The Auron MacIntyre Show - Hyperreality and Jean Baudrillard ｜ Guest： Mikeofpol ｜ 1⧸17⧸5

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00:00:30.000 Hey everybody, how's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

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00:01:40.500 All right, guys, so in today's episode, we're going to be discussing Jean Baudrillard, and his work is pretty famous.

00:01:49.000 If you aren't familiar with it, you are probably familiar with something that it has influenced, if you've ever watched The Matrix.

00:01:55.780 Famously, his book Simulacra and Simulation had a big impact on those directors.

00:02:01.920 So it's somebody who has impacted your kind of perception of a lot of media, even if you haven't read any of his stuff.

00:02:09.420 And I wanted to talk about him because along with his wide range of impact, he talks a lot about media and perception and technology and the way that we communicate with each other.

00:02:20.640 And I think in today's world, that is something that's very useful.

00:02:24.180 He's often thought of as postmodern, as a man of the left, but I think he has a lot of interesting things to say for people on the right, from our perspective, who are trying to tackle a lot of these issues.

00:02:34.380 And joining me today to talk about this is one of our kind of house experts on Jean Baudrillard.

00:02:40.720 It is Micah Pohl. Thanks for coming on, man.

00:02:43.200 Thanks for having me on, Aron.

00:02:44.620 You know, in all actual fact, I don't think I'm an expert on Baudrillard.

00:02:49.660 I just play one on TV.

00:02:51.400 He just happens to be one of my favorite political thinkers and philosophers.

00:02:57.040 And he comes from, you know, broadly the theory of kind of social critique.

00:03:02.260 And he has a beautiful kind of poetic way of writing that is extraordinarily difficult to understand.

00:03:09.620 You know, and I think that leads to a lot of mischaracterizations about, you know, broadly his theory and misunderstandings.

00:03:18.540 And I think, you know, in retrospect, looking back at how The Matrix kind of profused, like this one book, Simulacra and Simulation, into the public consciousness, I think, you know, I think that wasn't the right place to start for most people.

00:03:36.200 Because, you know, he has a huge body of work.

00:03:40.260 He's an extremely prolific writer.

00:03:42.600 And I've only collected maybe a third of his total discography.

00:03:45.800 But, you know, he tends to repeat himself, but he tends to go into nuances about his points that are more important than, let's say, he had said in another book in other places.

00:03:58.480 So, he's a very interesting guy.

00:04:02.580 And I think he makes a lot of interesting points, like you say, about perception, the relationship.

00:04:07.540 Especially one of the biggest points you have to have to understand Baudrillard is the relationship between, you know, language and what is the object to which you are referring to.

00:04:21.000 And a lot of his work is taking that for granted, that there's some sort of inversion between, you know, how you reference something in the objects that you're referencing.

00:04:32.100 And in modernity, after a certain point, something weird has gone on with that relationship.

00:04:38.980 And so, and that's hard to pick up with, you know, what everyone picked up for the first book that was their introduction to Baudrillard.

00:04:46.600 So, but in other books, I find he kind of delineates this a little bit better.

00:04:53.600 But I'm sure we'll get into it.

00:04:55.160 He's just one of my favorite thinkers.

00:04:57.500 Yeah, like you said, I started with this book.

00:05:01.440 This is the only book that I have read of his so far, though I'm aware of kind of some of his larger work.

00:05:06.400 And it is certainly kind of stepping into the middle of something for sure.

00:05:12.440 And like you said, it's probably pretty easy to have that fallout of context when you're not familiar with some of the other things there.

00:05:19.060 But I do find his work very interesting because it echoes a problem that one of my favorite philosophers, Alistair MacIntyre, also touches on,

00:05:27.400 which is kind of the loss of that core tradition, that beginning point, that original reference point,

00:05:34.400 and the way in which it makes it very difficult for us in our modern condition to have meaningful conversations

00:05:41.060 because we work so hard to try to get to the bottom of things.

00:05:45.120 And yet we're talking past each other constantly because we are in many ways referencing a copy of a copy of a copy,

00:05:52.080 which obviously he goes into in great detail.

00:05:54.500 But let's, before we get into all that, let's start a little bit at the beginning for people who are unfamiliar with his work.

00:06:01.840 Can you give us a big, kind of a brief background on who Baudrillard is and how you came into contact with him?

00:06:09.860 Yeah, so Jean Baudrillard, he is a, considered by some, the father of postmodernism.

00:06:17.940 He's one of the earliest people in the French intellectual tradition to break away from as-writ Marxism into a style of kind of like social critique

00:06:31.280 and, you know, moving on to different sets of problems that are not strictly advanceable by, you know, labor theory of value,

00:06:43.140 you know, all of this, you know, Marxist, you know, BS that's just been circulating and everyone's got sick of it in France at the time.

00:06:50.580 He was born in the 1920s, late 1920s, and then died in 2007.

00:06:57.420 And, you know, he found himself many times, like through his career in opposition to many of the people that we think of colloquially as postmodernists

00:07:09.500 and ended up becoming more and more, or ended up inheriting a more reactionary strain the longer in his work you kind of read into,

00:07:20.960 all the way into his posthumously published works where, you know, he's very kind of reactionary in some of the things that he says.

00:07:30.620 And all of that comes from this kind of dire conflict that started whenever he kind of came at Foucault with a sort of academic critique of Foucault.

00:07:43.560 And most of these people, you say, well, Foucault, he has that whole backstory of abusing children in Tunisia.

00:07:48.880 But, you know, it's interesting to see that from that point where his career ultimately got stymied because Foucault and in France in general,

00:08:02.100 they have this tradition of still valuing the field of philosophy very heavily.

00:08:06.580 Even the layman person still has some some grasp on philosophy that a lot of these philosophers enjoyed some amount of fame and public adulation.

00:08:19.940 And Foucault was at the commanding heights of his fame whenever he put out the fatwa against Baudrillard.

00:08:27.520 And so this ultimately stymied Baudrillard's career and ultimately set him on a path towards, I would say, a more reactionary strain.

00:08:37.320 And eventually, I think, culminating and breaking from the left almost in its entire entirety, even though he has more leftist presuppositions.

00:08:47.220 And this makes him an interesting person to study.

00:08:50.600 Yeah, that's pretty interesting.

00:08:51.820 Do you are you familiar with kind of his critique of Foucault?

00:08:55.920 I mean, we don't have to go to the whole thing now, but are you familiar with some of the beats?

00:08:59.780 Yeah, the biggest thing that Baudrillard kind of landed, because this ultimately landed in, there was a public debate.

00:09:09.400 And then but the thing that really got stuck in Foucault's crawl was the paper that he wrote, Forget Foucault,

00:09:16.660 which in there, he had said that Foucault was a perfectionist.

00:09:23.620 He's searching for some sort of perfect theory of everything or something.

00:09:28.600 And this is all it's all very it's not important.

00:09:33.920 It's ultimately like not an important critique.

00:09:36.820 I don't think anyway, I don't think there's actually a critique of substance, only of style in there.

00:09:42.960 And this really stuck in Foucault's crawl.

00:09:45.360 And ultimately, Baudrillard was stuck in the in the same university for the rest of his life and only contributed to smaller publications after that.

00:09:57.260 Yeah, that's that's very interesting.

00:10:00.200 So.

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00:10:32.400 Where if you it's it's really interesting that he began kind of, as you say, like almost as the father of this kind of postmodernism that we kind of use as a kind of a boogeyman in a lot of ways today on the right.

00:10:48.800 But ultimately, Trent's kind of transcended it, move beyond it, you know, as you point out, becomes more and more reactionary.

00:10:55.500 I mean, you can almost feel the Ted Kaczynski, you know, in a lot of these something you wouldn't be shocked to find in a lot of that as well.

00:11:03.800 So it is very interesting that having kind of kicked off that movement in many ways, he also closed the door on it first and ran afoul of some of its biggest proponents.

00:11:14.480 But I guess the next question would be we're going to focus on a lot of the stuff again in Simulacra and Simulation because that's what I've read.

00:11:21.820 Yeah, I'm sure I'll get to the to more of his stuff, but my reading pile is is giant.

00:11:27.680 And so I have to kind of take my wins when I can, you know, a hundred page book I can actually get through.

00:11:33.080 OK, I'll start there.

00:11:35.740 But if someone was going to properly begin, they were going to be smart about it and kind of work their way through, where would you have them start?

00:11:44.160 What's one of his best entry level books?

00:11:45.900 Um, I think I started with after skimming Simulacra and Simulation, I ultimately put it down because it, you know, I was I was confused.

00:11:58.260 Like, you know, I I only play like 140 IQ dude online.

00:12:02.540 Like I'm actually, you know, I turn wrenches for a living.

00:12:05.220 You know, I'm a blue collar guy, you know, simple dude.

00:12:07.860 But I really found some more legibility in his book, Fatal Strategies.

00:12:13.820 And I think there is more plain language and a more plain description of some of his concepts about the beginning of modernity and how this has like a dead point in history that we can't really trace back.

00:12:28.580 And all of this kind of these reversions and these kind of like ironic effects of modernity kind of start there, you know, in many of his other points about like in modernity, the relationship between subject and object, you know, in the philosophical sense, you know, you are the subject acting on objects in your environment.

00:12:49.860 Right. In modernity, that reverses he lays like all of these concepts that I think are the most important are laid out, I think, more plainly in Fatal Strategies.

00:13:00.700 But also like a handy, he has a handy little notebook called Passwords, where he goes through literally just like some of the words that he's kind of like stapled, you know, a meaning to and his kind of definition of them.

00:13:18.640 And that's kind of that's a pretty good guidebook for some of the smaller concepts that are just taken in pill form as well.

00:13:25.640 Yeah, that's very handy. I really wish that like Deleuze and Guattari had super, super helpful.

00:13:33.580 Like, here's the here's the codex. Here's the here's the little cheat sheet that lets you decipher the rest of this thing.

00:13:40.040 I think this is what makes Baudrillard better in some sense than Deleuze and Guattari is that it's like, man, I understand.

00:13:46.260 Like, I write like this. Like, here's here's a little cheat sheet.

00:13:49.440 Right. Yeah. Here's the body without organs. Like, just boom. There it is.

00:13:53.260 We don't have to sit here and speculate for the next nine years about it.

00:13:57.180 Yeah, no, that that is very good. All right. So those are those are good entry levels.

00:14:01.260 If you want to if you want a little kind of on ramp before you jump into this one, that that sounds like a good place to start.

00:14:09.020 But let's get to Simulacra and Simulation itself.

00:14:12.760 Then obviously, this book is very famous for kind of the way in which he's talking about the media and technology.

00:14:23.260 And the way that we kind of use these things to interact and how they distort our perception in the modern world of kind of lived experiences and communication.

00:14:34.460 We'll get into kind of like the procession of the Simulacra here in a second. 0.95

00:14:37.880 But can you just kind of lay out maybe some of some of the the broad stroke points of kind of what he's saying about media technology symbolism in this book?

00:14:46.760 Sure. So I think I guess like the preamble to this is understanding that that Baudrillard is writing from a point of view where he is critiquing the relationship between language or sign objects.

00:15:07.800 You know, he he he goes down into the level of of how do we talk about objects, like how are things are communicated and how that that communication relates to the object of interest that's being communicated about.

00:15:22.720 He is the this is kind of like the preamble knowledge that I think you kind of have to understand is that these little symptoms that he's talking about in these different chapters all boil down to this strange thing that's happened in our communication.

00:15:39.020 And how there's something weird in the middle, that middle stage of transmission between, you know, whether or not it's a stop sign.

00:15:46.560 And what is that trying to tell you? It's trying to command you to stop in in traffic, right?

00:15:51.920 It's trying to convey the laws of traffic. Right.

00:15:54.620 But in many senses, especially whenever you get into communication that's attached to mass media to in this is synonymous with things that Marshall McLuhan has said,

00:16:08.440 that the medium is the message is that part of the transition towards mass communication has changed the very nature of how things have the relationship between what is said,

00:16:20.960 you know, the actual communication itself and what is actually conveyed.

00:16:25.020 And this is very much he is restating through a bunch of these symptomologies, that core point that the medium is the message and the mechanics behind how a lot of that stuff has changed.

00:16:38.440 Yeah, this is very interesting to me because I'm someone for better, for worse, who who more or less made his living on Twitter.

00:16:46.860 And that's I didn't start out consciously thinking about it, but I have certainly done a lot more now about the way in which that, you know,

00:16:57.720 that platform changes the way that you think through things, the way that you present information, the way that people perceive reality, the way that you can bend and change the flow and direction of conversation and perception by, you know, addressing topics in specific ways.

00:17:13.780 And again, I was aware of this concept beforehand, but having kind of kind of turned that level of communication into a profession, it's something you can feel.

00:17:27.320 I mean, the joke, of course, now that since we're making the reference, you know, you're in the matrix and you can just see, you know,

00:17:33.600 you can see the people walking by by just looking at the code, you know, you perceive that immediately.

00:17:40.400 And that really does happen when you're kind of using this strange, you know, intermediation for communication.

00:17:48.640 You can feel like the algorithm, you can feel the different things that are occurring and you're aware of the way that that changes how people kind of perceive and understand reality.

00:17:58.400 And so obviously he's doing a much larger kind of meditation on the nature of that and the way that that that really impacts us,

00:18:07.320 especially, again, in the in the age of mass communication, the different formats, the different mediums through which we kind of communicate radically alters not not just the way we individually think,

00:18:20.080 but literally the way that things actually take place in the real world.

00:18:23.160 Yeah, the the key word here is social codes.

00:18:27.720 And this is something that I think is very important to understand about Baudrillard is that there is a reconfiguration of kind of like the underlying processes of of.

00:18:43.580 Yeah, I guess the general will or general thinking, but in its program by this thing called the social codes.

00:18:49.700 And this is part of of where Baudrillard did not like the movie The Matrix.

00:18:55.080 He said that this is, you know, what's underpinning kind of the inspiration for this work where, you know, they had obviously the Wachowski siblings had had referenced, you know, Baudrillard's work was a misunderstanding and that the social codes are not something that there is a reality plane.

00:19:17.920 And then there is this simulated plane and, oh, my gosh, we're stuck in the simulated plane.

00:19:23.960 That is not true. And, you know, just to stretch out to another book of his, he lays this out in better detail in the book, Symbolic Exchange and Death, when he talks about.

00:19:35.680 Well, I lost my train of thought. Whenever he is laying out the fact that in primitive societies and in Baudrillard, Baudrillard is kind of a post-apocalyptic writer.

00:19:51.740 He sees that this end point of history and these things and modernity have happened, and he's writing after the fall of man.

00:19:59.220 He's writing from a last man point of view, and he is trying to reach back for something that is closer towards the great chain of being.

00:20:12.960 And he lays this out in symbolic exchange and death, like he wants to return to monkey in some sense.

00:20:20.280 He wants to return to tribal societies and some of their symbolic ways of exchanging, like, value between people.

00:20:28.780 He views that as more healthy for a society in processes called, like, potlatch and these various kind of, like, tribal gift-giving ceremonies.

00:20:39.860 He takes that as an inspiration for, well, there is, like, a primitive form of simulation.

00:20:47.520 Like, he says that society can't live without at least one layer of simulation, and that's communication, period.

00:20:53.860 And to get back to simulacra and simulation, in the procession of simulacra, the first stage of simulation that he talks about, there's four stages, is communication as writ.

00:21:08.140 You cannot have a society without simulation, because that is the basis of language.

00:21:14.300 And his idea is that there's always going to be a separation between, like, the plane of communication and the plane of the real, right?

00:21:23.760 But primitive societies stayed in layer one.

00:21:27.240 There's only the small disconnect between what is real and what is communicated.

00:21:34.180 And primitive societies stayed in that domain, and it was more sincere.

00:21:38.880 He's looking for a return to sincerity in that.

00:21:42.700 I don't know if that was clear, my train of thought there, but trying to weave back into it.

00:21:47.420 No, no, it is.

00:21:48.440 And it's very interesting, again, on several levels.

00:21:52.520 You feel that, again, that Kaczynski-style feel of, like, you know, that you don't have the power process, and we've got to get back to that.

00:22:01.300 But you also, you know, as somebody who is very interested in rights and thinks a lot about complexity and scale and the way in which the abstraction from kind of base human interaction radically changes processes in the way that we understand things, this is a very important point, right?

00:22:23.060 You know, I'm usually talking about it when it comes to kind of power, political power, but, you know, communication is critical, especially as, you know, we scale up civilization and get further away from kind of these interactions.

00:22:36.780 And we rely more and more as we do that on kind of mass communication, propaganda, you know, the will of the people.

00:22:46.160 This becomes something that we, ironically, kind of the further we get away from being able to know the will of the people, the direct communication, the direct, you know, first level of simulation,

00:22:58.140 the more we reference it and the more we kind of glorify it and the more we distort it all simultaneously.

00:23:04.880 And so him really addressing that issue is, I think, fascinating because, you know, in a lot of ways, as you point out, kind of you have this, you know, he talks about the end of history.

00:23:16.660 He picks up on the Fukuyama thesis and these kind of things, but we have to ask ourselves kind of like, okay, well, what happens after this?

00:23:24.720 Like, how do we find a way forward?

00:23:26.860 How do we reestablish humanity?

00:23:28.680 How do we kind of make those critical connections in a world that has gone through this process?

00:23:34.560 And so, again, that's why I think that his work is valuable and something that's very interesting to kind of, for everyone to address, even if you're coming from the right, because it is a concept that I think is very important.

00:23:47.260 Do you want to go through kind of the process and his different stages here real quick?

00:23:51.220 Yeah, so I guess I get the famous meme here real quick.

00:23:56.520 Oh, yeah, yeah, go ahead.

00:23:57.740 But so in the section, the procession of simulacra in this book, he's going through the stages of simulation, and you can think about this as the stages of complexity of communication and how things exist now in their communicative state.

00:24:16.480 So, Oran, beautiful meme, thank you very much, you know, bringing up the famous meme.

00:24:23.580 So, stage one is the sign, the sign is a faithful representation of base reality.

00:24:33.040 So, this would be, of course, a picture of a fish, right?

00:24:36.240 Stage two, the sign masks the basic reality, the image becomes a distortion of reality.

00:24:42.440 You can think about this in terms of every food product, you know, the naive idea that food doesn't come from farms, it comes from the supermarket.

00:24:50.700 I see it on the shelves every day, right?

00:24:52.360 This is, yeah, it's trying to mask the reality.

00:24:57.640 So, we're getting one step away.

00:24:58.840 And then stage three, the sign marks the absence of reality.

00:25:03.300 It's trying to cover up the fact that there is something, there's nothing really underlying this.

00:25:09.820 Like, is that really, are the fish-shaped fish sticks, are they really made of fish?

00:25:15.600 I mean, we're finding that a lot of times that, you know, a lot of our food is not actually made of food.

00:25:20.440 So, you know, and all of this advertising around the food product that you're buying is trying to convince you, well, yeah, there's real food in this.

00:25:30.960 Trust me, bro, I promise, right?

00:25:32.980 And stage four is the hyper-reality stage that Baudrillard is talking about, where there is no reference to a base reality at all.

00:25:46.300 There is, there is no allusion to, like, fish actually being in the Swedish Fish Oreo.

00:25:52.400 There's, what it actually is, is self-referential, right?

00:25:56.880 And this is, this is almost the entirety of meme culture post, I don't know, like 2010-ish.

00:26:05.580 It is all self-reference, and all of this exists still now, right?

00:26:11.800 You still have people who will talk about things in stage one representation where they're faithfully, you know, talking about, you know, something that actually happened to them or, you know, a real thing in base layer reality.

00:26:26.540 Their communication is a faithful representation of what happened or the base reality principle, right?

00:26:33.300 But at the same time, in current day, we also have, you know, memes that just reference memes that are circularly, circularly referential all the way down.

00:26:42.700 So you can have anything that you look at in modern day.

00:26:46.500 One thing that I've taken to is what stage of simulation is this whenever you look at this?

00:26:52.260 This can broadly be understood as the, something that happens under the, like, second order of observation, right?

00:27:07.820 There is a purpose for why you are currently seeing on your screen, like, personalized ad campaigns for, like, political pundits.

00:27:17.580 There's a, there is some sort of awareness that the image is not the image in itself.

00:27:24.240 This eye for criticality for, like, why an image is put in front of your face through these means of mass communication exacerbate this process where more things are defaulting farther down the chain to being self-referential,

00:27:40.540 to kind of obfuscate this, some of the intentions behind, like, propaganda and stuff like this.

00:27:49.720 And this is kind of outlined in, there is, I think he's still serving Putin, one, his, like, chief propaganda guy.

00:27:59.260 He is kind of famous for innovating a style of propaganda that's meant to confuse, confuse the masses and create, like, fake political parties, make real happenings happen, you know, all to the point where you don't actually understand what is real, what is the base reality principle anymore.

00:28:19.860 And the same thing is reflected in psychological operations that are on CIA has done in order to confuse the masses to not know what base reality is.

00:28:32.140 Like, every intelligence agency, I think, understands this process quite well.

00:28:37.200 And I think it's an important process to understand, not just because, yeah, you can see the psyops, you can see, you know, the manipulation of propaganda, which is all very, very critical at the moment, but it even helps you in just basic discussions.

00:28:51.180 Like, to give an example of a kind of a way I have thought about this as has helped me when I'm, you know, trying to communicate with people, this happens to the Constitution and the Founding Fathers, right?

00:29:00.360 Like, a lot of times people are arguing, oh, well, we've got to go back to the Founding Fathers, we've got to go back to the Constitution, but they have no clue what the Founding Fathers actually said.

00:29:11.760 They're arguing about, like, the cartoon of the Founding Fathers that they learned about in school that was reiterated by, like, different conservative pundits, and then, you know, it's been iterated over and over again.

00:29:24.040 And so when you actually show them what the Founding Fathers said, or what they really wanted, they can't believe it.

00:29:31.920 Like, it doesn't make any sense to them.

00:29:33.680 Like, they don't have any of the context in which the Constitution was written, they have never seen the Federalist Papers, they don't know.

00:29:40.860 So they're arguing about kind of, we need to return to something that never existed, and that puts you in a situation where it's like, okay, no, here's what the real object looks like, and they hate the real object.

00:29:53.800 Like, they're repulsed by the actual reality of the thing that they have been advocating for.

00:30:00.680 It's like when you hand a kid, you know, that they've had nothing but chicken nuggets, and then you hand them, like, an actual rotisserie chicken, they're like, there's a bone in this, you know, because they're used to the hyper-reality.

00:30:10.540 Like, they're used to the fish stick.

00:30:12.640 They've never actually seen the real thing.

00:30:14.880 So, and I think this is best illustrated in modern politics, is that people, especially on the Con Inc. side, argue for, and this is the perfect illustration of hyper-reality, they argue for Schoolhouse Rock, I'm Just a Bill, as that was literally our founding document.

00:30:34.660 This is the prime deception of living in hyper-reality, is that the cell, like, the reference of the reference of the reference all the way down the line to the original thing, then gets argued about as, well, that was actually our founding document.

00:30:48.860 Don't you remember the founding fathers wrote, I'm Just a Bill, Schoolhouse Rock, you know, like, this is what we're talking about, is that those slow stages of confusion all the way until the self-referential gets accepted and substitutes the real.

00:31:05.200 Every step down this process through the procession of Simulacra is replacing more of the real. 0.99

00:31:11.660 Stage three is where the real disappears from what's actually trying to be referenced.

00:31:17.960 Like, the real doesn't exist anymore.

00:31:20.000 Stage four is the death of the human conscience.

00:31:26.140 Like, you are nothing but a cog, you're nothing but a monkey pressing a button whenever it sees a number on the screen, stimuli goes into brain, you press button.

00:31:36.640 This is the process by which, you know, through, like, pure information theory, people are turned into cogs.

00:31:45.220 And that's kind of the last man, catastrophic viewpoint of Baudrillard, is that this process cognitively turns you into a cog.

00:31:55.500 Yeah, and if we have any interest in establishing a healthier existence, the question becomes how to reconnect these things, right?

00:32:05.440 Can you reconnect these things?

00:32:07.940 Can you scale a society that is attempting to reconnect these things?

00:32:12.140 Can they only occur in that primitive tribal situation that you're talking about?

00:32:16.060 Like, these are all very fundamental and important questions.

00:32:19.420 And also, if you're trying to change minds, if you're trying to figure out how this is interacting, you need to understand this process.

00:32:28.120 You need to understand this when you're communicating in a mass way.

00:32:31.420 You know, you can't communicate in a mass way the same that you communicate when you're talking one-on-one.

00:32:39.640 So it's just a really important way to, you know, it's an important frame that you can kind of put things in.

00:32:46.860 Because if you don't grasp this, if you don't understand this disconnection, then you'll find yourself arguing, you know, the finer points of Schoolhouse Rock rather than actually getting to, you know, what's really happening.

00:32:59.940 Where does power really lie?

00:33:02.260 What's the actual process that we're going through here?

00:33:04.820 Are we really dealing with fish at this point or are we arguing over the Swedish fish Oreos?

00:33:11.140 You know, that's really important.

00:33:13.040 If you find yourself, you know, blue in the face trying to argue over the nature of the Constitution or power or tradition or any of these things, and you can't understand why the person doesn't grasp it, often you need to recognize, oh, no, I am communicating with someone who is deep into stage four.

00:33:30.580 And that's why, like, we're talking past each other, nothing's connecting, because we are in a fundamentally different mode of communication.

00:33:39.860 And I am using the wrong method to try to convey things.

00:33:43.620 I'm not tying it to anything that they would understand.

00:33:46.580 Yeah, listen, Auron, you know, the Chinese have been overfishing Swedish fish to make Swedish fish Oreos for a long time. 0.98

00:33:53.480 And this is something we really have to be concerned about, you know, at the end of the day.

00:33:57.760 That's why we need to control Taiwan. 1.00

00:34:00.580 Yeah, I think, you know, in your question about what do we return to and what kind of Baudrillard saw, you know, I guess, in some of his other related works as what is the return to the genuine?

00:34:22.200 And what is kind of like a rekindling of the great chain of being?

00:34:27.800 And he goes in at length in symbolic exchange and death about this.

00:34:33.140 And this is described by Baudrillard scholars as Baudrillard's primitivism is that he wants to see not the material return to he doesn't want to see the return to the material conditions of primitive societies necessarily.

00:34:51.360 He wants to find a way to return to exchange of symbolic value.

00:34:59.000 So he kind of illustrates that illustrates this in a Western Native American ritual called potlatch, which is kind of a paying off of debts at the end of the year between two tribes or two people, like basically settle all debts ceremony.

00:35:19.400 And there's a great feast.

00:35:21.400 Usually it's between two tribes or internally inside a tribe where, you know, the symbolic gifts are given.

00:35:29.500 And the value of the gifts is purely symbolic, where this engenders a more humanistic understanding.

00:35:41.940 And this is where he breaks from Marxism in an economic sense as well, where he says that, no, there's actually labor theory of value is wrong.

00:35:54.140 You know, part of our confusion cognitively has to do with part of our confusion about what is valuable.

00:36:02.240 And in that book, he describes about like a trading between, let's say, like a river valley tribe and a mountainous tribe where a mountain tribe may, after these tribes have, you know, have met.

00:36:17.620 Right. And they want to figure out, are you friend or foe?

00:36:20.940 You know, kind of feeling you out, bro.

00:36:22.180 What's going on here?

00:36:22.980 You know, they decide to have, you know, like a small instantiation of a, of a potlatch.

00:36:29.580 So we're going to have the sincere offering and give gifts and, you know, hopefully keep the peace.

00:36:35.240 And the mountain tribe, you know, they have llamas.

00:36:37.580 So they give the river tribe a bunch of blankets.

00:36:40.860 Right.

00:36:41.440 But the value is purely symbolic.

00:36:44.520 Right.

00:36:45.000 This is the best craftsmanship that the mountain tribe has to offer.

00:36:50.400 But the river valley is probably a warmer climate and stuff down there.

00:36:55.400 And, you know, they don't actually want wool blankets or whatever.

00:36:58.140 Like the value of some of these exchanges and this parallels to communication as well, not just the economic sense.

00:37:05.360 This exchange kind of like begets like a motor of economy pre-capitalism is his theory.

00:37:14.700 And he sees that as edifying for the human subject to, to have these processes where, yeah, there's gift giving ceremonies.

00:37:26.100 And that is a prime, a prime mover and shaker in, in the quote unquote economy.

00:37:33.380 It's, he says that's better for people in some way.

00:37:37.400 And how this kind of ties into the communicative effect is he talks a lot about symbolic exchange in, in some of his works, but he's talking about just like acts back and forth.

00:37:50.040 Like he talks about like, he talks about like the terrorist attacks on 9-11 and how that's kind of like a symbolic exchange with power.

00:37:58.080 Or he talks about kind of like arguments themselves have the kind of this nature where they end up being like a symbolic exchange.

00:38:11.380 Um, and if that, if that part of the value between human interaction is not accepted, that's part of the weirdness of modernity is that there's this whole symbolic value of everything we do, even economically, that is important for the human condition in some way, if that makes sense.

00:38:33.040 Yeah, I think I'm just going to strike out kind of a few of the, the examples or passages that he talks about.

00:38:39.240 I don't know if it's the best method, but, uh, that's the upside of hosting a show.

00:38:42.200 You can kind of do what you want.

00:38:43.840 Um, so, uh, the, the, one of the ones that, uh, grabbed me was kind of the, the hypermarket example, the supermarket example that he gives in there again, as somebody who's fascinated by the way that scale, uh, kind of abstracts things and, and, uh, radically alters behavior.

00:38:58.880 He kind of goes through the way in which the original, you know, market is created, which is just a bunch of booths that come together, uh, so that people can get to the butcher and they can get to the, uh, you know, the clothes maker and they can get to the, the baker and all these things.

00:39:14.180 Uh, you know, in the same area, there's a place to do business, a market, um, and, and that's the original, uh, you know, impetus of the creation of the supermarket is to kind of bring all those things under one roof.

00:39:26.000 Uh, but then by doing that, uh, you kind of alter the scenario and the way that people shop in that market fundamentally changes, uh, the, the, the presentation of the items is radically altered in order to, uh, increase consumption, uh, the way that it's laid out.

00:39:44.160 Uh, you, you manipulate every aspect of providing, uh, kind of those different goods and services in a way that, um, optimizes consumption and draws the eye.

00:39:56.000 And actually you end up training the consumer, you know, to, to go through the market in a particular way.

00:40:02.180 Uh, and so you, you've just radically altered the experience of going to a market, uh, and you've radically shaped the, reshaped the, the human and the way that they would do business and, you know, kind of organically in these scenarios, uh, so that you can increase efficiency and, you know, maximize output and all of these things.

00:40:21.640 Uh, and, and, and this is just like a small area in which we can see, it's not just, uh, not just communication of a verbal form, but also, uh, you know, the signs and, and the way we move through these different areas, uh, you know, get, gets very, very, uh, uh, it's radically altered in, in modernity.

00:40:41.840 Yeah. Yeah. So you got to remember that, uh, Baudrillard, I believe published this in 81, 1981.

00:40:49.180 So this is, uh, to say that Baudrillard wasn't on top of the ball with his predictive powers is, uh, is ludicrous, is absolutely ludicrous because he, he wrote about some of these entourage effects of modernity 10 years before they, they had, 10 years before we accept that they happened.

00:41:08.500 So, you know, this is very important to point out. He's writing about this in 81. So I think the most prescient example of the, of the hypermarket example, uh, you know, especially in modern day, just something I've seen as a recent development is, um, uh, the, the, not too long ago, it was a couple of months ago.

00:41:27.000 Uh, me and my dad went to the grocery store whenever I was over helping him with some chores and stuff, you know, whatever. And he was like, we need to go grocery. You want to come with? Sure. Okay. We go to Kroger and they had just installed new self checkout lines that had, uh, their own conveyor belt system. It's not just the single kiosk where, you know, you put your things on your left scan and put them in the right.

00:41:50.160 It had all the accoutrements of the normal checkout line, but with like guards and stuff. So people don't get pinching rollers and stuff and, you know, safety nibby ism, you know, stuff all around it. But it is a, it is a, uh, self checkout shoot. And, uh, I, I was disgusted by the site and I, I just had like, I must've had the most wrinkled face when I was looking at this thing, just Googling it. And my dad was like, what, what's going on? I was like, did this not seem evocative?

00:42:20.160 Of the cattle shoot to you? Like, was there not something deeply unsettling about this? You know, all, uh, all of the normal things that go into, you know, you put your things on the conveyor. You say, how, how are you doing, Mark? You know, uh, oh, that's my total cool. Yeah. I'll see you at church, buddy. All that stuff is gone. And instead there's this kind of process, this, this mechanical process in order to shoot people into a, uh, a course of action in order to check out at the grocery.

00:42:49.160 I said, like, everything here is now evocative of the cattle shoot. Like, look how the, the plebs, they yearn for it. They yearn to be, uh, to be prodded down, uh, the, the cattle shoot. And, uh, my dad was kind of, you know, uh, I don't know what he thought. I don't think he knew what to think. 1.00

00:43:08.580 And, uh, this is something that I think is very, if you see any of these things, I hope you look at them with the same disgust because that is the hypermarket is, is this process that squeezes out anything human into, uh, what is mere process.

00:43:24.420 It's engineering the social codes that, uh, where the, the environment can only be interacted with in a way that's, that's designed. And that, that's kind of the, the sickening element of it, uh, of the hypermarket is like, um, you know, you used to know your butcher.

00:43:40.980 Like these things that were valuable, like community is valuable. It's, you could say it has a symbolic value as well as real, like it has real world value. And then also like a symbolic value as well. And Baudrillard's theory that has all been kiboshed, completely eliminated for mechanical process through the engineering of the social codes to turn you into a good little cattle that checks out with the new automated, uh, you know, system and stuff like that.

00:44:08.280 Not to say that, oh, you know, Baudrillard, uh, uh, you know, like, uh, uh, total butlerian jihad. Now we should destroy technology. No, it's, it's the process, the engineering of that process that is eliminating, uh, some of the human good that came about, came about from the regular standard bazaar or market. And I don't know, Elizabethan England or something like that, that's been eliminated.

00:44:31.580 Yeah. I often feel like, uh, you know, Cassandra, um, when I, people are just tired of me doing this in my real life. But every time I see something like that, I have the similar reaction to you every, you know, when, um, I was a teacher and we had, um, everything went digital. I was like, this is going to be terrible.

00:44:50.200 Uh, you know, like, like, like you don't understand, like you need the friction, you need the human interaction. Like you need, these things are important. Uh, and I know I just sound like a Luddite, you know, I sound like I'm going to the cabin in the woods, but like it, it really does. Uh, I can feel it. Like I can feel the one more layer of humanity kind of getting, you know, one more layer of skin getting pulled off.

00:45:14.120 Uh, when, when I see stuff like that and I do make an effort to not go through, uh, you know, self checkout lines like this, because I also feel myself being trained into this. Like you said, I, you know, we used to have all these services, you know, a travel agent and all these things. Um, you know, someone who checked you out at the grocery store and they were providing a service to you.

00:45:36.260 And what all these companies have done is trained you to provide the service, uh, yourself and pay them for the pleasure, uh, of it, which I, I definitely try to, uh, avoid when possible.

00:45:45.640 The other one that I found really striking in this, uh, work is when he talks about, um, when it's in 81, so it must've been very early, uh, which was, uh, the, the, the kind of reality television where they, they, the first time they had filmed a, a family, right.

00:46:03.160 And that family, I think it's called the loud family, um, you know, was, was very much a reflection of kind of the perfect upper middle class, uh, American family.

00:46:13.680 You know, they've got the nice house and several kids and, uh, the, the big lawn and the white picket fence and everything.

00:46:19.360 And, uh, he has a really fantastic line of like, basically like we, because we don't destroy cities anymore, like there's no fire and brimstone destroying Sodom and Gomorrah.

00:46:30.780 Instead, we like foist this family into, uh, the reality television sphere because it will be destroyed.

00:46:38.340 Like we know that this, the process of kind of dissecting it and publicizing it and, and kind of exposing it to this hyper real process will immolate it.

00:46:48.660 And we, we want that, like we want that to be, it's our own human sacrifice ritual where we're taking something that was good and beautiful and at one point real, and we're exposing it to this hyper reality almost as like a, a social ritual of destroying this thing.

00:47:05.020 We can no longer have, uh, because, you know, we're, we're, we're almost offended by it in a way.

00:47:10.320 And it needs, it needs to be destroyed in this kind of ritualistic public, uh, sacrifice by, by exposing it to the hyper real process.

00:47:18.280 Right. That, uh, that passage, uh, when I first read it was, uh, I think the most blackpilling thing I'd ever, I'd ever read.

00:47:26.380 It's bleak.

00:47:27.160 It's, it's horrible.

00:47:28.600 So, and, uh, that, that passage, uh, is especially moving because of, um, uh, Baudrillard is a very polemical writer.

00:47:38.680 He's a very poetical writer.

00:47:40.680 Um, uh, and he doesn't, uh, he doesn't adhere to a writing style that's, uh, that's, uh, strictly formal logic, you know, the, uh, the order of operations for, uh, submitting an argument for, uh, you know, like some sort of scientific theory or, or, uh, anything.

00:47:58.580 Like that, you know, he's very poetic the way he describes, uh, things.

00:48:02.380 And the point where he turns around and says that, you know, the camera lens is like, it's almost like a laser beam, you know, of death.

00:48:10.800 And, uh, you know, the, the reason he's kind of coming to this conclusion is, you know, look what happened to the Loud family after this, uh, after this reality, like the first reality television show was, uh, they ended up all divorced.

00:48:23.560 And, uh, like the, uh, you know, the parents were divorced, like everybody, the whole family turned into shambles, completely destroyed by post the process of, of, of shooting this show.

00:48:36.960 And, uh, it was all, you know, the way he lays it out is, you know, it's, it's obscene the way that everyone in America wanted to be a voyeur of this new class of entertainment product where the, that family acts as if you're not there.

00:48:56.920 It's a fit. It's a complete figment of reality that any, like this, a family or anyone in the crew that was shooting, shooting the show, like had any preconceived notion about like, oh, we're actually going to be unintrusive.

00:49:09.780 And this family's not going to realize that there's this dude in the corner that's got a camera pointed at that.

00:49:15.340 Like it's a complete, the process of them creating this pure fiction destroyed them for, uh, the, for the edification of, of this voyeur class of people, which is the mass.

00:49:28.420 And, uh, it's very, it's, um, yeah, it's very like religious in the way he kind of lays it out that this is like a religious ritual we found ourselves.

00:49:40.960 Like we don't have the Coliseum anymore.

00:49:43.100 We have this, we have the, the camera lens is now the thing that like kills people for entertainment.

00:49:49.420 And you can think like, uh, think about all of the, like the absolutely evil and morally reprobate like telegram channels or Twitter, Twitter feeds about they're showing war footage in Ukraine and going rah, rah, look at this pig that got blown up by a drone.

00:50:05.040 Or in some way that camera lens feed is part of the killing act in itself, you know, for the edification of, I don't know, people who are rah, rah, Ukraine or rah, rah, Russia, or, uh, you know, uh, people dying on the subway, you know, to, to all of these crazed maniacs, you know, all of this that's captured through the screen is part of this new religious process in our stage of advancement in communication. 0.82

00:50:35.380 And it's, it's sick and twisted. And he laid this out in 1981.

00:50:40.520 Yeah. It was really incredible. This book could have been written, you know, two years ago.

00:50:45.760 Yeah.

00:50:46.600 The way that he does this. Someone, someone brought this up. Let me, uh, throw this up there real quick.

00:50:51.660 He said, uh, from leave it, uh, to beaver to real housewives. And that's an interesting, it's, it's an interesting point actually, because it got me thinking, you know,

00:51:01.480 leave it to beaver is now mocked for being so unrealistic, right? Like, ah, this, you know,

00:51:07.100 idea, like a 1950s, um, you know, TV show. And in a way, of course it is, it's a, it's a level of abstraction.

00:51:13.620 Uh, but the reality TV show, uh, today of a family is actually far less real. Like the, the, it is presented as being real in a, in a, in a certain sense,

00:51:26.180 but is a far more destructive and less real reflection of a family life, uh, than kind of a quaint 1950s over slick, uh, produced television show.

00:51:36.860 Uh, and so you have this kind of very strange moment where, um, you know, the thing that we think of is as being more real, uh, what we all know is fake.

00:51:47.280 And we, we, we all know is, is staged from the very beginning. And yet we all participate and treat it as if it is somehow more of a real reflection of family life than leave it to beaver,

00:51:56.920 which actually in it, in its idealization, uh, presents us with something that is probably far more wholesome and healthy and real than anything presented as real today.

00:52:07.900 Right. Stage four, the stage four, which is the stage of hyperreality replaced reality in some sense. Once we pass the, what, what, uh, Baudrillard is, is quoting, uh, this historian Sinetti,

00:52:20.700 when he talks about the dead point of history, it's this like mysterious thing that happened, you know, where this process began. And, you know, we look back and we try to find where all things went wrong.

00:52:30.720 And you can think about this in the same way that we kind of prod history in the, in the more reactionary sphere is like, okay, you know, was it, uh, uh, was it a certain constitutional amendment?

00:52:41.240 Was it, uh, you know, the civil war? Was it, uh, the French revolution? Was it, uh, inventing agriculture, you know, all the way back through history, we look through that dead point.

00:52:51.460 We look for that dead point where this stuff changed to eventually we got on the track towards eventually we're going to get hyperreality that replaces,

00:53:00.460 any reference to base reality in its entirety. Like when, when was, when were the fates written in the star?

00:53:09.580 When was it cast on the stone tablet that we were going to get to this end point? Uh, and because, you know, it's like, that was, that was in some sense, the death of us, uh, where, uh, you know, if, if there was a point we could go back and relitigate and say,

00:53:24.140 can we put ourself, you know, ex post facto onto a different course to not have the real housewives replace, leave it to beaver. When could we, when can we get that? 1.00

00:53:34.300 Yeah. When does the abolition of man actually occur? Um, yeah, again, just, he hits on a lot of really fascinating subjects that I think are, uh, are very much in the wheelhouse of people who are watching this.

00:53:47.420 And so I, I think it's worth people looking into it. We, we could go on this, uh, all day and, and I will probably have you back on next time I read a Baudrillard book so we can kind of expand on this.

00:53:58.220 But, uh, but yeah, I just wanted to give kind of the people, the basics, the overview, a few choice, uh, things so they could dive deeper into this. And, and I think we did that successfully. So, uh, let, let's go over to some of the questions of the people, but before we do, uh, Mike, is there any thing you want to, uh, go ahead and tell people about you working on anything? Want them to follow you anywhere?

00:54:20.940 Sure. Yeah. Um, uh, I am Mike of pole, um, you know, uh, Twitter, nobody, um, uh, you can follow me on Twitter at Mike of pole. Um, I run a show every Wednesday with, uh, the capitalissimo of Tookie's mag every Wednesday, where we do a mystery science theater 3000 style show where we watch a movie and just do comedy colored commentary over it with various guests. We do that every Wednesday at 7 PM Eastern, 6 PM central. Um, and then also,

00:54:50.500 and that's, uh, on, on, on streamed on Twitter, uh, or X.com and, uh, also rumble. Um, and then I also, uh, do music stuff. That's usually posted up on, on, uh, my odyssey channel, which is Michelangelo of pole. Uh, and then, uh, coming up next week is going to be, uh, the first episode in a series I'm doing called, uh, parts or die, uh, which is, uh, kind of an intro to, um, you know, at home engineering, manufacturing, um, you know, the various productive capital that,

00:55:20.500 uh, you know, it's feasible for a regular person to get a hold. And, um, you know, I think it's important for, uh, more people to be involved in manufacturing as, um, you know, the promise of reshoring is kind of looming over the horizon. And I think it's a, uh, especially with the dialogue about Panda Express this week, you know, I think it's very important to consider that, uh, you know, some of these, uh, uh, processes that we're talking about, even in Baudrillard, where, uh, you're turned into a cog is, uh,

00:55:50.500 you know, a trickle down effect of, of HR and working for a corporate firm. And so I think, um, in history, it was always popular for a man to be of his own interest, to have his own. It's, it's a concern, right? Your business was your concern. And, uh, I think it's important for people to establish, uh, more independence from, uh, some of these, uh, processes and, uh, business and, uh, and hopefully make a lucrative life for themselves.

00:56:17.160 So I want to give people the tools if they're interested in manufacturing and how to grow that out of even a garage bay or, you know, their, uh, single bedroom apartment. What, what are they able to do and produce? So, uh, the first episode of that is coming out next week and that will be on, um, Odyssey channel on, and on Twitter.

00:56:35.920 Are you telling me that, uh, it's healthier for people to perhaps bake something with their own hands and build something, uh, you know, for the future instead of putting 80 hours into orange chicken, uh,

00:56:45.920 No, that's, that's ludicrous. You should push code that eventually makes the orange chicken for you and then everyone can be unemployed and then everyone can bellyache about why you're not working for $5 an hour. Of course, that would be the best course of action. Don't you want the line to go up, Auron?

00:57:01.920 I genuinely don't understand how so many people don't grasp that they're just pushing the other end of gay race communism. 0.98

00:57:10.080 Yeah, it's, yeah, it's gross. It's horrible. Yeah. Oh, well, we will, we will fix this. We will, we will emerge victorious. All right. So moving on, uh, definitely check out Mike's work. Sounds like there's, uh, very good things for everyone to look into there. Uh, let's see here. We've got, uh, Darian Walker, who says, given that the, uh, given that, uh, think iconophiles, iconophiles, uh, were right about the represent, representability of the divine. 0.99

00:57:39.540 How does this affect our reading of Baudrillard's black pill? Okay. So he's talking about a very specific passage here. So, and I think, I think you mean iconophobes, right? So Baudrillard has a passage where he talks about, um, the minimalization of the icons of representation of Christ and, uh, in saints and stuff like that, ultimately culminating.

00:58:03.540 And in the most minimalist, uh, aesthetic representation in, uh, uh, in some of the Protestant sects in American Christianity.

00:58:12.540 Oh, yes, I remember this because they were worried. He said, he talks about how they were worried that, uh, people would recognize that, uh, that God isn't there. Or, yeah, I remember.

00:58:20.920 I was actually thinking about this yesterday. So, um, I, I guess, uh, give you a little thing to bite on for, for just a minute.

00:58:28.560 There, uh, there is in some sense where there is, um, uh, the fear of, uh, iconography being destroyed by the same process as, like, the, the, the stages of simulacra.

00:58:46.340 Like, the, that, that, you know, was something that was subconsciously understood by some religious people and eventually, uh, led to segmentation in the church.

00:58:57.220 So, there, you could say that there are some people, especially, I really hate to, you know, open this can of worms, but especially in the online Christian influencer sphere that absolutely do this. 0.84

00:59:13.440 It's these representations of, um, of Christ or of saints or, um, you know, this kind of, uh, I heard someone describe it once as playing, uh, chapters from the Bible or passages from the Bible like Yu-Gi-Oh cards.

00:59:29.860 This absolutely does occur. So, I don't think in totality it affects the core message of what Baudrillard is saying is this degeneration pro, uh, progress or process to the fourth stage simulacra where, you know, this is just like the idea of the idea of the representation of the myth of the legend of Christianity.

00:59:51.900 And it's just kind of this like fun thing to play around with, uh, aesthetically online instead of like a sincere, uh, uh, uh, religious belief that it just isn't holding with what Baudrillard is laying out in his theory writ large.

01:00:08.560 All right. And then we've got, uh, Bert, uh, Gord, the, the fat Lord says, uh, very good. Uh, Baudrillard, uh, says everything is fake and Lance says everything, uh, says that what is fake can be made real with enough will. The question remains, when does it become gay? 0.86

01:00:27.400 Um, well, it's, uh, that's the dead point of history. Everything became gay long ago. We can't figure out when. No, um, uh, Baudrillard doesn't say that everything is fake, right? This is part of the misreading that I think a lot of people like the glib reading of simulacra and simulation that kind of like art hoe people read this book and they think, oh yeah, matrix, uh, la la la. Right. It's not, it's not that everything is fake. 0.97

01:00:55.420 It's that everything has its roots in semiotics. Like all human action, uh, is involved in this relationship between subject and object and how communication takes place, right? Stage one is where you want to be like sincere. Everything is insincere, not that it's fake. So that I think this is the distinction that, uh, you know, to actually turn your funny comment serious.

01:01:23.460 This is the distinction that I really want to hammer home, uh, to everyone that day. It's not that we're actually in the matrix and the agent Smith is coming to kill us all. It is that, uh, everything has devolved into more and more insincerity until, uh, the point where insincere is default.

01:01:43.460 Right. Right. Right. The irony poisoning, uh, the culture. Yes. Uh, life of Brian says, uh, my hyperreality test is, does the real matter? IE. Uh, Paul Bunyan, uh, IE Paul Bunyan were based on a real person. That person would be a footnote to the legend.

01:02:02.080 Hmm. My hyperreality. Hold on. I'm trying to compute this. Hold on. Let me chew on this for a second. If Paul Bunyan were based on a real person, that person would be a footnote to the legend.

01:02:14.940 So like the legend is more important. Like the, the hyper real is actually the thing that people have taken away, I guess. Oh, sure. Yeah. So I guess, uh, uh, you know, the, the mythical, uh, yeah, you can think about Merlin type. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's fair.

01:02:30.200 No, I, I don't have any problem with this now that I understand. Remember, I'm just a wrench turner. Like I just play a Baudrillard scholar online.

01:02:37.280 No, that's that. I mean, Hey man, that's how I got here. I did book reports until I, you know, someone paid me to do it. Uh, Robert Weinsfeld says, uh, Sodom level destruction from hyperreality. Good stuff.

01:02:50.440 Yep. And it, it already happened. That's the sad part.

01:02:53.080 Yeah. All right, guys. Well, um, maybe not the happiest note to end on, but I think, uh, good, good talk. Like I said, I hope this kind of wets your appetite. Uh, you know, uh, maybe you can put your toe into, uh, kind of reading Baudrillard on, on your own. We'd certainly didn't do any exhaustive exploration of it. Uh, but I, I do think it's a good kind of a way to, to kind of understand the basics there and perhaps, uh, encourage you to do some more reading. Uh, Mike, want to thank you for coming on. It's been great talking to you.

01:03:22.240 Thank you.

01:03:23.720 And, uh, guys, if it's your first time on the channel, please make sure that you go ahead and subscribe. If you're on YouTube, you need to click the bell notification so you can get these streams when they go live. If you'd like to get the broadcast as podcast, then you need to go to your, your favorite podcast network and, uh, subscribe to the Ormac entire show. If you do leave a reading, a rating or review, it helps with the algorithm. And of course, if you would like to listen to my book, the total state, it is now out on audio book. So you can pick that up.

01:03:52.000 I've heard there's some problems with the UK version, uh, got people on that, but if you're in the U S you can pick it up right now. And if you'd like to support the show by going to blaze, uh, media.com, you can pick up some Oren McIntyre show merch there. Thank you everybody for watching. And as always, I will talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - January 17, 2025

Hyperreality and Jean Baudrillard ｜ Guest： Mikeofpol ｜ 1⧸17⧸5

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