00:22:22like oh serves them right yeah it's me me i'm the sicko at the window going yes i i like watching
00:22:31it i like that we did this now because there's a lot of people who gave their opinion the night of
00:22:37a couple days after we've had a bit of time to percolate and ruminate on it and see what the
00:22:45response has been what the copes have been maybe a week after so i don't know i liked looking at
00:22:54the voting demographics by race and by age because some people say the youth vote swung
00:23:00away from trump but you can't break it down by ethnicity the young latino vote versus the young
00:23:06white vote i'm looking at ctv news right now democrats won back support from five key groups
00:23:13that shifted towards trump in 2024 uh there's a you know everyone not everyone but some people
00:23:20were saying that it all had to do with the war in iran now i'm curious to hear what you think
00:23:26about this so there's a few key demographics that stuck out to me young white men swung away from
00:23:33trump pretty pretty significantly towards the democrats i tend to think that was due to the
00:23:40war in iran right and also feeling generally betrayed by his policies right uh do you think
00:23:48that would be fair to say as like a single main issue i mean i you can't discount the war in iran
00:23:55but i think you need to pay attention to like the average iq of the american population most of them
00:24:01not clued into the war in iran or why it matters well i'm talking about the young white male vote0.94
00:24:07Right, but the young white male vote is just as retarded as the old white male vote, which is to say that half of them are below 100 IQ. So like the young white male vote, many of them who voted for Trump are fucking retards. And they're probably mad at Trump for not their Iran betrayal, that was a big betrayal, but all the other betrayals, the immigration betrayal and the gas price betrayal and the jobs and the housing betrayal and all the other betrayals that hit those poor suckers right where it hurts.1.00
00:24:34so they have they have more pressing reasons again considering most of those people i'm talking about
00:24:39are poor they have a lot of reasons a lot more important like i agree with them that they have0.92
00:24:44better reasons to hate trump than the fucking war on iran i think that the war on iran as a canadian0.99
00:24:49intellectual was the the biggest fuck up of his tenure but i would not fault the average american0.99
00:24:57for not giving a fuck about the war on iran but caring about gas prices immigration jobs all of1.00
00:25:04all of the shit that he had the last two years0.99
00:25:06to do, and he didn't fucking do any of it.0.99
01:16:03Remember, even after Trump lost the election, they were still talking like he was in charge behind the scenes, that he was the real puppet master.
01:16:11You heard some wild nonsense during that time.
01:22:15Yeah, Charles Darwin. So you have these religious texts right side by side with scientific texts and secular texts. And that's interesting. That might create some philosophical or intellectual tension, but I don't think you can even really debate that Charles Darwin sits right alongside the Bible and Shakespeare and something that defines Western.
01:22:43is that a would you agree with that um can you can you restate it i missed it do you do you think
01:22:54if we talk about the western canon books that are essential to our identity it would be the bible
01:23:03um whether or not you're christian i don't think darwin is included in that no i wouldn't say that
01:23:09i don't think so it's scientific literature i mean well that's what i'm saying like it doesn't
01:23:14it's an observation of reality like i unless unless you want to just be if we can be you know
01:23:20we can be that guy and just say oh well it's very western to observe reality and be be smart i guess
01:23:27well kind of like the the theory of evolution i think it has it's been whether or not and how
01:49:13So rejected as heresy by the early Christian church and lost for 1,700 years.
01:49:18The document was rediscovered in Egypt in the 70s, decades of neglect and poor storage, which is very common to the Egyptians, led to the degradation of much of the maze, which would lead to the loss of portions of the text.
01:49:30After undergoing extensive restoration and preservation, an English translation was published in 2006 by the National Geographic Society.
01:49:38Who wants to hear what Judas has to say, huh?
02:05:34And what I really enjoy about it is that it really gets to the heart of what we identify with as celebrity today.
02:05:41Like, I mean, celebrity does not mean what it meant for our parents.
02:05:44Like, yes, there are silver screen movie stars and things, but even most of the hit film actors of today were still the same hit film actors 30 years ago that you would see on late night TV.
02:05:53And now that we have the Internet, our understanding of celebrity has radically changed.
02:05:57I mean, we just there's like 40 of you in this room and you all came to see two niche Internet micro e-celebrities, for God's sake.
02:14:21But that's why I think the beginning of it, and we can start with the Renaissance, or whatever you want.
02:14:27Well, we'll start with the Renaissance, but I really appreciated this section at sort of the introduction,
02:14:30which is just, self-made is also a story of how the social upheavals and technological transformation of the early modern period
02:14:37helped usher in two narratives of what self-making looked like.
02:14:41In one, a largely European narrative-based, self-making was something available to a very particular, very special kind of person,
02:14:48A natural aristocrat, which is to say not necessarily someone of high birth, but rather of graceful wit or bulging muscles or artistic creativity, could use his innate ability to determine his own life to set himself above the common bourgeois herd.
02:15:01The other, a predominantly American story, self-making was something that anyone could do so long as they put in sufficient amount of grit and elbow grease.
02:15:08Conversely, if they failed to do so, that meant they were lacking on an existential as well as pragmatic level.
02:15:12These two narratives, more similar than they might at first glance appear, converged in the 20th century with the rise of Hollywood and a new image of what mass-market stardom, simultaneously innate and self-taught, could look like.
02:15:24We'll get to that later, but there's a demarcation between the European-British-French version of this and the American one, where in Europe, I think they would have birthed the concept.
02:25:38But he's allowing himself to have this own sense of,
02:25:41I'm just as important. I am also just, you know, it's as the Beatles had said, you know, like we're, we're, we're bigger than Jesus. And that sort of sense of like, how do I transgress the cultural norm at the time allows me to create this sense of aura, the sense of celebrity, the sense of self.
02:25:56And that's really where for the first third of the book, like, you know, Tara is really focused on, like, the transgression of the political and religious norms in Western Europe are really what enable you to stand out as a sense of celebrity.
02:27:06as we covered Marshall McLuhan and Harold Ennis
02:27:10about how you have space-based communication and time-based communication.
02:27:16And time-based communication constantly requires you to reprint.
02:27:18This is the communication of empires because things go out of mind very quickly because you're distant from the imperial subject.
02:27:26And this is why paper records are so important.
02:27:28And in the internet, we can constantly reify and reaffirm positions of identity or takes very quickly.
02:27:35And what makes it so interesting about the internet is, I joked earlier that Twitter turns us all into these zombies that can't pass the marshmallow test.
02:27:41But if we consider, let's just say, well, let's reset the clock to 2020.
02:27:44Think of the number of people throughout the last six years that have had the most horrendous takes on elections, COVID, vaccinations, etc.
02:27:54And how many of them, if you call them out on their previous takes, they're either going to dodge, ignore, or say that that's not them anymore.
02:28:01And so, yeah, because you can constantly be transgressive and constantly reify a new position or take the exact opposite take that you had maybe two weeks ago.
02:28:09Even Hassan Piker is a really good example of this.
02:48:41is hard to discern tone and anyone who's texted anybody in here knows that sometimes unless you
02:48:46know the person very well it's hard to read tone when you're texting somebody they created the
02:48:51little forward slash s to make sure that the reader knows that you're being sarcastic as if
02:48:57i couldn't tell on the world's worst website known to man um but like that's a part of it and so
02:49:03as we transition now into the enlightenment and we'll do some more transitioning later um
02:49:08Well, it's okay. It's in the book. Don't worry. There will be no trooting out today.
02:49:15But on the question of the Enlightenment, we'll start here.
02:49:18The German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his 1784 essay on what exactly Enlightenment was supposed to be
02:49:24famously defined it as man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.
02:49:29The unenlightened, by contrast, were depicted like toddlers of the time would have been grasping, groping, if you will,
02:49:35leading strings to guide them in their parents' directions.
02:49:37Denis Diderot and Jean-Renaud Lambert's encyclopedia likewise celebrated the birth of what they saw as a new era full of light in which canny philosophers would be able to shake off the last yoke of authority. Tradition, mores, customs, prejudice, all were dirty words for Enlightenment thinkers.
02:49:53Another philosopher, Marquis de Corquette, claimed that the goal of his, rather ambitious, sketch for historical progress of the human mind was to remove the true nature of all of our prejudices.
02:50:04The English philosopher John Locke marveled that there was scarce that the principle of morality to be named or rule of virtue to be thought on,
02:50:18which is not, somewhere or other, slighted and condemned by the general fashion of the whole societies of men,
02:50:24governed by practical opinions of rulers living quite opposite of others.
02:50:27The enlightened man, unlike his forebearers, recognized that the social imaginary into which he had been born in
02:56:42Where does that go about when everybody's a pervert?
02:56:47It depends how, because on one hand you have people saying that younger generations now are more perverted than they've ever been.0.77
02:56:56but also that they're having less sex than ever before so there's this almost like fake fetishism
02:57:04in a sense like how many of these people who are hyper perverted are actually engaging in these
02:57:09acts that's an interesting you know dichotomy there like is it all just like like people like
02:57:15with the whole genderqueer thing like that's made up like that's just like a made up thing that
02:57:20people like you say and then they turn it off later so how much of it is actually serious we
02:57:26We were talking about, like, furries, too.0.96
02:57:28What we were talking about earlier, we were talking about how it's almost, it's like a society-wide shit test for people to see, like, what can you get away with?0.98
02:57:48But a good portion of that, too, I think is also explained by the fact that, like, computer-mediated communication facilitates ideas or perversions that can never be engaged with in the real world.
02:58:00Like, you cannot inflate into the size of, like, a hot air balloon, right?
02:58:04Like, sorry, I know that that gets someone going, but, like, listen, like, you can't do that in real life.
03:05:36Yeah, I think that, like, we've taken the keeping up with the Joneses to, like, it's the hyper-real extent that we can,
03:06:00which is like I can always compare myself to another person or I can compare my like social
03:06:06blade tracking to someone of like equal or moderate size of my own account or whatever like
03:06:10that happens quite regularly and I think that that forces people to act in a certain way I mean like
03:06:15and that's even been parodied too prior to social media like the Stepford Wives I think is a really0.88
03:06:19good example of this where like this feminist woman realizes that like all these happy trad0.97
03:06:23wives are secretly brainwashed but like that's her own projection her own comparison to that time
03:06:28So I think that, you know, the idea of being self-made today has certainly changed from maybe a creation story of like, well, you know, God allowed me to do this, or I pulled my own bootstraps up and to do it.
03:06:42Because now everything is just, how do I compare myself to the other guy?
03:06:44I'm going to say some weird shit, and I hope it answers your question.0.90
03:06:48So as I say that, I'm just reminded of McLuhan.0.98
03:06:50And we're talking about McLuhan, him and I, we're just hanging out, and how people quote McLuhan, but they don't really know what he means.
03:06:58you hear people say the medium is the message i had professors say that and have like the wrong
03:07:03idea of what that means i think that's just that's how you write for the screen
03:07:09yeah like most people who say it's she needs to stay on a cruise and just never come back it's
03:07:13kind of like when people quote nietzsche like we were talking laughing at that she'd mean like
03:07:17god is dead nietzsche nietzsche's dead god like that's not what he was saying really0.86
03:07:23But people, like, you learned about these people through fucking affirmation meme posters.0.96
03:07:28But the idea is, like, with McLuhan, we talked about auto-amputation.0.97
03:07:32When he talked about media, he includes tools.
03:07:37So he would include hammers and stuff, anything that kind of extends the sense.
03:22:53measure, like, someone self-made this by his wealth, how much money he made?
03:22:57yeah well that's it you almost want to give them more money if they have money
03:23:02like if there's like a momentum or something behind it it's like sometimes
03:23:05it's not even tied to money like you get the money by being let us in Elizabeth
03:23:09Holmes like she got the money she's already kind of well off right but by
03:23:14being more confident having the crazier idea and just saying well what is back
03:23:18in that company crazy eyes out it must be yeah it meant that really like just
03:23:24tractor beam for nerds like seeing that type of face but but like that that's
03:23:30you think there must be something to justify like it never occurs to you that
03:23:33they're just a con artist yeah and that that's sort of like the I don't even
03:23:48want to call the third world of vacation of it of the entire economy but it is
03:23:52justify where it's like look if this person can make all this money by doing0.97
03:23:56nothing and lying am I an asshole if I'm not lying I'm gonna be like the most0.98
03:24:01honest broke person in America right so you feel kind of you feel foolish if0.99
03:24:06you're not scamming that's the problem and so that's I don't know what to do
03:24:10about that because there's some justification for that but
03:24:22you're missing out sure yeah and that's her trying to explain how we got to this
03:24:43point because no one whether they're liberal or conservative or anyone likes
03:24:48the government like everyone has accepted that's this big hulking spitting smoking machine that1.00
03:24:55they're very cynical they're very pessimistic about but no one likes the fucking government0.99
03:25:00not a single person in america whoever's in charge it's just this thing that you have to0.98
03:25:05engage with but like no no one does anything because like half the militaries there are just0.97
03:25:10for free shit like no there's like one percent of the people in the military want to be there right0.93
03:25:15which is unfortunate but i again i don't know the smart play would be to do that the smart0.99
03:25:20play would be to scam what do i tell a young guy again like be the most honest broke person in
03:25:25america or do you thrive in a corrupt system like i i don't want i don't want them to sacrifice
03:25:32themselves for me uh if we're still on uh hustle culture uh specifically really more about the
03:25:38uh whatever you want that's why you're here sure like you already gave us the money
03:25:43so there's the uh there's of course the hustle culture but there's also the uh depressing fact
03:25:54that um like the hustle culture thing largely works i mean in my line of work i frequently
03:26:01encounter people who have small businesses and stuff like that and these people are
03:26:07not geniuses. They're not, they're a point short on the billboard. So the remarkable thing though is that even though they borrow like that, they still have their own business and they're still able to pay money and they're still able to be wealthy off of that. You go to your office job, you get paid like, I don't know, $20 an hour or something like that. It's like, am I stupid? Am I an idiot? It's like, economically, it's almost
03:26:37sort of like the question of like what's the economy of being a celebrity versus just the
03:26:42rest of the economy. I don't think our economy can run off of like pure celebrity. I mean
03:26:48it's run off of service in the past, like the service industry, but even then that was
03:26:54kind of like, you know, rugby pulled out economy because I don't think celebrities would be
03:26:58much a better substitute. Yeah, because even influencer culture has been withering for
03:27:04quite some time for a few years because i do like in my career like there was a peak of
03:27:11influencer culture where people really bought into what an influencer was that they had an audience
03:27:15then the result they figured out that didn't mean anything like eyeballs and views that didn't
03:27:20translate to sales that didn't translate there's just this big kind of made-up thing that had
03:27:24momentum it's saturated and then also like they're lying about them everyone's lying about all the
03:27:30numbers all the time by the way every platform lies about their numbers every influencer lies1.00
03:27:34But it's all it's all fucking lies. That's why like I've worked with influencers in a professional capacity before it's like0.93
03:27:41They it so everyone kind of got the idea like the money is not there like it was a few years ago
03:27:49Like the easy money. Yeah, people it's like OnlyFans you have influencers getting a hundred thousand subscribers
03:27:56And they're just hucking products for like pennies on the dollar because that's what's worth now. It used to be worth way more
03:28:02but yeah yeah I mean like consider like the early 2010s I mean like Jersey Shore 90210 like there
03:28:15was this sense that even older styles of celebrity or influencer or proto-influencer was the place to
03:28:22go and I mean like one those guys are mostly washed up lest we forget that like the ShamWow
03:35:05Like if you ever listen to like Marinetti's sound poetry or his audible, I don't know what he called it,
03:35:13but it's like it's basically just him like shoving a bunch of random noises together and he said this is to simulate war and then it's to simulate the mind.
03:35:22But that's like the thought process behind the Italian Braggar character and some of them aren't even like explicitly based on some of his poems, I believe.
03:35:32I think, like, Bromadillo, Bromadillo is, like, inspired.
03:35:37I almost want to, because D'Annunzio becomes very, like, she gets into fascism later in the book.
03:36:53Well, I mean, what you have to say about fractionalization as YouTube allows everybody to find their niche audience,
03:37:00I think it's the answer to the question of where things are now.
03:37:03But I guess to relate to that, I'd be curious about core perspectives or the author's perspectives of, I guess,
03:37:09the 16th century equivalent of a lurker or a reply guy, right?
03:37:14Like how the audience has sort of changed along with these types of celebrities and sort of cultivated, you know, this sort of performance, right?
03:42:36So, like, I mean, it's hard to, like, imagine a world in which, like, this doesn't just end up completely consuming, like, 95% of the population.
03:42:49So I'm going to agree with you saying, hey, this is a filter event.
03:42:53And actually, to go back to our sheriff's question up there, you know, has there been something that we're going to return to or cyclical?
03:42:58The one thing that I am sort of very kind of optimistic on as a prediction is that the thing that's going to filter this out is going to be those that are willing to actually show up.
03:43:10Because when you're on the internet, you have digitally disincarnated yourself from time.
03:43:14And I've talked about this for years, digital deracination and the rest.
03:43:17And so I think that this sort of filter mechanism that currently exists, whether you're in industry or you're doing silly book review podcasts like ourselves,
03:43:25Like, you are willing to now go out, fly, or drive to make the time to see these people.
03:43:31And I think that that's really where the future for who survives this great filter, it's going to be the guys who show up.
03:43:40We were talking about the belief that you need to express yourself.
03:43:45Because the biggest problem we have with the situation you're describing with so much shitty content is that too many people are expressing themselves.
03:43:54most people shouldn't express themselves night like because the problem is that
03:43:59the marketplace is flooded with uncreative people who feels that they
03:44:03need to be creative to exist I've got something I need to get out well you
03:44:07don't it so you just have so I feel like just with the recent event like USA
03:44:21getting cut and then like so many different things just kind of randomly
03:44:25falling apart. I feel like a lot of the entropy that's happening, a lot of the
03:44:28distribution of the internet is more or less just kind of a more efficient thing in a way.
03:44:33Because it might also recede on its own, like not be cyclical, but people might
03:44:39get bored of expressing themselves through slop videos. Like it could it
03:44:44could just go away on its own because people know it's like there's no0.99
03:44:47audience for this there's too much bullshit being created yeah that goes0.99
03:44:54back to the auto amputation thing yeah yeah0.99
03:45:04yeah it's correct it's like it's not that they should be told not to express
03:45:10themselves that they shouldn't be told that they need to express themselves to
03:45:14exist in a sense like they they feel that they need to do this society is
03:45:19telling them that they need to be creative because only creative people
03:45:22matter so it was this like commoditization of genius of creativity
03:45:27we're like what do creative people do they make weird stuff so we have just
03:45:30people making weird stuff for the fuck of it it doesn't matter and then we're
03:45:34just driving ourselves insane but that's because they've been told that well you0.69
03:45:37need to make stuff because that's what everyone wants to do right I mean they
03:45:41don't even like doing it they just feel like there's social capital attached to that so
03:45:45you know it could be as simple as saying like you know you can just not make things it's okay to not
03:45:51make things you don't have to log on it's not fun to make things that are when you try hard to make0.77
03:45:56something it sucks i hate writing i still do it's not enjoyable you it's enjoyable is heroin you
03:46:03should do that so i i hope that that answers your question but we're going to move on to the to the0.88
03:46:09next guy well then you don't have to make up a new one okay see the flash of
03:55:18You know, and I love Lindy Man so much, it makes me wonder where he plagiarized that from.
03:55:22But to get back to your question, I mean, like, the self-made thing has radically changed even today because the last chapter of the book is about do-it-yourself.
03:55:32Because now all of a sudden, like, the American self-made thing is, like, I've made it, but because of our liberal notions of egalitarianism or, like, anyone can do it,
03:55:41you too can become rich and i mean we saw this throughout the early 2000s of like get rich quick
03:55:47seminars i mean you know ben folds famously sung about this and um stuck in the suburbs and it's
03:55:52just like that's all part of the american experience of being a self-made man like it
03:55:56doesn't matter that you're like an accountant at like you know um adp like you too can create this
03:56:01on the side i mean multi-level marketing is a big part of this we're like i'm gonna sell yeah
03:56:05victoria's secret or tupperware like we're all sell or certain ginsu knives for those who got0.99
03:56:10like scammed in college and all that's trying to tell you that you too can get out of the shit0.58
03:56:14and you know shovel your way out of it ironically like this is like david lynch's last work that he0.98
03:56:20does it's like you can shovel your way out of the shit too because that's dr jacobi it's so0.89
03:56:23interesting like you mentioned that the get rich quick scheme which is it's still going on right0.99
03:56:29yeah it's just mean but it's like there's an acknowledgement howling mutant today the way0.93
03:56:33this guy got rich is because he got rich by selling seminars on how to get rich to fools1.00
03:56:39and good for him and fuck them, right?1.00
04:01:21So anyways, the question then sort of becomes, does the dandy get to exist?
04:01:25And I think in a large part it exists in communities that are explicitly attracting or alluring to sort of the quasi-social or aloof individual.
04:01:36So I mean, like Dime Square is a really good example of this, right?
04:01:42I don't say to call myself a dandy in a pejorative sense, but, like, there is something about these kind of aloof and alluring social organizations and clubs and people that we want to follow that encourages you to maybe get off the phone and actually meet them in real life.
04:01:58And parasociality, I think, if you can create an audience where, like, there's an army of people, you're talking about, like, the whole, like, you know, young guys, like, making white flight towards, like, the Catholic Church or whatever, or just religion in general, like, they're looking for a place to go where other people are going to sound and talk just like them.
04:02:14and if you can create an army through parasocial means where like i can get 40 strangers to show
04:02:20up and like listen to me and this canadian guy talk about a book like hey in a way i'm a self-made
04:02:26man because i've now created this like demand for attention and demand for presence and so i think
04:02:31that the dandy will exist in a different form as we know it but it's only going to be hyper limited
04:02:36in the sense that yes there's online culture but it's also going to be very vapid it's not gonna
04:02:41a lot of depth and it's going to come down to is that person willing to meet you and demand your
04:02:45attention in a physical sense see to me the definition of a dandy is the statement i can
04:02:52just do x so you looked at the nobility and said i can just do that i can just be an aristocrat i can
04:02:59embrace aesthetics and all of the ornamentation of that and i'll just i'll believe that myself
04:03:05enough that other people i can make something my personality so in that if we again we can skip
04:03:10and steps there but now it's like yeah i can just be interesting there's interesting people but what
04:03:14if i had all the trappings of an interesting person that's what a novelty take is like what
04:03:20what if i didn't have a good idea but it's something that sounded like a good idea because
04:03:25it was audacious and new that's what a novelty take it's just something that's new and extreme
04:03:32it's like that now i can be like that's why dandyism is just like yeah i can i can just do
04:03:36that without any connection anything deeper but i want the status i it really is just a status game
04:03:43if you think about it because i can pretend to be this so hard that people start to believe in it
04:03:50so you see that that's what the discourse sphere is like i can i'm not an interesting person but
04:03:55i can be kind of loud and contrarian and foe mysterious and i know a few people that have
04:04:02tricked a great many people forget not us of course but like some other people you know i0.94
04:04:07mean but it's it's it's dandyism all the fucking way down because dandyism is just inauthenticity0.83
04:04:13it's inauthentic status game so does that go away i doubt it you know we just and in fact some parts0.91
04:04:20of dandy dandyism has become sort of like socially protected classes because like what is early like