In this episode, Mark and Mark discuss their new book, "Cuff and Moosie," and why they think it's a good book to read. They also talk about why the Christian culture they grew up in doesn't work anymore, and how to deal with it.
00:00:00.000To be a little speculative here and introspective and self-critical, I think what we're doing in the book itself comes out at a very interesting point in history.
00:00:13.620Because I think in some ways we're coping if we're honest with one another.
00:00:21.200And I think we're coping for America, actually.
00:00:25.000And I think that everything that's happening on the right wing is on some level a cope with the reality that this thing is failing.
00:00:38.020You aren't going to be as productive and powerful as your grandparents.
00:00:49.440I think what is going on with Christian nationalism or nationalism, et cetera, is to just double, quadruple down on what they think got us here.
00:01:03.040You know, there's this sort of interesting fact that I've heard.
00:01:06.900Eisenhower, who was president at a time when 97% of the population went to church, would end speeches with good nights.
00:01:18.580That came in the 80s when there was already a little bit of a tottering situation going on.
00:01:25.300And now we have like J.D. Vance saying, I just want y'all to, you know, say a prayer for the brave ICE agents who are murdering people out there.
00:01:35.060Like they're overtly being Christian, which in this sort of Freudian way indicates that they've already lost it.
00:01:45.380Eisenhower wasn't an atheist or something.
00:01:48.300Eisenhower didn't feel it to be mildly necessary to say God bless America or something like that.
00:01:56.560It's like a man who tells you, you know, one thing that I know about my wife is that she is faithful.
00:02:03.500She would never conceivably have an extramarital affair.
00:02:09.420You clearly know that she's fucking around when you say something or you're almost indicating its absence, this quadrupling down on America or whatever.
00:02:20.300What in the fuck are you even talking about?
00:03:44.600That's like more like grounded in a way than being a Christian nationalist.
00:03:50.560And so I think we have this amazing opportunity precisely because of disintegration.
00:03:58.600Like disintegration is liberation in the sense of we've been tied up.
00:04:06.740We've been shackled with these ropes of America, the Constitution, you know, liberalism, capitalism, democracy.
00:04:17.840We've been those are these ropes that we've been tied up with.
00:04:20.980And the fact is, these rats have been chewing at the ropes.
00:04:25.300The ropes are, you know, a bit mildewed and kind of decaying.
00:04:29.420And at some point you can get out of them.
00:04:32.900But so our yeah, we are sort of coping.
00:04:35.580We're coping with the loss of something.
00:04:37.540But I think we recognize that this thing is disintegrating.
00:04:42.260But our cope is a more productive and realistic cope because we're saying we are not going to quadruple down on what brought us here.
00:04:53.740Because what brought us here brought us to here.
00:04:56.280If you go back in time to, I don't know, 19th century Christianity or whenever, I don't think, puritanical Christianity where we're stoning abortionists and adulteresses and everyone lives in some like tiny town and is dressed in black and no cleavage is available.
00:05:17.600You know, if you actually do that, you're going to press play on the recorder.
00:06:10.980We understand actually why you did that.
00:06:14.520And that's why we're not doing it again.
00:06:16.640So I think, again, just to sum up really quickly, we have this potential within disintegration.
00:06:23.640And what's coming up, what is the thing that is now talked about regularly in conservative circles, liberal circles, et cetera, that you could not imagine ever being spoken about?
00:06:39.860I'll just tell you because it's a rhetorical question.
00:06:45.360Maybe some people talked about like, oh, George W. Bush is the Antichrist.
00:06:49.840It's like someone on, you know, I'm thinking of some of those stupid liberal sites during, well, they were correct, liberal HuffPost during the Iraq war days.
00:07:00.120But they didn't think about it seriously.
00:07:03.400They might as well just call him a bastard or something like that.
00:07:09.000With Peter Thiel talking about this on this lecture tour, some internet personalities talking about this, people are really thinking about the Antichrist.
00:07:20.840And I think we should be thinking about the Antichrist as well.
00:07:24.280According to Peter Thiel, it's going to be Greta Thunberg, who is this like liberal nationalist white girl, you know, who's going to make you be based and trad.
00:07:35.120And she's going to reduce bourgeois development or she's going to reduce technological development.
00:07:41.440Because according to Peter Thiel, we need to leave this mortal coil.
00:07:49.300We need to use technology so that we can remove the body from the equation and reach a kind of purified essence through something that is radically puritanical technology itself.
00:08:05.280That's what computer programming is, radical logic.
00:08:07.620So we can kind of escape the body and reach this radical thing.
00:08:12.880The Antichrist is Greta Thunberg because she's going to drag us back.
00:08:16.340She's going to be like, no, you're going to grow organic eggs.
00:08:19.460You're going to live in this town and not use planes or trains or automobiles so that, you know, the earth can start cooling again and healing.
00:08:27.340She's going to bring you back to tradition as opposed to this bourgeois progressivism that he thinks is God.
00:08:35.300Accelerationism into a future where you no longer have a body.