Blood Satellite - Gen Y Got Mmmkay Ultra'd

00:00:00.000 as far back as i can remember i always wanted to be

00:00:07.700 blood satellite maybe we should just continue on that thread that we're talking about before i

00:00:21.820 lose the lead bury the lead rather yes um so i was talking about a real secret coffee hours

00:00:29.260 episode that just recorded and went up this past monday so it's still fresh in my mind and it's

00:00:35.340 part of this ongoing art that we've been doing about the peter teal sphere and you would love

00:00:41.420 it and i recorded it with you in mind and trying to package it in a way that you would find

00:00:47.180 entertaining it's about this guy named i believe his name's dried in brown it's how you how you

00:00:53.400 describe a dog turd on the on the hot sidewalk is dried and brown it does it sounds it's such

00:01:01.520 a turd-like name i can't even think of a shittier name but he was uh the quote-unquote founder

00:01:09.600 of this project called it was originally called praxis city then it was praxis nation as praxis

00:01:16.160 society now it's called atlas but you know we covered on this show quite a while ago and we

00:01:22.980 brought it up from time to time that book the network state um and i actually i quite like that

00:01:29.140 book it's an interesting idea but they said let's do that let's make a network state and we need

00:01:35.940 we'll get a bunch of investment and he received investment over the years he started this around

00:01:42.180 2020 i think he started he got two rounds of investment ultimately totaling 500 million

00:01:50.420 dollars so half a billion dollars which you might you stand in awe of that much money from something

00:01:58.740 either from a distance or a close range sounds like a scam like there's no part of this you're

00:02:04.500 encircling it you're breaking up and there's no there's no you know uh there's no way to measure

00:02:10.740 there's no kpis there's no what are you giving the investors what is he what is and then he's

00:02:15.620 changing the name every couple of years well also bizarre if you think about just from a baseline

00:02:20.980 perspective this isn't how you build a city or a society nobody builds a city and like that's

00:02:26.500 never being done the way he did it was he said okay we're going to build a city it's going to be

00:02:30.900 a new silicon valley and he's saying all the right things to get the dumbest people you know

00:02:37.380 interested so i'm just going to paraphrase what he said but i'm sure you've all seen before he says

00:02:43.380 we're going to revitalize the west and we're going to take back beauty and we're going to save

00:02:52.660 science and save innovation so he wants to start like a new silicon valley city what it sounded

00:02:57.300 like was akon city if you remember we covered that on the show where akon a musician african

00:03:04.820 sing-song man he said hey i'm going to start wakanda in senegal and this was after the black

00:03:12.420 panther movie so everyone's thinking the same thing oh he's actually going to build the dang

00:03:17.060 thing and there's 3d renders made of these curvy blob-like fluid buildings and it was designed

00:03:25.220 like all of these sorts of centrally planned cities are in a way that's uninhabitable to

00:03:31.060 anyone that matters you know here is the tech sector over here here's that quadrant and here's

00:03:38.020 the residential quadrant where everyone lives here's the entertainment quadrant where everyone

00:03:43.700 plays backgammon or whatever and it's all connected it's like saudi arabia when they

00:03:47.780 say and then it's gonna have the fastest train in the world but it's one train right down the

00:03:52.500 middle it's non-intuitive it looks good when you sketch it out on a napkin but

00:03:58.740 it turns out once people are in it they have the worst time imaginable so anyway you're looking at

00:04:04.020 it like that and um he he got 500 million dollars but had nothing to show for it and except for a

00:04:12.100 manhattan office and a reputation for throwing big parties where did that 500 million dollars

00:04:18.140 come from peter teal one of his many investments but again you're in awe of this because

00:04:24.000 i'm still deeply impressed by people who can scam at that level i don't even hate him

00:04:31.760 i would love to use that for good maybe you can't use it for good we're allowed we're allowed to

00:04:37.680 hate him and still appreciate the scale of grift also because you can hate him because you know

00:04:43.980 let us list the reasons uh he looks like shit the things he says are retarded uh he's annoying and

00:04:50.800 he's a fucking loser you know there's four things because if you look at his cv it's really

00:04:55.740 unimpressive and i don't know his entire life story but he sounds like the type of guy who came

00:05:01.920 from like he went to a i read this article in new york times about him it was so funny because it

00:05:08.740 was like he picked this was like a smear job of course but said he picked all the best schools

00:05:13.780 harvard stanford mit he was not accepted any of them so he went to nyu and then dropped out of

00:05:19.640 nyu but i'm like that that sounds like the type of guy who's got rich parents yeah that sounds

00:05:24.860 like someone who's oh that's my safety school i'm like for a lot of people that and also don't don't

00:05:30.860 act like there's no prestige at all or culture attached to nyu nyu has got a lot of prestigious

00:05:36.460 alumni you are going to build a network at nyu and he probably did even though he's a fucking dropout

00:05:41.020 but you're right the fact that he applied there and then ended up going to nyu he's definitely

00:05:46.060 the son of a some fucking rich jew somewhere no he's or he's white hey he could be white why not

00:05:52.140 You're such a thing as a white douchebag.

00:05:54.680 I've known a couple. 0.99

00:05:55.820 I know a bunch.

00:05:56.880 There's like a whole whack of them, I bet.

00:05:59.500 Arguably, there's two on the show right now.

00:06:02.700 Damn, son.

00:06:03.780 Where'd you find them?

00:06:04.480 Stop asking!

00:06:05.220 We can own that.

00:06:06.200 We can own just being a fucking dumpy asshole.

00:06:08.860 That can be a white thing.

00:06:13.420 Have you seen Kyle Rittenhouse lately?

00:06:15.500 Speaking of which.

00:06:16.260 Speaking of dumpy assholes.

00:06:17.500 speaking of a guy who's grown a mustache at just the wrong time yeah here's how you grow a mustache

00:06:25.700 for anyone's wondering you gotta start growing it when you're fit when you're young if you start

00:06:32.080 bloating up you can't then adopt the mustache it's highly suspicious yeah everyone knows what

00:06:38.420 you're doing and that's the wrong type of facial hair for that type of gored head that you've got

00:06:44.580 in an emergency you could go to the woods

00:06:46.720 for like two years and then come back with

00:06:48.760 the beard but you can't

00:06:50.360 be in public while you're working on that

00:06:52.600 nah man there's someone in this

00:06:54.740 world walking around who saw Kyle Rittenhouse

00:06:56.860 get into a mustache

00:06:58.620 they saw him

00:07:00.820 climb down into that thing

00:07:02.880 wicked

00:07:04.820 that's not good but you know what

00:07:06.580 I'd like to embrace people

00:07:09.080 kind of winning

00:07:10.180 winning at something like Kyle Rittenhouse did

00:07:12.680 he did a cool thing

00:07:13.700 shot a bunch of pedos

00:07:15.840 and then you know what he did

00:07:18.160 he started eating danishes

00:07:19.440 he started eating cakes

00:07:21.400 he started hanging out to

00:07:24.200 chew the fat figuratively and literally

00:07:26.480 he's been on a celebration tour for like

00:07:28.440 six years

00:07:30.000 seven years I see a guy like him and I say

00:07:32.440 he's eating

00:07:33.940 I present to you

00:07:38.400 a man who's eating

00:07:39.420 ain't nothing wrong with that

00:07:41.880 maybe you should have a few heavy years after,

00:07:45.200 after you shoot a couple dummies in the head.

00:07:48.900 Yeah.

00:07:49.640 When else can you do it?

00:07:50.960 You can't do it when you're on an off season from the Olympics.

00:07:57.000 And it should,

00:07:57.900 and I think getting fat at that level,

00:08:01.520 at an Olympian level,

00:08:02.980 that tells me that it was gorging.

00:08:05.300 That's a good type of fat to be when you can tell,

00:08:08.060 Oh,

00:08:08.240 this is from a guy who's been celebrating.

00:08:09.760 It's not just because it's been a slow build through seed oils.

00:08:14.880 You know what?

00:08:16.220 No, I know exactly what you're saying.

00:08:18.680 The seed oil or the endocrine disruptor fat is fat in weird places and weird balance and posture.

00:08:25.800 He is actually fat like the boy's been just eating ice cream and steak five times a day for a year.

00:08:31.760 Yeah, he's a jolly type of fat, and I like that.

00:08:35.760 He's J.D. Vance fat.

00:08:37.000 Yeah, here's a man who just heard

00:08:39.580 that you can have steak for breakfast.

00:08:42.200 Probably heard that. They did that

00:08:43.460 in the 50s. By just, you mean he heard about it

00:08:45.360 in 2022. He turned 22,

00:08:47.100 and he's just been going at it.

00:08:49.380 He learned about all the good

00:08:51.260 1950s foods.

00:08:53.180 If you're on a 1950s diet,

00:08:55.280 you're fucked. But

00:08:57.020 it's steak and eggs for breakfast, and then it's

00:08:59.220 a root beer float mixed

00:09:01.200 in there, too. Hell yeah.

00:09:02.980 A cheeky root beer float.

00:09:04.600 you know i read the other day that it just enraged me what we're talking and this is apart

00:09:11.600 from the peter teal thing we were just discussing but um there's some bullshit meme of course

00:09:18.100 going around and it was americans just learned about you know the power that they have to live

00:09:25.100 like europeans and it showed images of like some americans in some fucking city sitting in an alley

00:09:30.940 way in chairs smoking a cigarette

00:09:32.900 having a beer. It's like they're living like Europeans

00:09:35.040 and they described it as

00:09:37.000 nipping off for a

00:09:39.100 cigarette, maybe

00:09:40.240 drinking coffee and maybe even a cheeky

00:09:43.040 drink. Now

00:09:44.940 I don't know about you. Do you think

00:09:46.800 North Americans don't do that? First of all

00:09:49.160 no one I

00:09:50.980 know, no one that matters

00:09:53.200 ever does a cheeky anything.

00:09:55.740 Yeah. That's

00:09:56.820 despicable. Yeah. And I think

00:09:58.680 europeans need to know that we don't do naughty things over here yeah but to contrast that

00:10:06.060 is the accusation that canadians or americans have never day-drinked before

00:10:12.420 i thought we invented it do you know where you are you're saying that as if i'm not looking out

00:10:20.300 my window most days at a construction crew right outside my house where there's six guys crushing

00:10:26.420 twisted teas all afternoon

00:10:28.500 all staring into a hole

00:10:30.220 taking a three hour lunch in the hole

00:10:32.300 do you have that over there

00:10:34.400 do you have that in fucking

00:10:36.220 France do you have that

00:10:38.340 in Spain I bet you don't everyone's

00:10:40.180 sitting on really narrow metal

00:10:42.380 chairs cross

00:10:44.300 legged the reason they had to

00:10:45.840 codify siestas

00:10:47.880 is because people weren't

00:10:50.220 doing it people weren't taking

00:10:52.240 the three hour lunch here they cannot

00:10:54.060 make you not drink on

00:10:56.280 lunch they can't do it well this idiot here's what europeans invented and they're very quick

00:11:02.140 to remind you of this i know they invented the four-hour workday but over here we invented the

00:11:10.060 12-hour workday but you're drunk the whole time yeah yeah yeah we don't need to you do you do that

00:11:16.420 over there have you ever and that's what i used to do and i was at the top of my game yeah just

00:11:22.180 day drinking while at work you don't fucking pop off for cheeky anything you get in real early and

00:11:28.680 you take off your socks and you crack one open and then you leave after the sun goes down yep

00:11:33.460 yeah you guys invented the siesta paired with a baguette we invented being locked in

00:11:42.180 locked into drinking at work yeah yeah this used to be a planet where things made sense

00:11:52.180 um there's a few things we can get to and maybe i didn't want to keep having to return to this

00:11:59.920 but i think we do uh at our own detriment of course do you want to talk about iran

00:12:05.840 just just admit let's have a cheeky iran talk a little cheeky iran segment let's just let's just

00:12:12.320 pop off for cheeky iran segment so as of this week i think everyone's been proven wrong about

00:12:20.800 everything by my count not a single person has predicted a thing right except maybe for us of

00:12:27.380 course um the people who are predicting boots on the ground in iran or iran getting new tehran

00:12:36.480 getting newt not true um it seemed there was the worst of all worlds which was there was not just

00:12:44.520 ceasefire but several ceasefires one aborted ceasefire um and then trump putting on a show

00:12:54.760 saying you can't deal with these guys these guys are crazy almost seemed like he was agitating for

00:13:00.920 an american exit by saying like i i tried to do a ceasefire i had peace and they don't want it so

00:13:07.720 let's leave but of course that wasn't going to happen israel as soon as we made the deal they

00:13:13.080 came out and they dropped a load of bombs the likes of which i've never seen before the biggest

00:13:17.960 load that we've seen i'm not happy with israel you know when i say okay now you have 12 hours

00:13:24.040 you don't go out in the first hour and just drop everything you have on them so i'm not happy with

00:13:28.440 them i'm not happy with iran either it seems that even trump as of today is defending bb netanyahu

00:13:38.760 i don't know if you've seen this he says like bb and i just went through hell together

00:13:43.960 trump says netanyahu's trial should be canceled he released a tweet saying it should be canceled

00:13:49.160 immediately or a pardon given to a great hero who's in so much for the state of israel

00:13:55.240 uh there was a lot of people saying that trump secretly hates bb netanyahu right which

00:14:02.440 there's something to that however it's hard for me to square that with him saying hey cancel because

00:14:11.400 bb netanyahu is not terribly popular in israel no and like every other point in his career when

00:14:17.560 things are going bad for him he launches another war this is his mo he's been doing it for a long

00:14:22.040 time like a defense is a defense a defense of this man saying his trial should be canceled they can

00:14:27.240 said that's all kayfabe but i'm like well it's i think he means it or he doesn't hate netanyahu as

00:14:34.760 much as we seem to think so i mean he's been close personal friends with netanyahu for 40 years like

00:14:41.560 when he when his kids were little he would kick them this is a true story he would kick his kids

00:14:46.280 out and have them sleep in another room so that netanyahu could sleep in the kids room when he

00:14:51.320 visited new york that's how close they were this is before he was even in politics that's a wild

00:14:56.920 story yes yes this is a this is a real story so like that's how tight like it's not just he loves

00:15:02.480 israel he is very personally close and connected to netanyahu and has been for decades can i also

00:15:07.720 say how wild it is that netanyahu is sleeping in a children's room when i heard that story that's

00:15:13.160 what i imagine is like the little pink kid's bed he's trying to curl up in it well also the fact

00:15:18.960 that if if i was him perish the thought but if i would say if i was introduced to a child you might

00:15:25.540 say uh i'm gonna go to the waldorf i'm gonna go i'm gonna go to a hotel uh where men sleep

00:15:33.960 right but i mean but at that time he wasn't i don't think he was a politician he was just like

00:15:38.300 a terrorist on sabbatical oh he's like a jewish terrorist can't get just a regular jewish

00:15:44.880 terrorist yeah he can't get a room in new york city

00:15:47.920 Motherfucker

00:15:52.040 But there's a lot of

00:15:55.920 Opinions, a lot of takes

00:15:57.900 I think most of them have been

00:15:59.880 Tempered

00:16:02.280 Forcefully, I don't think anyone's

00:16:04.100 Been right, I think

00:16:05.600 The only thing that is

00:16:07.920 Reliable is the real

00:16:09.920 Nucleus of this conflict, which is that

00:16:11.900 I don't think

00:16:13.640 Anyone can disagree

00:16:15.860 That Israel

00:16:17.780 desires regime change in iran i mean they said it like cats and netanyahu and a bunch of them

00:16:24.720 in their cabinet have all said that openly yeah yeah and then and netanyahu is not popular within

00:16:30.800 this country uh there's forces agitating for change in there something of a coup d'etat that's

00:16:36.540 gonna happen just in time for october 7th of course um and would i put it past netanyahu to

00:16:44.660 allow some catastrophe to to befall israel that strengthens his position no i don't i think he

00:16:51.800 would do that in an instant so anyway point being that the forces that cause this conflict still

00:16:58.200 persist and even though nothing changed there's a temporary ceasefire like make no mistake this is

00:17:04.040 not peace however there's also that within that nucleus it's the what it's the truth that i think

00:17:11.600 iran knows which is that if israel was ever legitimately threatened or existentially

00:17:17.600 threatened they would ignite the samson option and declare a thermonuclear war on the whole planet

00:17:24.080 so like i'm trying to look at this from a neorealist position i'm like this was this could

00:17:28.940 never be the war we wanted it to be yeah it seems like so much of it was theater we're hearing that

00:17:37.140 and i guess we'll take his word for it trump was saying that oh the attacks from iran were

00:17:43.100 with the consent and coordination of america like oh we'll clear people out of our base then you

00:17:50.680 attack at this time wait what no way that's that's pure bullshit there's no way that's true

00:17:56.780 that's i mean he's such a no i'm not saying he didn't say it i'm saying he's fucking lying

00:18:01.540 of course he would say that he's like the most notorious liar on earth this fucking faggot

00:18:05.960 but there's no way that's true i'm trying to see if i was hoodwinked um well it does sound like

00:18:14.700 something trump would say okay here says i'm looking at cbs news trump says iran gave quote

00:18:20.300 early notice about counter-strikes on u.s base in qatar so and when he's that's no

00:18:27.200 president trump said monday the iran government offered early notice of a series of missile

00:18:31.820 strikes that targeted u.s uh al udid airbase in qatar uh and here's the quote i want to thank

00:18:38.220 iran for giving us early notice which made it possible for no lives were lost and nobody to be

00:18:43.340 injured and he's saying this to the press in his own bombastic style so i hear that i say oh this

00:18:47.980 is like you're just telling us this is a show none of this matters it's just well you gotta bomb

00:18:52.300 something we have what you can't not bomb something symbolically so then you know you look at this say

00:18:59.020 how much of this is just like a contract being signed if it were true if it were true strategically

00:19:06.480 he should not say it but the iranians should because you know what i mean that's that's a

00:19:11.460 good point it makes no fucking sense they didn't claim that they did that they told him that but

00:19:15.780 he is claiming it i don't know why he's claiming it but i don't i don't think it's true and

00:19:20.360 throughout the entire process during the peace the the uh the ceasefire and all of this other

00:19:25.280 there was so much bullshit going on all of these claims even now they're saying that fordo was

00:19:30.360 destroyed i don't know man i i kind of don't we nobody knows but there's come there's conflicting

00:19:35.960 reports right now whether that was even fucking damaged aside from the entrance in one of the

00:19:40.040 halls so uh we're gonna find out in the next few months whether this thing flares back up again but

00:19:45.220 trump to me aside from the fact that i'm finding out for sure then being vindicated that trump is

00:19:51.100 a warmongering fucking lunatic at neocon aside from that it's so so crystal clear how much of

00:19:57.740 a liar he is we all knew he was a liar but the amount of bullshit just in the past week where

00:20:02.800 he goes live and just makes up the most insane and it's all on twitter like he's he's trying to

00:20:08.520 run the globe on twitter it's a lot of the trump fans were saying that aha you guys got fooled

00:20:13.780 because you were talking about boots on the ground nukes and whatnot and this was all out of the deal

00:20:19.440 the fucking goal post because he he was using tomahawks and gbu what is it gbu 57s in a foreign

00:20:25.440 country without congress declaring war and you're moving the goals you get up but there's no boots

00:20:29.680 in your own off that was a war that i don't know what like you can't just change the anyways

00:20:35.200 anybody who still believes in trump is a faggot turn off the turn off the computer go listen to

00:20:39.440 something else if you like trump go away everyone was freaking out because trump was openly talking

00:20:45.440 about regime change in iran he used the term and everyone said that's just art of the deal

00:20:50.640 and i said you can't just say everything he does president you can't also the threat doesn't work

00:20:57.100 unless there's strength to do that you know i mean like constantly showing off and lying and

00:21:04.240 blustering and doing all this bullshit and yeah you want to say oh it's art of the deal art of

00:21:07.600 the deal like i just call it what it is man he's he's just lying and being a fucking idiot

00:21:13.980 yeah and you could say you could say how much of a lap dog is he for israel but unreal unreal and

00:21:21.740 then like him glazing netanyahu today as well yes saying he should he could just say nothing

00:21:27.500 if you really didn't like netanyahu you could just hands up and said no this this is a great man

00:21:32.720 who defended israel which is precisely the narrative that he wants anyway uh the point i

00:21:39.760 was trying to make ironically was i don't even want to talk about this i mean just because i

00:21:45.180 don't think a single this was like the early days of the war in ukraine there's there's nothing

00:21:49.580 known at this point honestly almost everything that we've got is propaganda from one side or

00:21:54.060 the other so i don't think anybody knows shit right now you know it's interesting we're talking

00:21:58.320 about this in our community the other day because i noticed some people who were very very pro trump

00:22:04.160 And I hear lots of people say that they've got insiders in the White House or they're being fed information about like Trump's intentions or real backroom deals.

00:22:15.340 Certain people are privy to things and they're reaching out to people like us.

00:22:19.900 And we're just laughing at this in the community because I was thinking that wouldn't you trust those people less?

00:22:26.820 now let's start by saying that a white house insider is a pretty broad definition like does

00:22:34.860 that include an intern does that include a secretary or is that someone who's in the oval

00:22:40.340 office if they're in the oval office consider that they're putting their entire career on the line

00:22:46.660 to give information to podcasters like you or i that seems unrealistic unless you really know

00:22:54.660 that person or or unless their career there is not that valuable because they actually just like

00:22:59.540 change ink in the printer yeah or more likely that if they indeed are all these things they

00:23:06.800 would be feeding you propaganda that would be part of their job is to feed you yes wrong information

00:23:11.900 and then see how that propagates and just keep everyone confused why why wouldn't that be the

00:23:19.100 first thing top of mind that you would assume any credible source is that's associated at all

00:23:26.080 with that administration you know i mean so like why would you should trust insiders less and it

00:23:33.320 was so if with that in mind you know how are we vetting something that is true and i was reminded

00:23:40.420 of um it's bad to laugh at this but there was this really great show called fash the nation

00:23:46.360 on the right stuff.biz hosted by jazz hands mcfeels and there are many iterations of that

00:23:53.540 show with different co-hosts a lot of people love the first one but near the end uh he i forget who

00:23:59.140 the co-host maybe it was james alsup but he was he claimed that he had insiders he claimed that he

00:24:07.020 had a couple guys from the community who were feeding him like real top secret classified type

00:24:12.940 stuff and it turned out that this person was making it all up just lying bullshitting making

00:24:21.580 up facts saying you know doctoring whatever we don't know what he passed out but this it would

00:24:26.720 make it into the show and he would very infamously say a bunch of wrong shit that everyone laughed at

00:24:32.500 him about but that's always colored my perspective because that means anytime i hear someone's got a

00:24:38.200 guy on the inside i'm like i don't know are they pranking you are they fucking with you

00:24:44.640 why would they fuck with me i i can answer that it's funny why do i why do i fuck with people

00:24:51.520 i fuck with people all the time i make shit up i just lie i spent when we were living in toronto

00:24:58.200 i kept telling people that you know japanese people don't know how to turn left i would just

00:25:03.500 make up racism like all the time when we were younger fresh just just see how it goes and then

00:25:09.560 hopefully that manifests in the real world as something they can now not do maybe one day

00:25:16.440 we go to japan and there's no left hand turns at all and then you know you look up in the sky and

00:25:22.720 and Hirohoto smiles down upon you.

00:25:29.940 Hirohoto and Kimba and Goku

00:25:32.040 all smile down at you from the clouds.

00:25:37.740 I want to make up

00:25:39.040 a new type of racism that

00:25:42.360 Dragon Ball Z was Japanese paganism.

00:25:47.440 Is this what they believed?

00:25:49.240 Like you go back a thousand years, that was their Odin.

00:25:51.500 yeah like shintoism was imported from china kind of true and then uh actually prior to that it was

00:25:58.420 dbz for sure which and where did dbz come from venezuela

00:26:02.440 moving back just momentarily to the iran thing i wanted to talk about this sub stack that i found

00:26:11.620 i thought was very interesting um everyone's talking about iran i don't know that much about

00:26:17.340 Iran. We've got a couple of listeners from Iran. They would probably call themselves Persian. I've

00:26:22.820 never known one of these people to call themselves Iranian. They're all just Persian. But I know

00:26:28.520 quite a bit about different BRICS nations. I know about Russia, I know about China, but I never knew

00:26:33.360 much about Iran. When everyone was talking about boots on the ground, what does a conventional war

00:26:38.940 look like in iran i found this this piece here by matt bracken on matthew's substack

00:26:47.160 it's called uh an important geography lesson concerning a war with iran and i don't know

00:26:53.920 much about this guy i can't vet his priors or anything but um he's looking at maps he's drawing

00:27:00.480 red circles and i like that like a guy who's drawing on maps the the geopolitical and height

00:27:09.460 underlying the word geo there now i'm just going to read from a bit of this he says the neocons

00:27:16.440 are now proposing that we can defeat iran with air power alone this is something i was hearing

00:27:21.060 okay maybe we'll require american air power a few bunker busters and it'll be all wrapped up

00:27:27.760 air power alone will bring victory this has never happened before so let's just say that despite

00:27:32.800 their optimistic forecast we do ultimately have to put quote boots on the ground to force a final

00:27:39.600 iranian defeat it's time for a brief comparative geography lesson related to just how many boots

00:27:45.840 might be needed if iran doesn't surrender after we shock and awe them with our air power

00:27:51.040 it required eight full divisions of the u.s army and marines three full months to subdue tiny

00:27:57.280 okinawa in 1945 these eight divisions added up to around 130 000 americans boots on the ground

00:28:04.000 just on little okinawa there were uh 12 12 500 americans killed in action iran is more than a

00:28:11.520 thousand times the size of okinawa with a 2025 population of 92 million iran is 2 2.5 times the

00:28:19.520 size of afghanistan 3.8 times the size of iraq and five times the size of south vietnam

00:28:24.880 um i made the map the meme below to show the difference in scale between the battle of okinawa

00:28:30.940 he used okinawa as a reference point here i think it's because other people were bringing that up as

00:28:38.380 well showing that oh we were able to subdue japan primarily with air power meaning dropping nukes

00:28:45.980 so maybe the subtext to air power is a nuke would be involved there but no one can say that so they

00:28:53.640 just say, if not that, then the threat of that. It says, if Iran fails to surrender after American

00:29:01.860 air attacks and keeps lobbing missiles out of Israel, and possibly also at US bases and ships

00:29:07.160 in the region, we will certainly continue to hammer around very hard. But what if they still

00:29:11.460 don't quit? If Israel enter the USA, destroy Iran's oil refining capacity, it also destroys

00:29:19.820 Iran's oil export terminals, Iran will have zero incentive to allow the other nations in the region

00:29:25.520 to profit while they perish. At some point, Iran may exercise its own Samson option and close the

00:29:31.580 Strait of Hormuz. And there's a map here. Some people have seen these maps and means circulated.

00:29:38.020 That's a very important geographical pivot point for the region. Hundreds or even thousands of

00:29:44.520 mobile anti-ship missiles are concealed in caves along the Iranian side of the strait.

00:29:49.020 if their operators are ordered to hold out and not to fire their missiles for weeks or months

00:29:53.520 they will do so then what making the rubble bounce in tehran will not open the strait of

00:29:58.580 hormuz and the idea is that that is an important area to control um meanwhile the global economy

00:30:05.860 will be in free fall just to name three major nations china gets over a third of its petroleum

00:30:10.640 from the persian gulf japan and south korea obtained more than 80 percent of their oil from

00:30:15.560 the Persian Gulf. Within weeks, many nations, in addition to those three, will have to decide

00:30:20.040 between keeping their electrical grids running or shutting down their industries. That's why he

00:30:24.800 calls the Strait of Hormuz Iran's Samson option. They will not perish alone while the other Gulf

00:30:30.540 states profit from the cutoff of Iranian oil exports. Only those dirty old boots on the

00:30:36.520 ground will be able to root out the last of Iran's mobile anti-ship missiles. Israel can't stop Iran

00:30:42.400 from firing giant medium-range ballistic missiles

00:30:45.300 at Tel Aviv after a week of rocket war.

00:30:48.060 These will be ready to launch.

00:30:50.060 And they said they can't even stop those missiles.

00:30:52.300 There's no way you're going to be able to stop

00:30:53.700 all the missiles hidden in all these caves

00:30:55.340 along this strait that's designed

00:30:58.100 for this express purpose.

00:30:59.900 Like, the only reason they're doing this

00:31:01.260 is because they're holding the sort of fucking Damocles

00:31:04.020 over this whole trade route.

00:31:06.220 Yeah.

00:31:06.860 So I ignore the folks who say,

00:31:09.060 nobody's talking about boots on the ground.

00:31:10.500 Not yet, they're not.

00:31:11.280 But if the global economy is in free fall, what other options will it have?

00:31:15.080 So that's an important thing to keep in mind.

00:31:17.000 It's that for certain strategies like this, like you will eventually need boots on the ground.

00:31:22.860 Unless you're hoping Iran just surrenders.

00:31:25.680 But, I mean, what if they don't?

00:31:27.540 How many people have been wrong about what they think Iran might do?

00:31:31.700 How much do you know about Iran politically?

00:31:34.240 You know what I mean?

00:31:34.760 I think they're more, you know, cunning and intelligent.

00:31:38.360 And, you know, if this is indeed all theater, it was only to prevent that, the second Samson option, one that was not present in Afghanistan and not present in Iraq.

00:31:52.800 I actually think Iran holds more cards, way more cards than people think.

00:31:57.160 They're not even they're not even comparable.

00:32:00.180 Like Iraq and Afghanistan have not been functional nations in decades.

00:32:05.660 and like yeah iran is past its peak but iran is not iran like i don't know there's so many people

00:32:12.000 who treat iran like it's some fucking backwater it is not it's a serious fucking country like if

00:32:17.980 you look at the technology that they have and like they're even saying the amount of missiles that

00:32:22.820 were available were not even a not even a tiny fraction of them were fired and like it's just

00:32:28.380 i don't know it's crazy the way that people downplay the actual power of iran yeah and

00:32:33.340 And that's what I was concerned about early on when I said, oh, Iran is gaining a reputation of someone that can be fucked with by Israel or fucked with by the international community.

00:32:43.140 And then they prove they can't be fucked with, which is what they're supposed to be doing.

00:32:45.780 So good for them.

00:32:46.960 Yeah.

00:32:47.120 But how far does that go?

00:32:49.540 You know, and that's why Trump is out there flailing his arms and talking about peace.

00:32:54.600 That tells me it's not going very good for Israel.

00:32:57.880 Yes.

00:32:58.380 Yes.

00:32:58.620 that's like israel like if there's one thing israel wish it could do is complete decimated

00:33:03.760 ron and it can't and i bet they're getting their shit ruined i was gonna say that earlier this

00:33:08.080 whole thing with israel and the samson option and all this other shit israel is not that strong yes

00:33:11.940 israel has nukes but even israel samson option would not be a nuclear apocalypse for the globe

00:33:16.820 it would just be a final fuck you to a lot of major cities but it would not destroy humanity

00:33:21.500 not by a long shot and they wouldn't even destroy iran they don't they don't have the the hardware

00:33:25.900 for it also like we can see from what they did to iran in the 12-day war that a lot of their stuff

00:33:32.600 was taken out by iran's anti-air like yeah iran lost a lot of anti-air but it was a far cry from

00:33:38.840 this curb stomp that they said it would be it was actually a fairly even match and on i'm telling

00:33:44.120 you i believe iran was holding back for the reasons that you just mentioned which is that if iran went

00:33:49.480 full force and brought everybody else in we are looking at world war three and iran is not iraq

00:33:54.500 iran is more like europe in the way it's managed in that they don't actually want to destroy the

00:33:59.040 fucking planet they don't want world war three any more than we do is the only people who want

00:34:02.800 to blow the fucking planet up is israel and we're going to get to this later on in the episode when

00:34:07.700 we talk about sort of the circuit theory of money and the importance of global trade routes but that

00:34:13.800 seems to be the one you know existential third rail that no one wants to touch which is that

00:34:19.560 we could have this show war but nothing can be permitted to disrupt international trade

00:34:27.040 yeah which is what that what would happen if a canal gets blown up now it's world war three

00:34:32.640 and that's what we're saying like okay you know nukes is just one aspect of it nukes is obviously

00:34:38.300 terrifying nuclear weapons we've all been irradiated with stories of nuclear winter

00:34:45.180 it seems to be that the british are pretty good at producing these by the way they love a good

00:34:49.960 nuclear winter story but aside from that when no one talks about it's like oh yeah like if

00:34:55.240 if that trade route is closed then electrical grids shut off very very fast and the international

00:35:03.940 trade network is a very complex system where there's a lot of pain points if any of those

00:35:10.760 pain points are truly disrupted that causes reciprocating effects and now prices skyrocket

00:35:16.320 here or there as we're seeing with trump and the tariffs so i think there's there's the moment you

00:35:24.180 start talking about that people take it very like people kind of don't even take nukes seriously

00:35:27.940 but they take the closures of the canals more seriously and by they i mean the people who are

00:35:32.980 actually in control of things where they okay let's get into a room we we need the ships to go

00:35:38.800 like don't fuck around you throw some fucking dukes we don't care anymore we got too many people

00:35:43.900 already and we're declining but there's still too many we need to get down to two billion people

00:35:47.760 that's what some fucking jew in switzerland told me but you know you the if the money stops

00:35:54.100 i start to fade away it's like a vampire exposed to sunlight you turn to dust

00:36:00.880 oh by the way how's it going how's life we've been all over the map we didn't finish our peter

00:36:06.680 teal talk we're good man everything everything is fantastic over here yeah how the girls

00:36:13.540 the uh what are they uh graduated from junior kindergarten tomorrow is there a ceremony nope

00:36:22.000 well we did it we did a thing with them uh earlier this week we went and they got to do a little song

00:36:26.960 and dance and yeah it was all right it's fucking they get them hooked early on ceremonies yeah i

00:36:34.860 wish they got done graduating things or i i'd love i'd love to get them out of the system but

00:36:40.660 you know how it is it's like the same what the fuck you're gonna do yeah like the i mean the

00:36:46.560 homeschooling thing but then there's a lot of fucking oddballs in that system to be honest

00:36:50.140 i don't i i would love to do that but it's just not it's not available to everyone who gets their

00:36:55.560 first kid especially in our space says the same thing i'm gonna do a right we're gonna cook every

00:37:02.200 meal it's going to be organic we're not going to do sneed oils we're not going to do anything and

00:37:06.780 i say there's limits and you you can do that for a period but eventually you you remember honey

00:37:15.220 nut cheerios exist eventually they they like kids really like chicken fingers there's there's

00:37:22.080 limits based on the resources available to you right like i i swear i would be doing more if i

00:37:27.480 wasn't fucking dirt poor like i am well everyone that's what everyone would be doing if they had

00:37:32.560 time to do it and no one fucking does yeah yeah yeah especially if there's more kids and especially

00:37:38.020 like how extreme do you want to take it what's the what's the risk versus reward what's the cost

00:37:45.540 benefit of this so you know even early on even my wife was saying we can make our own crackers

00:37:51.500 like we can make our own crap like just buy the fucking crackers there's other shit to do

00:37:57.320 you know what and i think part of that is because you know my my wife stays home we actually do like

00:38:03.940 my wife made crackers like last week i still have them actually so she's like she makes we make

00:38:08.740 everything and there isn't there's a utility to it long term in that once you're used to making it

00:38:13.980 it's actually really it's like second nature to make it so she makes all this stuff all the time

00:38:17.280 but that's only if you have a stay at home and then it's a whole other thing because it's like 1.00

00:38:21.280 well now you have all a single income so there's a balance we we all know your wife is fucked up so 0.97

00:38:27.080 when you said he says crackers i know what that's called for it's thinly shaved hoof 0.98

00:38:32.800 no no no you know what it is it's it's our it's her attempt at sun sun chips like we went and

00:38:39.700 looked at the sun chip recipe so they don't taste exactly like sun chips they don't have the same

00:38:42.860 texture but the flavor is right and they're good and they're cheap because sun chips are like

00:38:46.760 fucking six bucks a bag dude see you have to understand their their food dynamic it's a

00:38:51.800 fascinating anthropological study if like me you've been surrounded you've been confronted with

00:38:57.600 it your whole life where judas wants her to cook food and he thinks she's good at but his wife

00:39:06.680 not only hates food but hates people who like food if we're up to her we wouldn't do it all 0.98

00:39:14.440 we would just be eating out never cook and kill everyone so everything she cooks is like a 0.99

00:39:19.400 rebellion against his 0.99

00:39:21.300 desire for her to

00:39:23.300 be this. So it's like, oh yeah, I'm going to make you

00:39:25.580 oh, you want crackers?

00:39:27.100 We start with pulverized

00:39:29.400 fish eyes and

00:39:31.240 fucking coriander and

00:39:33.420 dill. I'm going to smush it down

00:39:35.320 into pucks and I'm going to bake

00:39:37.320 those pucks and I'm going to smash those apart.

00:39:39.260 I'm going to bake them again. 1.00

00:39:40.340 You bitch. 1.00

00:39:42.080 You know what though? Fish cakes with coriander and dill 1.00

00:39:44.260 would be pretty good, I think.

00:39:45.820 I accidentally made a tasty...

00:39:47.380 Accidentally, you're a secret chef over here.

00:39:50.780 That's good.

00:39:52.200 Accidentally made a delicacy.

00:39:53.600 Fuck. 1.00

00:39:56.500 So she fucking hates food. 1.00

00:39:58.520 She's going to whip together what? 1.00

00:39:59.680 Like a linguine noodle? 1.00

00:40:00.900 Maybe we get some mussels in there.

00:40:02.460 We steam it with some chili oil.

00:40:05.580 A meter of jazz.

00:40:07.240 Do a nice brioche.

00:40:08.520 You can throw a nice fucking brioche on there.

00:40:10.180 Yeah.

00:40:10.760 You do it up nice.

00:40:15.360 As a rebellion against it.

00:40:17.260 the eggs right so here's the thing i love this now i've adjusted to it i'm spoiled here

00:40:22.380 good we have too many eggs uh and might you know mike always says if you have you have uh

00:40:26.780 if you don't like nobody from the like nobody yeah our our sage if you if you have chickens

00:40:32.940 you don't have an egg problem you don't have enough chickens so we have an egg problem but

00:40:36.220 the way we solve the egg problem one of the ways is she's making uh noodles she's just making and

00:40:41.420 she's so good at it she just randomly make up a mess of uh egg noodles and they're

00:40:46.620 fucking great because they're fresh for one thing like and then we just eat them and how do these

00:40:52.620 egg noodles compare to the egg noodles that the rest of us might be thinking of because i had egg

00:40:57.580 noodles when i was growing up because my mom god bless her cannot cook and as has maybe attempted 0.94

00:41:04.860 it twice in her life it's what making them fresh or what no i think she would make egg noodles and

00:41:10.300 it would be like egg noodles plus hamburger helper and even at the time even as a child it made me

00:41:15.340 you want to vomit i mean part of the thing is the dish like what are you making them with so it's

00:41:19.600 usually like an asian fusion type thing because it's that kind of noodle but at the same time the

00:41:23.940 noodle itself because like to me i'd never even had fresh egg noodles i'd had egg noodles like

00:41:27.660 from the pack well that's one thing like is or do these taste better than the one oh yeah well

00:41:31.740 the thing is when they're from the pack not only are they dry they're never as good when they're

00:41:35.260 when they're uh like rehydrated but even the rehydrated ones are full of preservatives and

00:41:39.360 shit right so these have no preservatives so they're fresh they're not rehydrated you just

00:41:43.380 you make them and they're soft and you eat them like that like fresh pasta and fuck man it's not

00:41:49.020 like there's no comparison they're really good i know your wife and she did this for us when she's

00:41:53.500 got a pasta press i've seen her use it and she's highly skilled at it but i just keep imagining her

00:42:00.160 cracking an egg over the lasagna press and just running the egg through it

00:42:04.940 there's like bits of shell on one part and he's such a good guy he would scarf it

00:42:13.360 down you've never seen someone scarf a meal down like this he makes noises that you cannot believe

00:42:20.660 when he's eating his wife me I'm ambivalent you gotta keep them trying so I say it's fine

00:42:33.460 it's you know I don't want to talk about it she's like what do you think about your dinner do we

00:42:41.720 have to talk about this right now can we just so that so that's what you want to do tonight you

00:42:45.220 want to have a big fucking fight oh man oh we're gonna do the fucking the the so i'm gonna stay

00:42:54.580 at my my parents and you stay at your parents we may be alienating the younger audience but this

00:42:58.880 is i this has got to be pure mid to late 30s marriage shit you can take it to 11 and resolve

00:43:06.040 it within an hour and then you're you're back well because you have the biggest fight the biggest

00:43:11.340 It's like you're saying wild stuff sometimes.

00:43:13.940 You shouldn't do that all the time.

00:43:15.180 If you're having a screen match once or twice a week, something's wrong.

00:43:20.600 It's bad.

00:43:21.400 You got to blow off steam sometimes, though.

00:43:23.380 You got to clear the cobwebs out.

00:43:25.600 You got to let each other know they can still yell.

00:43:28.640 And it's good.

00:43:30.180 Because when you have a kid, you're not yelling at your kids.

00:43:32.000 So maybe the yelling muscles in your throat don't get worked out enough.

00:43:37.180 Oh, you don't yell at your kids?

00:43:39.280 I fucking holler, dude.

00:43:40.840 i just let it out it's too i just think it's too early for that because he's only just past two

00:43:45.880 and he's only now getting like a true understanding of consequence he knows i can yell he knows i can

00:43:52.540 get mad sort of just but just as like an urgency thing yeah so i'm at a point where when i raise

00:43:58.960 my voice he pays more attention um if i yell but he he's also you know what i noticed was if i'm

00:44:06.680 driving in the car he's in the back seat right i've yelled at another driver who like cut in

00:44:12.820 front of me or isn't moving fast enough i go what the fuck i'm not screaming i just raise my voice

00:44:17.200 he'll i hear him in the back he starts to get worried he thinks he just knows dad's mad and

00:44:22.600 he thinks it's at him because he doesn't know the rules of the road he doesn't know the ballet that

00:44:26.960 i'm engaged in right now there's diminishing returns for me where you get to a certain point

00:44:31.220 where the volume you've got to maintain a certain volume but then you got to actually

00:44:35.840 you get the words that are coming out of your mouth have to also have impact there's got to be

00:44:40.440 some kind of a some kind of an implied threat or something or else they're not listening and he's

00:44:45.820 still young but if he if he breaks something or because he does test you so he'll throw things

00:44:51.020 but it's you have to figure out okay did he throw something because he's just having fun

00:44:55.440 or is he throwing something because he's pissed off and i need to tell him that he can't throw

00:44:59.580 shit just when he's pissed off versus when we're outside he's picked up a rock and he wants to

00:45:05.640 throw a rock at the sidewalk just to see what happens which is cool right there's lots of

00:45:11.220 weight he throws shit all the time his mother's like don't throw things i said no you gotta let

00:45:15.480 me he's gonna he's gonna throw he's going to throw things like you're telling a little boy

00:45:20.460 not to throw rocks and the fuck are you retarded get out of here and he's at this great age where

00:45:25.380 just past two like two and change so his entire life is just getting in the dirt and playing in

00:45:34.340 the dirt and drawing with a stick picking up rocks test picking up gravel yeah dropping it

00:45:41.820 and then watching it drop and like experimenting eating it yeah well not even eating it i'll say

00:45:48.100 he has tried a few times but because i let him try he understands that rock right right that's

00:45:54.380 i think each of mine had like maybe three times each that they did it and then they

00:45:58.300 were had enough so it's it this at this age is hard for me to get mad at him it was easier to

00:46:06.380 get mad when he was a newborn because i guess you're new to it but also you can't reason with

00:46:12.840 them i can actually kind of reason with him now yeah i can communicate with him and he can't

00:46:16.940 communicate very well but i can reason with him and say we're gonna do he'll be wanting something

00:46:21.320 i say we're gonna do that later and he stops i'm like okay we can have a kind of a conversation here

00:46:26.920 whereas with a newborn like you just it's like diffusing a bomb sometimes and then you're just

00:46:32.200 you're there are times if a child is like just screaming for hours or for whatever reason you're

00:46:38.520 like you get a little bit crazy i find i'm crazy less now this is just like a fun age guys in a

00:46:46.280 guys in a trade who make three times as much as minimum wage or five fucking ten times as much

00:46:51.960 will sit around on their extremely long unionized lunch break and

00:46:55.800 bitch about the calluses on their heels even though they're driving home in a new truck and

00:47:02.200 essentially have way more than anybody else who's turning a fucking wrench that day so

00:47:07.240 i i and they know that i'm not i'm not pissing on them they know that they are blessed for what

00:47:13.480 they've got i think it's just that that's what you do you're with other people who are doing the

00:47:18.440 same thing and it's kind of just fun to bitch and moan about shit like parents will bitch and moan

00:47:22.120 about shit but like not we're bitching and moaning we're not saying we don't like this we just it's

00:47:27.160 fun to about it but no i mean i'm i wouldn't i have zero regrets yeah people have a hard time

00:47:34.280 understanding that and maybe that's part of the canadian identity there's two big pillars of the

00:47:42.200 canadian identity one it's that everything and i mean everything in canada is at least 250

00:47:50.600 to do anything you want to go to a museum you want to eat out you want to chase a hoop with

00:47:55.640 a fucking sick 250 dollars everything is just a level of money that's that's noticeable we just

00:48:03.400 we just don't do it we just literally we literally just do not do any of it everything everything's

00:48:09.000 everything's expensive there's not a cheap thing um the second pottery you do pottery anyways i

00:48:14.340 won't derail i'm not better pottery class like you can do pottery at home which i'm sure you do

00:48:18.880 that's my point yeah if i wanted to do a pottery class with 250 fucking dollars a pop i bet you

00:48:23.020 anything we found a clay spot in the yard we've been digging it up and cleaning clay and old wine

00:48:27.380 buckets and then doing pottery i'm just used to even if by cheap groceries for family and i know

00:48:32.380 you've got your own you've had to adapt all these other ways to get around it because the average

00:48:38.560 grocery bill is easily

00:48:41.020 like $250 to $300 a week.

00:48:42.760 Just for cheap shit.

00:48:44.860 It's insane.

00:48:46.420 The second thing is that

00:48:48.920 part of the Canadian identity

00:48:50.160 we complain about everything.

00:48:53.080 And I love it. I love complaining about

00:48:55.000 everything. I don't know what I would do in Hawaii.

00:48:57.340 I don't know what I would do in a perfect

00:48:58.920 climate. I like being

00:49:00.760 here. I like bitching about

00:49:02.940 the weather constantly.

00:49:04.620 And I can't explain it to people.

00:49:06.440 Don't you want to live in a nice temperate zone? No.

00:49:08.560 nah i want it to be i want to go right from pouring rain to freezing ice storm and then

00:49:17.400 thaw to slush it's like a dynamo like it's been 35 degrees here celsius for the past few days

00:49:22.780 and it was miserable and now that it's dropped down to 27 or whatever it's like oh cool and then

00:49:29.700 it's gonna pour rain for four days my roof's gonna leak and i'll be mad about that but it's fine

00:49:33.500 i don't want to i don't want to live in the tropics fuck that look up here my organs are

00:49:39.060 screaming bloody murder 24 7 if i'm down there i don't know what my organs do

00:49:45.200 atrophy i'm gonna they're gonna fucking wither and die buddy yeah yeah you gotta keep them

00:49:53.580 activated i'm gonna plant myself within the vacuum of the caribbean we're gonna go to i

00:50:02.000 almost died in france man i almost had my head blow up like a fucking balloon and pop off my

00:50:08.240 head float up in the stratosphere france will do weird shit to a canadian physiognomy

00:50:14.640 you're gonna come back with your fucking face upside down brother

00:50:18.800 canadian goes to paris gay paris as i'm calling come back with your hair on backwards

00:50:27.980 I came back from

00:50:33.940 all my clothes

00:50:34.660 are on backwards

00:50:35.460 so I mean

00:50:36.860 that's not Fran

00:50:37.480 that's just

00:50:38.060 you're retarded

00:50:39.820 you're a profoundly

00:50:40.900 confused man

00:50:41.960 we have squandered

00:50:44.540 quite a bit of the audience's

00:50:46.360 good nature

00:50:47.340 on this episode

00:50:48.180 I wanted

00:50:48.540 there's a couple things

00:50:49.260 I wanted to just

00:50:50.060 get you to kick 0.98

00:50:52.680 the tires on

00:50:53.520 I was looking at

00:50:55.020 an article here

00:50:56.340 and I think you're

00:50:57.320 going to hate this right out the gate I'm going to lead into it there's this study I found this

00:51:03.520 is I'm looking at Springer Nature link it's in the behavior and genetic section I only have access to

00:51:09.240 the abstract but it's a paper titled natural selection across three generations of Americans

00:51:16.940 what's interesting is you can even tell by scrolling through the study that the

00:51:23.100 um, the, the candidates for this study were predominantly white.

00:51:28.160 So in a lot of ways, it's trying to, it's everything it tells you is primarily focused

00:51:35.340 on white populations in the U S but I also say Canada.

00:51:39.860 And, um, I'll, I'll just read the abstract here.

00:51:43.100 Then I'll, you know, restate it here.

00:51:45.240 It says we investigate natural selection on polygenic scores in the contemporary U S

00:51:50.940 using the health and retirement study.

00:51:53.100 across three generations scores which correlate negatively with education are selected for

00:51:58.540 however results only partial partially support the economic theory of fertility as an explanation

00:52:06.620 for natural selection the theory predicts that selection coefficients could be stronger among

00:52:12.060 low-income less educated unmarried and younger parents but these predictions are only half

00:52:18.060 borne out coefficients are larger only among low-income parents and unmarried parents we also

00:52:24.100 estimate effect sizes uh corrected for noise and polygenic scores yeah so you can see that right

00:52:30.900 there did you have an immediate take on that so i always i always do but i actually don't want to

00:52:37.280 jump out because this is with in an abstract like this they're throwing a lot of words they may very

00:52:42.300 well be totally legit and uh i'm not saying the words are wrong but like um there's not enough

00:52:47.480 information there for me to know how the study was done a couple of things like you're talking

00:52:51.740 about you're talking about markers of mark um eugenic markers but then you're talking about

00:52:58.160 like these are born out less in or more in people who are unmarried or i guess it doesn't mean they

00:53:04.400 aren't parents i'm sorry i read that i'm listening to that wrong they they did have kids they're just

00:53:08.600 unmarried but it is i guess it's fascinating that there's yeah they're saying and i heard

00:53:14.640 to summarize that this is showing that there are dysgenic forces at work within white reproduction

00:53:22.380 that absent the declining birth rates and all of the environmental influences on that

00:53:33.900 and we've discussed those that passed there is a social factor or there's at least a phenomenon

00:53:39.860 where it seems that these dysgenic groups are populating.

00:53:44.380 I don't want to use the term idiocracy like a lot of people say that.

00:53:47.980 Are we putting the cart before the horse, though,

00:53:52.060 saying that scores which correlate negatively with education are selected for,

00:53:57.020 and we call that dysgenic?

00:53:59.180 By whose standards?

00:54:00.300 Who made those rules?

00:54:01.540 How do you know that isn't eugenic? 0.99

00:54:03.060 Maybe the education system isn't actually good for the genome or the population.

00:54:07.120 This is true.

00:54:07.760 it by like to me to me the idea of and i don't know what their definition here here is right

00:54:13.360 to me eugenics is um how fit are your offspring and by fit i mean how successful is are your

00:54:20.660 offspring in the world as it exists compared to the previous generation and it doesn't mean how

00:54:26.240 many offspring do you have because if they're measuring how many offspring yeah it it negatively

00:54:31.960 correlates with education i got that but if you're saying like are they more successful

00:54:37.060 and again I wouldn't know

00:54:39.300 I wouldn't be totally

00:54:40.860 I bet it's changing right now

00:54:43.260 quite a bit

00:54:43.960 to me this is the strongest argument

00:54:46.300 and people are going to get frustrated

00:54:48.400 that I say this phrase

00:54:49.560 but a parallel society

00:54:51.220 when we talk

00:54:54.700 because a lot of people say that

00:54:56.360 and they're very vague about what they mean

00:54:58.120 but to me the strongest argument

00:55:01.160 for a parallel society

00:55:02.140 is simply to have a space

00:55:05.320 where these eugenic influences can actually propagate because you know why should because

00:55:13.740 we talked about survival of the fittest right uh you made a good point there when people hear

00:55:17.740 survival of the fittest they think oh the most physically dominant not necessarily if the system

00:55:24.340 if the environment is selecting for let's say meek individuals meek and not even particularly

00:55:31.920 intelligent but with a high verbal iq and cunning you know their survival is based on how they can

00:55:38.900 thrive in a bureaucracy there could be a negative correlation between that and physical fitness so

00:55:44.960 yes you are you are thriving and you that's the survival of your genes and maybe you even have

00:55:51.800 more kids than the who we also think is is the apex predator of that system the you know seven

00:56:00.880 foot chat or whatever that guy just withers on the vine so you need us and you would be foolish

00:56:07.900 to try not excel in that system that's why people are going to school because i want to sell

00:56:12.600 so and there's no alternative so you just need a space where excelling at those things those

00:56:19.500 virtues those skills actually have a relationship to economic sovereignty right because one of the

00:56:27.600 problems is that if we pursue a lot of the values that we think are important which would be

00:56:33.060 self-sufficiency physical fitness whatever it might be you can still end up a broke loser and

00:56:39.100 that's a hard sell for a lot of people you're always going to be a minority just doing that

00:56:44.800 unless you have some space where these people can not only exist but propagate and raise their kids

00:56:51.460 and then that becomes an argument for positive birth rate because then you want each one of

00:56:55.380 those guys to have seven kids and that you want to raise them and then it's a numbers game it's

00:57:01.620 hard to make a case for a numbers game within this system because everyone's thinking why do

00:57:06.240 i want to birth so many people into the system that sucks that's just punishing that's going to

00:57:10.480 you know lead them astray that's gonna this whole system makes my kids retarded and trans and maybe

00:57:16.240 they're ripped away from me by my crazy wife whatever so there's a lot of even social forces

00:57:21.900 that make people not want to have kids but you see a space where you know you can the the the

00:57:28.920 the strategy of a positive birth rate and an extremely positive birth rate makes sense a bit

00:57:36.400 more exactly is anything i'm saying track there yeah yeah it does it does and and then i i read

00:57:43.080 that and then i was looking at this just a dumb tweet um this is by john de la rose don't know who

00:57:51.740 that is um he's responding to a um a tweet here from someone named steven circ circarelli says

00:58:00.940 it's really it's a really a guy with a very italian name that is not an italian looking man

00:58:06.720 um italians shouldn't have beards right out of here if i don't even like seeing a lot of

00:58:13.060 europeans with beards got an english beard this guy british men with beards doesn't make sense

00:58:18.800 to me this is more of a sponsored by the shadow government really this that's our thing he says

00:58:25.700 i just failed a student for submitting an ai written research paper and she said i mean

00:58:30.240 obviously ai written email apologizing asking if there is anything she can do to improve her grade

00:58:36.100 we are through the looking glass here folks i'm sure there's stories like that countless stories

00:58:42.240 like that that's very brown coded i want to say but there's no doubt many there's guys i know

00:58:50.800 many white guys i know who are like i'm getting in on this i'm gonna get the ai just why not get

00:58:55.980 the ai just do all this shit right this is the time to do it where the the institutions haven't

00:59:01.760 caught up yet so of course that's gonna probably what are your thoughts on that so far okay so

00:59:06.360 first of all i never use ai to write my emails uh i always write my emails in my own voice and i

00:59:15.080 include common canadian misspellings intentionally when dealing with american clients and that is one

00:59:21.820 facet of the reason that i am poor and unfit for this society yeah if you want to excel in this

00:59:31.780 society this is just what we're talking about yeah you need to be scamming with ai which is

00:59:36.740 making you stupider and let's remember that the the ai is just it's essentially i'm gonna get in

00:59:44.280 trouble look it's averaging let's just call this it's averaging the the the the data the data pile

00:59:51.440 or the the fucking data right it's averaging the data if the data is linkedin emails and those

00:59:57.860 linkedin emails were written by real people because those real people are a bunch of fucking

01:00:01.900 gay fags because we have a work culture a bunch of dumb gay fags then when another genuine gay fag

01:00:09.080 runs you a write to a genuine gay fag email yeah it's gonna sound like chat gbt but it's it's

01:00:15.580 possible that that guy sounds like that because you idiots have been training people for 30 years

01:00:20.760 to write emails like that how do you know this is that john del a rose guy who i was just talking

01:00:27.360 about he hears him reacting to that tweet he says here's the hard truth your student is using the

01:00:34.160 future of tech to perform and is probably learning more useful future skills by getting better at ai

01:00:40.640 prompts than anything you're teaching and here's here's the thing we might recoil and disgust at

01:00:47.680 that but there is if you just step back from it there's something true to that i think it's

01:00:52.480 It's dysgenic, though, and that's the inverse of what we're – the ideal we're talking about.

01:00:57.080 What do you mean by dysgenic there, though?

01:00:58.880 Do you mean it makes people unfit or it makes people have fewer children?

01:01:01.600 I think it makes them stupider, and I think on a long enough timeline, if people are – here's a good point.

01:01:08.840 You did just point out that using these LLMs regresses people to the dumb faggot mean of society, which only becomes lower IQ as more brown people are fit into it.

01:01:21.840 i was saying that these people before ai existed the dumb faggots already were the majority

01:01:27.040 and the ai is trained on them so the ai is mimicking them not the other way no that's

01:01:31.040 what i'm saying and it's it's actually dragging us down into that if we are d yeah if the more

01:01:37.280 it's averaging us all yeah or the more we surrender our communication skills to the ai

01:01:42.960 as many if these students are doing that if there's white students doing that they are

01:01:49.120 surrendering their voice to just a retarded brown mass and excelling as that so you can talk if this

01:01:56.880 continues generationally the iq is going to get dragged down to that mean eventually um and so

01:02:04.160 that's why i was saying that that's sort of a communicative dysgenics but that's one aspect

01:02:10.720 of what i was just talking about like what is it what are these forces that are truly dragging

01:02:17.360 the white genetics down because it's you could say it's miscegenation but it's it's something

01:02:22.080 almost more it's political and social it's also metaphysical well what if what if the future and

01:02:26.960 i think this is what john is getting at what if the future is so saturated in ai that the only

01:02:32.240 people who survive it and reproduce are not people who are intelligent it's people who shut down whole

01:02:38.560 regions of their brain in order to plug into prompt life prompt slop life maybe those people

01:02:46.480 not only have the most kids but they also make the most money 50 years from now and people like

01:02:51.600 people like you and i who don't refuse to do this and are thrilled at our own you know adequacy

01:02:59.440 are actually going to die poor of some novel disease yeah i remember the tweet by arthur

01:03:06.560 chu and we discussed we mentioned this at one point in the past but he was saying that the

01:03:12.240 future is going to be held by people like me yes i'm fat and short and ugly and i like slop and

01:03:22.320 i'm emotional but there's more people like me like he was making the argument of you know it was if

01:03:28.720 the camp of the saints was written by the other end so we have strength in numbers yes we are a

01:03:34.640 virus and we will spread like a virus and i look at that and i'm like and that that if left to its

01:03:43.120 own devices the system will amplify those people because it will be up to people not just us but

01:03:50.320 people like us if if you're the type of person who has noticed this and you don't like it this will

01:03:58.000 be the reality that you live in unless there's hmm hmm unless there's hmm i can only you know

01:04:07.020 what unless there's um hmm because i was i was loading four or five rounds into the tube on what

01:04:13.560 i was gonna say and i think we're gonna leave it at hmm that's good i was opening the box making

01:04:19.100 sure all the wires are connected setting the timer on it of that idea of my point

01:04:27.340 but it's like if if you like this is what they're saying and i do think they mean it i do think that

01:04:33.260 actually is true that that the cancer will metastasize um and and here's just one example

01:04:38.860 of it being forwarded by artificial intelligence and people are seeing it's it's like this cool

01:04:44.140 exciting thing but you know i don't think it gets any better from here i just think it keeps i want

01:04:50.860 to point out too it's really the pot calling the kettle black when you have people in academia

01:04:56.460 complaining about this like you have steve ciccarelli is apparently i guess he's a prof

01:05:00.940 complaining about his students the reason that that is even possible for them to do that is

01:05:06.260 because your system of which you are a part which you support has encouraged this behavior you've

01:05:12.200 been encouraging students to write in a certain voice in a certain way to a certain style they

01:05:18.040 literally have style guides and and and i'm sure i'm sure steve cittarelli is a totally upright guy

01:05:24.000 but when i was in university most of the profs that i had you were essentially trying you had

01:05:28.220 to write something that was going to suck their dick if you wanted to get a good mark and i think

01:05:31.300 everybody who's been through academia has had that experience so if the objective is not to learn

01:05:36.080 something and it hasn't been for a long time the objective is to suck the prof's dick to get a good

01:05:40.000 mark so you can get a good job that's fitness and if the new fit mode the new you know lock in is to

01:05:47.100 be better at writing prompts then who are you to complain you and i'm not saying this is good i'm

01:05:52.780 saying it is cancer but you know what it's not cancer it's not cancer from a uh uh uh from the

01:06:00.100 standpoint of survival of the fittest because it is it actually the best expression of survival

01:06:04.240 of the fittest it's it's it's cancer from the standpoint of anybody who believes in objective

01:06:07.660 truth and beauty yeah and this is the sort of attitude once again we're stepping back from this

01:06:14.260 and not making a quality of judgment on it but this is the attitude behind crypto rug pulls

01:06:18.420 which is that look i'm trying to excel in this system i'm smart enough to realize how to scam

01:06:25.040 i can make a million dollars with a few tweets and a few greased palms to create this whole

01:06:32.560 a new type of bitcoin that gets suckers involved and i take all their money and i make a million

01:06:38.740 dollars and maybe and that's excelling in that's survival of the fittest in a sense but the system

01:06:45.560 itself is so corrupt and rebelling against that system from the inside doesn't seem to help

01:06:52.240 so there must be some kind of parallel system that filters for people like you that can rival

01:06:58.180 that other system because you know accelerating that system and excelling in that system will

01:07:05.620 just turn you into precisely what you don't want to be so with that in mind we've kind of taken us

01:07:14.400 on a path through all the things that are wrong with society um this leads into an article we'll

01:07:22.220 only discuss this very very briefly but i thought it was pretty interesting it was in military

01:07:27.480 strategy magazine and it's by david betts uh from king's college london uh titled civil war

01:07:36.200 comes to the west and this was published this is from 2023 okay um so you know it's not the

01:07:47.300 i don't know if we're still caring about january 6 by the way but i think it's people people don't

01:07:53.980 i think it's perennial i don't think it's ever been resolved and it's one of the more important

01:07:57.160 things to deal with in a democracy but yeah i mean do people care about it no people don't

01:08:01.000 care about it yeah i'm just going to read a couple excerpts here he says europe is a garden we've

01:08:08.680 built a garden everything works it is the best combination of political freedom economic

01:08:12.600 prosperity and social cohesion that humankind has been able to build the three things together

01:08:18.520 most of the rest of the world is a jungle so said eu foreign affairs chief joseph burrell in bruges

01:08:26.040 in october 2022 future dictionaries will use it as an example of the definition of hubris

01:08:33.320 that is because the major threat to the security and prosperity of the west today emanates from

01:08:38.040 its own dire social instability structural and economic decline cultural desiccation and in my

01:08:44.600 view elite pusillanimity some academics have begun to sound the alarm notably barbara walters how's

01:08:53.640 civil war start that barbara walters really i mean if we're quoting barbara walters maybe i don't like

01:09:01.600 this essay the old bitch who just was on the view like that maybe there's another barbara walters 0.99

01:09:09.580 which is concerned primarily with the dwindling domestic stability of the united states 0.99

01:09:14.280 it does sound like something a woman would write a book about that everything seems

01:09:18.220 nervous. Everything

01:09:20.420 seems shaky right now.

01:09:23.040 I'm hot.

01:09:24.300 I'm hot all the time now and I don't know why.

01:09:28.240 I see young mothers and I get sad

01:09:30.620 and I don't know why. Maybe that's

01:09:32.620 America. Maybe that's everyone.

01:09:34.540 I think my feelings are everyone.

01:09:38.320 To judge from President Biden's

01:09:40.440 September 22 speech in which he declared

01:09:42.240 MAGA Republicans represent an extremism

01:09:44.440 that threatens the very foundations of our republic,

01:09:46.440 governments are beginning to take heed albeit cautiously and awkwardly the literature on civil

01:09:52.960 wars is united on two points firstly they are not a concern of states that are rich and secondly

01:09:59.000 nations which possess governmental stability are largely free of the phenomenon there are degrees

01:10:04.800 of equivocation on how much regime type matters though most agree that securely perceived to be

01:10:11.100 legitimate democracies and strong autocracies are stable in the former people do not rebel

01:10:17.260 because they trust the political system works justly in the latter they do not because

01:10:21.900 authorities identify and punish dissenters before they have a chance in my view there's no good

01:10:27.980 reason to fault the main thrust of extant theory on civil war causation as described above the

01:10:32.540 question rather is whether the assumption of the conditions which have traditionally placed

01:10:37.420 western nations outside their frame of analysis of people concerned with large scale and persistent

01:10:42.540 eruptions of violent civil discord are still valid so what he's saying there is it's generally

01:10:48.220 understood that civil wars happen in nations that are economically punished or people have a severe

01:10:55.900 distrust in their government everything's in flux and this allows for factions to emerge and that's

01:11:01.580 what causes the civil war and historically you know forgetting things like the french revolution but

01:11:09.260 uh western countries have been prohibited from this analysis they haven't been included and all

01:11:13.740 he's saying is well maybe it has nothing to do with economics maybe it has nothing to do

01:11:18.780 with whether it's an autocracy or if it's a a strong democracy that people believe in because

01:11:25.820 he says those are stable anything in between isn't and all he's saying is well maybe not

01:11:30.940 maybe those times are changing and i find a lot of these guys they won't broach the subject of

01:11:37.600 multiculturalism that it's difficult to talk about factionalism unless you're talking about

01:11:45.260 multi-ethnic factionalism as well because if you're talking about factionalism in 18th century

01:11:50.840 romania you know you would have different social groups and reform groups but they were all

01:11:57.180 romanians but like if you consider the factionalism of a place like america where there's not only

01:12:03.220 left and right and iterations thereof but then there's also the ethnic representations of each

01:12:09.480 and they all don't get along you see what i'm saying like it's yeah it's only factions and

01:12:14.080 all the factions fucking hate each other and there's almost so many it's only kept in balance

01:12:18.800 by the hatred between

01:12:20.700 the factions.

01:12:22.780 He says,

01:12:23.120 Oh, look at that.

01:12:46.040 Now they're talking about ethnicity.

01:12:48.800 In sociological terms, what this collapse of trust reflects is a plunge in the stock of, quote, social capital, which is both a kind of superglue, a factor of societal cohesion, as well as a lubricant that allows otherwise disparate groups in society to get along.

01:13:05.720 That it is in decline is disputed by no one, and neither is anyone seriously unclear of the happy consequences.

01:13:13.500 There's dispute over its causation, but no one's in disagreement that it is happening.

01:13:21.560 Now, this is part one of a two-part essay.

01:13:24.740 I'm just going to read the end here because I think we kind of see where he's getting with this.

01:13:27.700 He says, the fact of the matter is that the tools of revolt in the form of various

01:13:31.800 aperturances of modern life are just lying around.

01:13:37.040 Knowledge of how to employ them is widespread.

01:13:38.820 targets are obvious and undefended and more and more formally regular citizens

01:13:43.560 seem minded to take the shot and this is something we talked about with revolt of

01:13:48.660 the public that great book we've covered a great many books on the topic of

01:13:53.780 revolt in the late 20th and early 21st century and that seems to be the case

01:14:02.240 and i'm noticing what i'm noticing is that the word terrorism is falling out

01:14:07.760 a favor have you noticed that like i still see but it's it's not like it once was and it seems

01:14:13.900 like there's so many things that could formerly fall under terrorism that and and some people

01:14:21.860 that endorse like luigi mangioni arguably could be terrorism right although people like that so

01:14:29.000 it's something else now you know i mean like and and the more there's assassinations of course but

01:14:36.420 there's parts of luigi which are like textbook terrorism the only thing i can think of is that

01:14:41.380 he wasn't part of a group and it wasn't schemed in the same way like if it was if it was al-qaeda

01:14:46.600 or something and they had a long-term goal and a and a and a plank policy or something whereas

01:14:52.060 mangioni just said you know fuck insurance companies yeah i'm gonna do i'm gonna do this

01:14:56.640 as a public act i'm gonna do this to send a message it seemed to be what he was doing as well

01:15:02.920 like it could fall under the definition

01:15:05.140 but it's just that that's the type of terrorism that people

01:15:07.320 like yeah it's weird that they didn't actually

01:15:09.480 I'm sure somebody called it

01:15:11.240 terrorism but if it had to happen in

01:15:13.120 2005 all they would have called it would be

01:15:15.060 terrorism like the

01:15:16.180 Boston bomber

01:15:19.240 that was all about terrorism

01:15:21.000 terrorism terrorism and it's like okay

01:15:23.100 but I mean

01:15:23.700 they called January 6 terrorism

01:15:27.200 too they called like everything

01:15:29.220 is called terrorism for a minute

01:15:31.080 But I noticed that it goes away or doesn't seem to rile people up anymore.

01:15:37.280 And maybe they've overused it.

01:15:38.780 That could be one thing.

01:15:39.640 But I think there's also an acceptance of terrorism.

01:15:43.160 I think it's not spoken of, but I think for the general public, they've become A, desensitized to it, but B, they've seen instances where they endorse it.

01:15:55.580 yeah i think the israeli-palestinian conflict i think the war in ukraine really pushed that

01:16:01.720 over the edge because you saw you know formerly country club liberals like trading in videos of

01:16:09.380 war atrocities and laughing at it or you know guys let's just be honest like there's a lot of

01:16:14.720 terrible things on both sides that have emerged from the israeli-palestinian conflict like we

01:16:20.340 said everyone's getting raped everyone's getting slaughtered i saw a fucking video everyone was

01:16:25.280 like cheering on where it's like a bunch of guys in a tank get roasted alive and i'm like you know

01:16:31.200 there seem to be atrocities being committed that people just like so what some people would say

01:16:37.900 that any violent act that is being you know forwarded to cause grief and discombobulate

01:16:46.200 the society is terrorism but we just consume that willingly now so maybe maybe we don't care

01:16:52.800 about terrorism i think the two other things i would think of is that the belief in the

01:16:57.720 functionality of the democracy is that breaks down right that people no longer have faith

01:17:02.640 like it's it's a nice luxury when you when you live in a society that you believe works normally

01:17:09.440 it's a nice luxury to say oh well i mean terrorism is awful it would never stoop to that and anybody

01:17:15.120 who does that for any reason is awful but why can you say that it's because you live in a society

01:17:19.480 where it's not necessary but when you start to notice that your elections don't matter your vote

01:17:24.700 doesn't matter you have multi-tier justice you have no normative morality in your society and

01:17:31.720 and the and at some point the only voice you may have is something that starts to look like

01:17:37.840 terrorism and maybe not for you but you observe other people doing it in other countries and you

01:17:42.180 say wow wow i wish we had that yeah and also i think there's more normal people who speak like

01:17:50.240 we do which is i want these people terrorized i think there's a lot of like you have enemies

01:17:56.720 real enemies now yeah like even a lot of maga people would say i want politicians terrorized

01:18:01.840 i want to be afraid of me yeah i want everyone wants journalists afraid no one likes journalists

01:18:06.980 they would at least like them scared constantly but i think just regular people think that like

01:18:12.460 no i want i want them to be scared of me i think there's been moms and dads and store owners who've

01:18:18.260 seen one too many trans school shooters and said no i want trans people to feel uncomfortable and

01:18:25.920 they might not say that but they believe it or if they if they were to learn that trans people

01:18:30.440 were living in fear they don't give a shit and and that's again across the board across

01:18:36.900 so that is look even the trans shooters themselves are terrorists that's the reason they don't

01:18:41.960 release a lot of the manifestos because their whole point is to make a political statement

01:18:45.600 against whites against christianity so so that's so forget all the economic pressures that lead

01:18:54.000 to civil war let's say people are generally anesthetized to the sort of violent collective

01:19:02.000 action that would be so common in the 19th and 20th century there's other forces that make

01:19:06.940 these flashpoints more likely i think i just want to tie it back momentarily to survival of the

01:19:12.720 fittest um terrorism works terrorism is actually effective not always i wouldn't even say a

01:19:21.840 majority of the time but terrorism is more effective on a per person basis than voting

01:19:28.880 right or than political organization there is more that you can do for your society and i'm just

01:19:34.860 talking about i've read two books on this recently actually but just talking about historical

01:19:39.280 precedent terrorism actually is more likely to succeed you know to to actually reach your goal

01:19:47.680 than any kind of political action.

01:19:51.680 And maybe that's a bad thing.

01:19:53.660 Bravo, let's say it's a bad thing, but it's a fact.

01:19:56.320 So we want to talk about, oh, well, it just shouldn't happen.

01:19:58.920 It shouldn't exist.

01:19:59.540 How about it exists, but it'll exist in a place that's unstable, right,

01:20:04.100 where there's an opening for it.

01:20:05.820 Well, this is what we've said about violence as well,

01:20:08.200 that it's difficult to sound like you're not endorsing violence when you say this,

01:20:13.080 but it seems that every social change

01:20:15.700 or everything that's ever happened in society

01:20:18.140 that's moved the needle in society

01:20:20.080 has been with violence.

01:20:21.940 Yes.

01:20:22.420 And I'm saying that without endorsing it,

01:20:25.920 that that just seems to be the case.

01:20:28.220 Same thing with terrorism.

01:20:31.220 You can scare people into not doing something.

01:20:34.800 And one illustrative example would be

01:20:37.780 people saying the N-word.

01:20:39.920 why are white people

01:20:42.120 so propagandized against saying

01:20:44.300 the n-word I think very

01:20:46.280 few of them avoid it

01:20:47.900 because of you know historical

01:20:50.600 emotional

01:20:52.760 reasons and

01:20:54.100 most of the time they're afraid that black people will attack

01:20:56.560 them yeah yeah

01:20:57.840 you're afraid you'll get beat up or robbed

01:21:00.340 or something bad is going to happen to you

01:21:02.280 blacks are violent animals completely

01:21:04.220 out of control and if somebody heard you saying

01:21:06.160 the n-word you don't

01:21:08.280 no you're gonna yes you say it and then you're checking over your shoulder to make sure a nigger

01:21:11.720 isn't gonna fucking shoot you yeah that's that's the only reason yeah and so when you really strip

01:21:18.280 some of this morality away you think you understand it's just fear of consequence so is it you know

01:21:25.760 you can define terrorism very acutely by saying no it has to be affiliated with a group okay but

01:21:32.000 maybe that part is changing because you're used to seeing a civil war with 19th and 20th century

01:21:40.600 political collectivization like here's a military group if it's not a military group with a flag

01:21:46.680 and the flag's probably red red and yellow so you know that here's the terrorist colors that

01:21:53.340 they use probably a lot of black but if it doesn't take that shape then it's not terrorism i'm like

01:21:57.920 okay well okay then maybe that goes away but you still have somewhat decentralized violence emerging

01:22:07.380 with these new inputs being the reason for it i think that's what he's getting at

01:22:11.480 so and then but then was a civil war why isn't that a civil war you know what i mean like does

01:22:17.860 does it need to be malicious or can it just be like groups of guys with like hackers with guns

01:22:24.120 you know i kind of see what i'm getting at here like it's yeah yeah it's just it just because it

01:22:28.440 doesn't have a uniform doesn't mean it's not the same sort of thing um and believe it or not

01:22:36.440 i think that does seg you into the book i wanted to talk about nice we're getting onto something of a

01:22:46.200 minor economic arc um every so often i'm possessed by the urge to dive back into economics i've got

01:22:54.120 many people in our circles who are always sending me economic stuff some of it's very very dense

01:22:58.860 i don't have you know you can lose yourself in economic theory um there's so many different

01:23:04.820 conflicting economic theories as we have learned with our discussions on modern monetary theory

01:23:10.460 interest and capital the monetary economics of mikhail kaleki and i'm pronouncing that name

01:23:18.780 wrong, I'm sure. This is written

01:23:20.920 by someone named Jan

01:23:22.380 Topaworski.

01:23:25.480 But it's talking about...

01:23:26.820 It's probably Kalitski if it's Polish.

01:23:30.060 Kalitski.

01:23:30.860 Kalitski.

01:23:31.620 K-A-L-E-C-K-I.

01:23:34.480 Yeah, it's Kalitski.

01:23:35.680 Kalitski.

01:23:37.220 So this is an author writing about the economic

01:23:40.620 theory of this

01:23:42.380 other individual from the early

01:23:44.760 20th century.

01:23:46.060 Someone who's maybe not as popular

01:23:48.160 as he should be but this pairs very well with the last book we covered on this topic which was

01:23:56.820 building a ruin and that was about the decline and fall of the soviet union and the economic

01:24:05.020 system of the soviet union and i'm reading one book right now that will cap this off it's called

01:24:11.720 why the west can't win and it's written from the multi-polarity advocates position and it's you

01:24:19.240 know it is what it sounds like it's saying why the western world america the anglosphere is going to

01:24:23.840 fail and why bricks is going to win and we say bricks we don't mean brazil russia i used to think

01:24:31.100 it was india but it's iran um china and south africa which is wild that south africa is in

01:24:38.000 there but whatever but really it's just the main three russia china and iran they were saying one

01:24:44.220 of the mythologies in my view at least is that the soviet union was not allowed to thrive because of

01:24:54.040 pressures from the outside world that we were just bullying them by not accepting their production

01:25:01.740 their productive um capacity like they we wouldn't accept their exports of their natural

01:25:08.560 resources um and i don't believe that to be true because no of course not as we talked about in

01:25:14.540 building a ruin it's like the entire time post during the cold war post world war ii there was

01:25:20.600 internal struggle going on about what type of economy it should be and we discussed the idea

01:25:25.600 of the middle income trap um for those who haven't and we'll get to that more in this book i'm just

01:25:31.420 setting this up the middle income trap which we discussed on that last book which is what china

01:25:37.480 was dealing with for a long time that yes when a nation begins to rapidly industrialize and

01:25:44.880 generate a lot of wealth and distribute it to the workers and the people of the country

01:25:49.360 they got more money maybe more money than they ever had before then what happens well unless

01:25:56.320 there's an outlet for that money unless there's a market where people can spend the money it turns

01:26:00.940 that what they do is they just hoard it and then the money doesn't go anywhere and people just

01:26:06.540 keep it reserved that's kind of a natural thing for people to do unless there's ways to spend

01:26:10.700 money you just hold on to it because what you want to just give it back to the government

01:26:14.780 no one does that not even in communist countries and that was the problem so they said well to

01:26:20.140 escape the middle income trap we need more of a service economy we need stuff for people to buy

01:26:25.020 to circulate that money back into the economy and um in russia and soviet union discovered that all

01:26:32.400 too late china apparently has discovered that over the course of the 20th century and that's

01:26:37.420 one of the reasons that they're i don't want to say succeeding right now but why they're surviving

01:26:42.880 at least but the way that the reason the soviet union failed was because they adopted that too

01:26:50.020 late was the point and this is the economic theory explaining that which i never really

01:26:57.300 heard described before but i've heard it described as the circuit theory of money and i'm curious to

01:27:04.400 hear what you think about this and maybe just based on what i'm saying maybe you have some

01:27:08.980 thoughts but it's this idea that the money always needs to keep flowing because if the money is

01:27:13.940 static and by money we just mean you know salaries and wages paid to people if that money is static

01:27:21.360 and just held on to then the economy really suffers and dies it just ends up with this

01:27:25.060 glut so you need money to keep moving the the economy kind of almost by definition is not the

01:27:31.320 money itself it's the movement of the money like there is there is no price right you have objects

01:27:37.080 but none of the objects or services have any price if money isn't moving because it's through

01:27:41.660 the movement of money that you discover price so yeah it's interesting to hear described like that

01:27:45.660 too because when i hear marx's talk about it it's more reductive which is that there's labor and

01:27:51.600 labor equals wage and then you get the wage and that's the only transaction that matters

01:27:56.360 you trade this for that and then you have it but that was so reductive because what yes yes you can

01:28:03.780 center that transaction but then your economy stagnates and when you're a great power as the

01:28:10.620 soviet union was and you're on a global stage you don't want to be seen as stagnant and the claim

01:28:16.080 was that the soviet union was boxed out of the international trade network and i'm like

01:28:21.120 laughable there's there's some truth like there's sanctions of course but they were they were were

01:28:28.220 they buying american goods the whole idea of the soviet project was you wouldn't necessarily need

01:28:33.440 that either and your empire was expanding very clearly yeah they're moving the goalposts there

01:28:38.820 Yeah. So it's like, why did that matter? Why couldn't, why, why is it now the case that it's America was unfair in not buying your stuff? That shouldn't have mattered. Like that's a very capitalist problem that I thought you were going to solve.

01:28:54.800 It could be, it should have been an internal ecosystem, but it wasn't.

01:28:59.000 So I'm just going to start reading from this because, you know, it was written in a pretty dense way.

01:29:06.480 Outside the academic journals that dominate monetary economics, two schools of thought have emerged,

01:29:12.320 each claiming to secure a firmer grasp on monetary circulation in our economies.

01:29:17.420 One of them has sought to focus on money and credit around the principle of stock flow consistency.

01:29:23.400 Its limitation for the analysis of monetary circulation is that the principle is usually presented as a system for the whole economy

01:29:30.560 that becomes too complex to be entirely tractable as soon as one breaks it down into transactions.

01:29:36.740 The other school of thought is the French-Italian-Canadian group of economists,

01:29:40.680 I was kind of surprised to see Canadian in there,

01:29:42.940 who have sought to reconcile the monetary theories of Marx and Keynes by examining stylized, quote, circuits of money.

01:29:50.080 So that's really what he's talking about here, the circuit of money, the idea that it's always got to keep going.

01:29:54.980 He gives one interesting example that I wonder if you're going to love it or hate it.

01:30:03.120 The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, okay, so this was the big fiscal stimulus that took place after the financial crisis.

01:30:13.040 And so her question was, okay, but how much is this really helping the people that directly need the help?

01:30:18.560 And so, in order to answer that question, even though she's a post-Keynesian type person,

01:30:24.220 she did not go to Keynes.

01:30:25.980 She instead went to Koleski.

01:30:28.240 And let me tell you why.

01:30:30.160 Koleski, having grown up in Poland, knew Marx fairly well, and he approached things

01:30:37.640 from a Marxist perspective.

01:30:39.300 Not in the sense that those of you who have also taken contending perspectives that he

01:30:42.880 believed in the collapse of capitalism and so forth, but that the way he tried to understand

01:30:48.540 And the economic system was not by types of spending, all right?

01:30:52.980 Now, Keynes is doing types of spending.

01:30:54.920 There's investment spending.

01:30:56.060 There's consumption.

01:30:56.860 There's government spending.

01:30:58.900 So, Kolesky doesn't focus on kinds of spending.

01:31:02.360 He focuses on groups of people, workers, capitalists, and the government, all right?

01:31:07.220 So, you can see where somebody trained from a Marxist perspective would think more along the lines of different classes of people.

01:31:13.500 All right, so I'm just going to read this long part here.

01:31:16.800 It says,

01:31:16.980 after the war working at the international labor organization collect kaletsky returned to the

01:31:22.500 question of full employment and an op in an open economy that was his goal how can we achieve full

01:31:28.580 employment in a relatively open market system um and so all of his work was in the interest of that

01:31:37.780 in his writings uh particularly during the war kaletsky made the point that with the

01:31:44.340 discovery of these ideas of effective demand, the work of himself, of course, but perhaps

01:31:50.920 more particularly that of Keynes, he used a rather optimistic phrase that everyone now

01:31:57.660 agrees that unemployment can be solved, in effect, by budget deficits and demand management.

01:32:06.720 and then it's not a precise quote but that's the the idea what he did then go on to say

01:32:14.960 was that even though the technical solution is now known that is run budget deficits that

01:32:23.280 doesn't mean to say it's going to be accepted and there will be many forces particularly from

01:32:28.720 financial markets and others which will resist the use of budget deficits in order to reach full

01:32:35.840 employment um he says multilateralism and full employment starts by pointing out that the new

01:32:42.400 international monetary fund the international bank of reconstruction and the development and the uh

01:32:48.880 the international bank for reconstruction development and the u.s loan to the uk aim

01:32:53.760 at establishing a working system of multilateral international trade the principle of multilateralism

01:32:59.920 requires that each country should be guided in its purchases in other countries by the price and

01:33:04.640 quality of goods without taking into consideration whether the supplying countries are or are not

01:33:09.840 buyers of the produce of the country in question um and he gives an example of how this can all

01:33:17.280 work out here because he's talking about like what money is why is the circulation of money

01:33:23.360 matter and how can the circulation of money actually act as value in itself without really

01:33:30.800 creating anything so he goes here um this is the illustrative example he's used his entire

01:33:36.320 career says in an impoverished jewish shuttle in eastern poland um whose residents were mired in

01:33:42.880 debt and living on credit a wealthy and pious jew arrived one day and checked into the local local

01:33:48.320 inn taking care to pay his hotel bill in advance um i'm not sure how essential the jewish part of

01:33:55.440 this story is i don't know if it's being satirical or if you thought it's important that this be

01:34:00.880 jewish anyway this is very talmudically coded so guy comes to town pays his hotel bill in advance

01:34:10.740 on friday to avoid breaking the sabbath injunction carrying a bank against carrying money he handed

01:34:16.180 over the innkeeper for safekeeping a hundred dollar note early on sunday the wealthy and

01:34:21.800 highest Jew left the inn before the innkeeper had a chance to return the bank note. So it's just

01:34:26.920 free money, right? Oh, he gave me $100 and I just have $100 now extra. After a few days, the innkeeper

01:34:33.660 decided that the wealthy Jew was not going to return. So he took the $100 note and used it to

01:34:38.180 clear his debt with the local butcher. The butcher was delighted and gave the note for safekeeping to

01:34:43.060 his wife. She used it to clear the debts with the local seamstress who made addresses for her.

01:34:47.600 the seamstress was delighted and took the money to repay her rent arrears with her landlord the

01:34:52.400 landlord was pleased to get his rent at last and gave the money to pay his mistress who'd been

01:34:57.420 giving him her favors without anything in return for too long the mistress was relieved because

01:35:02.780 now she'd use the note to clear her debt at the local inn where she occasionally rented rooms so

01:35:08.220 it was this bank who finally returned to the innkeeper although no new trade or production

01:35:14.920 had occurred, nor any

01:35:17.040 income had been created. The debts

01:35:19.160 in the shadow had been cleared,

01:35:21.020 and everyone looked forward to the future with

01:35:22.940 renewed optimism. A couple

01:35:24.880 weeks later, the wealthy and pious Jew returned

01:35:27.020 to the inn, and the innkeeper was able to return

01:35:29.180 the $100 note. To his amazement

01:35:31.200 and dismay, the wealthy Jew took the

01:35:33.080 note, set it afire, and

01:35:35.060 the paraffin lamp that was on the table... I mean, this

01:35:37.060 is just where it gets into science fiction.

01:35:39.880 The idea of that...

01:35:41.060 I mean, what are we

01:35:43.100 talking about here come on come on um on seeing the innkeepers just made the wealthy jew laughed

01:35:50.120 and told them that the banknote was forged anyway so that illustrates you know it's in a very fable

01:35:58.460 like way but it's like okay a hundred dollars just showed up and let's say that's credit that

01:36:04.680 represents us just creating money out of thin air which is what it was here's how it circulates to

01:36:10.600 the community that's so indebted to itself but it cleared all that debt and by the time it returns

01:36:16.500 you might as well just destroyed well technically the debt is cleared so that's one illustration of

01:36:22.940 the circuit theory of money how the it's like the transaction itself has a life of its own

01:36:28.920 and nothing was created nothing was produced nothing was really done to alleviate this

01:36:36.120 community which now with a new vitality and i like where he says that it can feel better about

01:36:42.480 the future that's essentially what the government does now in a very very reduced scale which is

01:36:48.480 we're going to start controlling spigots over things not just over industries to produce them

01:36:54.160 but on a large enough scale i know what you're going to say this would create some type of

01:37:00.340 inflation is that where you're going with this i mean inflation is if inflation is the first order

01:37:04.940 thing but worse than inflation as again it's first of all it's a just so story right because

01:37:12.620 he specifically says nothing was produced no service was rendered no profit was recorded like

01:37:17.660 yeah why though why why didn't you include the baker and the and the candlestick maker and and

01:37:22.960 everybody else in the town there's a reason i think he didn't include that but the other part

01:37:26.300 of it is is um malinvestment like if you add enough of this in and then well what are what are

01:37:32.920 the um like i guess what okay how many of those were debt you were paying off debt paying off

01:37:38.740 debt to people the debt pre-existed so you're just covering expenses that you incurred prior

01:37:42.640 to getting the money if they use the money to to change their decision making then you get

01:37:49.100 malinvestment for example if the hundred dollars went to the baker and the baker says i have enough

01:37:52.620 money now to hire somebody else and so he hires somebody else like okay well that person that

01:37:57.260 works for you could have worked for somebody else you've just now changed the course of the

01:38:00.660 whole economy the moment you add any bit of complexity right you've changed it you've changed

01:38:05.360 it in an you've altered the course to something that wouldn't have organically happened otherwise

01:38:09.860 and if you don't keep your finger on that scale then that's going to have to revert back to the

01:38:15.080 actual path it would have taken and somebody's going to lose their fucking job and so and that's

01:38:19.520 your fault and in the case of a hundred bucks maybe just one guy loses his job but in the case

01:38:23.180 of 50 billion dollars uh you're going to have millions of people lose their jobs you're going

01:38:27.940 to have hundreds of thousands of suicides and deaths of despair and that's exactly what's been

01:38:31.880 happening since 2020 so i think it i think if it were to work it could only work on a micro scale

01:38:38.240 like i'm trying to try to figure out how to apply this to a problem like let's say it's school debt

01:38:44.540 all right so you got people students carrying debt because they you know consumed a service

01:38:52.580 let's let's say it consumed because a lot of people don't even get anything out of it it's

01:38:56.480 just that you paid for a piece of paper that's really what you did okay so what can the government

01:39:01.600 do could it forgive all the student loans it could but that would incentivize that would

01:39:08.820 introduce a lot of incentivizations that you probably don't want to have one it's that hey

01:39:14.000 we can churn out whoever the fuck we want and the government's going to pay us we can we we can just

01:39:19.180 take in as many students as we want yes release them in the world and create dummies and we're

01:39:23.880 going to recoup our investment so you've incentivized the destruction of academia

01:39:27.820 thanks the only way to do it would be if you were to release money in the interest of clearing a

01:39:34.600 debt it would need to be through the industry it's like we're going to who who are the most

01:39:40.140 unemployed students in in something and forget like hope ben shapiro say like under underwater

01:39:46.900 ballet shakespeare whatever the fuck but let's say there's a lot of people who are out of work

01:39:52.400 because they got into windmill tech.

01:39:54.720 Programmers.

01:39:55.440 Yeah, programmers, right?

01:39:56.820 So the government would say,

01:39:57.800 okay, well, we would open the spigots

01:40:00.620 over programming firms,

01:40:03.400 whatever you want to call them,

01:40:04.560 that they can hire more people for more wage,

01:40:08.040 thereby, and this is taking on faith,

01:40:10.900 that they would repay their student loans

01:40:12.820 instead of spending it frivolously.

01:40:14.220 That would be, you would need to go

01:40:15.980 so many steps removed from that.

01:40:18.900 that that i appreciate what you're doing that is a bad idea and here's why it's a bad idea

01:40:25.000 if you have way you have a glut of programmers and programmers don't have jobs because nobody's

01:40:30.320 paying enough for programming the reason nobody's paying for programming is because there isn't that

01:40:34.560 much programming to be done because this would incentivize more programmers you know what we

01:40:39.620 have this is the real example this is happening right now because of ai programmers are gradually

01:40:44.240 we're losing their jobs what we actually need for example in canada is home builders now

01:40:48.580 the government carny could today say look these programmers have spent a lot of money on their

01:40:53.500 education and none of them can find work we need to pour money into software so these software

01:40:57.600 companies can hire more programmers first of all they won't hire more programmers they'll take

01:41:02.220 stock buybacks now but let's assume they do hire more programmers okay they hire more programmers

01:41:06.660 we're already being more charitable we're being very charitable if they hire more programmers

01:41:11.580 you've tilted the market to once again favor people who are not providing what the economy

01:41:17.860 wants the economy our fucking economy wants houses we want affordable milk and eggs our

01:41:25.040 economy as canadians we don't want fucking apps so you've just taken our money you've inflated

01:41:30.820 everybody's savings in order to pay more to programmers who frankly made a bad decision

01:41:36.540 going to that fucking school rather than pouring the money into the or rather not pouring it this

01:41:42.140 is the the weird the weird duality of of taxing or or rent or money printing right is that if you

01:41:49.080 don't print the money everybody's richer which allows the companies that actually need to hire

01:41:54.540 people in their industry to get more people for the same dollar value so you'd actually have over

01:41:59.760 a long over a certain time frame you'd have more people going into construction than you or more

01:42:04.740 people going into farming more people going into actual trades that are necessary than you have

01:42:09.720 going into programming so is it is it effective is it effective if you measure the wages of

01:42:16.140 programmers of course it is but that's a just so story that's not what we actually want when you're

01:42:20.960 talking about economics you're talking about the whole economy and i want to just one analogy i

01:42:23.960 was thinking of with because he's talking about this hundred forged dollars that a jew leaves at

01:42:28.620 the hotel and it goes in a circle and no profit or service or product is is rendered or created

01:42:33.380 okay this is essentially if if uh if a nigger drives by a theater closes his eyes and eyes

01:42:41.380 and fires 10 shots into the theater with it through through painted doors you can't even

01:42:45.620 see who's in there and in this story none of the bullets hit anyone but it calls for the door to

01:42:52.840 be repaired and so the point is it's just so it's the nigger theory it's the nigger theory of

01:42:59.040 economics what if it had to hit someone or what if it had to just hit somebody's foot but they

01:43:03.300 didn't die that's still okay right no the point is you can't use one of these just so stories

01:43:08.020 to make an argument about economics generally because a hundred forged dollars and when we

01:43:14.140 say forged we're talking about you know what what forged money is it's the fucking inflationary

01:43:18.640 money printing from the fed right it's not real fucking money though that money is not actually

01:43:24.680 going in a circle and not hurting anybody it is actually driving changes in business and hiring

01:43:29.800 constantly and also i think the end of that story it might be written as a joke saying he burns it

01:43:37.300 because it doesn't matter but i think that would be an essential part which would be this is where

01:43:42.440 you get into the george bataille uh accursed chair theory that any any surplus must be destroyed

01:43:50.380 otherwise but but but i'm like but that's not what happened you're saying it's going to end

01:43:56.840 up so it's not going to cycle back to originally and then they burn it ceremoniously look i'm not

01:44:02.520 the economics guy i know people think i'm dumb about this but to me this is what this is like

01:44:07.300 the keynesian credit cycle this is what we already are doing right they print money into the system

01:44:11.600 with the intention of it going in a couple of loops and then when everything's okay we can just

01:44:16.580 take the money back out again we can just burn the money which they and sometimes they do like

01:44:20.480 there have been periods recently where a certain amount of that money was quote unquote burnt which

01:44:25.200 is to say that it's pulled back out of the out of the money supply but it now it's a ratchet it's

01:44:31.240 always 10 steps forward and two steps back there's no time in history where they've backed it all the

01:44:36.600 way up to the starting position the only way it backs up to the starting position is the whole

01:44:40.200 thing fucking blowing up i'm just gonna i know we gotta get going soon so there's i kind of

01:44:46.060 explained the circuit theory of money that he's getting at but there's some uh other things that

01:44:51.020 he establishes in this book that I want to get to.

01:44:54.140 I think the Gillespie tradition is still unique

01:44:57.580 in the way it puts all of this together,

01:44:59.920 the following chain of causality.

01:45:03.460 It starts with a micro-foundation,

01:45:06.080 which is a theory of oligopolistic markup pricing.

01:45:10.540 That in turn determines the distribution of income,

01:45:14.060 of the functional distribution between wages and profits.

01:45:17.100 That, in turn, affects the elements of aggregate demand, consumption, investment, and net exports in open economy models, which in turn affects macroeconomic outcomes, such as the utilization rate, employment, growth.

01:45:34.900 And then there are feedbacks of all kinds to productivity growth, for example, and back to the ability of firms to set markups at the income distribution.

01:45:46.600 So it's not really a one-way chain of causality, but it's a dynamic, evolving process.

01:45:52.620 Let's start with a quote here.

01:45:53.940 It says, many economists assume, at least in their abstract theories, a state of business

01:45:59.040 democracy where anybody endowed with entrepreneurial ability can obtain capital for starting a

01:46:04.720 business venture.

01:46:05.600 This picture of the activities of the quote-unquote pure entrepreneur is, to put it mildly, unrealistic.

01:46:11.600 The most important prerequisite for becoming an entrepreneur is the ownership of capital.

01:46:17.520 Capital, it should be noted here, refers to the monetary resources spent in the course of production and investment,

01:46:22.660 monetary resources that then return as profits, income to capitalists.

01:46:26.720 Therefore, the starting point for Kalecki's monetary theory is not the abstract properties or functions of money

01:46:33.060 or the suppliers of that money, whether bankers or the state,

01:46:36.480 but the possession of money by capitalists or firms.

01:46:39.580 The financial system of a capitalist economy is a comprehensive credit cooperative of capitalists for those capitalists with monetary reserves.

01:46:47.900 I thought that was an interesting starting point.

01:46:50.320 It gets that early on.

01:46:51.600 This is sort of the mythology of, you know, the American economy, American for sure, but also in Canada, is of the lone entrepreneurs starting a business.

01:47:00.960 But he says that rarely works out.

01:47:03.300 It seems that the more you to succeed in the economy, you basically need to be a firm.

01:47:09.100 you need to be a collective of some kind that attracts capital and it seems that the business

01:47:14.140 cycles are controlled by these accumulations of capital it's not so easy as just being a guy

01:47:20.460 starting a business because capital almost doesn't want to release itself to those people

01:47:26.140 so you need to be so it's not even like the suppliers of money or the receivers of money

01:47:31.100 it's it's these firms and that seems to have been the case early 20th century and i would argue now

01:47:36.300 too it's a small club and you're not in it right and this is what we complain about

01:47:39.820 quite often that myth of the entrepreneur may have existed at one point but today you either

01:47:45.420 are if people invest in you because you already have capital you already own something you already

01:47:50.460 have money or at the very least you have connections like uh uh dried what is his name

01:47:56.060 dried and brown dried and brown little dried and brown uh where did he come from well he went to

01:48:03.420 to nyu and he's got a rich dad and he's well connected now his stupid fucking praxis bullshit

01:48:08.840 may not have had a bunch of money in it to begin with but he had a bunch of connections and there's

01:48:13.060 a reasonable expectation that what goes around comes around in this little closed circuit so

01:48:17.520 yeah for him he can get money but you or i try to go out and get money for not for some dumb

01:48:22.300 bullshit for some pie in the sky fucking reddit scheme but for an actual profitable brick and

01:48:28.920 mortar business nothing not 500 fucking dollars for us why because what do we have i got a fucking

01:48:35.820 used civic what do you got but none neither one of us have a dad who's an nyu alumni and has

01:48:42.660 friends at the mayor's office that capital makes capital magnetized to you even easier and that's

01:48:49.140 he's like you know and it makes sense when you frame it like that which is that you know your

01:48:53.800 entrepreneurial drive is maximized just by the capital itself so you're either trying to beg

01:48:59.360 for it from a bank and they probably won't give it to you never or it's from a private investment

01:49:03.380 of some kind but yeah yeah then they are pretty much the entrepreneurial force in that in that

01:49:08.500 exchange he goes on he says interest rates do not determine the business cycle but are endogenous

01:49:14.640 to the cycle implicitly the size of the firms is not determined by the scale of production

01:49:19.840 but by the scale of their financial resources the credit system therefore reinforces a business

01:49:25.600 hierarchy from large corporations that can access credit most easily to small and medium-sized

01:49:32.080 enterprises that have the greatest difficulty in accessing credit because they have the least

01:49:36.780 money capital to put up as security and you know you hear it like that that seems to be a lot of

01:49:43.820 people's lived experience especially if you've been an entrepreneur before and i know a lot of

01:49:48.760 people know this you've started your own business so you know that's just a flaw and i don't know

01:49:52.480 how he's rationalizing that but to me that's just a flaw in the way that we do banking in our

01:49:56.300 society because like i get it that the amount of credit that should be available to you available

01:50:00.900 to you should be proportional to what you have to put up but i mean it seems like you'll get a

01:50:07.800 proportion based on what you have to put up but your your rates will scale and your protections

01:50:12.180 will scale as you get bigger and then for people who are literally on the bottom like even if i

01:50:16.680 wanted to put up a thousand dollars for security to get a two thousand dollar loan that's that's

01:50:20.740 not even a thing you can't get that and even if you got it it'd be at 25 interest so like yeah

01:50:26.120 the whole thing is is structured against people at the bottom rising yeah when i read him i don't

01:50:31.940 even think he's endorsing it he's more just saying here's how it is but his goal is to achieve total

01:50:39.020 employment so he's got a utopian vision as some economists do i don't know if keens did but he

01:50:45.540 might have i didn't read too much of keen's but i know the goal of a lot of these economists is

01:50:50.560 how can we move towards a society where there is no unemployment where money makes sense and

01:50:56.540 ultimately what they would love is a predictive theory of money how can we create a science that

01:51:04.000 can explain the economy in perfectly rational scientific ways that's that's their goal and i

01:51:10.540 don't you know you laugh and i i laugh too but you know i and i don't think ai can solve it i don't

01:51:18.700 think because it's it's not i don't know it's it's not a function of the natural world you're

01:51:25.660 trying to create a simulation of the universe inside the universe like you don't have the

01:51:29.080 processing power for that you don't even understand a fraction of the variables so it's not and it's

01:51:33.920 never going to happen he goes on here says koletsky's theory of profits provides the crucial

01:51:38.960 factor left undefined in the theories of Wixell and Keynes. Both Wixell and Keynes placed the

01:51:44.540 rate of interest in a key position in determining the level of investment, and then proceeded to

01:51:49.340 explain why this determination may prove to be ineffective. In Wixell's case, the falling natural

01:51:54.500 rate of interest. In Keynes's case, animal spirits and uncertainty. With his theory of profits,

01:52:00.100 Kolecki defined actual profits as the main factor determining investment in the business cycle,

01:52:05.060 and found that the rate of interest had only a weak and decreasing influence on investment,

01:52:11.700 which is an interesting, not to say that there's no influence,

01:52:14.720 but the interest rate isn't really the defining characteristic of what drives these firms to invest.

01:52:22.580 Yep, yep.

01:52:23.140 But his theory of profits accumulated as bank deposits also explained how investment was, in fact, self-financing.

01:52:29.940 In this respect, Kalecki was in agreement with Keynes, where Kalecki differed from Keynes,

01:52:35.060 was in seeing the distribution of profit around the economy as the mechanism by which money spent

01:52:40.580 on investment or capitalist consumption returns to be saved by those capitalists. A more elegant

01:52:46.200 reflux than Keynes' elaborate revolving fund of credit for financing investment. And this sort of

01:52:53.060 ties it all together. It says there are certain fundamental principles that run through the

01:52:57.180 fragments on money and monetary circulation by Kleski's work. The first and most important of

01:53:02.800 these principles is his assertion that capitalist money is the money of capitalists. This money is

01:53:09.160 thrown into circulation when capitalists undertake production and investment. The idea that, in a

01:53:14.820 capitalist economy, money is capitalist money is therefore inherent to the nature of the dominant

01:53:19.660 class under capitalism. The ownership of money is what defines capitalists. This assertion is

01:53:26.260 perhaps the most obvious in Kleski's famous definition of a capitalist. Quote, many economists

01:53:32.560 to assume, at least in their abstract theories, a state of business democracy where anyone is

01:53:37.240 endowed with entrepreneurial ability. This is what I opened with. This is the quote returning.

01:53:43.380 His famous working assumption that workers do not save or, in Joe Robertson's phrase,

01:53:49.000 workers spend what they get and the capitalists get what they spend,

01:53:52.420 amounts to a view that workers are monetarily passive. It is capitalists who, at any one time,

01:53:57.860 can activate the money in ways other than just by buying consumption goods with wage and salary

01:54:03.980 differentiation the velocity and circulation of money rises as incomes rise so i think that's

01:54:10.500 probably the best way to summarize it and it doesn't sound like you disagree with no most of

01:54:15.320 this it's a lot of it's just an observation and and as long as he's not making a value judgment i

01:54:19.460 agree with that yeah he goes on here and this is where he gets more into his you know social ideas

01:54:25.040 he says relying on private investment to achieve full employment was in kolesky's view a fundamental

01:54:31.120 error the proper role of private investment is to provide tools for consumption goods and not

01:54:36.640 to provide enough work to employ all available labor both public and private investment should

01:54:42.560 be carried out only to the extent to which they are considered useful if the effective demand

01:54:47.760 thus generated fails to provide full employment the gap should be filled by increasing consumption

01:54:53.360 and not by piling up unwanted public or private capital equipment the third way of achieving

01:54:59.120 full employment was by redistributing income to achieve higher consumption by taxing higher

01:55:04.560 incomes and subsidizing with welfare payments those on the lower incomes so to me when i read

01:55:11.200 this it sounds more like like the american economy that is the economy we have right now

01:55:18.400 is sort of this mix of investment and saying that look to keep the money flowing we should subsidize

01:55:24.720 the lower incomes to keep them like it just sounds like this is what came to pass to explain this

01:55:30.000 economy that we have now because at that point it didn't exist or you know it didn't exist in this

01:55:36.880 form i don't know how many people would have read this and taken seriously but he was one of many

01:55:42.480 economists at the time who was thinking this way where it's like okay we're going to redistribute

01:55:47.440 a little bit then there's going to be private investment but we need to achieve employment

01:55:51.360 with these different strata of society whereas in the soviet union they just said we'll just

01:55:56.960 have full employment by giving them full employment and we'll decide what they need to produce

01:56:01.920 and that and that it's undeniable that that was the competition the america's sort of mixed economy

01:56:10.640 versus the Soviet economy,

01:56:12.800 which over the decades became more mixed

01:56:16.460 and introduced more capitalist entities within it,

01:56:22.420 as we discussed in building the room.

01:56:23.740 They were saved by unemployment.

01:56:25.420 The ability to allow unemployment

01:56:26.940 is what actually let their economy work for once.

01:56:29.880 Yeah, and right near the end,

01:56:32.880 and the fall of the Berlin Wall,

01:56:35.500 the Soviet economy was,

01:56:37.640 it's almost like the fall of the soviet union was just a rebranding of russia that the economy

01:56:45.600 yes the bureaucracy fell apart but it was already in a process of changing it's not like

01:56:50.640 it was consistently running and then there's a hard demarcation and then it became it became

01:56:55.580 chaos and became something sure there was chaos but the reform process within the soviet union

01:57:01.000 was already so far along that it was becoming this mixed technocratic plus socialist plus

01:57:11.000 ostensibly capitalist but not really you know it's it's if you look at both economies they're

01:57:16.740 very very similar they've got a divergence in what industries they open spigots over but it's

01:57:24.280 the same sort of spigots it's the same pretty much the same type of government and the same

01:57:29.420 sort of like technocrats and billionaires involved so yeah anyway the the thing he was

01:57:35.660 just describing the economic entity it's not idealized it's not because you can accuse keens

01:57:43.740 and you can accuse even marx of having idealized more humanistic understandings of what the economy

01:57:50.860 is just based on the free-floating metaphysical concept of the surplus and then two people doing

01:57:57.260 a transaction but i i sense a cold pragmatism in this even with his story about the jewish

01:58:06.300 shuttle he's trying to say here's how here's how weird and fucked up and how this doesn't make

01:58:11.820 sense but it's all in the interest of what if we could get everyone a job but how do we figure

01:58:17.020 what type of job they could have well here's how you know um because he's still making space for

01:58:23.340 market price discovery it seems rather than a central committee saying it should be lower i'll

01:58:30.940 tell you what the price of wood is let this nerd tell you what iron should be you know i mean see

01:58:38.220 how that worked out um so yeah i guess we can probably end it there it's not the longest book

01:58:43.740 in the world it's under 200 pages um i'll just end on this point it's interesting he says following

01:58:50.380 the financial crisis central banks were forced to resume responsibility for the liquidity

01:58:55.580 of the financial system this meant a revival of open market operations but for all their success

01:59:01.420 in renewing liquidity in banking and capital markets these extraordinary measures of central

01:59:07.100 banks have failed to revive economies but after a decade of making the markets liquid enough

01:59:13.020 through repeated buying of long-term securities it's clear that something else was wrong

01:59:18.300 And that something else lies in corporate finance and the reluctance of business to undertake investments.

01:59:23.600 As Keynes and Kalecki noted in the 1930s, capitalism is suffering a crisis of underinvestment that central banks cannot repair.

01:59:31.540 Oh, my God.

01:59:32.520 What do you think of that?

01:59:33.140 That's such a beautiful paragraph.

01:59:35.080 Following the financial crisis.

01:59:36.860 So open market.

01:59:38.440 Open market is where the central bank is allowed to go and actually just buy fucking equities, buy commodities, buy whatever the fuck they need,

01:59:45.640 whatever they think they need to do in order to juice the economy and get things flowing again

01:59:50.200 they do that and it's weird because even though the soviets tried it and it didn't work when we

01:59:55.100 tried it doesn't work either the economy doesn't actually grow it bubbles up for a second and then

01:59:59.580 it stops again and now we appear to have a new problem and the new problem happens to be that

02:00:05.400 private businesses don't seem to want to undertake investments the same way that they did before we

02:00:12.020 started the open market operations you know why idiot because before the open market operations

02:00:16.880 the only way that you could make more money was by investing and select not just investing i should

02:00:23.540 be very careful not just investing but being intelligent and competing to only select and

02:00:29.960 invest in the very best option and the winner makes the money now when you have open market

02:00:35.180 operations all you have to do is suck dick at the fed and you get a million dollars why on earth

02:00:40.280 would anybody invest in anything why would you give a loan to a small business person when all

02:00:44.580 you got to do is fill out a fucking form to get money from the federal reserve like of course

02:00:49.680 of course they're not going to invest in businesses they're not going to invest in businesses

02:00:53.540 ever again until you close the spigot yeah and you know what i i understand what you're saying

02:00:59.700 too and this is uh congruent with something i was thinking of earlier because like i said i was

02:01:05.760 reading this book called why the west can't win and one of the statistics they cite i won't go too

02:01:11.600 deep into this because that's going to be a fun book to review but it was about how many stem

02:01:18.000 graduates china produces and by stem we mean science technology engineering and mathematics

02:01:23.460 so they produce i'm thinking of the graph in my head i don't know what the numbers are but it's

02:01:29.540 like five times the amount of stem graduates than america does like something crazy right

02:01:35.900 and they all live in little holes yeah yeah and they're saying like that's why you know they're

02:01:39.700 going to win because they their government has said we need more stem and they they churned more

02:01:44.300 out from the assembly line but if you've ever dealt with these countries you understand that

02:01:48.520 their their understanding of what stem is is not the same as ours right and so but but that was

02:01:56.800 like a central planning-esque solution to it which is that you know we want to beat america so get

02:02:03.040 get more get more and so they just started lying on tests and cheating as an epidemic and the types

02:02:08.800 of tests they run don't encourage any sort of creativity it's just rote memorization so even

02:02:15.580 the quality of the stem graduates is low but i keep returning to this idea of why do we need

02:02:24.560 total employment um and that's a utopian goal everyone should be employed but i would say

02:02:30.160 but but why maybe some people should be unemployed and and that's just a matter of course like you

02:02:38.400 said like there's too many programmers and we can try and play with the spigots and hope hope against

02:02:45.900 hope that the market responds to that by just letting them coast into the sunset instead of

02:02:52.120 causing all these reciprocating effects like where the academia says oh keep churning out

02:02:56.820 programmers because employment's so high right so like we we can we can keep playing with that or

02:03:03.240 we can kind of let the programming market crash which it seems like it's going to do in the next

02:03:08.380 five to ten years anyway i had this is this analogy in the chamber and i didn't want to fire it because

02:03:14.900 it was too autistic but i'll go for it in a in a mechanical system if you have a gearbox right

02:03:20.500 you want your gears to mesh as closely as possible you want the time when one gear starts moving

02:03:26.620 which is one job and then when it hits and the next gear starts moving which is when that person

02:03:31.560 moves to another job uh you want that time to be as little as possible and we call that backlash

02:03:36.620 or hysteresis in engineering where you have the time that it takes for one to hit the other when

02:03:41.420 you have a lot of backlash that's a lot of unemployment it causes trouble because you

02:03:45.300 have grinding and you have friction and you have noise and you have a higher maintenance schedule

02:03:49.740 it's bad however if you have zero backlash because it's possible to make a system with

02:03:54.560 virtually zero backlash if you spend all your time and money on that you have something that

02:03:59.120 doesn't even fucking start because the backlash itself the ability to have a tiny just a very

02:04:05.100 small gap uh we could say there's a peak in there in that graph somewhere there's not zero not five

02:04:11.520 percent but like two percent there's a percentage where there's just enough gap that the thing can

02:04:16.520 move but not so much gap that it causes a problem you have to have backlash you have to have some

02:04:22.600 you've got to have some and and with unemployment what you're saying is a person loses their job

02:04:29.040 and they start looking for a job if they find a job within one hour that's still unemployment

02:04:35.560 because they were without an you know what i mean how are you measuring this actually and if they

02:04:39.660 even if they find a job within an hour how good is that job actually how can you actually find a

02:04:45.060 relevant job within an hour are you telling me that the absolute ideal perfect job for that

02:04:50.500 that one specific guy happened just happened to exist at that moment give me a fucking break

02:04:56.740 that's utopian yeah it's utopian and that's close to what the government's trying to do

02:05:03.400 in the sense that they will try and reduce the number of unemployment and that should be their

02:05:09.340 job i just think every strategy they've deployed has been the wrong strategy so when you talk about

02:05:16.080 like what's the government doing to limit unemployment well they seem to be creating

02:05:19.220 bullshit jobs a lot of people will remark that our society is full of bullshit jobs email jobs

02:05:24.920 that don't matter um you know consulting positions that don't matter but you can say on the surface

02:05:31.080 that unemployment is down but nothing's being produced nothing really matters it is true

02:05:36.160 that money is circulating in this service economy yeah it's just the services are so

02:05:42.760 kind of twisted and abstracted and decoupled from anything that matters you know there's the rare

02:05:49.440 cases where you know you could have someone who like works two hours a day from home and they're

02:05:54.680 making six figures you know like weird shit yeah um or even the fact that in canada about half of

02:06:01.300 our economy is government right so it's people that are getting paid but they're not getting

02:06:05.400 paid by the market nobody nobody decided to pay them instead of someone else they're paid at the

02:06:10.020 point of a gun right if you don't pay them you go to prison for tax evasion and that's half of our

02:06:15.800 economy and the thing is how are we ascending out of that you know at some you would think that okay

02:06:22.100 that's how we keep us in stasis and at some point the economy will fix itself well it's not it just

02:06:27.720 stays in that state stays in that sort of bureaucratic nightmare where okay half the people

02:06:33.400 are kept in service of the government for the sake of the government nothing's being innovated

02:06:39.260 nothing's being created and they just get paid and pay taxes back it's there's a circuit here

02:06:44.180 this is very much what the canadian economy is the circuit exists money is being transferred

02:06:50.060 but nothing is being produced at that scale yeah and it's important because that original example

02:06:56.860 with the with the shtetl that you brought up at the beginning mentions that nothing is produced

02:07:01.800 or created right it's all just clearing existing debt but what happens when people want to eat when

02:07:07.120 they want to build houses when they need gas in their car right those things actually have to be

02:07:11.320 produced yeah and there's so few options for private investment here in canada not even just

02:07:19.420 compared to america but compared to other countries of canada's population it seems that

02:07:24.740 your only recourse if you want investment is to go to the big banks or to go to the government

02:07:30.880 um but there is no like mechanism for to get to get money for entrepreneurship any other way in

02:07:38.900 canada right like what are your options there's there's like a couple billionaires millionaires

02:07:43.000 but they're not very free with their money yeah basically that's it so in the mixed model that

02:07:49.480 kaleski was talking about which is that okay it can't be the central bank just releasing money

02:07:54.240 because like you said it bubbles up for a while but that doesn't that doesn't help long term and

02:07:59.340 it seems that private firms the ones who own the capital are not forthcoming with their capital

02:08:06.060 well then what right because he was saying well the government's got to fill in the gaps well it

02:08:11.000 is and this is what we got and it doesn't seem to be progressing in any way yeah so all i was

02:08:18.500 saying was that and it sounds darwinian i'm sure because i think okay let's say that all the

02:08:26.560 programmers are made unemployed because of ai which realistically will happen especially for

02:08:31.460 the type of programming that they were employed which was bullshit programming making right and

02:08:35.600 apps and games and stuff the government should say okay what are we going to do with you

02:08:39.400 because the government needs to figure out what to do with these unemployed people because if they

02:08:43.840 don't they're going to start cutting off the heads of politicians that's where that comes in

02:08:48.280 where it comes in is if you even in china where like what's the gender imbalance there there's like 1.00

02:08:55.820 Five men to every one woman like you have a civilizational glut of

02:09:02.240 Psychopathic incels that might be only kept in check by their genetic predisposition of being bug men, right?

02:09:09.580 Yeah, but if you got a bunch of white madmen doing that like people start dying things start blowing up

02:09:15.560 You get what we were talking about earlier, which is if not a civil war than something by a different name

02:09:23.940 You know people people getting shot and we think it's funny and we just fuck when I was in high school

02:09:29.520 We used to trade gore videos because we were trying to like desensitize each other now

02:09:34.560 That's something your mom does with fucking Ukraine videos 0.97

02:09:37.800 Like we're out of our fucking minds right now, and I think that's why I'm seeing articles

02:09:43.600 Released by mainstream

02:09:45.880 Press and by the government saying that everyone's extremism is on the rise

02:09:50.580 uh-huh you can tell they're nervous does anyone knows how nervous the government is i bet the

02:09:57.460 government's more nervous now than it's ever been yeah in history just by the tone of what they're

02:10:02.680 doing right now so um here's the economic dimension of that i'm sorry guys we spent so

02:10:08.940 long explaining how economically we're fucked but it's i think i think there is a there has to be a

02:10:15.760 way out of this but i think this makes the strong case that it can't be centralized planning um and

02:10:23.740 that the the and i'm guilty of this like the the dream of individual entrepreneurship within the

02:10:31.840 system is still subject simply to the capital owners and that it's very difficult for most

02:10:39.560 people to barge into that system unless they gain the favor of a capital owner it's not just

02:10:44.780 something you can whip up yourself it seems at a certain point you need the capital firms to allow

02:10:51.880 you into that and then you become subject to them that's what he's basically saying so anyway um i'll

02:10:57.320 let you go we've been going on for a while thank you so any closing thoughts or no good one man

02:11:01.980 we're doing that you let me shout about economics so i'm thrilled it's a good one we're gonna have

02:11:06.300 some more coming up too so i'll talk to you soon yeah man all right bye

02:11:10.720 all right good evening everybody i'm thrilled and pleased as punch to be here a lot of people

02:11:33.540 are excited for this interview by the way i'm here with josh neal now i got some history with

02:11:40.520 Josh Neal. I've actually spoken to Josh Neal before. I've been following his work for quite

02:11:45.160 some time. Big fan of all of his books, which we'll get to in just a second. In fact, let me

02:11:50.760 just pull that up right here while I got it here. This is his Substack, Psychopolitics. Here's a

02:11:58.400 selection of the books that we'll be discussing, Intolerant Interpretations, Understanding

02:12:03.300 Conspiracy Theories, and American Extremists. But because I know so much about Josh Neal,

02:12:07.600 i i'm inclined to think that other people do too like oh yeah i'm getting josh on you guys know

02:12:13.080 josh so sometimes i can forget that some people don't know who you are there might not be a lot

02:12:18.500 of neil heads out there but for josh i kneel thank you very much for coming along with us

02:12:26.160 on this journey tonight thank you your reputation precedes you and i i am i am as uh heterosexually

02:12:35.440 gay for you as you are feeling so you know i'm not i'm gonna get dinged for this one because i'm

02:12:41.060 like oh i kneel as if he's in a he's a king this is in a very monarchical fashion it did sound

02:12:47.320 incredibly gay um i i knew at the moment the words left my mouth we're off to a rotten fucking start

02:12:54.860 so we don't have the soundboard here so people are following out along at home with the blood

02:13:00.320 Sally at Soundboard. Play Airhorn 2 right there. This is an interactive show. We got Gio in the

02:13:06.920 comments here. He's saying it's Kino already. What do you think? You're smarter than Gio? I don't

02:13:11.780 think so. So where should we begin? You know, I'm just going to say that my experience with Josh,

02:13:20.320 I was a big fan of a show that you were on with a friend of ours, Tyler Hamilton,

02:13:25.280 by the name of Euro Bureau of Literature,

02:13:27.860 which will rise again one day.

02:13:31.860 I'm going to trick you guys into bringing that back.

02:13:34.820 He was also co-host of the Jefferson Lee Show,

02:13:37.620 beloved show with a beloved figure.

02:13:40.860 And then you had your own show for a minute there.

02:13:44.540 There was Psychopolitics, and then there was another one.

02:13:48.180 It was another politics name, I think, or am I wrong?

02:13:51.080 I was thinking of Theopolitics.

02:13:52.720 That was Tyler Hamilton's.

02:13:53.700 But am I missing anything there, Josh?

02:13:59.040 Well, my first YouTube channel was called No Apologies.

02:14:02.120 That was before I got canceled.

02:14:04.440 I did that concurrently while I was on Heel Turn, if anyone remembers that.

02:14:11.020 I was Richard Spencer's co-host.

02:14:14.720 I did like a quarterly show with Keith Woods and Joel Davis.

02:14:19.220 And I think it was like a rotating panel.

02:14:21.420 i think mike from imperium press was a was one of the guys on that jefferson lee was one of the guys

02:14:26.140 on it was that the boys or is that a different i've been around the block it was the boys yeah

02:14:32.140 there was this one this was all up on uh tyler hamilton's youtube channel which got struck down

02:14:37.900 i don't know if you can find a lot of that anywhere i mean some of them might be on rumble but

02:14:42.540 a good chunk of that might be lost until someone figures out how to re-upload all that stuff which

02:14:48.220 ain't easy i understand tyler's over there in rome right now uh you know studying to be the next pope

02:14:55.600 so we wish him well on that front we're all stuck here in the trenches though trying to figure it

02:15:01.820 out and i think you've done as good a job as i've seen of trying to figure it out in the american

02:15:09.320 context now i'm going to say something you correct me if i'm wrong with three these three books it

02:15:14.360 almost seems like a triptych to me and I don't know what you've got planned for your next book

02:15:18.920 but when I look at this corpus of books it seems that there is a conceptual through line

02:15:25.540 it's seemingly explaining politics in a distinctly American context but you started with an American

02:15:33.720 extremist describing the phenomenon of extremism and you can't really explain the whole story of

02:15:39.680 american extremism without conspiracy theories so then you have conspiracy theories and then you

02:15:44.480 can't really explain that without getting into the psychology of the post-war consensus which

02:15:50.840 is what i believe the third one is about does that sound about right to you

02:15:54.420 yeah more or less um and it wasn't intentional i think i just um kept trying to narrow my focus

02:16:05.000 over time. And yeah, the most recent book is like very nitty gritty on a handful of social

02:16:14.600 scientists who, I mean, I make the case in the book that they are basically, maybe not the most

02:16:21.700 important people, but if there was, they're the S tier list of social theorists whose arguments

02:16:28.520 are basically ubiquitous everywhere.

02:16:32.780 We were talking about Richard Hofstadter

02:16:34.440 a little bit before we went live.

02:16:36.980 And, you know, that's not a name

02:16:38.180 I think probably anyone thinks about anymore,

02:16:42.000 but so much of his body of work,

02:16:45.400 and I'm still working through his back catalog,

02:16:49.060 Hofstadter's arguments

02:16:52.600 basically formed the core of John Stewart liberalism.

02:16:58.520 Like I'm a millennial. I think you're basically the same age as me. Like the liberal world, maybe mix in some other people, but it's very much Richard Hofstadter.

02:17:09.940 Richard Hofstadter wrote about American gun culture, anti-intellectualism as like a conservative

02:17:19.440 tendency. He wrote about famously, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his essay,

02:17:28.220 The Paranoid Style in American Politics, which is like the OG anti-conspiracy polemic.

02:17:35.060 Yeah, I remember you were on an interview recently where you're discussing

02:17:38.180 that word specifically paranoid and i love that because just to interrupt you our on the show

02:17:45.120 we've covered quite a few books from what we call the shit lib canon and i also discussed uh

02:17:51.740 steven pinker's enlightenment now with my buddy prudentialist on our sideshow do you even read

02:17:56.540 but i never really heard of hofstetter and a lot of people when they think of notable

02:18:02.000 shit lit books would be you know francis fukuyama's uh end of history and the last man among others

02:18:09.560 but uh you had pointed out correctly maybe we can get into this now how how integral hofstetter was

02:18:16.060 and specifically um how you described it how do you describe it was him basically admitting the

02:18:24.100 critiques from the right were valid but almost psychoanalyzing them to say they were paranoid

02:18:29.000 and because they're paranoid, they should be dismissed.

02:18:32.180 Is that correct?

02:18:35.660 Yeah, one of the first pages of the essay,

02:18:38.840 and it's like maybe, it's a short essay.

02:18:40.980 I think it's under 30 pages or so.

02:18:44.280 But it says,

02:18:46.760 it created the language of psychoanalysis

02:18:51.940 in the way that an art historian might talk about

02:18:57.360 That's how he was using paranoid.

02:18:59.120 So he's like deliberately saying that he is abusing medical language, effectively, psychiatric language in a polemical way to smear, to disempower, basically what he called pseudoconservatism.

02:19:21.020 And the thing that's funny to me is the really effective Jewish social scientists invariably have a fairly large kernel of truth that they are fastidiously coding with layers and layers of shit.

02:19:43.360 um and and it's true when he talks about pseudo-conservatism um not have been that i mean

02:19:50.820 we're young guys weren't alive and kicking in the 1950s and six have been

02:19:55.520 obvious back then that the emerging strains of conservatism were sort of uh actual

02:20:04.600 and and maybe serve really but if you look at the the the last 20-30 years political culture

02:20:13.080 it's like clearly conservatism has gone off the rails um and in some ways like the MAGA

02:20:21.160 movement is is kind of of the pseudo-conservatism that he was critiquing back in the 1960s

02:20:32.020 but on the other side of it he's using this psychiatric language and and these

02:20:38.100 neologisms that he's coining like pseudo-conservatism, basically to paint a very broad brush with

02:20:47.960 which to damage, and I don't even want to say right-wing sensibilities per se, but the

02:20:56.220 political concerns of whole America, which is to say hundreds of millions of just normal

02:21:03.040 people, entrepreneurially minded people, civically minded people. The John Birch Society was one of

02:21:11.340 the most effective and influential conservative organizations in this country's history. And I

02:21:18.080 spend a lot of the first hundred pages of my new book basically critiquing the John Birch.

02:21:27.200 If you were a patriotic, you know, lowercase C conservative American, that was where the action was at.

02:21:37.900 And it was a lot of very serious, very competent people who were just trying to find a way to do something for.

02:21:49.280 And the fact that the people at the head of the John Birch Society

02:21:54.720 And even in general the anti-communist movement

02:21:57.520 Were sort of compromised in one way or another

02:22:01.240 Like Joseph McCarthy was wrapped up with Roy Cohn

02:22:04.920 The John Birch Society famously ousted Revelo Oliver

02:22:09.460 For basically his anti-Semitism

02:22:14.420 uh i mean there were there were major major errors that the the sort of radical right of

02:22:21.460 the 1960s committed but nonetheless it was a vehicle for like authentically patriotic americans

02:22:28.900 and and and all of these people in hofstadter's view were pseudo-conservative um you know it's

02:22:36.900 interesting here which is obviously so this was there might be a little bit of lag here by the

02:22:42.180 the way i apologize for i can hear myself coming through your um side so it sounds like i'm not

02:22:48.660 looking for a space to jump in but it says um his admirers say he's an iconic historian of the

02:22:55.000 post-war liberal consensus it was just interesting that in the current discourse that i've been

02:23:00.220 exposed to you see people denying that there is such a thing as a post-war consensus um and you

02:23:07.440 had made an interesting point there about how he's almost trying to psychoanalyze the right and

02:23:12.800 i noticed this i remember in another interview you had said that hofstetter formerly was a leftist

02:23:19.660 or a communist in his youth then left that because he saw the excesses of the left but i find that

02:23:26.100 he's got a peculiarity that a lot of leftists have and you had mentioned he's playing very

02:23:30.940 fast and loose with a lot of this terminology but that's something i noticed from leftists

02:23:36.280 specifically and maybe some people on the right do it but leftists they will appropriate esoteric

02:23:43.240 psychoanalytical or historical or like like zizek does this all the fucking time frankly

02:23:49.860 but these guys they hear a word they like and they say oh i that that kind of sounds like something

02:23:53.900 i can wield against capitalism or like he was just using psychoanalytical terms as like a

02:24:00.160 convenience for political aims that's why i i view this very very cynically anytime i see it

02:24:06.260 One day I may do a more exacting piece of work on Hofstadter,

02:24:19.060 because I do think it's emblematic of a certain type of Jewish public intellectual.

02:24:26.840 everyone's heard that phrase

02:24:30.720 that's often

02:24:31.360 to discuss

02:24:34.920 the execution of Jews

02:24:36.960 by not

02:24:37.360 I don't know if this was

02:24:40.120 where it came from but you know

02:24:42.280 the idea that German Jews

02:24:44.220 themselves as more German

02:24:45.720 than the ethnically German

02:24:48.600 and Hofstadter

02:24:50.840 is kind of like that

02:24:52.140 he is

02:24:53.120 setting himself up as sort of the American

02:24:56.540 American history. That's sort of how he's labeled as a historian. He's done this long

02:25:08.300 view of one of his books. It's the elimination of basically the transition from 19th century

02:25:22.160 populism to 19th century

02:25:29.240 and that's just one of the works

02:25:33.040 that he has a very long view on

02:25:35.840 and you do sort of get the sense that he

02:25:41.060 does care about America and does see himself

02:25:45.080 he famously wrote a response to

02:25:47.440 Susan Sontag criticizing her for basically

02:25:51.980 her anti-white post often attributed to her

02:25:53.980 the white

02:25:55.240 race is

02:25:57.020 the cancer of

02:25:59.100 I'm probably paraphrasing

02:26:01.560 that and he was critical of that

02:26:04.020 you know so he was not like

02:26:05.500 nakedly

02:26:08.740 chauvinist

02:26:11.640 Jewish

02:26:12.400 but nonetheless

02:26:14.700 he

02:26:15.380 his legacy is one of

02:26:18.820 giving

02:26:20.440 the ascendant elite

02:26:24.600 to intellectually and culturally

02:26:30.460 down the rest of the country.

02:26:32.600 Sorry, Josh, I'm getting a couple of notes in the chat.

02:26:36.540 Now, I'm not hearing this, but some people are saying that your audio is

02:26:40.380 cutting out. It's not coming through on my end, but I do wonder, maybe

02:26:44.400 something is happening during the broadcast. If you

02:26:48.120 can quickly i don't know if on your side of the screen there's like a little gear

02:26:51.580 icon open that up and see under the audio if there's a toggle for noise suppression or echo

02:26:58.800 cancellation and see if you can turn those off if that helps at all um yeah so yeah i went ahead

02:27:09.400 make any difference yeah it might um maybe i'll just keep chatting let me see do you have any

02:27:16.980 headphones by the way let me see do you have any headphones by the way maybe hold on

02:27:25.060 sorry everyone just trying to do with some um technical stuff here it wasn't uh occurring

02:27:34.080 in the green room before this launch but i don't think it's an issue with the platform

02:27:39.300 or if it is it might be one of the settings that we have but if it was a little bit of lag i think

02:27:45.460 we could deal with it but i'm getting some notes that it's making it almost impossible to hear so

02:27:50.400 um what we might do we'll get it fixed right now hopefully but what i probably will do later

02:27:55.700 is take the live video down uh re-upload it because on my end i have the ability to separate

02:28:02.840 the audio tracks in a more effective way and i can probably repackage this so you can hear

02:28:07.520 much more clearly the first bit so we're going to give that we're going to see how this ends up but

02:28:13.580 i'll have to listen to it later to see what it sounds like on your end

02:28:16.800 uh also thank you for trying gentlemen see this is the type of comment i like to see everybody

02:28:23.320 look at that it's short it's complimentary it's deferential and um let me just say hey josh how

02:28:31.840 how you sound it right now so uh is this any better for you can you hear me at all yeah i

02:28:38.480 can i can hear you let me just see if i can turn up your volume say something now

02:28:46.640 test two three yeah i think maybe yeah i can kind of hear myself in the background a little bit

02:28:53.600 coming through the speakers but um i think we might we're gonna keep going and uh people in

02:28:59.760 in the chat let us know if the audio is improved at all um so yeah um where were we uh what were

02:29:08.260 we just saying i totally ground this to a halt uh we're talking about hofstetter we were talking

02:29:13.860 about post-work consensus um so continuing on with intolerance interpretations you begin with

02:29:21.760 hofstetter um you spend it sounds like quite a fair bit amount of time on the beginning of it

02:29:26.800 Where does that book lead us from Hofstetter?

02:29:31.840 There's really, there's two, there's two halves to the book.

02:29:36.740 The first half is sort of this examination of who I view as the most important of the post-war, not the most important, but part of the reason I chose them was in the case of, and there's Richard Hofstetter and Karl Popper.

02:29:56.800 He's been a punching bag on the right for everyone from Glenn Beck to R.R. Reno.

02:30:05.400 I mean, everyone writes about him, but I don't know that people necessarily dug into his writing and sort of like excavated choice arguments and excerpts to show really how bad the reason.

02:30:20.800 You were saying this about Steven Pinkert. It's like, I can't believe you're a celebrated intellectual. These are very, very bad arguments.

02:30:26.360 It's the same thing with Karl Popper.

02:30:27.920 I see that they're saying the volume's a little low.

02:30:29.820 So is this better or you're not hearing me?

02:30:33.620 Can you turn it up just a little bit more?

02:30:35.380 Let's see.

02:30:35.900 Turn it up just a little bit more.

02:30:36.980 Let's see.

02:30:37.660 All right.

02:30:38.100 I just punched it up all the way.

02:30:39.720 So hopefully I'm not blowing out anyone's eardrums.

02:30:42.540 But I mean, George Soros' Karl Popper is an obvious example because the legacy of the open society and its enemies is it's not just academic.

02:30:54.100 In the case of someone like George Soros, who's one of these right-foggy men, the Open Society Foundation has played a major, major role in transforming the world, the political culture globally, towards one, progressivism, open borders, anti-nativism, anti-nationalism.

02:31:20.200 and Karl Popper himself mentored many important intellectual and political figures who all

02:31:29.660 basically were like generals of the open society so and also Karl Karl Popper wrote a very famous

02:31:39.580 essay an anti-conspiracy polemical essay called the conspiracy theory of society

02:31:49.600 So on the one hand, he's sort of like the arch philosopher of liberal democracy.

02:31:55.760 He's the arch philosopher of the great replacement.

02:31:58.300 He says towards the end of the open society and its enemies that it may be a necessary result or an inevitable result of this sort of policy of liberal democracy through dramatic demographic change.

02:32:18.940 text of liberal democracy is also not necessarily advocating, but sort of admitting

02:32:28.720 that, you know, the great replacement is baked into the cake of liberal democracy.

02:32:35.660 So it's like, okay, that's a good place to start. If you want to show that there is a longstanding

02:32:43.200 tradition of demographic replacement as a sort of liberal political methodology well it's right

02:32:54.040 there well it also sounds to me and you sort of touched on this very briefly there that they've

02:33:00.400 always had an antagonistic view of maybe they had a different term for back then but conspiracy

02:33:06.840 theorists and we go back to hofstetter psychoanalyzing the paranoid nature of their opponents

02:33:13.400 but it seems that their their enemy has always been in their words the conspiracy theorist the

02:33:19.880 person who's looking too deeply the person who they're trying to discredit by saying is is

02:33:25.160 mentally ill because they have the wrong theories would that be a correct assessment

02:33:29.160 Certainly in the case of Hofstadter, in the case of Karl Popper, he creates the conspiracy theory mentality to a sort of like Homeric view of the idea that there's sort of this pantheon of conspirators, effectively.

02:33:59.160 that that if you're a conspiracy-minded person that you're sort of theistically minded and you are

02:34:08.840 attributing to financial elites conspirators so on and so forth a godly-like quality

02:34:20.680 and this is something you often hear people say when they want to critique

02:34:24.120 um anyone that that that is is skeptical to for example uh jewish political privileged jewish

02:34:34.920 uh parties they will say well you just think jews are like gods you think they are able to do

02:34:40.760 everything and accomplish everything and this is carl poppy theorists that they attribute a sort

02:34:45.880 of godly nature or or a godly power to this you know quote unquote shadowy elite of people

02:34:53.560 people um which is like which is sort of like a farcical uh framework to put on it because

02:35:01.960 you don't need to put on your theist hat to understand that people socially organize

02:35:10.460 and they socially organize in to achieve some end this is one of the things that's sort of

02:35:18.120 sort of very painful to confront over and over again in the open society.

02:35:25.620 He says that the purpose of democracy effectively is to not, is that it doesn't really have

02:35:34.780 a goal or a that it wants to arrive upon. And that in fact, having a teleological view

02:35:42.040 politically, socially, culturally, is like this very damning, oppressive, counterfactual thing

02:35:51.780 to pursue. The open society does have a telos, and the open society is to abolish

02:36:00.540 native sovereignty. It's to abolish local cultures. And he says this over and over and

02:36:10.280 over again throughout the book but with regards to the your comment about you know if you're a

02:36:16.980 conspiracy theorist mentally ill this is all throughout uh also you know this this uh meme

02:36:24.200 that richard hanania puts out there of of elite human capital and low human capital that uh that

02:36:32.500 has its roots in hofstadter's book the age of reform where he basically says um in in a chapter

02:36:39.780 titled the conspiracy theory of history he says that populists are conspiratorial by nature

02:36:46.900 and uh they're conspiratorial because they're poor they're stupid on the levers of power

02:36:55.700 so because they are there's been hananias across time yes it's the multiverse of richard hananias

02:37:02.420 um but so the the argument isn't really an argument it's a it's sort of a class anxiety

02:37:12.920 that that gets played out richard hofstetter wants to align himself with the ascendant liberal elite

02:37:21.060 um and he does this by basically taking up the whip and castigating uh for lack of a better way

02:37:29.060 putting it, conservative America. So whereas Popper is not psychologizing his opposition,

02:37:38.860 Richard Hofstadter does, Karl Popper is basically just crafting a series of non-sequiturs

02:37:46.740 to demonstrate the illegitimacy of conspiratorial thinking. There's one important thing he says,

02:37:55.260 One important thing he says in the essay, The Conspiracy Theory of Society, he basically argues that all of the things that happen in the world, which we don't like, economic depressions, military conflicts, whatever, social upheaval, social downturn, he says that these things are sort of like stochastic.

02:38:22.860 They are the unintended and inevitable consequences of some other action that we have undertaken.

02:38:33.060 So, I mean, this is actually in stark contrast to not just how we have classically understood history to work, but how history actually does work.

02:38:45.360 And when you put him and Hofstadter together, you've got two people who are basically trying to overturn what the dominant view, especially in America with Hofstadter, Hofstadter gained his reputation as a consensus historian by critiquing Charles Beard, who Charles Beard was one of the most preeminent historians in America, World War II.

02:39:13.940 And Charles Beard had a conflict model of history, not in a Marxist way per se, but he basically took the view that the major events that happened in history, in American history, are the result of conflict between different groups and societies.

02:39:35.180 and Hofstadter comes in and while he's not really dismissing the idea that there's class conflict

02:39:44.300 for example he acquires this this title as a consensus historian by basically trying to say

02:39:52.020 well the way America is now it kind of has always been that way and so the things that are happening

02:39:59.340 in the 1960s and the 1970s are sort of the inevitable uh unfurling of tendencies and

02:40:09.180 aspects that were always part of the american experiment and again in a certain way we can say

02:40:17.340 that that's true but that neglects the fact that it first off it just completely uh dismisses

02:40:25.260 contingency that there are unique things happening at any time any moment in a given historical

02:40:33.420 environment and that the things that inevitably did happen were not necessarily prescribed they

02:40:42.140 didn't have to be that way any number of other things could have happened so but we ended up as

02:40:48.540 as a liberal democracy we ended up as a racist society because well that was that was always the

02:40:55.460 way it was ever yeah it's a very thick there's a strong undercurrent of inevitability that runs

02:41:02.200 through that just like we were mentioning before francis fukiyama uh end of history and the last

02:41:06.600 man and like we are saying people tend to dunk on fukiyama these days he's he's sort of

02:41:12.840 of scorned in even liberal circles like i've seen so many speeches he gives where it feels like he's

02:41:20.600 almost apologetic to the book and he's trying to answer his critics but i had found that uh

02:41:26.620 end of history and the last man is a far more interesting book than a lot of these other ones

02:41:31.840 and i'm thinking of enlightenment now by steven pinker where it's it's a lot of the same thing

02:41:38.460 And the more of this stuff that you read, you realize that it's really just parroting the same stuff like Richard Hanania.

02:41:44.820 There's zero interesting ideas in Richard Hanania's fucking ghoulish corpse skull.

02:41:53.440 And the more you read, the more you understand the way he thinks, the more he seems like a copy of a copy of a copy where the original image was a man's ass on top of the Xerox machine.

02:42:05.620 and then after a thousand copies it is now a chattering howling skull that's richard hadania

02:42:13.180 but with stephen pinker it's interesting because he's he's also taking an adversarial tone against

02:42:19.820 the critics against people who say that first of all they affirm the post-war consensus while

02:42:26.420 simultaneously denying it they'll affirm it and say that anyone who disagrees with it is mentally

02:42:31.580 ill or insane and we discussed this on the the second show i do with with mr prudentialist

02:42:38.780 but like he starts off the book saying that everything's great now we're living in a secular

02:42:43.100 humanist utopia you're stupid if you disagree and then he writes an entire book with cherry-picked

02:42:50.220 data and very flimsy arguments to try and prove it but there's something in their soul in their

02:42:55.820 essence that truly believes that there's something wrong with you if you disagree i'm reminded of

02:43:02.560 this great book i've mentioned a few times called the therapeutic state by thomas zazz who was a

02:43:09.760 luminary in the world of psychiatry and psychoanalytics i believe you have a background

02:43:15.540 in psychology am i mistaken

02:43:17.360 yes and actually the the myth of mental illness was uh one of the influential

02:43:27.320 was an interesting guy hungarian jew who um a libertarian who

02:43:34.300 for better or for worse advocated for deinstitutionalization you know kind of a

02:43:42.380 mixed bag legacy there but yeah there was this um and i'm just extracting this from the book it's a

02:43:48.220 great book and we cover it on our show but uh he points out and this is obvious if you think about

02:43:53.520 it although some people don't see it that uh and i believe it was dr menninger who was the head of

02:44:00.740 the american psychiatric association but he was sort of like the leading voice in psychoanalysis

02:44:05.260 at the time which would have been like the 40s and 50s and uh he pointed out and i think there's

02:44:10.560 we got a quote of him saying this in the episode saying that there actually is no standard for

02:44:15.800 mental health. We don't know what a mentally healthy person looks like. There's no ideal,

02:44:21.460 there's no archetype, but we just know that every single person is mentally ill. It's just to what

02:44:27.220 degree. However, how can you judge someone who's mentally ill if you have nothing to contrast it

02:44:32.920 against? It makes sense, right? But then you realize, oh, this is merely a political tool

02:44:38.540 one can wield so that you're inconveniently medically ill, mentally ill. Whereas these

02:44:45.100 other mentally ill people are, you know, the type that we prefer. And then you realize this entire

02:44:51.020 thing is shoddy. I know you studied this, so I don't want to be too cruel. However, I'm in

02:44:55.240 marketing and all anyone does is talk shit about that around me and to me every single day. So I'm

02:45:00.660 pretty sure you must be used to it by now. Oh yeah. Yeah. Uh, I've definitely got a chip on

02:45:07.840 my shoulder for psychology as a discipline um so yeah i mean that's soviet things feel today where

02:45:20.080 if you're not in conformity with the the ruling ideology then you are a psychological maladapt

02:45:29.040 and you know the role of of psychiatrists psychologists social mental health clinicians

02:45:37.840 um as a sort of secular priestly class noted time and time again throughout history so i won't

02:45:48.360 belabor it um but to steer things back to the book so uh the first half is really looking at

02:45:56.360 popper and hofstadter as very very important mouthpieces for liberal democracy uh but the

02:46:05.680 second half of the book sort of looks at the same issue of liberal democracy, the post-war

02:46:14.020 consensus, social decay, if you want to say that, and looks at it specifically through

02:46:20.640 the lens of, or through the works of three fairly prominent psychologists, all of whom

02:46:30.480 published widely received, well-received books during the 2010s. Jonathan Haidt, who published

02:46:39.420 The Righteous Mind. Danielle Kahneman, who was fast and slow. And perhaps less well-known,

02:46:48.960 but still noteworthy, Paul Bloom, an American Jew, who published a book called Just Babies,

02:47:01.200 which with the subtitle on the origins of good and evil in infancy and each one of these books each

02:47:08.880 one of these specialists in psychology kind of in their own way reflect tendencies of the post-war

02:47:18.080 consensus exacerbate tensions created by the post-war consensus and have invariably contributed

02:47:27.200 to the sort of cesspool that we're living through right now and I feel a little bit badly about

02:47:36.000 including Jonathan Haidt in this because the framing is very negative the way I'm putting it

02:47:42.000 I actually think of Jonathan Haidt as one of the better public intellectual psychologists of the

02:47:48.240 last few decades I certainly view him as one of the more sincere people and even when his conclusions

02:47:57.200 or prescriptions are not really accurate he's he's often barking up the right tree

02:48:03.020 um and his book the righteous mind I think is a very influential book for a lot of people

02:48:09.520 it was for me if there was two psychology textbooks that kind of like pushed me here

02:48:16.700 into this space it was the Thomas Oz and it was also Jonathan what do you think separates

02:48:22.520 jonathan height from the others and if it's his academic priors or his temperament what makes him

02:48:29.880 better than the rest in your opinion

02:48:35.000 his work is less

02:48:39.720 obviously ideologically motivated um really it's less politically motivated

02:48:46.520 uh despite him now being sort of synonymous with uh like you know anti-woke idw type um

02:48:58.760 culture war stuff he has always looked at specific issues and tried to examine those specific issues

02:49:07.640 So he wrote a book about, or he's written essays basically looking at the problem of social media and the increased psychiatric dysfunction of teenagers.

02:49:27.040 It's a specific problem. It's a problem. Everyone agrees. This is a problem. It's not really an anxious issue. Everyone understands that the young people have ever been. And everyone kind of understands that there's things about the social media culture that are really destructive. And I see you have it pulled up. The anxious generation is a good example of that.

02:49:51.320 at the university system you've also got it pulled up there the coddling of the american mind

02:49:55.420 so he's he's looking at the at the problems that are out there and he's putting actual

02:50:01.880 empirical data behind those problems you know he has the you know bless his heart he has this sort

02:50:10.740 of stereotypical liberal solution of what we just need to do liberalism harder that's kind of

02:50:19.460 always his resolution or at the very least it's his resolution in the righteous mind he talks

02:50:25.900 about how there's this massive problem of hyperpolarization and the solution to hyperpolarization

02:50:32.480 is we just need to do more liberalism that's sort of incoherent and you know what it sounds

02:50:38.800 like to me with height there's a bit more of a scientific or at least intellectual curiosity

02:50:46.180 with him whereas in at least in what i've read with the likes of pinker and others it's very

02:50:52.460 defensive it's they will say on one hand that we have the perfect system it's called secular

02:50:59.080 humanist liberalism and all we must do is tweak it to make it perfect yes it's not perfect but

02:51:04.560 we must tweak it but they're very vague about what tweaks they would do whereas at least height will

02:51:10.700 say well here's the problems here's the problems everyone understands and here's what we would

02:51:15.160 need to do to fix them whereas everyone else that I can see the only thing they would suggest

02:51:21.140 tweaking is that there's too many people who are against liberalism so we should do something about

02:51:26.720 them I'm not going to say what should be done but something should be done like they'll I mean I

02:51:31.720 remember in Steven Pinker's book he was pretty upfront about it like he almost was advocating

02:51:36.160 for education camps saying like we got to get these people out of here yeah yeah

02:51:45.160 I'll say one thing, maybe, to grab this point at home.

02:51:51.560 Jonathan Haidt, his model of cognition that he called the social intuitionist, his model basically is a defense of irrationalism.

02:52:08.400 you want to contrast that with or a paul bloom paul bloom was a critic of jonathan heights

02:52:17.200 um they are sort of these guys who are like yeah enlightenment uh reason is the only thing that

02:52:25.760 exists and human emotions are sort of this proper with ever more exacting enlightenment reason tm

02:52:35.600 you know trademark enlightenment reason and logic uh there's like stefan molyneux or ben shapiro

02:52:41.760 tier like uh we need our capital l logic jonathan height basically says in the righteous mind and

02:52:49.440 the righteous mind is really a culmination of his laboratory work so he's bringing his his

02:52:58.160 laboratory work to a popular audience through this book the social intuitionist model says

02:53:04.080 in only so many words that there's a set of evolutionarily informed uh axioms or intuitions

02:53:13.600 that we have through which reason is trying to make sense of these deeply evolved that we

02:53:24.400 have intuitions so his notion of the moral foundation theory is his way of defining

02:53:33.040 basically the how many of these intuitions exist how what they are and

02:53:40.660 how they operate so he says that there's the loyalty intuition the sanctity

02:53:45.700 intuition the authority intuition the care intuition the fairness intuition

02:53:53.280 the liberty intuition and that these are sort of kind of they're all in the mix

02:53:59.140 and they may find themselves in conflict with one another.

02:54:02.980 They may find themselves cooperating with one another.

02:54:06.220 But invariably, reason tends to be a sort of post hoc justification.

02:54:16.360 We already have predetermined, right?

02:54:19.840 If you want to put this in terms of Daniel Kahneman's model,

02:54:22.760 Daniel Kahn proposes that human cognition has sort of two modes, hence the title Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow, that there's a sort of gut, intuition, fast, snap judgment that we make, and it's not really effective, and it's not particularly rational, it's very prejudicial.

02:54:46.980 and then we have a more of a slow burn system uh and this is the reason if you want to say

02:54:56.800 reason tm logic tm uh so most of the most of the popular psychology books that have been

02:55:05.240 published over the last few decades are taking up this kind of fact of human irrationality

02:55:12.080 and using it to beat. There's a famous book, You're Not So Smart, that was published in the 2010s,

02:55:19.360 or Dan Ariely, who published Predictably Irrational. There are many of the, Daniel

02:55:26.420 Kahneman being another example, Thinking Fast and Slow, there are many of these books published

02:55:30.240 since the turn of the century that all highlight the fact that humans are sort of dumb,

02:55:36.040 uh emotional irrational um and and that they use it to undermine the the reader's confidence in

02:55:47.580 themselves as a thinking person whereas jonathan height turns around says actually no

02:55:51.960 the fact that we have these deeply evolutionarily informed intuitions is a fact we have to

02:56:02.240 like affirm yeah it's not a bug it's a feature right um and just uh just to explain that a little

02:56:12.260 bit um there is um when you explain it like that this is something i've noticed with these people

02:56:18.760 they'll say humans are irrational they're basically trying to say humans are stupid

02:56:23.020 it's only the james lindsays of the world that will say the quiet part out loud because they're

02:56:28.240 so frantic about we everyone's stupid which is to say that their plan was perfect it's only the

02:56:34.560 people that are wrong if you ever worked with it people they say this all the time so they were

02:56:40.540 forced to say this when their schemes and schematics were proven not to be effective

02:56:46.620 so i'd say well i guess my plan needs to be as stupid as you are which always seemed very petty

02:56:52.500 to me it's like no you you failed your ideas were wrong it's not the people you deployed

02:56:59.620 them upon it's not their fault that that's that's a sign of someone who doesn't understand

02:57:09.940 what leadership is actually about it's like a good who understands that when things go wrong

02:57:16.420 it is always you know even if it's specifically their fault the role of a leader an authority

02:57:26.520 figure is effectively in in a not insignificant way is to be the person i don't mean this in like

02:57:34.740 a girard figures but in a certain way like a good leader is someone who is the first person to say

02:57:41.240 say yes this was a fuck up they are the first person to own uh personal weakness shortcomings

02:57:50.980 because somebody has to be the first person to step out of that egotistical frame

02:57:55.740 so that you can bring group solidarity together right um and so when you have a james lindsey

02:58:02.360 type like who's bitter that he was rejected by the peasants it's like you don't understand

02:58:08.760 what it actually is to be an authority figure um yeah and the problem also is that james lindsey

02:58:16.360 wants to be cool because he couldn't cut it as being boring and stuffy it requires a bit of

02:58:22.400 gravitas to be truly boring and effective which he does not have so he said oh i know what i'll do

02:58:28.440 i'm gonna be like a funny witty guy and he's awful at that i've one of the great there's so

02:58:35.660 so few pleasures in life as you know one of my few pleasures is watching james lindsey just bomb

02:58:42.280 in front of an audience telling a joke that goes nowhere complete misfire a misfire of a joke a

02:58:47.760 misfire of a man so to me james lindsey is this very special entity because i mean he hasn't

02:58:55.980 figured out that he's a failure yet

02:58:58.040 i'm reminded of that i'm on instagram and every third post is racism i'm like

02:59:08.460 bring back the hot chicks and nobody claps everyone's just like pin drop it's like dude

02:59:17.840 you suck which is something that a man who has never had sex would say it's like hey show hands

02:59:23.800 who likes hot chicks no one no no one actually likes quote-unquote hot chicks you gotta be

02:59:29.100 specific you gotta be way more perverted if you want to make that joke land you don't got it in

02:59:34.240 you you don't got the fucking brain you don't got the penis to be that cool about a joke like that

02:59:40.120 i'll say that to his turtle fucking face yeah it's funny what the other tweet of him was like

02:59:48.140 yeah me and my stepdaughter checking out chicks butts it's like bro what are you what are you

02:59:53.000 talking about this is this is absurd yeah that's what you guys do right this i we all have sex we

02:59:58.920 go out and check butts like that no that's the the better you are at scoping out an ass the less

03:00:04.980 you talk about it you know you don't you don't hear you don't hear navy seal snipers talking

03:00:11.720 about how they do it no if you have a tree if you're good at something you don't do it for free

03:00:17.580 james you're a failure at looking at asses to by the way and actually

03:00:22.460 that's that's uh that's that's the thing about james lizzie um but but yeah so like jonathan

03:00:31.940 height these are basically the reasons why i'm like sort of cautiously pro height even though

03:00:39.560 i think uh i think his book the righteous mind is wrong in very important ways they're wrong

03:00:46.040 in instructive ways that's this is you know you sort of like um one of the the first best thing

03:00:55.060 you can do as like an intellectual or something like that an academic the first best thing you

03:01:00.780 can do is be correct but the next best thing which is almost as good is you can be wrong in a very

03:01:08.840 interesting and productive way and i do think jonathan height is somebody who is wrong in a

03:01:14.000 very productive way. Because what he does point out is, one, that intuition and human emotion

03:01:20.680 is a legitimate dimension of human thinking and psychology, right? And two, the other important

03:01:27.680 thing he demonstrates is that there are significant differences between liberals and

03:01:33.420 conservatives and that the the that it's not that conservatives are bad or defective or nazis or

03:01:43.900 whatever it's that there are actual differences between these two and so those are two they're

03:01:49.880 very simple things to state but he said it at a time and the book was published roughly uh roughly

03:01:57.080 around the the i think just before or just after obama's second term so in the united states this

03:02:03.400 This was like peak liptard, you know, dominating political culture, dominating popular culture.

03:02:11.380 It was like conservatives were constantly getting whipped, constantly having the boot on their throat, constantly being humiliated.

03:02:18.880 And here's Jonathan Haidt saying conservatives aren't bad and they're not even wrong.

03:02:25.480 There's just something different.

03:02:26.980 Where he started is explaining why and what should be done to ameliorate those differences. I would say that we shouldn't be seeking to ameliorate those differences. We need to exacerbate them to the extreme point of view.

03:02:47.420 he says that the difference between

03:02:52.640 is due to these

03:02:57.100 psychological factors which is an interesting thing to say

03:03:01.400 I think it's also wrong

03:03:03.180 and it's wrong even in the context of his own work

03:03:08.780 he says that for example liberals

03:03:12.940 of these six moral intuitions liberals

03:03:16.460 are unable to employ all six moral intuitions, that conservatives have an easier time accessing

03:03:25.960 and acting upon the six moral intuitions, care, fairness, loyalty, authority,

03:03:33.080 liberty, and liberals basically invoking Thomas Zaz earlier, you mentioned, that's a good segue,

03:03:43.120 way, because Thomas Zaz's book, The Therapeutic State, I think of as a pillar of demonstrating

03:03:50.560 structurally why contemporary liberals are sort of obsessed with care and harm reduction.

03:03:58.960 It's sort of an obvious consequence of the rise of the therapeutic state.

03:04:05.760 It's the, there's a few things. It's the general trend towards the nanny state,

03:04:12.540 you know welfare queenism that there's a new religion uh uh therapy as a new religion

03:04:20.300 um all these kinds of things but they that dovetails with yeah go ahead also i was going

03:04:27.660 to say that um you mentioned something very interesting there about um one could i'll say

03:04:33.180 that there's a feminization at work there where the liberal more than anything in my experience

03:04:39.580 is about maintaining care but also maintaining the status quo and i remember if people remember

03:04:45.820 back to the gamer gate days you know josh and i are both old as shit so there's a lot of young

03:04:52.120 people listening here who might not remember this stuff but i remember there's this term we all used

03:04:56.400 to band it about was it was cognitive dissonance and there's this idea especially on our side of

03:05:02.560 the fence that it's impossible to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time

03:05:08.340 you get cognitive dissonance and then you melt down and you basically call them people a hypocrite

03:05:13.380 in internet nerd terms but one thing i found in dealing with liberals specifically it was always

03:05:18.760 just forks in the road and binaries very rarely if ever does anyone but especially liberals hold

03:05:25.260 two conflicting ideas in their head in fact the only people who can hold several perhaps

03:05:30.120 hypocritical or conflicting ideas in their head the same time and be okay with it is people on

03:05:34.620 the right and that's a that's for a different time but liberals it's always a binary it's always

03:05:40.540 you know you might say a great example would be uh you know during covid you know there's the

03:05:46.680 george floyd riots and all these shit lib nurses were forced to be like okay are we sticking with

03:05:53.200 the lockdown narrative or are we letting people just go out and protest for george floyd and you

03:05:58.940 would say, well, you can't do both. That shows the internal inconsistency in your worldview.

03:06:04.920 They didn't see it that way. They just picked one. They weighted them against each other and said,

03:06:09.980 well, for me, the George Floyd thing is more important than keeping up this narrative of a

03:06:15.300 global pandemic where everyone's going to die. So yeah, just do that. And then they don't think

03:06:18.440 about it. The only people who think about it are people like us. And they forgot about it. They

03:06:23.720 just forgot that they did that so with these people not only do they not have cognitive dissonance

03:06:30.100 or they you know they don't they can't skillfully employ it but they also don't experience it but

03:06:34.060 they also don't have any fucking memory so for them it's just whatever ends the conversation

03:06:39.620 because they just kind of want to they're adverse to change they're really adverse to true critique

03:06:46.040 and this leads me to my next question and i apologize this is too much of a divergence i

03:06:51.120 make sure i get to everything though because i i have a lot to ask you but i wonder and we'll

03:06:56.640 mention your second book here explaining conspiracy theories is there something implicitly right-wing

03:07:05.120 about conspiracy theory culture and by that i would include libertarianism because i would see

03:07:10.560 libertarianism more strongly correlated with conspiracy theory culture in america which is

03:07:16.960 is usually what people think i'm not even sure if they have them in france or fucking italy but

03:07:21.860 for sure it's a crucial part in my opinion of american identity and there is something

03:07:27.660 implicitly libertarian or broadly right-wing about it and going off what i just said conspiracy

03:07:34.700 theories at their core are a critique on the system itself and i don't know if that maybe

03:07:40.760 that's why liberals and the left but mainly liberals are so adverse to it now what do you

03:07:46.800 of that all that i just dumped on you when i before i wrote understanding conspiracy theories

03:07:56.160 i read a lot of books by german philosopher his name is peter slaughterdyke

03:08:04.080 um and if there's one thing your audience takes away from this conversation we're having

03:08:09.200 it's that you should absolutely read peter slaughterdyke he's probably

03:08:13.680 one of the five greatest living, you know, lowercase c conservative philosophers on the

03:08:21.560 planet. And I'll just say it, when I read his book, The Critique of Cynical Reason,

03:08:28.140 it was almost like a religious experience reading that book. So having said that,

03:08:33.500 why am I talking about Peter Slaughterdyke? In his book, The Critique of Cynical Reason,

03:08:38.020 he makes this he presents this sort of dichotomy um within enlightenment that you know the unfurling

03:08:48.700 the historical unfurling of enlightenment um he basically says that today

03:08:55.500 in the modern world and he published this book in the early 1980s i think it was actually his

03:09:02.260 first major publication he says in the modern day when people give their reasons for any particular

03:09:10.820 cause that they advocate or any particular desire that they want satisfied that it's kind of obvious

03:09:19.140 to most people that it's a naked it is a very thin justification which is covering up a sort of will

03:09:30.820 to power i'm giving you my reason for x y and z but but the reason is actually i just want

03:09:38.180 to be on top i just want to conquer i want to dominate i want to feel so this would be like

03:09:43.620 academic agents specific brand of elite theory as well as far as i'm concerned which i am for

03:09:50.820 the most part with some some caveats here and there i basically agree with with mima when he

03:09:57.460 he does this whole bsbsbs and then you know like that whole spiel of his i generally tend to think

03:10:03.740 he's correct but um but he so he says cynicism is sort of like this modern i hope i'm not

03:10:11.640 misrepresenting it because it's now been several years since i read it but cynicism is sort of

03:10:16.240 like this modern twisted version of like the greek kinical tradition where when when like a

03:10:22.620 diogenes went around and you know pointed out other people's bullshit he was actually doing

03:10:29.020 something revolutionary and today in today's world when an lgbt person goes around how

03:10:35.920 oppressive hetero everyone's kind of like yeah but you got those guys in colorado like you

03:10:48.040 fucking ruin their business so we know you're full of shit you're challenging authority you actually

03:10:54.360 are the authority and you're using this mask of like sort of revolutionary clinical energy

03:11:02.880 really it's just a pretext to step on people you don't like right so um oh gosh i went all the way

03:11:11.040 down this road and i forgot why i even freaking brought it up in the first place um well we were

03:11:16.640 talking about i think you know a's elite they were talking about the role of cynicism and um if we

03:11:22.360 can just build on that um i'm not sure that i agree with aa's analysis because he would say

03:11:30.540 i'm probably putting words in his mouth he might very well disagree with this in fact i know he will

03:11:34.340 because he's just you know hot-headed like that he'll just anytime you say he said something even

03:11:41.100 If you got a recording, he'll probably disagree with it anyway.

03:11:43.820 But I do think elites, as we might call them, are more ideologically beholden than a lot

03:11:51.460 of people like to believe.

03:11:52.600 You know, I'm reminded of Peter Thiel, and we did a pretty big deep dive on Peter Thiel

03:11:59.080 on our paywall show, Real Secret Coffee Hours.

03:12:02.700 If you actually spend some time listening to what these people say, they are true believers

03:12:07.220 in, you know, for example, transhumanism.

03:12:09.780 um his particular brand of christianity that he's talked about in interviews which is basically the

03:12:16.540 type of christianity that you would expect from like an insane gay transhumanist which is that

03:12:22.320 you know jesus would like insane gay transhumanism you know it's the type of christianity you'd

03:12:26.660 expect from a guy who looks like he just stands naked in a soundless white room for two hours a

03:12:32.780 day and we can never understand why that is you know i mean so a guy who was like in shape but

03:12:38.500 took Ozempic anyway. Just weird things, weird things that I don't even want to know about.

03:12:44.960 But these people are more, you know, even with Stalin, when people say Stalin is this great

03:12:51.620 Machiavellian figure, in my reading, and Stalin's war is a great example of this.

03:12:59.080 I know I'm not the first guy to say this, but there was nothing about what Stalin did that

03:13:03.320 indicated he wasn't a true believer in the bolshevik revolution and in marxism he wasn't

03:13:09.400 some machiavellian cynical power grab thug like people say like and to the point where i'd said

03:13:16.120 i don't think lenin would have behaved any differently had he survived like the i don't

03:13:23.000 think marx would disagree with anything stalin had done so i i think there's this misconception

03:13:29.640 that's like oh they only just say these things to the plebs but i'm also like you know they can

03:13:35.160 elites can also be insane and stupid too there's enough evidence of that throughout history they're

03:13:40.240 not just beyond spirituality or prejudices or i don't know fucking syphilis some of them were

03:13:47.800 born syphilis like there's a whole history of this shit anyway we're getting off topic here but

03:13:51.600 that's why just when it comes to the cynicism with which we can view that that to me is almost

03:13:58.100 you want to cast the elites as something other than human which is something very plebeian

03:14:07.080 you know i mean like a lot of people who are into elite theory i think

03:14:10.260 view themselves as elite adjacent but you know what one thing that aristocrats don't do it spend

03:14:16.820 all fucking day talking about aristocrats that's just the thought anyway that's this is one big

03:14:22.280 fat ass tangent i'm on right now well you know what to kind of split the difference

03:14:29.200 um it seems uh nema's critique sounds more true in the era of the post-war consensus

03:14:38.680 if you wanted to talk about the or even the american revolutionaries these were people who

03:14:45.460 were working diligently to create not just a justification, but an actual system and worldview

03:14:53.400 for what they were trying to do. So maybe it's not something you can say that is universally true

03:14:59.480 of every ruling class everywhere around the world that has ever lived. But I think when people

03:15:04.260 listen to like Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi or Paul Ryan, and they say things, you're like,

03:15:11.820 I think you're just BS-ing me, but insofar as why did I bring up Peter Slaughter Dyke,

03:15:18.740 your question was, is conspiracy theory an expressly right-wing phenomenon?

03:15:26.140 I would say no, but it is an expressly American phenomenon,

03:15:31.400 and that is for a handful of very, I think, obvious reasons.

03:15:36.560 America was founded in a clandestine fashion.

03:15:41.820 It was founded as basically the first major New World civilization amidst the backdrop of not only other existing civilizations, but decayed the process of being sort of swallowed up by like secret societies like Freemasonry, like international finance,

03:16:10.720 like uh like the the international jewish element um so americans are conspiratorial

03:16:22.100 i think because americans understand the conspiratorial nature of

03:16:29.300 world historical events which is to say people socially organize to bring about some thing

03:16:37.960 and the more dramatic the change they're bringing apart

03:16:42.580 or the more dangerous the change they're bringing apart,

03:16:45.280 they often have to do it in a sort of clandestine.

03:16:50.720 So that there was a time

03:16:54.860 when there was a legitimate left-wing conspiratorial culture

03:16:59.900 in this country.

03:17:01.600 I often talk about the 9-11 truth movement

03:17:04.560 as effectively a left-wing conspiratorial movement.

03:17:09.780 Occupy Wall Street was a left-wing conspiratorial movement.

03:17:14.600 Howard Zinn's, you know, history of the United States

03:17:17.800 and the whole revolutionary ethos of the 19,

03:17:22.540 I mean, pick the decade in the 20th century.

03:17:25.000 You have the beatniks, you have the hippies,

03:17:27.140 you have the sexual revolution,

03:17:31.000 you have literally the American Communist Party,

03:17:33.480 You have all of these sort of left-wing coded social movements that were effectively engaging in their own transparency, and they were also propagating conspiracy about the powers that were oppressed.

03:17:53.440 i was bringing up slaughtered before was you know when if you look at the contemporary conspiracy

03:17:59.760 culture on the left these are the things rich are legitimate ideologies and not actual conspiracy

03:18:08.160 theories um you like blm uh the the trans oppression all these kinds of things are sort of

03:18:18.480 of conspiratorial in the way that slaughtered like this idea of cynicism, sort of verbal

03:18:27.440 trapping that does not have a logical or intellectual substance, but really is just a mask for a

03:18:40.040 will to power so um and the kind of collapse of a liberal or left-wing conspiracy theorizing

03:18:49.540 from my point of view that happened when the left basically became

03:18:57.460 sort of an unquestionable hegemonic power let me say why the reason i brought this up is because

03:19:05.940 and I should qualify what I mean by conspiracy theories

03:19:08.820 because I'm painting with a broad brush here.

03:19:10.780 So that would include anti-Zog stuff,

03:19:15.480 but also UFOs and maybe even Bigfoot

03:19:18.320 and also Alex Jones type stuff.

03:19:22.100 And the reason I brought that up is because

03:19:23.440 we've covered this on our show,

03:19:25.440 the very expansive history of communist infiltration

03:19:29.920 and subversion in America

03:19:31.100 and how a lot of their conspiracy theories

03:19:34.960 And even Occupy Wall Street, I mean, the story of Occupy Wall Street is actually pretty interesting.

03:19:40.100 Like, I think it became like a left wing movement, but kind of like the counterculture of the 60s, it began as something else and was co-opted.

03:19:50.320 But that's what they're known for.

03:19:52.240 These infiltrators is co-opting movements.

03:19:54.740 But I find that their conspiracies are always explicitly to undermine two things.

03:19:58.700 it's either global hegemonic capitalism in zero other particulars or just the american empire

03:20:06.360 whereas and this was trying to get out the libertarian thing just based on my experience

03:20:11.360 in dealing with these communities was i don't think ufos fit into dialectical materialism

03:20:19.140 and i don't think like flat earth and tartaria or any of like the really trippy stuff that's kind of

03:20:25.200 been in the zeitgeist for such a long time i don't think it fit practically into left-wing conspiracy

03:20:33.240 theories which were explicitly just to undermine the american culture american dominance whereas

03:20:40.060 more of that stuff might have been trafficked easier in right-wing circles maybe because as

03:20:45.880 we have said before i don't know if it's genetic or biological or whatever but these types of people

03:20:51.300 tend to be open to more ideas and can balance these in their heads like you can still love

03:20:57.580 america but believe in ufos you know i mean so anyway that's just where i was coming from with

03:21:02.660 that and i'm not even sold on this position but i was just trying to see if there's this is like

03:21:08.080 the one counterculture that i think the left has had a hard time really co-opting because like they

03:21:15.440 don't really want to get in the weeds with timothy mcveigh i don't think or like when they get into

03:21:21.140 then you have to start talking about pat con you gotta start talking about a lot of things that

03:21:27.780 don't cast the left as the sole victims and all this which is a narrative that they need

03:21:33.540 anyway this is another tangent but that's just where my position was so

03:21:41.940 in an essay i wrote on my sub stack called uh richard hanania is wrong about conspiracy theories

03:21:47.700 I basically tried to give a very, I guess you could say very narrow definition of what

03:22:00.700 I understood as a conspiracy theory. In my book, I posited my own language

03:22:10.320 and I sort of stopped using the phrase conspiracy theory. I used the phrase folk history or

03:22:17.540 a folk account of history. And to me, to describe a folk account of history is a very, it casts a

03:22:26.000 very wide berth. To talk about a folk account of history means you can talk about Bigfoots,

03:22:32.040 you can talk about cryptids, you can talk about fluoride in the water, you can talk about a

03:22:38.700 eugenic sterilizing vaccination program, you can talk about Jewish finance, you can talk about

03:22:47.540 um you know world war ii as a false flag to get america into the war you can talk about all of

03:22:54.940 these things where effectively people are questioning the sort of received wisdom that

03:23:00.940 they have about the world around them and that's that's and it's it's not even expressly political

03:23:07.900 political it's more expressly um epistemological um and i would say it's it there it's it's even

03:23:17.400 ethnological um now if we're just if we're gonna affirm the use of the phrase conspiracy theory

03:23:26.560 to my mind conspiracy theory is is the only functional way we can use that phrase

03:23:35.980 and apply it to contemporary politics or just political culture

03:23:42.880 is to assume a political meaning to a conspiracy theory.

03:23:48.200 And so when someone is engaging in a conspiracy theory,

03:23:50.540 what they're basically doing is they are trying to bring about justice.

03:23:57.900 This is the argument I make in my essay,

03:24:00.160 that there's three parts to every legitimate conspiracy theory,

03:24:03.620 that there's a question, who killed JFK, who did 9-11, so on and so forth.

03:24:11.860 There's an investigation.

03:24:14.620 Okay, well, there's the clean slate report.

03:24:18.100 There was, you know, Zapruder was a Jew, whatever.

03:24:23.000 And then there's a prosecution where you identify the guilty parties

03:24:28.320 and you try to bring them to justice.

03:24:29.760 You try to expose the conspiracy.

03:24:31.560 you try to bring some residue, basically you're trying to restore sovereignty, restore order

03:24:40.620 to the political culture. And in that case, like cryptids don't fall into the category of

03:24:47.660 conspiracy theories. UFOs don't fall into the category of conspiracy theories because these

03:24:52.160 don't have direct political import. And when people are trying to engage in political conspiracy

03:25:01.280 culture. These are the sort of outliers that damage the credibility of specific is that they're

03:25:11.060 trying to call attention to. When Candace Owens does, you know, a three week long series on 0.99

03:25:21.400 the USS Liberty, and then she turns around and talks about Brigitte Macron being Emmanuel

03:25:27.000 macron's father it's like you've actually have stepped out of like proper political conspiracy

03:25:33.160 territory into the sort of fantastical mythical

03:25:38.160 uh carnival territory that that is discrediting i'll tell you what i love that though i love

03:25:47.440 canis owns because for a lot of people that was their first foray into like black conspiracy

03:25:53.900 culture because a lot of people don't know that maybe some of your followers i know

03:25:57.640 a lot of mine do because i forcibly expose them to this but black people believe literally every

03:26:04.260 single conspiracy theory in the world um if they don't believe in atlantis it's just because they

03:26:10.980 to them that reads as too white coated but everything else like let's name a conspiracy

03:26:16.600 theory they believe in so candace owens you know she's done her best to make herself palatable 1.00

03:26:22.700 to certain audiences but deep down she's a ratchet ass hood bitch like she's about to go off about

03:26:31.400 how they're putting aids in the kool-aid i can just feel it and i'm glad everyone's getting

03:26:35.400 exposure to this i'm not surprised i think this is a great thing that's happening

03:26:39.000 i uh when i was a university lecturer it was in mo it was in very urban parts of new york

03:26:51.020 brooklyn the bronx queens manhattan there were very diverse classrooms tons of black folk uh

03:26:58.940 and i guess i was sort of the hip by virtue of being like literally 25 barely older than the

03:27:04.700 people in the room uh i had a sort of like geek and i did bring a lot of alternative views on a

03:27:12.460 lot always devolve into black people sharing their pet conspiracy theories um so i so like

03:27:20.060 like like the african doctor who cured cancer or whatever uh dr sepa you ever hear about him

03:27:27.020 there's a whole conspiracy about oh did i ever hear i i i don't think i heard about that one

03:27:32.220 but i'm dying to know i this is many years ago i don't quite remember but he's like yeah

03:27:38.140 yeah that guy he he they got him they got him that they got him you know it's like a lot of

03:27:46.300 that's always like it's always like vague on him i love that it's funny because as i've gone older

03:27:51.980 uh there's a lot of inlets people can take into this thing of ours as we might call it um there's

03:27:58.220 people get into it just because they're outcasted academics nothing wrong with that but then there's

03:28:04.220 some people who enter into it just through straight-up white nationalism that's their

03:28:08.060 priors some people enter it through conspiracy theories that's probably closer to what i did

03:28:12.620 or they're they were just post left types up until five minutes ago and they're here now because all

03:28:17.180 their friends are gay and killing themselves they can't have that so they're over here but

03:28:21.340 i like the conspiracy theory types so i've got a lot of background in reading deeply into all

03:28:28.780 this stuff i've given everything a shot i found as i got older i had less patience for it like

03:28:36.380 reading through some of the most classic conspiracy theory texts i mean with with an adult mind with

03:28:43.660 an old a coal head old truden's mind like mine a lot of it's just straight up poorly written

03:28:49.500 like i find nothing interesting in the tartaria mud flood like i can't even be entertained by it

03:28:56.700 forget believe it's actually real but then even like some of the you know flightier claims of

03:29:02.860 bill cooper like a lot of these guys like i just i i don't dig it and like david ike like if anyone's

03:29:08.260 actually just sat down and read david ike it fucking sucks it's just not good it's not fun

03:29:12.760 he just won't stop writing the same shit over and over again so i'm like this is low effort

03:29:17.000 stuff and so you know i do think conspiracy theories as such i think the most insanely

03:29:24.840 legitimate one is the pedophile satanic cult stuff that's the one no one wants to touch you get

03:29:31.220 laughed out of the room for that in some circles but to me if you look into that there's something

03:29:37.020 there however everything else so much of it is done to sort of fog these issues um yeah anyway

03:29:44.980 so i i just found that and maybe it's maybe it's just you spend too long online you've seen it all

03:29:49.340 but the crazier they get and the more ludicrous they get i don't know i'm just i think a lot of

03:29:56.240 people just numb to it at this point well i i literally tuned out of conspiracy culture about

03:30:03.020 15 years ago for all the reasons that you mentioned it's like uh you try trying to find the the one

03:30:10.560 like uh not not even reasonable per se but just like

03:30:16.540 uh the one coherently construct your conspiracy it's like you what you sift through so many crap

03:30:23.960 books uh or people just like doing auto ethnography you know that's kind of like like david ike is

03:30:32.080 just like keeping his dream journals and he's publishing it for the whole world to read and

03:30:36.680 it's like you just read enough of those like man i don't i don't care about this i don't care about

03:30:41.180 this at all um and it's like so unsatisfying it's really i would love to um a lot of the

03:30:49.180 conspiracy stuff that i read in my teens and 20s now like you said with a culture and old head

03:30:57.880 or you say coal head old trune um mentality because like back then like i wasn't sure

03:31:04.520 and now i know what's being left out of like a lot of the important ones like if i'm reading

03:31:11.300 about jfk or 9-11 or whatever uh i know they're leaving out the jews you know if if they're

03:31:18.700 talking about uh x y or z i know they're leaving out this and i and i would like to come back to

03:31:26.300 it and and and maybe piece it together again but just to go back to the question like

03:31:33.020 i've gotten so narrow in my focus that like the only way to retrieve

03:31:38.700 the concept of the conspiracy theory really is to like blend in the jewish question because every

03:31:45.100 relevant political uh conspiracy in our lifetime they are basically front and center of that

03:31:55.800 which isn't to say like they're the only element um or they are the only group with agency in any

03:32:03.460 of these events happening but the conspicuous absence of this in virtually everything that's

03:32:10.700 going on means that nine out of every 10 explanations that you're getting for anything

03:32:16.300 that's happened in the last 70 years are just not going to cut it you know what i mean

03:32:20.860 now i agree completely uh it used to be a lot more common to even bring up the jq i remember

03:32:27.100 bill cooper in behold a pale horse he famously had to remove i think like the second half of

03:32:33.480 that book because he i think it was just reprinting the protocols of the elders of zion in there

03:32:37.900 but uh no i agree completely and i like that you you had to step back and sort of doing a meta

03:32:45.880 analysis on conspiracy theory culture itself which is where i'm at and i'm working on

03:32:50.400 an article for my sub stack the vanguardist journal that's one of the reasons i was so excited

03:32:55.940 to talk to you about this you know one thing and i because i wanted to explain or state this to you

03:33:02.280 see what you think about it i i noticed with what we might call conspiracy theories i don't

03:33:08.320 even like using that terminology as i'm sure you know that seems like a pejorative cooked up by the

03:33:12.480 cia um but one thing i had noticed is like i know my favorite definition of propaganda was

03:33:20.920 written by jacques lul who defined it not just in the way edward bernays would do which is just a

03:33:27.200 mass media control but he's a truly propagandized individual you can tell them because when someone's

03:33:33.480 propagandized the propaganda sits outside of their logic and reason if you had to create a map of

03:33:40.260 their mind you know it's not subject to reason but it creates a pavlovian response so you know

03:33:46.440 the one example i gave before was i'm catholic so i was sitting in mass one day and i think at some

03:33:54.320 point, this was years ago, the priest, he'd mentioned something about homosexuality is

03:33:58.860 critical of homosexuality. And there's just this chill in the room. Like you're not supposed to

03:34:03.200 say that regardless of where you are or what you might actually believe. You just, it's the phrase

03:34:09.560 you're not supposed to say that. It's not subject to reason. You know, it doesn't make sense,

03:34:14.940 but you just, you feel it. There's a chill, there's a tightness in you. And so with conspiracy

03:34:20.220 theories, there's a similar Pavlovian response that I think was intentionally produced where

03:34:25.680 people don't even want to look at conspiracies in the particular. And if they do, they have to

03:34:32.880 explode it out into the universal or the general. This is actually how we started the conversation

03:34:38.040 tonight. One example would be, we did a whole arc on this on our show talking about a lot of the,

03:34:46.220 let's take epstein someone i mentioned in here epstein because i'd mentioned the satanic pedophile

03:34:51.780 child sacrifice cults and stuff which i believe is the most relevant and has the most evidence we

03:34:57.100 don't need to get deep into that but you know let's take epstein what i find with liberals

03:35:02.320 especially but you know with everyone kind of broadly who is propagandized it's that there's

03:35:08.600 a drive to believe that someone like epstein is just a glitch in the system and you see this with

03:35:15.860 a lot of child sex trafficking cases there's this great book called eye of the chicken hawk by

03:35:21.320 simon dovey which we covered recently and uh a lot of people when you watch the news you'll see

03:35:28.980 these cases like the elm guest house in the uk they caught a child sex trafficking ring and it

03:35:33.880 just turns out that it's popular the names were judges and ministers and senate members and chief

03:35:40.320 of police so there's always all these highly connected people and then they say well that's

03:35:44.880 weird we got it it's just a glitch in the system nothing is ever indicative of anything else so

03:35:51.080 epstein they would say yep we got him we got the one epstein there ever was and that's the system

03:35:57.440 working perfectly don't even you don't need to think any more about it but anyone who looks in

03:36:02.380 the story says well he must have just been one in the latest in a long line of entities that are

03:36:11.380 there for that express reason which is to be a procurer or a fix a sexual fixer for those in

03:36:18.900 power he's just the latest one he's disposable he proved he's disposable are you saying there's

03:36:23.160 no more epstein you fucking fool you know i mean but that's what they expect you to do because to

03:36:29.400 say anything else that would mean that well that must mean that there are people complicit in

03:36:34.440 epstein being there then everything falls apart right but you must accept you must accept that

03:36:40.920 there there can't just be this one instance but there is a um a drive within our culture especially

03:36:49.360 with a lot of the serial killers and these child sex abuse cases to say no it's just one guy one

03:36:54.320 lone wolf and that great book aberration in the heartland of the real by wendy painter

03:37:00.160 about timothy mcveigh challenging the accepted narrative on timothy mcveigh as the lone wolf the

03:37:06.140 archetypical loser lone wolf terrorist it's like well i mean if you look at the facts he didn't act

03:37:12.400 alone it's impossible he acted alone that's silly but what does that mean if he didn't act alone

03:37:17.220 where he was part of a group or if he was there at the behest of the government there's all kinds

03:37:24.160 of angles to this but you can't look at that and you've been propagandized to not want to even look

03:37:30.900 at that even propagandized to want to think well there's just these these weird lone wolves out

03:37:35.620 there and then they just randomly pop up and the system correctly finds them or and it distributes

03:37:41.900 justice so to me that that the problem with conspiracy theories is no one even knows how to

03:37:48.060 talk about them without triggering something then that takes it to the most like straw manning

03:37:53.740 extreme where it's it's a thought terminating sort of cliche in a sense that once i've once

03:38:00.260 again dumped a load of shit in your lap what do you think about that

03:38:02.920 um i'm not sure where to pick

03:38:16.840 up with that um

03:38:25.800 well one of the first things i thought and it's not necessarily directly related

03:38:29.720 but just like a taboo of predatory

03:38:33.680 and the higher up the hierarchy it goes

03:38:38.740 the more disgusting

03:38:42.220 and abrasive it is

03:38:45.380 I did a show with Pete Canones not too long ago

03:38:49.080 where we read an essay by Laurent Goyenot

03:38:52.300 I have no idea who's that guy's name

03:38:56.160 the French guy, the French anti-Semite

03:38:57.700 where he's basically reviewing psychoanalysis from like a anti-semitic point of view and he's

03:39:08.880 talking about like what's one of the many great controversies of the freudian worldview is the

03:39:18.080 fact that he moved at one point in his career from claiming that mental illness not his language

03:39:29.240 obviously was the result of sexual trauma to mental illness was the result of a fantasized

03:39:39.760 a fantastical sexual experience on the part of the individual themselves

03:39:45.200 so and there's many different interpretations as to what caused that shift uh the story i had

03:39:55.060 heard growing up was that he went presented his paper showing that sexual trauma is the cause for

03:40:01.480 all this psychic dysfunction and that basically like the vienna neurological society or whatever

03:40:09.540 it was called just laughed him laughed him out of the hole and so fearing that his career was over

03:40:16.640 he pivoted to this you know ph fantasy idea now the other point of view is that he intentionally

03:40:26.040 uh um made that transition because not because he got mocked but because nobody cared there's a lot

03:40:35.200 different explanations but the point being what he did was bring a scholarly demonstration that

03:40:41.440 there was rampant child sexual abuse within the upper levels of jewish society um and it's like

03:40:50.960 okay well like that's just one of countless million examples of like the closer you get to

03:40:57.760 the top everyone's kind of a predatory or a lot of people are or there's an endemic

03:41:05.840 predatory sort of mechanism in place and i don't know if what i'm saying now is like

03:41:11.760 fulfilling what you said about like going from the particular to the universal

03:41:15.360 but it's one of those hard things to just it's just psychologically hard to wrap your head around

03:41:21.600 because so much of it does seem to whether you're talking about pizzagate or you're talking about

03:41:27.280 um like the process church and the son of sam killer uh are you talking about the manson family

03:41:33.840 or you weirdly the founders like that was a conspiracy from like five or ten years ago uh

03:41:40.720 all of these weird things the satanic panic all of these things that kind of weirdly seem to cohere

03:41:47.200 and the and the uh constituent elements all uh predates predatory sexual behavior abuse of the

03:41:56.560 young affiliations with the government uh uh some sort of like either breakaway religious cult or

03:42:04.240 formal uh formal affiliation with a mainstream religious institution um

03:42:14.640 i think if i'm trying to make something coherent out of this uh

03:42:20.480 it's there's sort of like a psychological taboo against systemic predatory violence that like

03:42:30.060 makes it impossible to conceptualize any of this in any coherent way does any of that make any sense

03:42:37.840 no it does and uh that's one of the problems that you're seeing is weird for caring about it a lot

03:42:44.260 of people i know are subjected to that like why do you even care about you must be a pedophile if

03:42:48.840 care about pedophilia but i think people want to reject the idea that this can come from a purely

03:42:56.500 logical route instead of some obtuse fetishistic route which is probably what governs their lives

03:43:05.500 um but uh yeah sorry i didn't want to i was trying to get through this episode without taking it down

03:43:11.400 the satanic pedophilia route but it is just that we talked about that uh quite a bit on the show

03:43:18.080 recently and um what do you think because i i was doing a panel recently and i know we gotta get

03:43:28.120 going soon so we can probably wrap it up in just a bit but i wanted to talk about this panel i was

03:43:33.680 on um it was we called it the christian pagan synthesis summit and brought together some

03:43:39.360 pegs and christians and i'll just to briefly summarize it it was the the core message near

03:43:46.560 the end was that um and we referenced this book the disenchantment of the world by marcel gaucher

03:43:53.600 among others and it was saying that both christians and pagans and most spiritual people

03:43:58.400 are trapped in such a liberal context they cannot apprehend spiritual ideas like the ancients would

03:44:06.720 or like their great ancestors would the approach from a very logical position even though they

03:44:12.640 might be very very faithful they lack the psychological or even biological mechanisms

03:44:20.000 to truly immerse themselves in the transcendence we're a meta people we try and you know encircle

03:44:26.800 everything step back from it and understand it and dissect it and i wonder you know we had mentioned

03:44:32.480 before how conspiracy theories or conspiracies as such are sort of a new they would say it's a

03:44:39.120 a new religion. I would reject that. But there's something there. There's a germ of an idea that

03:44:44.680 conspiracy culture is integral to the American identity and that the fantastical speculation

03:44:54.300 works hand in glove with politics. And I just do wonder, and again, see if you can follow me on

03:45:01.620 this like do you think conspiracy culture a is integral to the american identity b do you see

03:45:11.180 it getting like with so and so on more popular more normalized c if so is that good or bad

03:45:19.900 and d i don't know like what are your thoughts on on that like do you think

03:45:26.240 this this this is something that will mutate in the future and maybe make more extremists

03:45:32.720 fewer extremists what do you think i yeah i mean if i if i remember what you're saying correctly

03:45:42.680 i don't think uh

03:45:44.760 i'd be exposing myself as an illiterate jackass i mean i don't know that uh

03:45:54.860 there would have been a conception of conspiratorial worldview in Benjamin.

03:46:04.740 I mean, I think, I think they just saw it in a non-pejorative way.

03:46:11.900 Like there are powers in the world that are organizing things and influencing

03:46:19.600 things. And we are, we have our counter conspiracy and there are

03:46:23.020 conspirators over there there's conspirators over here and we're doing our own conspiracy

03:46:27.260 i mean i think i think there's just a practical uh acceptance of the fact that people

03:46:33.400 orchestrate they organize to orchestrate um and and so to say there was a conspiracy culture

03:46:44.140 i think there's a conspiracy culture now now i think that yeah that's more what i was saying

03:46:52.000 that now let's say it started in the 60s in earnest 50s and 60s and it's gone just to where

03:46:58.300 we are now it's gone to the point where if it hasn't happened yet i can see jd vance out there

03:47:04.160 waning on ufos like i think the next few presidential candidates will be talking about

03:47:10.940 ufos we'll be talking about interdimensional beings like that's because alex jones shit

03:47:16.200 is so normal like the career of alex jones generally can be seen as a transition into the

03:47:23.400 zeitgeist of that sort of thing something well what are the consequences of that the consequences

03:47:29.060 of the integration of the fantastical the normal where everybody's a fucking conspiracy i don't i

03:47:34.480 don't know if there's one person that doesn't think that there's some kind of crazy conspiracy

03:47:40.120 going on in america who lives in america i guess that's where i'm coming from

03:47:43.400 yeah well you know um so in i don't remember if this is in the new book or the last book but i i

03:47:53.720 i make the argument that there were i use the phrase suspicion culture i don't call it conspiracy

03:48:01.000 culture uh i use the phrase suspicion culture just as a way to to kind of describing heavily

03:48:07.080 loaded language so if we're talking about suspicion culture we're saying the the social forces that

03:48:14.440 produce skepticism and paranoia and doubt and and this is actually like a subfield in sociology so

03:48:23.880 it's not just like my own cockamamie word uh it's called agnotology and the whole again this very

03:48:30.760 similar idea that uh there's an intentional production of skepticism and doubt and paranoia

03:48:38.440 and conspiracism um so if you want to say that there was a suspicion culture of the 20th century

03:48:47.000 uh it was in response heavily uh shrouded widespread transformational change happening all

03:48:57.320 across the world technologically politically culturally and people were trying to get to

03:49:04.040 the bottom of it and like each decade of the 20th century sort of had its own

03:49:10.200 transformational you know historical transformations of historical significance

03:49:16.200 um you know if you want to go from like sort of the og conspiracy uh material it's you know

03:49:23.640 was it 1913 and Jekyll Island right uh into World War I into what caused the Great Depression

03:49:32.600 into you know civil rights sexual revolution into the Cold War Iran-Contra in

03:49:41.960 to Timothy McVeigh Waco Ruby Ridge into 9-11 like they're all of these sort of hallmark moments

03:49:50.520 and they all engendered their own sort of culture of suspicion and in the 20th century I think you

03:49:57.600 could say for the most part in in one of the books I don't remember which one I think it

03:50:01.920 might be intolerant interpretations I call it post-modern suspicion culture and and my argument

03:50:09.560 is that it was sort of quote-unquote conspiratorial environment because there was

03:50:15.840 because this this was before conspiratorialism sort of became a consumer identity before it

03:50:24.900 became a commoditized product and and the fact that people now make being a conspiracy theorist

03:50:36.000 their whole personality is an expression of the fact that it has become a consumer identity

03:50:42.000 is that is that um which is sort of speaking to the fact that more primary identity markers

03:50:50.000 are completely out of touch to these same way that i could say i'm a

03:50:55.440 german irish catholic some people will say i'm a conspiracy theorist

03:51:02.520 um and and we'll take that on as a as a like a social identity

03:51:08.720 I think that's where the more fantastical bordering on antisocial sort of

03:51:17.180 territorial conjecture comes from, where it's more solipsistic. It's more self-reflect

03:51:27.880 sort of masturbation it's it's it's not not even about uncovering anything it's a it's about a

03:51:40.960 sort of endlessly speculative discourse that doesn't yeah you know what it's not even there's

03:51:48.700 um one example i always give because i i do think there's a extreme politicization of

03:51:54.420 conspiracy theories in the sense of i'm going to use a friend of mine as an example his name is

03:51:58.940 johnny monoxide host of the paranormies right and i'm not saying anything i think they would

03:52:03.680 disagree with but you know their byline is everything is fake and gay right so they they

03:52:11.460 accept everything they reject any consensus on anything so it's flat earth plus tartaria

03:52:18.640 plus hollow earth hollow moon all of it at once every female celebrity is trans i don't know

03:52:25.540 they're pretty big show i'm sure you've heard of them um and i've spoke interviewed them on the

03:52:30.500 show and i gave them a phenomenal performance on android wk on there but many people love it

03:52:36.960 everyone's talking about it but even though i don't subscribe to those conspiracy theories i

03:52:45.340 say that with the utmost affection towards them i understand how they got there i understand that and

03:52:51.980 this is what you're talking about like a culture of suspicion even if it's not conspiracy theories

03:52:56.300 but there is a constant rumbling suspicion of everything correctly so but if you've lived your

03:53:04.460 life and you've been lied to and you and you've watched the exposes you understand

03:53:10.460 the history of the cia you understand you've been through covid you've been through everything

03:53:15.120 at what point do you just say you know what i don't believe in anything you've said i if you

03:53:21.540 spend time within the dissonant right alt right whatever you want to call it you're big into

03:53:26.740 revisionist history you understand the fraudulence of the post-war consensus you're like okay how

03:53:32.100 much of my everyday life is a lie why not everything's a lie and until further notice

03:53:39.100 you need to reassert the basics to me guess what you got to prove to me the fucking earth is round

03:53:43.960 because i you've lied to me so often about other science related things vaccines whatever it might

03:53:51.320 be so like i even though i don't describe the conspiracy theories i do understand where they're

03:53:56.480 coming from from a political position almost or an intellectual position and i understand

03:54:01.520 the demands they're making of you need to reassert the fundamentals of this society because you've

03:54:08.180 You've lost so much trust with me.

03:54:10.240 And I think more and more people are jumping on that bandwagon.

03:54:13.720 That's where I was trying to get at with where do we see this going?

03:54:16.780 Because using Candace Owens as an example, I see conspiracy, the kookier, more fringe

03:54:24.220 conspiracy stuff.

03:54:25.780 Fuck, flat earth theory is an example.

03:54:27.480 Flat earth theory is so fucking popular.

03:54:30.540 It's wild how big flat earth theory is.

03:54:33.820 So what are the political consequences of that going forward?

03:54:36.860 Because I do hear, I look at that and I, I see people screaming out for some kind of legitimacy.

03:54:44.540 They can tell something is deeply off in society.

03:54:48.700 And so they've, they've checked out of that reality.

03:54:53.660 That's what that looks like to me.

03:54:57.580 Yeah, I don't think there's a political consequence to that.

03:55:01.100 because i think by going in this direction and everything you just said i basically cosign

03:55:08.220 like i understand that that's that people have gone in this direction i understand why they've

03:55:14.780 gone in this direction i view the sort of antidote to that as as a conscious

03:55:22.060 sort of methodical rejection or turning away from mass society i mean this rampant

03:55:30.140 conspiratorialism is a fact of mass technological society basically in its in its death throes right

03:55:41.980 um the the the or i should say not that the mass technological society is in its death throes

03:55:47.820 but that it can be a functioning society uh i think everyone's like you're saying in the same

03:55:55.340 way that nobody believes anything um i think most people sort of acknowledge that they can't even

03:56:05.180 get their bait from society as it is presently constituted um and so to me the the solution to

03:56:13.740 this sort of and again i say this lovingly as well the sort of hair-brained conspiratorialism

03:56:21.180 really is is a methodical turning away

03:56:25.340 away from mass technological society i don't quite mean going amish per se but i mean like

03:56:32.760 intentionally pairing down one's engagements with the sort of trappings of technological society

03:56:42.060 because if people are going to continue going in this direction you've just described

03:56:45.980 the johnny monoxides of the world and again i don't mean that in a negative way to drive an

03:56:50.480 oxide if he's who i think he is i believe i've actually met him and he's a very nice guy

03:56:55.120 he used to grill post in our chat all the fucking time he's one of our top guys as far as i'm

03:57:00.860 concerned he knows his way around a brisket and that's high praise if for people to go down this

03:57:09.700 route is to become depoliticized and so you have a mass of depoliticized schizotypal people who

03:57:21.480 uh i don't know if that's better or worse than like you know the generation that was

03:57:29.960 raised on tv and was like similarly maybe it's just one successive wave of technological

03:57:36.600 depoliticization after another you had normies watching tv not knowing really their ass from

03:57:42.440 their elbow and being herded in one direction or another and then maybe had another generation

03:57:48.080 through nintendo and xbox and whatever um and now another generation through tiktok and uh x

03:57:57.180 and instagram and i mean i think ultimately all these things really are are different forms of

03:58:04.000 depoliticization which is another way of saying like people losing their agency and they're not

03:58:09.980 even just losing their agency as political animals but also as just social animals they're not

03:58:18.940 engaged in a sort of process of creative production whether that means starting a family

03:58:25.020 or having a meaningful sort of work related identity or artistic or whatever all the sort

03:58:36.180 of foundational primal things that give us meaning this endless sort of conspiratorial

03:58:42.960 ideation is is like supplanting all of that in the same way that marijuana or like heroin

03:58:49.220 supplants a lot of that or watching too much mtv supplants all that you know what i mean

03:58:54.860 absolutely and i think that's probably the best place to wrap this up because i got to everything

03:59:02.340 i wanted to get to i got my spiels in i got my big booty tangents and so i'm absolutely thrilled

03:59:10.340 at everything we got to talk about i wanted to throw up your twitter here to make sure people

03:59:14.980 follow you on there this is josh neal you got to find him at still jay neal he's back

03:59:20.820 you retired for a bit if i'm not mistaken

03:59:23.860 yeah i um right after the second book came out i just

03:59:33.100 was it because i've listened to like i said i've i've followed your stuff for quite some time

03:59:39.200 and uh you're very forthcoming with with all of your background information i met we could

03:59:45.640 have talked for an hour just on your experience in the band and your opinions on music in fact

03:59:50.340 we had a comment from rumble up here and i want to get to it now before we go let's see if i can

03:59:56.120 find it he was basically asking what you're listening to right now i don't know if that

04:00:01.020 meant yeah here it is from tower of bones based i asked joshua he's been listening to lately he

04:00:07.180 knows his shit i don't know if that means music or podcasts or what but if you wanted to shout

04:00:12.700 not only your own plugs here but anything that you've been liking recently

04:00:16.720 anything that you can like and receive i uh my girlfriend got me a record player for my birthday

04:00:25.040 and so i've been trying to get into records which is actually really tricky because i've been

04:00:29.840 just like a music playlist ipod guy for the last 15 years that the concept of just listening to an

04:00:38.000 eight song record three songs at a time or four songs at a time because you got to turn it over

04:00:43.920 was like sort of like bending my brain a little bit um so but i did pick up diary of a madman

04:00:51.840 i went through a heavy ozzy born phase like a year and a half ago i see for most of my life

04:00:57.360 um and then i went into his back catalog and realized literally every album he put out until

04:01:03.600 like 1995 was like a phenomenal album uh yeah that ozzy's lost time that reality show really

04:01:12.160 fucked up a lot of people's image kind of like robert de niro's later career people forget like

04:01:17.680 he used to be an actor but like there's there's a reason ozzy was synonymous with the genre

04:01:24.320 as was black sab but ozzy was putting out good there's just so many it's like everyone he had

04:01:33.920 the most improbable collection of musicians around him great bass players who wrote his

04:01:41.520 lyrics for him great drummers uh i forget the name of the guy who played on uh bark at the moon

04:01:50.800 tommy something or other great great drum fill um and like every guitar player he had

04:01:57.280 jake lee the album is seriously good but um and i'll tell you this i even like his new stuff i

04:02:05.280 even like patient number nine there's a lot of great songs in there i thought some people might

04:02:09.840 disagree but you can like the old stuff and the new stuff too i think the album he put out with

04:02:16.320 uh behind the kit and i was like this is actually really good um but as i'm getting older like

04:02:24.960 i don't know my my learning that uh i'm slipping into boomerdom because i hear the new stuff

04:02:31.360 that's on youtube and i'm like my god this is terrible

04:02:35.520 um well we're rediscovering pop punk right now every pop punk right now well this this is the

04:02:44.960 thing that's weird to me i the music that people are starting to get nostalgic for

04:02:48.880 is the music of our youth and i didn't like it when we were uh it's sort of this like this like

04:02:55.500 ironic rediscovery of creed and nickelback i'm like guys this was this was awful the first time

04:03:03.960 around i'll tell you this though i'm a contrarian at heart like i'm about to be out there and like

04:03:08.960 nickelback's fucking good i and i say that i'll tell people that i've never listened to nickelback

04:03:15.360 very much i just want to have that opinion that's a that's a way that's the most contrarian it could

04:03:22.200 possibly be because they were literally a punching bag until just about five minutes ago um you know

04:03:28.580 who i like i like tears for fears has a good back catalog um oh we got one here from geo he says ask

04:03:37.480 josh if he liked the portal album by cynic when they had that female lounge singer

04:03:43.040 geo's got me beat i don't even know what any of those words mean geo you killed the

04:03:51.340 stream thanks a lot bud we're going we're up to talk about motorhead and you throw a

04:03:56.340 monkey wrench into the train tracks here uh but oh here comes you on the chat no nickelback album

04:04:04.720 curry was you know here's the thing i got a pretty eclectic uh taste in music a lot which

04:04:11.360 frustrates and enrages a lot of people so even a lot of like they're rediscovering some pop punk

04:04:17.620 right now i'm like you know i like some of that i got i got a wife and she was she got me a little

04:04:23.640 bit in a panic at the disco there later stuff like okay i get this there's some stuff i don't

04:04:28.460 get but i get this um but i also have a lot of metal in rotation i'm not discovering older bands

04:04:36.620 like i used to i used to be really big into music and i got really big into digging through the

04:04:41.920 crates finding old bands from the 70s and 80s and whatnot and that's something i haven't done in

04:04:49.500 quite some time i'm still doing that actually that's i'm i'm fine you know there's so much

04:04:56.640 stuff i listened to when i was younger that i physically my stomach turns listening to it

04:05:01.520 partly because like the the lyrical stuff doesn't resonate with me but also i'm like starting to

04:05:08.660 realize like oh these guys like we're not good songwriters like this is just like dumb riffing

04:05:13.400 like i loved soundgarden when i was younger and now i listen to like a lot of it and it's like

04:05:18.480 actually chris cornell is not a good singer and like there's this this is just like clunky riffing

04:05:24.220 where about music they wouldn't play it that way you know so i'm finding myself continually going

04:05:31.020 further back uh like talk talk i think my favorite decade now is basically the 1980s

04:05:37.800 and i almost don't listen to anything regardless of genre i almost don't listen to anything that

04:05:43.520 wasn't produced in the 1980s i love talk talk even their pop stuff but they're also their

04:05:49.280 experimental stuff is really really good i gotta listen to some talk i haven't heard about them

04:05:54.740 um and are they popular now because i'm going to give them a shot i was about to say though

04:06:00.820 do you remember uh you're talking about sound garden that's the type of vocal style

04:06:06.280 that i was hoping would come back and it hasn't where

04:06:10.120 like that that can make a comeback that was a very strange masculine style that no one does

04:06:21.880 anymore he i got this before chris cornell died and i'm really glad that i did um because

04:06:31.600 as they played well for one they played a bunch of songs that they don't ever play

04:06:36.620 and they were really really good

04:06:39.080 I got to see Stone Temple Pilots

04:06:40.580 just before Scott Weiland killed himself

04:06:42.200 and again

04:06:42.720 there were so many recordings

04:06:48.640 of them blowing it

04:06:49.920 night after night

04:06:51.340 because they were so good

04:06:53.800 and they played all of my favorite songs

04:06:56.660 there's this band

04:06:59.600 and I guess they've been popular for a couple of years now

04:07:02.340 the Cleveland thing

04:07:04.140 um greta van fleetwood or something like that whatever whatever the the name

04:07:10.620 um it seems like the younger guys that are doing rock and roll now

04:07:17.700 are like very feminine and doing more she stuff than the gruff stuff um

04:07:24.740 yeah oh i was even watching just one of those i was watching those music documentaries about

04:07:30.340 like metallica for some reason i was just on a trip and i got this video about the history

04:07:35.420 in the background behind the saint anger album which is a bit different than the some kind of

04:07:39.880 monster documentary and uh it was explaining how kurt you know they were getting into writing

04:07:47.240 lyrics that were trying to you know ape new metal at the time so you saw them talking about more

04:07:53.720 like personal frustration and stuff and it lost some of its rock edge that they would have

04:07:59.760 established on earlier albums even on load and reload but uh yeah there's when i think of rock

04:08:06.320 bands that are doing it in a way that i think would you know be relevant to the legacy of rock

04:08:13.840 the only one i could think of right now is queens of the stone age the queens of the stone age might

04:08:18.400 be the only cool band i can think of and cool in a way that's not putting it on or trying to

04:08:25.200 are like effortlessly cool and still cool when they're being supremely weird i so i was i was

04:08:33.860 just uh james edwards of the political cesspool was the queen of the stonage album all the way

04:08:40.440 back from that and they still do have it it's a shame though because john theodore is their

04:08:45.000 drummer the guy from uh the mars volta and i feel like he's severely in the queens of the stone age

04:08:51.300 but they're yeah they still got it going on um well here's what it comes down to like i don't

04:08:57.720 even listen to bands anymore i've sort of fallen into the youtube rabbit hole of like individual

04:09:05.840 performers so like there's like a lot of guitar guys that just do like fusion stuff

04:09:11.780 like frank and bali would be one example uh and it's like once you can hear buckethead of course

04:09:18.500 buffett head of course yeah well he he's he's like sort of a cartoon but like once you can hear guys

04:09:24.620 who can play with the fluidity in the way that you and i are speaking i can't go back and listen

04:09:30.600 to a guy like brutalize the the minor pentatonic scale like i literally can it's just like blow my

04:09:37.960 brains out this is like it would be like imagine if you went around and you could only use seven

04:09:43.660 words in every conversation that you ever had it's just like who you wouldn't want to talk to

04:09:48.780 that person so i got i got vin ghoul trying to crawl up my penis hole right here did dimes

04:09:54.860 mention queens of the stone age as a contemporary man 20 20 year old reference you

04:09:59.580 fucking scarecrow of fraudulent cloth that's not what i said i bet i just said they're the

04:10:04.540 only ones i could think now that are doing it so you stand corrected i guess all right go ahead josh

04:10:09.980 sorry yeah i uh i i feel like if we kept going we could keep going so i'll just say follow me

04:10:20.780 on twitter still jneil follow me on substack jneil.substack.com uh pick up my books from

04:10:27.820 imperiumpress.org and antelope hill publishing and um dimes you're like the 10 millionth person

04:10:35.020 to ask me about another book there isn't another book but i will take recommendations if few people

04:10:40.620 definitely want well that's good because i i see these as one coherent work and that's why i was

04:10:46.780 trying to get at the start like i i do see a conceptual through line through all three of

04:10:50.380 them if this was at these three make sense to me read back to back to back uh for a fourth one i

04:10:57.500 I would recommend launching into a totally new triptych,

04:11:03.440 a new set of Joker's cards, if you will.

04:11:07.940 So anyway, thank you so much.

04:11:10.160 This has been a phenomenal talk.

04:11:11.740 Big fan of all your work.

04:11:13.180 I can echo the sentiment.

04:11:14.560 Go buy these books.

04:11:16.880 I wasn't goofing when I called him a popular man.

04:11:20.040 He's one of the best writers we got going.

04:11:22.420 I think Antelope Hill and Imperium Press are premier publishers.

04:11:27.500 nothing but good stuff coming out of them so if that ain't enough reason to buy then i don't want

04:11:34.040 you living i'd rather you you go into the uh the the the stupid fucker cubing machine all right

04:11:44.560 thank you so much everyone for tuning in i think we got it we got all the goods no no other chats

04:11:49.640 to get to thank you so much everyone for taking the time i'll see you next time

04:11:53.640 Hey, baby, I hear the blues are calling

04:11:57.200 Tossed salads and scrambled eggs

04:12:00.080 And maybe I seem a bit confused

04:12:04.640 Yeah, maybe, but I got you, Peg

Blood Satellite - June 27, 2025

Gen Y Got Mmmkay Ultra'd

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