeah it's it's just so baroque it's there's there's no there's no words
02:34:46.100i can describe that like to convert you like how byzantine everything is and how bureaucratic there
02:34:51.840is a there is a hco policy letter that covers the correct way to iron your uniform trousers
02:34:57.020you know there are policy letters uh describing the correct way to clean a room and then do a
02:35:02.120white glove inspection of the room there are do you know what i mean how to write a letter how to
02:35:06.920sell a book how there there's a series of policy letters called the data series which provide you
02:35:12.680with an alternative set of logical propositions so how to investigate a problem and and and find
02:35:19.300a solution to any given problem ron walks you through ron's way of doing it you know what i
02:35:24.380mean you use the data series you don't you don't think about it you do a you do a data series
02:35:29.220analysis uh so it's it's it's crazy um even things like the oxford capacity analysis you know the
02:35:36.480free test that they give you when they hook you up to the e-meter and ask you all these questions
02:35:39.980that's part of a battery of standard tests that they used within the church and they have the
02:35:45.340collective umbrella of scientometrics not psychometrics so you know in the wog world in
02:35:51.500our world when we do uh intelligence tests or cognitive tests and things that's that's
02:35:56.200psychometric testing you know cycle meaning mind metric meaning measurement uh it's it's not
02:36:01.860psychometry in scientology it's scientometry so would it be fair to say that the bureaucracy
02:36:10.380itself is the attractive element of scientology even before the lore and everything else uh i
02:36:17.480think it might not be what gets someone to walk through the door of an org but not many people
02:36:23.080are walking through the door in the org anymore you know the the div sixes the public divisions
02:36:27.320they're they're awfully you know it's tumbleweed city these days it might not be what attracts
02:36:32.640anyone to the church but once you get into that world especially once you start serving on staff
02:36:36.860that it's it's certainly one of the things that keeps you there you know it's it's certainly
02:36:41.660and and the longer you exist in that space the longer that you you operate according to these
02:36:47.860these interminable instructions that originated from the mind of one man, you know, the more that
02:36:54.460one man begins to supplant your own cognitive architecture and you start thinking like a
02:36:59.680Scientologist, you know. Is that what you felt happening to you, which kind of drove you?
02:37:05.080Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. One of the many models of Scientology, one of the many angles
02:37:11.640that you can, you can kind of interpret it from is it's a machine for turning you into L. Ron
02:37:16.620hubbard and eventually the scientologist the dedicated scientologist begins to exhibit
02:37:21.580l ron hubbard's peculiarities they share his paranoia they share his quick anger they share
02:37:27.500his magnetic charisma to an extent you know a lot of the courses and and process not processing the
02:37:34.480training in scientology focuses on communication on the ability to what they say communicate with
02:37:40.080intention you know we you begin to have some of l ron hubbard's magnetic charisma people people
02:37:47.780begin to hang on your word you can hold people's attention you know and and yes some critics have
02:37:53.860characterized the church as a machine for turning people into l ron hubbard you know which is
02:37:58.860interesting because when we talk about uh islam a lot of people don't compare it to anything like
02:38:04.640judaism because judaism is obviously ethno-religious but we had always argued that islam is also
02:38:09.160ethno-religious the ethnicity is arabs yeah when you become islamic you become arabic in your
02:38:15.200behavior and so it's kind of amusing to think that uh scientology does the same except rather
02:38:21.240than one ethnicity it's a single american white man which right there might get some of our
02:38:27.500listeners on board with it no it's it's it's wild man it's wild and this is this is just one minor
02:38:33.400sort of sidetrack in in the discourse it can be interpreted so many ways um i think
02:38:41.240so one of the critical ways that you can interpret it as well is it's l ron hubbard's attempt
02:38:46.040to make himself into a god it's it's kind of a magical work with with the with the goal of
02:38:51.800making l ron hubbard immortal because as long as scientology exists uh there is this body of work
02:38:58.280uh that has hubbard's name all over it you know there's this there's this uh you know philosophy
02:39:03.600this this way of life uh this this whole paradigm of how the mind works uh and everything's hubbard
02:39:10.660branded the famous e-meter that's the hubbard electro psychometer uh it's the hubbard dianetics
02:39:17.080foundation you know you know what i mean you become a hubbard qualified scientologist you
02:39:21.400yeah one of the things i was always wondering was how significant is the image of l ron hubbard in
02:55:46.200and maybe I'll link it to you in the chat later.
02:55:48.220But they have their own political pressure groups and front organizations.
02:55:52.320Narconon is one of them, which is like a drug rehab program.
02:55:55.780But the other one is this Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights,
02:56:00.560which exists to document psychology's abuses.
02:56:04.540Like they have a lobotomy museum, for instance, and things like that.
02:56:08.820I don't think they specifically endorse any political party,
02:56:11.240but buying politicians is not banned in Scientology.
02:56:15.920They believe they should seek power actively and take it wherever they can find it.
02:56:22.320I wonder if there could ever be a future war between Scientologists and Mormons.
02:56:26.880Do they have any position on Mormonism?
02:56:29.560So any prior religious belief is known as an earlier system or prior practice.
02:56:36.380So once you become a Scientologist, you're supposed to discover how much more effective Scientology is and slowly abandon any former practices.
02:56:43.140you know so the church's official public stance is that you can be a catholic scientologist you
02:56:47.600can be a mormon scientologist and so on and so forth but the the actual internal process of
02:56:53.100things that that would be impossible to maintain it would simply be impossible for you to sincerely
02:56:58.620believe in scientology and continue to be a practicing mormon or or whatever well it's so
02:57:04.300interesting and you know i'm once again reminded of david miscovige and you know he's a bit of a
02:57:10.080you know shadowy I don't want to say shadowy figure but not a lot is known about him but I
02:57:15.340as we've discussed how the image of L. Ron Hubbard seems to amplify over time what absolutely
02:57:22.740now David Miscavige you know he's very obviously true believer and he's risen to the top of the
02:57:29.140ranks as far as I'm concerned like where does he fit in all this does he because I suppose let me
02:57:34.240just just to back up within Islam within Catholicism, you
02:57:38.320obviously have the initial, you know, founders, you have these
02:57:42.480figures early on. But over time, you also have hopes you have
02:57:45.540saints, you have reformations, you have deviations, and it
02:57:49.480kind of evolved, I don't say evolves, that's ironic. But it
02:57:52.300changes over time. And there's certain figures who have that
02:57:54.340power. Yeah, David, could Scientology with L. Ron Hubbard
02:57:59.140not present? Could it change internally from figures?
02:58:04.240um so there's a there's an ongoing program and it's been it's been ongoing since the 90s called
02:58:10.940the golden age of knowledge and the idea is that like a lot of the things that were published of
02:58:16.140L. Ron Hubbard before had errors in it or there were what's called squirrels which is a Scientology
02:58:22.260heretic you know someone who misapplies what's called the technology which is the technology
02:58:27.120of Scientology uh there were squirrels in the church there were bad influences and and they
02:58:32.220moved these published works away from what Ron intended and so a lot of things have been withdrawn
02:58:37.940pending the publishing of corrected golden age of knowledge compliant versions so that's one way
02:58:43.840that David Miscavige could sort of change things if you like but he it's it's to what extent he
02:58:49.960would because uh David Miscavige was part of the Commodore's messenger org which was uh you know
02:58:57.380early teens predominantly female there's no suggestion that he sexually abused any of them
02:59:03.200funnily enough because that's the first thing that you would expect he was surrounded by all
02:59:06.360these nubile girls but it seems he just genuinely enjoyed the company of young people you know he
02:59:11.480was sort of a very uncharitable interpretation would be he was an energy vampire and okay so
02:59:17.560why of them why are so many of them pretty and female well he found girls to be more biddable
02:59:24.180you know men were more likely to kind of answer back they were less likely to be compliant
02:59:29.000so to be a male member of the messenger org you were you were unusual you know there were very
02:59:34.760few of them uh david miscavige was one and that means when he was a very young man he would follow
02:59:40.300l ron hubbard around and these people used to light his cigarettes for him you know they would
02:59:44.660attend on his every whim messengers would help him get dressed in the morning and he would confide
02:59:49.680things to them you know he would he would um they're the ones who have that like the the they
02:59:56.300had the real knowledge of L. Ron Hubbard you know they saw him at his most vulnerable at his least
02:59:59.960guarded uh and I I think that's where Miscavige probably got imbued with his mission to take over
03:00:07.680the church you know like now that Ron is gone he's dropped the body the church needs a leader
03:00:13.140you know it can't it can't just sort of dissolve uh and he saw it as his crusade to kind of seize
03:00:18.740the reins of power and in true Scientology fashion he stopped at nothing to get there there was a
03:00:23.980whole generation of officers already existing in in the Sea Org hierarchy who occupied positions
03:00:30.240of power ahead of him and who were maybe better positioned to take control and he swept them
03:00:34.840aside in the case of Mike Rinder and and this Marty whose surname I find impossible to remember
03:00:40.820and many others he imprisoned them in a concentration camp in the desert called the
03:00:45.740hole and that's what prompted many of them to ultimately escape the organization but like
03:00:51.860yeah you would always hear stories about that about certain people disappeared certain people
03:00:56.980have just been literally imprisoned and can't leave and then there's talk about like no they
03:01:01.840can leave but they're so brainwashed that they don't want to leave in your opinion and your
03:01:06.300research would it literally be a concentration camp uh yes yes the hole was awful uh i have no
03:01:13.420doubt that the conditions were awful i've seen members of the rpf so if you get assigned a lower
03:01:18.120condition so if you fail in like a work responsibility or you you don't meet your
03:01:22.860targets in the sea org you can be assigned a lower condition and then you're expected to work your way
03:01:28.160back up through the the ethics conditions so the the worst one would be a condition of non-existence
03:01:33.620say you know but the way you work it up is you get assigned to the rpf the rehabilitation project
03:01:38.580force and the you've got to wear a gray rag when you come across someone in the corridor you've
03:01:43.720got a salute you're not allowed to speak unless spoken to and you do all of the dirtiest jobs you
03:01:47.880know you clean lavatories with toothbrushes you you only get to eat once everyone else has finished
03:01:52.760eating and you get the scraps and i've seen rpf members in in st hill you know going about
03:01:58.300their responsibilities and and things and as far as i understand it they have a relatively kind
03:02:03.960life compared to the original Sea Org, you know, the yacht Diana and L. Ron Hubbard's small fleet
03:02:09.300of ships that he took around the Mediterranean looking for buried treasure. That's when the RPF
03:02:13.680was invented. And these people used to have to sleep down in the bilge, you know, and just
03:02:19.240dreadful, dreadful conditions. And as I said, David Miscavige was a boy in all this. He would
03:02:25.220have absorbed this as just absolutely normal practice. So when he's assigned the lower
03:02:29.740condition to all of these officers when he's when he's enacted his purge and sent them to the hole
03:02:34.100make no bones about it it would have been a literal hole they would have been you know sleeping
03:02:39.020in shipping containers in the desert not enough water for all of them and all of the time they
03:02:43.500would have been expected to undergo intense processing you know this was not a pleasant
03:02:47.060experience mike rinder has written about it yeah and so do you suspect that the sign church
03:10:06.700We'll give the advanced civilizations the technology, we will create a Scientological civilization in the advanced countries, and then that will almost automatically trickle down to the less advanced countries that will lift people up.
03:10:18.140I never met a non-white Scientologist in all my time.
03:10:22.080I've never even heard of one, and that's what made me ask.
03:10:24.540In America, Scientology briefly had a strategic alliance with the nation of Islam, you know, the black supremacist.