The Auron MacIntyre Show - The Legacy of Unqualified Reservations ｜ Guests： Lomez and Astral Flight ｜ 4⧸6⧸23

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00:00:30.000 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:32.000 Thanks for joining me this evening.

00:00:33.680 I've got a great stream with some great guests that I think you're really going to enjoy.

00:00:39.180 Now, I think a lot of you will be familiar with the work of Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Minchus

00:00:45.400 Mulbug.

00:00:46.600 And recently, Passage Press, run by Mr. Lomez here, one of my guests, has come out with a

00:00:54.060 great edition of his original work here, The Unqualified Reservations.

00:00:59.660 And it's really, obviously, one of the keys to a lot of the thought that we have talked

00:01:05.480 about pretty extensively on this channel.

00:01:07.940 And so I wanted to go ahead and take this time to look at the legacy of Unqualified Reservations.

00:01:14.040 How have, has its, you know, predictions held up?

00:01:17.240 How have the theories espoused there held up?

00:01:20.420 What have the impact been on the wider kind of right-wing thought space?

00:01:24.900 And what have the reactions been from different thinkers, media figures, and all kinds of other

00:01:29.980 people who have now interacted with Curtis Yarvin's work?

00:01:33.680 So joining me on the stream today, like I said, first is Mr. Lomez.

00:01:38.160 Hey, Oren.

00:01:38.880 How's it going, man?

00:01:39.660 I'm really honored to be here.

00:01:42.240 I think the last time we spoke was on your YouTube channel.

00:01:46.280 So getting recruited to The Blaze is a well-deserved elevation in status and reach, and I'm really

00:01:53.360 happy to see that.

00:01:55.680 No, thanks, man.

00:01:56.500 And I'm really glad that you've been putting in great work.

00:01:58.600 Of course, for people who don't know, the Passage Prize is a really excellent contest.

00:02:05.080 They just ran their second one here, and it's a really great opportunity.

00:02:09.940 You know, a lot of people talk about the need to build things, the need to create things,

00:02:13.580 the need for culture and art and space on the right to kind of grow and create its own

00:02:19.680 thing.

00:02:20.240 But Lomez is one of those guys who is putting in the real work, and so we definitely appreciate

00:02:25.000 his efforts and him coming on to talk a little bit here about Unqualified Reservations.

00:02:30.120 And then my other guest here is Astral Flight.

00:02:32.540 He runs a really excellent podcast.

00:02:34.940 I've been on there.

00:02:35.780 All your favorite people have been on there.

00:02:37.500 Astral, thanks for coming on, man.

00:02:39.200 Thanks for having me.

00:02:40.080 It's an honor.

00:02:40.820 It's great to talk to you again.

00:02:42.340 When I had you on last year, it was for a very similar topic.

00:02:46.120 And, you know, I consider you one of the experts in this topic.

00:02:49.920 And a lot has happened in that year for Curtis and NRX and Passage Press.

00:02:55.140 So it's exciting to be here, and thanks for having us on.

00:02:58.060 No, absolutely.

00:02:59.100 Yeah, I think, you know, you came up with the idea of this discussion, and I think it was

00:03:03.420 a really good idea.

00:03:04.400 Of course, we've talked about, again, Curtis Yarvin a lot here, but I do think it's good

00:03:08.160 to just take a moment and reflect because there have been so many real life.

00:03:12.080 It's weird when you have these little things that you think are kind of completely online and

00:03:16.140 on the internet, and, you know, no one in your real life is ever going to kind of make contact

00:03:20.380 with these things.

00:03:20.980 And then all of a sudden, Curtis Yarvin is on Tucker Carlson.

00:03:23.620 And it feels like kind of the ground has shifted under you.

00:03:26.720 So I think it's a good time to kind of stop and kind of think about, you know, how all

00:03:30.620 of this has changed.

00:03:31.980 So we're going to dive into all that, guys.

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00:05:03.040 All right, guys.

00:05:05.460 So let's go ahead and start out by just kind of talking a little bit about how you first

00:05:11.220 made contact with unqualified reservations.

00:05:14.640 I came to it fairly late in the game.

00:05:17.220 I really only became aware of Curtis Yarvin through the distributist, actually.

00:05:24.360 And the distributist would every once in a while make a video about this guy,

00:05:28.680 Menchus Mulbug, and kind of some of the ideas that he talked about, he would weave them in

00:05:33.520 here and there.

00:05:34.560 And it took me a couple of years, even after I kind of discovered the distributist channel,

00:05:37.720 to actually read unqualified reservations.

00:05:39.600 So I probably didn't actually read the majority of unqualified reservations until at least like

00:05:44.000 2019.

00:05:45.340 But Astro, when did you first kind of make contact with unqualified reservations?

00:05:49.040 Oh, I feel a little bit better about it now because I'm a latecomer, too.

00:05:55.200 You know, first contact actually was around the time of the Trump election.

00:05:59.160 I can't remember if it was right before or right after.

00:06:02.000 But I tell this story on my show.

00:06:04.540 But just to briefly go over it quickly, a friend of mine, a friend and myself had been

00:06:10.620 kind of left wing.

00:06:12.160 I kind of ran the whole gambit from like from like libertarian anarchist to left wing anarchist

00:06:18.100 to like ANCAP, you know, that whole trajectory in the early 2000s.

00:06:22.520 And I had a friend with me.

00:06:24.660 And around the time of Trump, he just started talking all of this lingo that just was like

00:06:30.920 totally foreign to me.

00:06:32.700 And he kept talking about monarchism and the red pill and Cthulhu swimming left.

00:06:36.780 And I'm like, you know, dude, what are you talking about?

00:06:39.120 So he showed me the open letter.

00:06:40.660 And I tried to read it back then in like 2015, but I wasn't ready for it.

00:06:45.860 And then over the intervening next five years or so, Yarvin's name and Nick Land as well

00:06:51.240 kept coming up over and over and over again.

00:06:53.280 And it was finally when he was in the Claremont Review of Books and he started writing regularly

00:07:00.100 for them that I started reading him regularly.

00:07:01.980 And then I dove in.

00:07:03.120 So it was about 2020.

00:07:04.280 It was the pandemic.

00:07:05.300 It was when everybody was locked down in their homes.

00:07:07.480 I really dug in and was like, wow, this is the sort of the safe harbor that I never knew

00:07:14.880 was there, you know, because I had gone through the whole, like I said, and cap nonsense stuff

00:07:19.660 in the 2008 crisis and all that.

00:07:22.780 And when I finally found Moldbug, I'm like, OK, so everything I've been kind of thinking

00:07:27.300 has a home and has it has a direction.

00:07:29.840 And this guy's been doing it this whole time.

00:07:33.560 Absolutely.

00:07:34.080 Lomas, what's the what's the first time you kind of made contact with Unqualified Reservations

00:07:38.180 and what was it like to finally kind of bring it to print now?

00:07:41.860 So I guess compared to you guys, I'm an old head.

00:07:44.880 I wasn't reading when Curtis first very first started his blog, like 2008, 2007.

00:07:51.280 It wasn't quite around then, although I was in the sort of tech scene at the time and

00:07:58.360 I was, you know, reading various, quote unquote, dissident blogs.

00:08:03.020 I was reading Sailor fairly early on and Curtis's ideas would kind of pop up here and there or

00:08:09.900 not Curtis at the time.

00:08:11.020 It was just Mencius Moldbug was a name that sort of and it's a very sort of it's a name

00:08:16.880 that sticks with you when you hear it.

00:08:18.460 And so I kept hearing this name and I would see various conversations happening around

00:08:24.220 NRX stuff.

00:08:25.780 I remember, you know, a lot of stuff back then.

00:08:28.840 It was interesting.

00:08:30.300 There was this guy named Mike Anisimov who has since kind of fallen off the radar, but

00:08:35.060 he did a Google like video debate with Noah Smith once upon a time about the merits of NRX.

00:08:44.080 And so these ideas were floating around, I don't know, 2010s, you know, early 2010s when

00:08:51.080 I first encountered unqualified reservations, really like sat down with it.

00:08:56.780 And funny enough, like I hate reading and have always hated reading long form writing

00:09:01.980 on the web.

00:09:02.600 So when I came across unqualified reservations, I printed it all out and I had this stack of

00:09:09.520 papers on my bedside table of, you know, open letter and some of the other longer posts from

00:09:18.420 unqualified reservations.

00:09:19.720 And that experience of reading it in print was, was much better for me as a reader.

00:09:26.640 Although there were some aspects of it that were, that made it difficult to read in print,

00:09:30.700 all the links and the way that the text sort of invites you to go down these various rabbit

00:09:36.960 holes, Wikipedia rabbit holes.

00:09:38.820 And it's constantly linking to like Google books of old books.

00:09:43.500 And so you missed out on some of that reading it in print.

00:09:46.920 And so when I came to this idea, you know, now 10 years later to put this in actual book

00:09:53.200 form, that memory of reading out the print version was still on my mind.

00:09:59.060 And so what I attempted to do with this particular edition of the book was fuse the best aspects

00:10:07.120 of reading this in print, reading Moldbug in print, while also trying to maintain

00:10:14.280 some of these other features that are native to digital writing.

00:10:20.440 So using QRs as a way to stand in for the hyperlinks in the original blog.

00:10:27.260 That was the idea behind this book.

00:10:29.920 And I think, I hope it was successfully pulled off.

00:10:34.020 Yeah, no, it's a really, it's a really nice volume.

00:10:36.020 I like that it's good.

00:10:38.540 It's well put together.

00:10:40.060 So I encourage anybody who, you know, I'm like you, I did not, I'm not a big fan of

00:10:45.240 reading things online.

00:10:46.400 If I can avoid it at all costs, I really prefer to have a physical volume.

00:10:50.760 And I didn't have that, obviously that option.

00:10:53.200 I didn't print it out.

00:10:54.000 I, I listened to it.

00:10:56.360 You know, there's, there's those heroes out there who are putting all this stuff into

00:11:00.100 like computer red voices.

00:11:02.380 And so I literally just listened to half of you are, uh, while I was like on walks and

00:11:07.660 such, uh, that obviously doesn't help you with, with the links either.

00:11:11.260 So I had to go back and actually read some of it online as well.

00:11:14.280 But, uh.

00:11:15.180 Did you, did you read it?

00:11:16.620 Did you experience it after it had moved to unqualified reservations.org?

00:11:21.780 The new site.

00:11:22.920 Yeah.

00:11:23.040 Yeah.

00:11:23.280 Yeah.

00:11:23.540 I'm, I'm, I'm new enough to where that's where I, I was reading it.

00:11:28.580 Yeah.

00:11:28.920 I think a big part of the reason I didn't even make it through the first time is because

00:11:32.000 I tried to read it on my phone.

00:11:33.720 Yeah.

00:11:35.040 So to have the book is a real treat.

00:11:37.400 Yeah.

00:11:37.520 I think, you know, the thing, one interesting thing about, uh, unqualified reservations and

00:11:42.180 doing this project, um, is that despite the prominence of Yarvin within this, like sort

00:11:48.840 of larger discourse, you know, community that we belong to within this sphere and the

00:11:54.620 prominence of mold bug and unqualified reservations specifically, most people, it seems to me, even

00:12:01.220 who use a lot of the terminology and coinages from, from the book, haven't actually dug in

00:12:07.220 to the particulars of the writing, or they've sort of skimmed some posts here and there.

00:12:14.440 And that's, I think a consequence of this huge corpus being available online.

00:12:19.780 It doesn't sort of force you into this contained environment, like a book where you sort of

00:12:25.040 absorb this thing all at once or in a more sort of detailed fashion.

00:12:30.480 Um, so I think one thing, this book, I hope this book will do will entice people who are

00:12:36.720 interested in these ideas, but have only experienced them in this, um, way that, that is, uh, not

00:12:48.260 quite as intensive, not quite as immersive to actually pick up the material and like read

00:12:54.100 through the whole thing.

00:12:55.600 And I think that'll give a much more sort of profound understanding of, of the ideas that,

00:13:01.720 that Curtis is, is trying to communicate.

00:13:04.300 Yeah.

00:13:04.760 That is a really big deal.

00:13:06.240 I think you're right that a lot of people, again, so many people, I mean, the, the, the

00:13:10.560 phrase red pill is everywhere now.

00:13:12.360 Like, uh, you know, I hear 60 year old people use it.

00:13:15.740 Um, and so it's so weird that, that, that the language involved has become pervasive, you

00:13:21.200 know, uh, you know, guys on Fox news throw around the cathedral and stuff.

00:13:25.620 And so it is, it is very strange in that way, but so many people have kind of the McNuggets

00:13:30.400 of it.

00:13:31.280 Uh, they've, they've caught a video or two here.

00:13:33.860 I mean, I, I might be responsible for some of that, but like they, you know, they, they

00:13:37.680 have, uh, you know, basic understandings of some of the concepts or they, or they've run

00:13:42.820 into criticism of it, but they've never really gotten into it.

00:13:46.980 And so it's weird that there's a very surface level conversation of mold bug that goes on

00:13:52.580 on kind of the wider, I think, uh, internet, right.

00:13:55.640 For a lot of people who have never really actually read a whole lot of mold bug.

00:13:59.680 And I think you're right that for a lot of people, it's like, okay, where do I even start?

00:14:03.040 Uh, and then when I start, it's so disjointed and I, you know, pick it up, put it down.

00:14:06.860 I don't know where the next post goes to that kind of thing.

00:14:09.100 So having a book, you can really get stuck in and, uh, you know, you can dog ear and you

00:14:13.980 can, uh, actually study and go through, I think is, is a big deal.

00:14:17.860 So, yeah.

00:14:18.580 And I will say, I mean, I'm partially shilling the book here.

00:14:21.560 Of course, I want people to buy the book and enjoy it, but you know, I can honestly say

00:14:25.680 in my own experience with mold bug and his ideas.

00:14:29.900 I mean, if you, if you divorce like, like these McNugget of ideas from, from the text in

00:14:36.260 which they first arose, they might seem a little bit, uh, like facile in some regard that they

00:14:42.420 might not seem like they have a ton of depth or maybe these ideas like red pill or

00:14:47.500 cathedral, they just seem so obvious now.

00:14:50.420 Um, but what you get when you really dig into the material is this immersive experience that

00:14:59.080 if you're a curious reader is going to lead you in all sorts of directions that will open

00:15:04.700 you up to ideas that I'm certain you have never heard or seen before and writers you have never

00:15:10.960 seen and heard before.

00:15:11.900 So Curtis for as much as he is, uh, generating new ideas is also an incredible guide, a kind

00:15:21.640 of teacher leading you towards, um, new ways of thinking and new ways of analysis that even

00:15:30.360 if you disagree with Curtis's particular prescriptions on this or that idea or his particular framing

00:15:38.240 of, of, of some concept, you're still going to discover lots of new stuff from reading

00:15:44.240 him that at least in my experience, you wouldn't have discovered anywhere else.

00:15:50.520 Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right.

00:15:52.400 A lot of people get, you know, they don't like specific aspects.

00:15:55.640 They don't, they don't think, you know, patchwork is good or they don't like the clear pill or

00:15:59.920 there's there's, you know, they don't like the, the Protestant, uh, you know, thing.

00:16:03.840 They don't like some aspect of the work and they just kind of immediately say, oh, well,

00:16:07.540 this guy just doesn't understand it or he doesn't get it.

00:16:09.740 Or these things are too obvious now, but it really is the thinkers that, that Yarvin puts

00:16:15.040 you in contact with, which are the most important, you know, Yarvin is the reason I know about,

00:16:20.760 you know, Burnham and, and, and, uh, all the Machiavellians, all of the Italian elite theorists

00:16:26.380 Schmidt, you know, just, uh, Bertrand de Juvenal, all these really, uh, important thinkers that

00:16:32.240 themselves really desperately deserve to be read and understood.

00:16:36.060 And so if for nothing else, it's an incredible resource when it comes to making context with

00:16:41.360 or contact with these older, uh, writers that really help you understand power and what's

00:16:46.620 going on today.

00:16:48.120 Somewhere I read, and I think it's, there's an exclusive introduction in this book written

00:16:53.100 by Moldbug.

00:16:54.540 And I think it's in that, but somewhere I read that he's the reason that the Machiavellians

00:16:59.880 went back into print because he popularized it.

00:17:02.400 Yeah.

00:17:03.880 Yeah.

00:17:04.280 No, he, I think, I think the joke was something like the, the original copies before it was

00:17:08.100 reprinted were going for like thousands of dollars.

00:17:10.480 Yeah.

00:17:10.940 And so he had, he had manufactured his own like market of, he should have scooped up all 0.96

00:17:15.400 the copies when, before he started writing about it, because he could have like juiced

00:17:19.180 his own library of highly valuable, uh, Machiavellian prints.

00:17:23.860 But, you know, it's something I wanted to say too, and this is kind of speculation, but you

00:17:27.200 know, over the years I had been spending time online in, in literary and philosophical circles,

00:17:32.560 excuse me.

00:17:35.000 And I had come across some thinkers that I never would have, um, under normal circumstances

00:17:40.920 like Schmidt and Spengler.

00:17:43.440 And I almost wonder if that was like from Moldbug's influence without me realizing, you 1.00

00:17:49.820 know?

00:17:51.000 Yeah.

00:17:51.520 No, I think that's true.

00:17:52.600 Um, yeah, he, I mean, the Machiavellian's thing is definitely true.

00:17:56.240 It was, it was Curtis popularizing his work that has, um, brought attention to those books.

00:18:02.220 Um, but yeah, again, it's, you know, for anything else, Curtis might or might not have contributed

00:18:09.260 to the discourse.

00:18:10.120 What he's doing with unqualified reservations is essentially introducing a canon for dissident

00:18:18.160 right thinkers from which we can sort of draw our own conclusions and our own prescriptions

00:18:23.220 for what should be done.

00:18:24.340 And again, sort of shameless shilling here.

00:18:26.880 But one thing we've done with this book is if you flip to the back, we have this recommended

00:18:31.380 reading section where we've cataloged like all these books that Curtis mentions, uh, throughout

00:18:37.740 you are.

00:18:38.500 And if you wanted to, you know, present basically like a history class to a precocious young person

00:18:47.400 who was dissatisfied with, uh, whatever syllabus they've been given at their, you know, college

00:18:53.640 history one-on-one or government one-on-one, uh, level courses, this would be a really great

00:18:59.500 place to start.

00:19:00.880 Um, and so again, there's so much value to, uh, unqualified reservations and the Curtis's

00:19:07.600 writing beyond, um, just sort of the, the straightforward arguments that he makes and that get passed

00:19:14.820 around, um, and, and have been popularized like red pill and cathedral.

00:19:20.940 So now that we have kind of the legacy of the reading list and the importance of kind of the

00:19:25.740 thinkers he puts you in contact with, let's go ahead and get into how some of the understandings

00:19:31.480 in you are have aged.

00:19:33.580 So I think the first one that everyone comes to the one that's the most popular, again,

00:19:37.980 they're, they're using the term on Fox news.

00:19:39.720 So it's, you know, it's, it's kind of entered the, uh, the popular, uh, lexicon at this point

00:19:45.060 is the cathedral.

00:19:46.640 Now, a lot of people, uh, you know, the, the, we'll, we'll have two criticisms of the cathedral.

00:19:53.180 We get two simultaneously.

00:19:54.360 One is now it's obvious, right?

00:19:58.340 And, and that makes some sense to me because, you know, back when this was being written,

00:20:02.980 you know, it started in 2007, I think the open letters, 2007, 2008, the cathedral, uh,

00:20:08.680 was much less obvious.

00:20:10.080 It's much more revelatory today when the media like directly comes out and tells you like,

00:20:15.460 we decide who the president is.

00:20:17.740 It's a little more obvious, right?

00:20:19.500 So some people will say, okay, well that's not the, well, I still think the idea is very

00:20:24.340 important because of the way he breaks down kind of the decentralized networking and the

00:20:28.660 nodes and the way that they influence each other.

00:20:30.760 I still think it's very worth reading the source material.

00:20:33.840 Uh, the idea that these kind of institutions work together, um, is, is something I think

00:20:39.620 most people can have a much easier time grasping.

00:20:42.040 The other, uh, the other criticism we get a lot with the cathedral is people saying, well,

00:20:48.580 look, uh, the, we now know that these people, uh, coordinate openly and directly.

00:20:54.380 It's not all this soft, you know, influence through, uh, you know, sharing the same religion

00:21:01.000 or sharing the same ideas.

00:21:02.200 We actually have some things like the Twitter files where people are revealing themselves

00:21:06.900 as they directly work.

00:21:08.480 The government works with private corporations, works with the security state and all this

00:21:12.460 stuff.

00:21:12.760 We can see this colluding.

00:21:13.980 So does that mean the cathedral doesn't work?

00:21:17.080 I have, of course, in my own opinion on this, but, uh, Astro, what do you think about the

00:21:22.120 concept of the cathedral in the year of our Lord, 2023?

00:21:25.720 Yeah, these are great insights and these are great questions to ask.

00:21:29.700 And you have to, because one of the things that happens to me is people can see the Neo

00:21:36.540 reaction just in my comments and in my tweets and in my commentary.

00:21:40.220 And every once in a while, people will say like, oh, you're like a 2016 year, 2016 year,

00:21:46.040 uh, era Neo reactionary.

00:21:48.380 Like that's passe now.

00:21:50.080 Haven't we moved on?

00:21:51.260 But my assessment is that the things he was observing have been proven more true, like over

00:21:59.120 time.

00:21:59.560 And I almost wonder if the way things stand now, after the Twitter files, after we see

00:22:06.240 the heavy hand of the state directly intervening with Twitter, which we all suspected was happening

00:22:11.080 anyway, that just proved it to us.

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00:22:39.960 That if it's different, if it's a different thing than what Yarvin, uh, described in 2008,

00:22:50.120 it's like the logical progression or the logical conclusion or evolution of the cathedral as

00:22:56.760 he described it.

00:22:57.820 So the cathedral before is kind of like a really broad term for what the cathedral was, was

00:23:05.840 really just like prevailing ideology.

00:23:07.780 The prevailing ideology that all of our institutions sort of operated within the framework of.

00:23:14.060 And he was just kind of describing that.

00:23:16.780 Whereas now, it can't really be considered ideology as much as like direct political propaganda.

00:23:25.400 And the ideology is in service to the state, clearly.

00:23:28.960 Um, so I, I guess it could be a chicken or egg situation that we can debate, which came first, the ideology or, or the state propaganda, uh, who follows what.

00:23:40.320 So I have my opinions on that, but in terms of how it relates to Yarvin and the cathedral, um, if this is something different, it is what the cathedral evolved into, which is very much in line with the way Yarvin describes how progressivism works.

00:23:58.240 Right.

00:23:58.480 Because he talks in the open letter that, um, and this is, this is a controversial statement too, so we can couch this, but just to kind of make my point, um, in the open letter, he talks about how religion, particular Protestant, American Protestant religion sort of evolves into secular liberalism and secular progressivism.

00:24:21.480 Um, and I kind of see the evolution of the cathedral in, in, in similar terms that it went from this sort of like ideological framework to just open, you know, manipulative propaganda.

00:24:34.660 And with the case of Ricky Vaughn, it's, it's, it could even, it's like pure Soviet, you know, censorship and pure, pure, uh, so I, I, I wonder though, or, and if, if your opinion on it coincides with what I'm saying, excuse me.

00:24:51.780 I'm getting over a cold here, guys, if you can bear with me.

00:24:53.900 Oh, no problem.

00:24:54.800 Yeah, no, I'm, I'm with you.

00:24:56.300 I think that, um, one of the things, and we'll get more into kind of Nick Land's contribution here in a second, but one of the things Nick Land said about the cathedral is the only reason we can see it is that it's dying, right?

00:25:08.340 If you have a mind control device, um, then you shouldn't be able to kind of see the strings.

00:25:13.420 You shouldn't be able to see that the puppets are, are being moved.

00:25:16.780 And the fact that now we can kind of see these things means that something has degraded, something in the cathedral is failing, uh, it's getting worse at what it's doing.

00:25:27.080 It has to be more obvious.

00:25:29.520 And so I think there's a lot of truth that, uh, the cathedral worked more the way Yarvin was talking about originally and has now kind of degenerated even further to the point where now it's, it's becoming increasingly obvious.

00:25:44.440 And that's, that's a failing of the cathedral, not, uh, not a failing, I think of necessarily Yarvin's understanding of what happened there.

00:25:50.920 I do think he went too far.

00:25:52.980 Sometimes there are points and Yarvin just does this on a regular basis where he gets a little too extreme with kind of pushing a certain aspect.

00:25:59.640 And he has just come out and repeatedly said, like, there's no collusion.

00:26:02.420 There's no collusion.

00:26:03.180 These people don't have to work together.

00:26:04.420 It doesn't happen.

00:26:05.640 It's like, well, yeah, actually, obviously there is.

00:26:07.880 Like, and so I think he, I think while he set up a really excellent framework for understanding how this kind of decentralized, these decentralized nodes influence each other, I think he did probably step a little too far with kind of how much he pushed there.

00:26:21.700 There was no overt collusion because that kind of left him then open to the obvious point that at some point these people will talk to each other and they will coordinate something, especially as they get worse of this and they need to actually directly coordinate rather than just kind of pick up on each other's understandings.

00:26:36.660 And so that kind of leaves him open to that criticism.

00:26:39.860 But Lomis, what do you think about the idea of the cathedral in 2023?

00:26:43.920 Okay, just for the sake of making this conversation interesting, I'm going to take a slightly different view here, I guess.

00:26:50.320 Or at least maybe try to add a bit of like a different analysis to it.

00:26:55.740 So, okay, so the cathedral, Curtis says, is the instantiation of the type of society we live in, which is between on the one hand, like Karl Popper's open society version of, you know, free information flow where truth wins out always over everything.

00:27:14.540 It's this very sort of scientific way of thinking about not just like epistemology on the other side, we have tightly controlled, like a type one society, this tightly controlled information apparatus, like a Soviet style information apparatus.

00:27:30.540 And what Curtis is saying is the cathedral is somewhere in the middle, it's a consensus society that arrives at truth through what he calls spontaneous coordination, okay, between these various nodes of the cathedral, between, you know, universities primarily and the media.

00:27:55.160 And so the question like we're asking is, okay, well, just how explicit is this coordination, just how planned is it versus how spontaneous it is.

00:28:06.020 And so that's, I think we all agree that we're somewhere in the middle here.

00:28:09.800 And what we're trying to negotiate with this conversation and what I hear both Astral and you saying is that we've really gone much further towards this type one controlled information society, where there's this top down sort of directive for what is and isn't considered truth.

00:28:31.000 And so that these epistemic authorities have a kind of explicit informal role in controlling information flow.

00:28:40.860 That's hard to argue with.

00:28:42.480 Um, and, and, and that sort of tracks with what I observe, but on the other hand, one thing in the Twitter files that you saw below the like headline is that there really was this, like, at least ostensible negotiation within the bureaucracies of both Twitter.

00:29:02.680 And the government agencies working with Twitter, to figure out like what they can and cannot say and what they can and cannot publish and what's the right thing to do here in terms of like dictating control.

00:29:17.460 And we really never did see, I mean, I hate to sort of, uh, come to the defense of like Yoel Roth or whoever, but we never really did see like that smoking gun that says, we are going to say this, this is our message that we're going to deliver to the American people.

00:29:35.620 It had that effect, but the way it was negotiated, how those decisions came about allowed for all of these different people within this, these bureaucratic structures to have plausible deniability and tell themselves that they were coming to these, these decisions through like some good faith effort to balance the demands of the first amendment with like public health.

00:30:01.100 And, um, and, um, um, what we, what we see instead is not this sort of straightforward, top-down expression of information, but the selection of personnel where you can guarantee that the people who are within these bureaucracies are all going to land on the exact same place when it comes to these important decisions.

00:30:26.220 And, and, and so what I see rather than, I don't think Curtis is wrong about the cathedral, but what it underplays is how the personnel of the cathedral is selected in and just how carefully and precise that selection mechanism has become probably over the last 10 years.

00:30:48.100 And so the only people who are left in the cathedral are people who you can guarantee where the incentives are aligned just right, that the effect is the exact same as if we were living in one of these tightly controlled societies, but they have this again, plausible deniability.

00:31:08.100 They can tell themselves this story and present a story to the public, even through the Twitter files that no, we were actually, uh, negotiating these decisions in good faith and there was disagreement and we were all making compromises and doing the best we could under, you know, difficult circumstances.

00:31:26.100 Uh, if I may, yeah. So this is how I understand, like, uh, the neo-reactionary take on these things. This is how, this is the neo-reactionary framework for understanding these things. And of course it's not wrong. I mean, I basically consider myself a neo-reactionary and I agree with everything Lomez is saying, uh, spandrels bio-Leninism for me is like the perfect way to understand this where, where you, as the institutions drift further left, the, the personnel that make up the institution

00:31:56.100 uh, drift further and further into bio-Leninism, uh, or further and further into just open freakishness. Um, so Yul Roth. Now here, right here's the crossover from where I sort of diverge from the standard neo-reactionary understanding of this. So, so Yul Roth wasn't just gay. He went to MIT, which is a well-known, uh, institution funded, according to Noam Chomsky himself, 90%

00:32:26.100 by the military, 90% by the Pentagon, where he learned, uh, how to like, and he also studied at some of the Kennedy school, which I think is at Yale or it's at Harvard. And what he did at these places was, uh, learn how to like game the algorithm or learn how to like, uh, implement, you know, what we call web 2.0. And it's how the algorithm sort of directs people to things they want it to go to.

00:32:53.680 And as Elon Musk revealed, uh, this was done, uh, Yul Roth. I don't even know how much of this I can say on this show. Yul Roth's PhD was all about directing children to pornography online.

00:33:07.680 So this looks very manufactured to me. Um, he's coming from these elite institutions, but this is still within the framework of the cathedral.

00:33:17.680 But then when you see some of these emails coming from the CIA, like, or the FBI, excuse me, asking for people's IP addresses and home addresses and asking for, uh, excuse me, people leaving the FBI to go work at Twitter as employees.

00:33:33.680 Um, it looks a little bit more heavy handed than that. And I know that Yarvin has made claims that it's, this, this is also the, uh, manufacturing consent argument, which, which Yarvin references in unqualified reservations, which is that it's like, um, they land on personnel who are going to all land or excuse me, they hire personnel who are going to all land on the same conclusion, which is true.

00:33:58.000 But we know, I remember Edward Snowden, uh, shared, retweeted this, this, I think it was a dateline or maybe, uh, you know, uh, frontline, one of those, uh, news institutions, uh, interview with a CIA agent who was talking about how they would manipulate, uh, stories in the press about the Vietnam war, how they would like leak certain things on purpose to make it look like troop movements were happening in certain ways when they actually weren't.

00:34:24.820 So even, you know, back when Chomsky was writing manufactured consent in the seventies, it was known that intelligence agencies were working with the media and helping to manipulate the media on purpose.

00:34:36.680 So I do think that we're kind of on uncharted territory in a certain way. And that maybe, uh, although I appreciate Mo Bug, I'm a, I'm a huge Mo Bugian. Like, I do think he gets a little bit of this. He doesn't go hard enough in my opinion on some of this.

00:34:52.360 Um, yeah, let me jump in real quick. I just want to respond to that real quick. So Astral, I, my view is that that version of events, that narrative of why and how Yoel Roth is selected into this position is a bit sort of conspiratorial.

00:35:10.340 Uh, I think instead what we're seeing is this rather than Yoel Roth being this sort of like Machiavellian actor who learns how to manipulate the algo, you know, to advance like his own status or something.

00:35:26.080 It's the, it's the, it's the bureaucracy. It's the bureaucracy algo selecting for Yoel Roth and people like him, which is, uh, high IQ people who are competent. I know we hate to give these people any credit, but they're like smart and competent at certain tasks and at certain things.

00:35:47.200 And what they're, what they're competent at, and what they're selected for. And this is something that Mo Bug talks about with the cathedral. What is the cathedral's goal? Is it to arrive at truth? No.

00:36:00.480 It's this iterative process of creating an epistemology that reinforces its own power and importantly, its own existence. And so what Yoel Roth is really good at is not truth seeking or not even necessarily acting out to, uh, create some like specific political agenda.

00:36:28.800 Although I think he probably has a specific political agenda. His primary value is that he's really good at doing things that will allow the institutions he's a part of to continue to survive, regardless of how antithetical to sort of truth or any baseline morality, uh, those survival strategies are.

00:36:51.540 Well, to be clear, I don't disagree with that. And I, I think, um, this is why, this is why I like to talk about Neo reaction and mold bug kind of, I can't really talk about it without bringing in land as Oren has done a couple of times and spandrel, because my understanding of all this is that it's all kind of together.

00:37:12.460 And I do think the bio-Leninism perspective accounts for, uh, what Lomas just laid out, which, which I don't necessarily disagree with. I hope it's clear.

00:37:21.840 Yeah. I think the, the intensity of the Leninism, uh, is what, uh, then produces the kind of the, uh, the self-selection process that Lomas is talking about there. So I don't, I don't think that it's, uh, it's really a disagreement that much as a kind of a, simply a shift in, in perspective there.

00:37:40.460 Uh, but that said, uh, let's go ahead and look at a few of the other ideas, uh, from you are and, uh, how some of them have aged.

00:37:49.740 So one of the ones that, uh, people talk about a lot is the, the, the, uh, connection between kind of Protestantism and universalism in turning into then this progressivism and the kind of the descent there, uh, of those.

00:38:06.760 Uh, a lot of people get angry about this. They say, you can't tie these things together or, you know, uh, there, there's, uh, an issue with that.

00:38:15.420 I think a lot of people misunderstand what Yarvin is saying in this. Um, I think a lot of people look at this and they say, this is a, uh, critique of a very particular type of Christianity and saying it would inevitably lead here.

00:38:29.820 I have another take on this and I think it's the one that kind of Yarvin has, has pointed out later too, which is that this is kind of a Spanglerian, um, uh, inevitability that, uh, you know, Spangler said that each, uh, each civilization is going to spawn

00:38:47.320 versions of atheism that are connected to, you know, their, their original kind of metaphysical animating spirit. So like the Romans end up with Stoicism or whatever, and that's kind of their version of it.

00:39:00.020 And he says that, you know, so, uh, for, you know, uh, the Western man, you get this kind of very scientific, uh, atheism that is like all of the stuff of Christianity, uh, but without any of the Christianity, all of that is stripped away.

00:39:14.420 And so it's not Yarvin, who's the first one to kind of make this connection. And I think that Yarvin's right that, um, you know, the, there is a connection there between these two forces that they share, uh, similar, uh, descent, though. I don't believe, you know, as a Protestant Christian that like this inevitably has to become progressivism or that, uh, you know, but, but I think it's just every,

00:39:39.080 every, every civilization produces its mere image in it, in kind of its end phase. And that's what we see with progressivism. And that's what Yarvin is kind of identifying when he ties it to kind of the descent of, uh, of, uh, Protestant Christianity. But what do you guys think? How does, how is this take aged from Yarvin?

00:39:59.620 Uh, Lomas, you want to pick that one up first?

00:40:01.880 Yeah, sure. So, um, you know, this is the, this is like the basis for the third part of this,

00:40:09.080 this book, which is how Dawkins got pwned, which is a, you know, I don't know about a 90 page, uh, sort of short book on the subject of what at the time, you know, was just called political correctness or social justice. Um, but what we might call now wokeism and this idea that wokeism is a religion, uh, is something that obviously many people have been saying,

00:40:39.080 now for quite a while for quite a while for about as long as wokeism has been in the public spotlight. Um, and what Curtis is doing in this book is taking that metaphor literally.

00:40:51.080 And so the question is, what is the theological basis for this thing called wokeism or social justice or simply progressivism? And, you know, this gets back to an argument that Curtis makes elsewhere. Um, it's sort of an ongoing theme in all of his writing, which is that the predominant ideology of, uh,

00:41:21.080 is a kind of, is a kind of wig history, this sort of linear, uh, progressive history, which, you know, presumes that the future is going to necessarily definitionally be better than the past, that change is good. And because change happens in the future, all change is necessarily positive change.

00:41:42.080 Well, you can see how adhering to a sort of wig history version of, of, uh, uh, society would require a certain amount of faith and a certain amount of sort of moral and theological malleability in what you believe.

00:42:01.080 And so what Curtis is simply doing in my view in making this argument about Protestantism is trying to trace the theological history of this back to sort of the New England Puritans who came over and how that evolved.

00:42:20.080 Like in Curtis's view, like in Curtis's view, it's a straight line from New England Puritanism of, of, you know, 200 years ago, 300 years ago to where we are now.

00:42:33.200 And frankly, I don't have the historical or sort of theological chops to, um, have much of my own sort of say on the matter.

00:42:42.580 But when you read what Curtis has identified as his like key piece of evidence, uh, for this theory, which is this article called American Malvern, which he repeats over and over from time magazine, which was born out of, um, the theologian and historian, Arnold Toynbee, who was himself, uh, influenced a great deal by Spangler and Spangler's view of like cyclical histories.

00:43:09.160 And, and, and, and, and precisely what you were just saying, Orin, and how these civilizations devolve over time into these sort of secular versions of themselves.

00:43:20.020 Toynbee was saying our only sort of way out of this is a kind of like universal church.

00:43:25.920 You know, that was Toynbee's big idea, which, um, requires like all of these sort of cathedral apparatuses, like this NGO apparatus.

00:43:34.920 And what amounts to this kind of, uh, American military adventurism, this sort of, uh, global human, humanitarianism that we see now as the consequence of that, which is really like the, the, the force, the, uh, the physical force, the, the hard power behind woke ism.

00:43:58.380 Um, is this sort of foreign policy that arises out of the concepts presented by Toynbee and the implications of this idea of the universal church.

00:44:10.720 This could be, or, and as you mentioned before about, about mold bug and writing, like you hit on this interesting idea and then there's this tendency to like over expand the implications of it and like start to see it everywhere.

00:44:24.280 And that may be the case here, but just again, like my view about this is as a provocation as, as something to make us reconsider history and the, in the sort of trajectory of American ideology and American civil religion and how the sort of theological substrate of American life has devolved.

00:44:46.280 Uh, whether it's Protestantism specifically or something else has devolved in this kind of woke secular humanism is pretty convincing and either way, something worth thinking about.

00:45:03.180 Uh, yeah, I mean, I just think it's real. I think it's, he's correct. I think mold bug is correct. There are other factors at play. Uh, one of the things, and I have to assume both of you guys agree with me on this.

00:45:15.920 A lot of the criticism you see of mold bug is very clear that the critics haven't read him. It's very clear. And he addresses, I mean, he's not perfect. I, I obviously dive, you know, divulge, uh, um, I, I obviously, uh, disagree with him on a couple of things here and there, but this one, I, I accept wholesale.

00:45:37.740 Um, so if you, if you go back to like the pre 19, uh, 20th century in, in America, like before all the immigrants came over from, from Europe, because communism, the thing people, the refutation people have against mold bug is that the things he, he attributes to like Anglo and Germanic Protestantism are actually, uh, foreign and introduced by like European and Russian communism, Bolshevism.

00:46:04.680 And it came here in the 1910s and the 1920s and ramped up to FDRs. Uh, and, and he talks about FDRs cabinet and FDRs entire staff, which like people talk about how many communists were in FDR staff.

00:46:19.580 And they use that as like proof that mold bug is wrong, but he talks about it in the open letter. Uh, and, and he, he talks about McCarthy and how McCarthy was like, correct about how many communists were in the, in the government and stuff.

00:46:32.160 Right. So he doesn't obfuscate that or deny it.

00:46:35.520 They even go so far as to call America a communist country after.

00:46:39.780 Yeah. Uh, which, uh, essay was that where he's, I forgot that.

00:46:43.400 Yeah. I don't remember right off the top of my head, but I know he does it several times.

00:46:46.460 Yeah, he does. Exactly. Right. So what I wanted to say real quick is that if you go and look at like Quakerism, that's one of the main ones that mold bug says kind of like evolved into progressivism and wokeism.

00:47:00.580 And he says, he says right in the, in the open letter that like, if something, if you don't, if you can look back in history at something that existed and there's no point in which it, you see it die, it means it's not dead. It means it's still around.

00:47:14.580 So, and so he says like all of these like, uh, Protestant American religious groups, like who are they now? Well, they're the progressives.

00:47:23.560 Um, and the Unitarians is another one too. Uh, but anyway, so if you go back to the 19th century, uh, some of the tenants of Quakerism are like, uh, instead of punishing prisoners, you're reforming prisoners.

00:47:37.060 So you don't, you don't lock them up in prison to, to sequester them away from society or to punish them. You do it to reform them because everybody, you know, that they consider that a fundamentally Christian belief that people, people can be, you know, uh, reformed from their, their, their ways of error.

00:47:53.080 Uh, passivism, uh, passivism was all the way through there. There were passivists and all the wars in the 19th century, uh, 18th century, excuse me.

00:48:03.100 Um, what was the other one? Suffrages, uh, universal suffrage and women's rights and feminism. You know, these are all things that communism endorses, but these were, these were all things that existed before, you know, the foreign infusion of communism came over here. 0.63

00:48:17.580 Uh, that was in like the 1800s. I recently read the book, um, not hunger by a Newt Hampson. Um, uh, the growth of the soil, the growth of the soil. And it's, it's about, uh, it's about abortion reform in Norway in the 1900s and feminism and the, and the way that like the, the modernization of that country was like tearing apart, you know, the traditional ways of, of society.

00:48:42.660 And I just remember reading that book thinking like, okay, Norway was having all of these problems in like the 1890s and the 1900s.

00:48:50.660 And people are accusing mold bug of like obfuscating that the fact that communism calls all this stuff in the West. When right here, uh, you're seeing like the very same problems that we're talking about in this, in this country.

00:49:06.460 And in a previous century that didn't even have like the, the immigration issues that we had in the earliest 20th century. So clearly there's something to it. Um, and that, you know, you could give a million other examples.

00:49:18.020 So something that you've mentioned astral, and I agree with you a hundred percent is that it's, uh, kind of important, especially if you want to understand the wider kind of neo reactionary thought to look at the way that mold bug and Nick land interact.

00:49:35.520 Now I know mold bug has said many times that he's never read land. He doesn't like to read people who have responded to his work. So he has, he hasn't interacted with it, but this interaction is really essential.

00:49:45.500 It's kind of a mold bug is kind of John Rawls of this sphere in the sense that like everybody who wrote after mold bug was reacting in one way or another to mold bug.

00:49:56.780 And so you have, you, you can understand mold bug on his own. And I encourage people who, you know, if they're too daunted by like a larger, like having to chase down every single blog that ever commented on them, you can just read unqualified reservations.

00:50:10.320 You can just read the unqualified reservations book and you'll still get a coherent kind of understanding what's happening there.

00:50:16.760 But if you really want to expand and understand what's going on, then Nick land is really essential. Many people again, reacted to mold bug and in valuable ways, but Nick land, especially, you know, with the dark enlightenment, which is just entirely, uh, his reaction.

00:50:32.320 And then later on in something like Xeno systems where he kind of adds back in his own acceleration ism is really foundational to kind of the other side, I think of the Neo reaction, uh, kind of, uh, sphere and the kind of all the thought that developed around it.

00:50:52.620 Yeah, I agree. I can't, uh, the reason I say I can't read mold bug, uh, decoupled from land is because I read land first. Um, well, technically I read mold bug first because I tried to read the open letter, but I didn't, it didn't really make sense to me at the time.

00:51:11.180 Um, so I've been reading them back and forth for the last three years. And my understanding of the whole near reactionary perspective is, is those two are wrapped up together and spandrel as well.

00:51:24.240 But what I want to say, and I don't want to get too abstract here. So I'll try to make it concise. Um, I understand history. My perspective on history is certainly informed by Spengler, um, and many others, but, but Spengler kind of has this morphology of culture and this morphology of, of history in which he basically says that like history follows like a certain structure more or less.

00:51:53.640 And he has the, the phases you, you had a really good episode on Spengler with, um, the Prudentialist, one of the best explanations of Spengler I've ever heard.

00:52:02.340 But to make a long story short, um, he's got like the, the, what is it? The spring, summer, autumn, and winter phases of a culture's life cycle. Right. And once you hit the winter phase, it's kind of over and it's, it's reached its final form and it will never like evolve into something more and it's done.

00:52:21.520 So the question we have to ask is like, if you believe in this, this cultural cycle or this historical cycle, where are we in the cycle? Um, and he, Spengler's got this idea. It's much more complicated than this, but for our purposes, he's got this idea that you transfer, you transition from the culture phase to the civilization phase.

00:52:41.840 And that's basically like the culture phase is basically spring and summer where the culture is like flourishing. And then the civilization phase is when it's, uh, autumn and winter, when it's kind of ossified and it's sort of like winding down.

00:52:57.260 And it's, it's kind of running out of cultural steam. And a lot of thinkers think that we are in the transition phase right now from culture to, uh, civilization. And this is a lot of the talk about the Caesar figure. The Caesar figure comes right at that transition.

00:53:13.260 Uh, a really simple way to think about this is Rome going from, uh, going from, uh, the, the Republic to the empire, you know, with the Caesars, uh, they initiate the civilization phase.

00:53:27.300 Accelerationism, as I understand it is basically the idea that you, you, you understand that you, that we are subject, we are subjected to these cycles and accelerationism.

00:53:39.260 Accelerationism, uh, and Nick land is famous for saying, right. Acceleration is happening, whether you like it or not.

00:53:45.260 And I understand mold bug is an accelerationist. I don't, I don't know how he would feel about me saying that, but, but that's kind of what I see the clear pill as the clear pill is kind of like, uh, we're going to go through these cultural phases, whether you like it or not.

00:54:00.220 And some things are going to happen that you don't like, you can't get upset about it. You can't care about it.

00:54:05.260 And the way he characterizes the clear pill is like, you can't be emotionally tied up with like a certain narrative because it might not come to the conclusion that you want it to come to.

00:54:15.140 So when he talks about this, like tech monarch CEO, it's sort of like his version, in my opinion, this is how I read it anyway, of, of the Caesar figure.

00:54:24.820 So when I say that I'm like a neo reactionary accelerationist, what I mean is that we're going through these cycles. Another way to call it is the cycle of regimes. Uh, I think Aristotle is the one who characterized it that way.

00:54:38.660 Um, as we transition from democracy to oligarchy and then oligarchy will eventually, uh, transition into tyranny.

00:54:49.560 Um, the, the democratic processes are the political processes are going to be more and more like further removed from us.

00:54:59.620 The people that are going to be more and more taken out of our hands and they're going to be more and more concentrated in these like large figures or these large bodies like the democratic party or the GOP or, uh, these individuals like Donald Trump or Elon Musk.

00:55:14.780 So for me to read Neo reaction and mold bug talking about this, like tech future, right. And he's got some of it right in here. He talks about like virtual reality prisons and, and boards of directors with like, you know, uh, heavily encrypted code so that they can make their decisions for government.

00:55:32.300 So as we move to this, like authoritarianism, or however you want to call it accelerationism and the clear pill to me means that we accept that we're going through this process and we have to basically, uh, do what we can to like make the transition as, as painless as possible for as many people as possible.

00:55:55.840 Um, and I could go on because this is, these are totally the terms in which I understand mold bug, but I want to let one of you guys come into, to pick it up and I don't, maybe you disagree or see it, see it the same way. I'm not sure.

00:56:07.740 Well, I think what land does that is so valuable, um, particularly in the dark enlightenment is he expands in really important ways on a lot of the ideas that mold bug touches on and puts them in terms that I think are really clarifying.

00:56:24.160 So that's one of his incredibly valuable, valuable contributions, contributions.

00:56:28.780 And part of that is land's similar interests.

00:56:32.100 Like you said, there's, there's already this kind of tech futurist, um, you know, CEO, monarch, uh, you know, uh, strain in, uh, in mold bug, you know, patchwork and everything.

00:56:44.580 But I think what land is particularly interested in is kind of the end of the political, uh, and what exists beyond the end of the political, uh, as where someone like,

00:56:54.160 Dugan looks at this as kind of the ability of the political to reemerge, I think both mold bug and land are looking to kind of remove the political from, from, from the kind of the general reach of the people at all.

00:57:06.920 And for land, it seems, I, I, I also kind of look at it with a little bit of Spangler there, you know, uh, for, for land, it's the ability to escape.

00:57:17.500 I think perhaps the civilizational cycles altogether, kind of the, you know, the, the interesting thing about, uh, Spangler is, you know, the, his idea that the Faustian man is always reaching beyond is always trying to kind of push things and expand things into spaces that never existed before.

00:57:33.680 And so the question is, can, like, Faustian man escape the civilizational cycle?

00:57:39.680 Can he do what no other great, uh, high culture has done before?

00:57:44.440 And I think in some ways, accelerationism is the attempt to do so by, uh, by kind of removing the, some of the, uh, civilizational forces that would otherwise kind of tie you to this cycle.

00:57:57.660 Now for land, this means, and can he, cause he comes at this from kind of, uh, his, his kind of old Marxist background is, is that capital is just de-territorializing everything, every bond, every, uh, thing that makes us traditional, everything that used to kind of hold these cultures and civilizations together.

00:58:17.320 And by doing so, it kind of, uh, possibly achieves, uh, escape velocity from everything that kind of makes us human and the need for, you know, the political and these other, uh, kind of institutions to continue to interact.

00:58:30.580 Uh, so there, I mean, there's, there's lots of places we couldn't, you know, you can't spend the whole, uh, stream talking about land's interaction, but they are all very fascinating and well worth, uh, reading these two thinkers in tandem if you have the opportunity.

00:58:44.340 Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to, I don't want to, um, hog the mic on Nick land, but you are, uh, you are, um, speaking right to my, uh, my sci-fi nerd proclivities here.

00:58:56.560 Um, but yeah, for anybody who wants to look deeper into it, uh, Xeno systems is certainly where you want to go among, among others, but that's the most direct one.

00:59:05.960 Oren, can I use your platform real quick to speak directly to Nick land and the op chance that he's listening by all means?

00:59:12.280 Okay. Nick, um, or Mr. Land, however you prefer the, uh, called, uh, I've been trying to get ahold of you.

00:59:18.500 I would love to publish, uh, Xeno systems, uh, given the relevance to you are and everything else we are doing.

00:59:25.940 So please respond to my DMS or there's some other way to get ahold of you.

00:59:30.880 Maybe, uh, someone listening can get ahold of Nick, uh, Mr. Land.

00:59:34.760 We would love to publish his book, uh, given the overlap here.

00:59:38.640 Absolutely. Yeah. I think it's an invaluable resource guys. Um, you know, like I said, I think

00:59:44.040 dark enlightenment is probably the first place you should go. Cause it's just a direct reaction

00:59:48.280 to you are. So if you've read unqualified reservations, then dark enlightenment, but you

00:59:54.300 absolutely should then continue on to Xeno systems. Oh, the nice thing about Xeno systems is most of the

00:59:59.860 entries are like a page. Uh, so they, they are really thoughtful, but they are not over long.

01:00:06.220 It's something you can land can at times become very difficult to process. You can, you can write a

01:00:12.500 very, uh, way that obscures a lot, but the Xeno systems while being complicated are at least

01:00:17.320 bite-sized enough where you can kind of go over them multiple times and better understand them.

01:00:23.840 Yeah. Well, so mold book puts a lot of like super tech ideas in his writing. Uh, he had the one,

01:00:33.300 I think it was called fascism and communism today. It came out last year. And he talks about like, uh,

01:00:40.420 he talks about like the, the, the CEO having like, uh, uh, an encrypted code that he can be like,

01:00:48.720 he doesn't know the code to it, a key, excuse me, and not a code, a key.

01:00:54.040 And he like, can't get anything past the board without using this key. And if they don't like

01:00:59.300 the way he's ruling, um, they take the key away from him and they pick a new person and it gets,

01:01:05.200 it gets really complicated. But my point is that, uh, Nick land like picks this stuff up and he's got

01:01:10.980 this whole like futuristic AI Skynet. He's always talking about Skynet, like taking over. And I,

01:01:17.960 you know, I don't know how realistic some of this stuff is. I don't know how realistic all this stuff

01:01:21.880 is. You know, are we going to get a Caesar? I don't know. Is it how, how much energy and how much

01:01:26.700 intellectual capital should we really put in to the idea that Skynet's going to take over or that,

01:01:32.080 um, that there's going to be a tech CEO someday ruling the country? You know, I don't know,

01:01:37.400 but these guys make pretty strong arguments. Can I ask that question? Like how realistic

01:01:41.880 do you think some of this stuff is? Uh, is that fair to ask?

01:01:46.040 Yeah. Well, I think, uh, I think the Caesarism thing's kind of an inevitable, inevitable. I think,

01:01:50.920 I think the cycle there will happen. Some people disagree with me about that, but

01:01:54.740 I think that part's, uh, kind of inevitable. It won't be direct. Like no one's going to name

01:01:59.840 anybody King. Um, but it, it'll be the transition in the way that you get, you know, uh, you know,

01:02:06.080 Augustus, uh, uh, you know, uh, taking power. No, no one calls him emperor, but everyone understands,

01:02:12.740 uh, that he's accumulated the, you know, the Senate still exists. We kind of go through the motions in

01:02:18.020 some way, but, but everyone kind of knows that the, the first citizen is the one in charge,

01:02:22.380 uh, when it comes to AI, uh, you know, land's whole point is that about accelerationism is like

01:02:29.460 you said, it's happening whether you want it to or not. And the decision space to do things about it

01:02:34.900 is collapsing because the cycle is accelerating itself. There's fewer and fewer interactions with

01:02:42.460 humanity as kind of each part of the system, uh, ends up kind of auto generating a tighter feedback

01:02:49.160 loop. And so for land, you know, there might not even be the, it doesn't really matter how much you

01:02:55.080 put into it. You'll, you'll never be able to pursue AI safety or any of these things anyway,

01:02:59.140 and it'll merge on its own. Uh, but that, that's a, that's obviously more controversial, uh, conclusion

01:03:04.080 of his. Yeah. I think, um, to the previous point about like a Caesar, I have the same view as

01:03:10.580 you do or, and, and the model that Curtis always points to, and I think is the most likely, the

01:03:17.140 most plausible is a sort of new FDR where an executive comes in and through sort of the force

01:03:27.940 of his rhetoric and by seizing on these various levers, uh, within the, uh, DC bureaucracy,

01:03:39.740 all power is refocused and consolidated to the executive. And then these other branches of

01:03:45.780 government, you know, there's all sorts of ways that this might happen through like court packing

01:03:50.540 or whatever. Um, these, these other branches become these kinds of like impotent, you know,

01:03:58.740 uh, it's just pro forma sort of proceduralism without any real power. They're just operating in

01:04:05.460 accordance with, uh, with the executive's, um, interest in agenda. And, and that seems,

01:04:11.580 I mean, uh, I, I agree that that seems almost inevitable that we're heading in that direction.

01:04:17.720 And, um, yeah, I saw the other day, someone had mentioned, I think it was, uh, my friend,

01:04:24.220 uh, Peachy Keenan had mentioned, you know, there was a video of Gavin Newsom doing something or other

01:04:30.500 in California. And as much as I hate to say it, it seems as equally plausible that it's a blue Caesar

01:04:39.260 in the form of Gavin Newsom as it is a red one. But in either case, that seems the direction we're

01:04:47.020 headed. Um, you know, I, I, I'm just going to go off in a brief tangent here. One thing that I found

01:04:53.440 with unqualified reservations, you know, Curtis does put forward a prescription for how to, um,

01:05:02.760 eradicate and basically liquidate the cathedral and install like this executive that's going to

01:05:10.020 like take over the sort of corporate restructuring he calls, you know, he sticks with this corporate

01:05:14.060 metaphor throughout the book. And, um, this was always kind of vague. It was like, you know,

01:05:20.220 and I don't know, maybe land has a better and clearer answer for how this is supposed to happen.

01:05:25.320 But, you know, one day we're just going to, there's going to be tanks in Harvard yard.

01:05:28.640 And then we snap our fingers and we have like benevolent dictator Lee Kwan-yoo or something, 0.98

01:05:35.440 uh, leading the U S for the, you know, our glorious future or whatever. And I, I haven't really

01:05:44.040 come to terms yet or seen the mechanism by which that happens. And I think actually Curtis to some

01:05:51.940 extent in this book sort of punts on that question. I mean, he proposes like a few possibilities for

01:05:58.080 this to happen, but one thing, whether it's with land and Skynet stuff or all this AI, it seems to me

01:06:05.240 a bit of sort of wishful thinking. There are like steps in this process that I don't think any of us

01:06:10.320 have quite figured out yet. How do we actually, uh, pull off what amounts to a coup? Okay. I mean,

01:06:18.900 I, I mean that, uh, in the least sort of violent sense of the term, but at what point and how do you,

01:06:29.760 uh, move on from this broken down system into some new machine, you know, you take all the parts and

01:06:37.440 you move to some new machine that is now being operated by this, what Curtis calls receiver or

01:06:43.840 this executive. And I don't yet really see the mechanisms for that. And one curious thing about

01:06:50.400 you are in Curtis's new intro that he wrote for this book is he basically warns readers, uh, we're

01:06:58.200 nowhere near that point yet. We're not there. And it could be a long time off. I mean, this could be a

01:07:04.140 sort of generational project pushing us in that direction. And I think that's largely what our

01:07:10.360 political work is, is sort of how do we imagine or get to a place where we can, you know, uh, defang

01:07:20.960 the cathedral and basically liquidate whatever you want to call it, liquidate the sort of this,

01:07:26.360 this sort of bureaucratic regime that is ruling over us. I think that's the major, uh, sort of

01:07:32.160 ideological task before us. Well, so Yarvin, I think does punt or he's a little bit oblique

01:07:40.180 sometimes because I don't, I, I, I, I mean, I don't know, but I think he doesn't want to get

01:07:45.500 too specific because the more specific you get, the more wrong you'll be in the future.

01:07:50.500 But one of the ways he addresses this is he talks about, uh, in Rome, like all these big,

01:07:56.900 powerful Caesar like figures. And, you know, remember the slide into the fall of the Republic

01:08:02.400 and the rise of the empire took something like 120 years. I think most people date it to like

01:08:08.420 the beginning to the Gracchi brother murders, which were something like a hundred years before

01:08:12.400 Caesar, 120 years before Caesar. And then there was a long, slow process and the big figures along

01:08:19.720 the way, Marius Sulla, Pompey, Crassus and Caesar, they all addressed big problems that the state had

01:08:29.400 that the, that the state couldn't handle on their own. Uh, Marius reformed the military. Uh, Sulla

01:08:35.880 took care of, uh, of, uh, uh, uh, King who was a wayward, uh, you know, King of the, who was,

01:08:43.380 I can't remember his name now, but he genocided like 80,000 Romans. And, uh, he was basically 0.94

01:08:48.720 like taking money from the state and then doing things like killing Romans in his country and 0.83

01:08:53.320 nobody was doing anything about it. And Sulla finally took care of him. Pompey cleaned up the,

01:08:57.520 uh, the, the pirates in the Mediterranean. Crassus was took care of, he was like a fireman.

01:09:02.740 He took care of the, the rampant fires that were devastating the city of Rome. Um, he became a

01:09:08.180 landlord, a wealthy landlord. And then of course, Julius Caesar was the first guy to go into, uh,

01:09:14.020 uh, England where there were wealthy tin mines and Rome had known about this for a long, long time.

01:09:20.000 And they were never able to go up there. And he, he conquered Gaul and went up there and

01:09:23.220 got them access there. The point being, and, and these are all examples that Yarvin uses.

01:09:28.220 The point being that the state had all these goals, uh, and they had all these problems and

01:09:33.660 they couldn't achieve their goals and they couldn't fix these problems. And these like charismatic,

01:09:37.800 wealthy, strong men came along and fixed them all. And by doing that, they, they amassed like

01:09:44.240 huge amounts of influence and power to themselves. And they eventually took the state over. And if

01:09:50.120 you remember, uh, Sulla took the state over and became a consul for life and he abdicated at the

01:09:56.760 end. I mean, arguably Sulla could have like started a dynasty right then and there. So I think this is

01:10:03.840 the way by which, uh, uh, mold bug thinks these types of things are going to happen. And two

01:10:08.900 examples that I like to use is, well, well, mold bug uses one of these examples, which is that, uh,

01:10:13.840 when they tried to roll out Obamacare, uh, they, they couldn't, the state couldn't make the website

01:10:19.400 work. It didn't work at all. So last minute they brought in a private contractor. Um, and then on

01:10:24.660 think about like Eric Prince's Blackwater, uh, how much work they did at Dyncore and other, uh, uh,

01:10:30.840 uh, I almost called them mercenaries. I guess we could just call them mercenaries. Private armies,

01:10:35.600 uh, we're in Iraq. I mean, they're the ones who got like most of the stuff done, right. Or,

01:10:40.900 or a lot of the stuff done for us because they weren't beholden to like the bureaucracy.

01:10:45.620 That's the whole key here. That's the whole key. Pompey wasn't beholden to the bureaucracy.

01:10:50.660 Sulla wasn't beholden to the bureaucracy. They just did whatever they wanted to do.

01:10:54.140 And if you look at somebody like Elon Musk, and I know he's the go-to guy, um, but you know,

01:10:58.960 I'm kind of becoming more and more flagrant about my like endorsement of him as like the

01:11:03.500 person to watch right now because of his, he bought Twitter. I mean, he took Twitter away

01:11:09.360 from the state. He, he took away their propaganda tool. And, uh, one of the things the state used

01:11:14.560 to do, and this will be my last example, but I hope I make the picture clear here, like

01:11:18.280 how this transition happens. And Yarvin does call it a coup. He does use that word. Um,

01:11:24.660 the state used to, to, to operate the space program. The state used to go to space that

01:11:30.180 used to be like one of the main, uh, things that we use to like put us together as a nation.

01:11:37.660 And as a people like looking to this, like shared destiny or the shared project, we were all

01:11:42.920 working together to like put a man on the moon, like all of America got behind that. And that's

01:11:47.960 gone now. And the state like over time has just been putting less and less and less money into the

01:11:52.920 space program. And that knocks out like, uh, one of our, like our goals as a people to strive

01:11:58.200 towards. And here's Elon Musk, like coming along and like taking up the mantle and taking up the

01:12:04.740 project. And he's stated this as like one of his main goals in life. Like this is one of the things

01:12:09.680 he, his entire project is working towards. So he, he exists as a figure. Oh, and think about another

01:12:16.980 good example is he, he put Neuralink in, uh, Ukraine. So there he is like helping communications

01:12:23.460 up and run this one guy, this one independent capitalist businessman, uh, putting the

01:12:30.440 communications infrastructure in place that the state was unable to do so that they could

01:12:35.020 perpetrate their war in Ukraine. Uh, so yeah, no, I think, uh, I think you're right that that's

01:12:41.140 kind of how mold bug lays that down. And, uh, funny enough, uh, Elon Musk was, uh, was replying

01:12:47.600 to Alex Kashuta today. So, uh, you know, he, he might be, uh, more familiar with our sphere than

01:12:52.780 people might realize, but, um, I think a lot of, one of the big, uh, another one of the big

01:12:59.260 criticisms that mold bug always got was that he leaned too hard on collapse, that there was just

01:13:04.100 kind of this magical collapse that would happen and then kind of things would move forward. But I think

01:13:09.040 you're right that he, he lays it out a little more particularly. And, you know, he often makes

01:13:13.440 the connection between like the fall of the Soviet union, right? He just says, look, at some point

01:13:18.040 people are still going through the motions because it's the only system they know. And there's really

01:13:22.860 nothing to like receive the system after it collapses. So they're still doing it. But then

01:13:27.640 like at some point they realize that like, no one cares about this anymore. And it's just completely

01:13:32.200 an apparatus of power and no one's invested in it and it's not producing anything anymore.

01:13:36.080 And people just kind of wake up and say, maybe we don't do this anymore and we do something else.

01:13:41.240 Uh, he's a little too tidy in that. That's not exactly how the Soviet union fell, but, uh, but he

01:13:47.000 does make, uh, he does make the point that, you know, the things, the transition between the

01:13:51.320 governments or the transition to the governmental form doesn't need to be some kind of violent

01:13:55.340 revolution or some kind of big smash, some kind of massive, uh, you know, uh, show force or anything

01:14:01.900 that these things people will peacefully, uh, or willingly transition to these new forms when they

01:14:07.640 realize the old forms are kind of just rotten to the core and are fading away on their own.

01:14:12.980 And, uh, he has, he has seemed to have elongated his timeline on that. As both of you have kind of

01:14:18.780 pointed out, he has kind of pushed that down the road and said, no, we could be stuck in this kind

01:14:23.100 of degrading, uh, form for a long time before that transitions. Uh, but that was in the UR days,

01:14:28.940 something that he went to repeatedly. Yeah. Well, one thing I'd like to point out, and I'm, I'm not

01:14:33.680 really sure what the counter argument to this is, if there even is one, but people like to talk about

01:14:38.400 collapse, maybe because collapse is like exciting, you know, the meme, nothing ever happens and people

01:14:43.820 just want something to happen. But the way I understand it, like the Roman Republic didn't

01:14:50.900 collapse. It's not like it, it's not like it like decayed so much that it collapsed and Caesar like

01:14:56.760 reigned over the ruins. He just like replaced it. You know what I mean? And, uh, you know,

01:15:02.720 they were in a much worse state than we are because you have to remember this hundred year period I was

01:15:07.700 talking about was, uh, endless, endless civil wars. I mean, Marius and Sulla fought a war against each

01:15:14.020 other. Um, uh, uh, uh, Augustus and, um, Mark Anthony fought a war against each or a huge battle against

01:15:21.880 each other anyway. And the Roman Republic never collapsed, even though they call it a collapse,

01:15:28.000 it didn't actually fall. People weren't like liquidated. Uh, the city wasn't burned.

01:15:34.020 It just was, everything was just replaced by, by Augustus. So I don't think we need to see that

01:15:39.420 happen at all. If it, and you kind of already said this on, but if, if the CEO, CEO monarch takes

01:15:45.200 over in America, the Senate and the Congress could still be intact. Not only could the Senate and

01:15:50.380 Congress still be intact, they could still meet with the same regularity. The Roman Senate met

01:15:55.240 all the way to the end of the empire, uh, and, and debated things as if they had power, but you

01:16:01.020 know, it just, it basically turned into emperor worship, but, uh, they never, the Senate was never

01:16:06.240 dissolved as far as I know. Yeah, no, I think you're right. And I think, uh, that's a good perspective

01:16:12.640 to people have when they're kind of demanding some kind of immediate explanation to how, you know,

01:16:18.340 you'll get this, this really quick transition. Uh, but that said, we are already running long

01:16:23.420 and the super chats are stacking up, but we can't in, we can't go to the super chats without

01:16:28.600 at least touching on gray mirror and kind of the wider expansion of mold bug. So we won't spend too

01:16:35.260 long on it, but I'm hoping each one of you will kind of talk a little bit about post you are

01:16:41.440 Yarvin. What do we think about the legacy of, uh, what do we think about the legacy of, uh,

01:16:51.540 unqualified reservations? What do we think about gray mayor? And it's in kind of Yarvin once he

01:16:56.660 started writing his own name. And what do we think about the fact that Yarvin is now making contact

01:17:01.460 with kind of major political players, you know, uh, people like, uh, you know, Tucker Carlson,

01:17:07.340 he shows up on the Tucker Carlson show. Uh, he writes for things like Claremont. He, uh,

01:17:12.640 obviously had some level of contact with Blake masters and others, Peter Thiel. What do we think

01:17:17.460 about that legacy? I can jump in here. Um, I, I don't know any of this, uh, for sure. I mean,

01:17:25.340 I've talked to Curtis a little bit about this, but, um, my impression of you are versus gray mirror

01:17:33.940 is that gray mirror has like a different audience. There's a different sort of rhetorical goal that

01:17:42.060 Curtis is trying to accomplish with you are. And one thing we just got done discussing is how,

01:17:48.420 since you are, was written, I think Curtis's mind has changed about a couple of things. One is

01:17:54.800 the immediacy of this possibility of collapse. Uh, that timeline, as you said, or, and has been

01:18:01.980 extended and I've heard him speak on this subject. And he, in fact, thinks we're nowhere near collapse

01:18:08.060 that this machinery can just kind of keep on chugging, uh, aimlessly across the sort of power

01:18:17.080 landscape for a long time. Um, so there's no, uh, possibility of imminent coup or imminent, uh, regime

01:18:28.340 change. Um, what I think you are is doing or what gray mirror is doing then is it's a, uh, persuasion

01:18:38.580 campaign. Curtis is sort of proselytizing to, I think what he thinks are possibly open-minded

01:18:46.260 progressives. I think that's his intended audience. People that he thinks might be, uh, persuaded with the

01:18:54.800 right kinds of arguments and the right kind of approach to abandon what he identifies as a kind of

01:19:02.840 faith-based, uh, belief in the prevailing consensus ideology, this prevailing sort of default liberal

01:19:13.360 ideology that, uh, holds up this, you know, concept, however degraded of democracy as its sort of primary

01:19:24.160 virtue and primary organizing principle. And he's just, I think, trying to demonstrate to these

01:19:31.440 progressives who may be frustrated or disappointed with this or that direction that the country and,

01:19:40.500 uh, sort of the West generally, uh, with the leadership of America is headed and at least lead

01:19:49.520 them to the possibility that there's some other way of organizing ourselves without being as direct,

01:19:56.200 uh, as he was with you are and potentially scaring off that audience. And so what I think has happened

01:20:03.720 is that some of us on the right who previously knew Curtis as Menchus Moldbug think that his message is

01:20:11.220 sort of diluted or has been neutered in some way, or that he's gone soft or, you know, he's refusing to

01:20:18.840 say certain things that he would have said 10 years ago. And that's true, but there may be an intention

01:20:26.000 behind that, I think, which is that, uh, you have to meet people where they're at. And if your goal

01:20:32.160 is to meet these fence sitting progressives, then you're going to have to drop some of that harsher

01:20:38.900 language, uh, just as a matter of, um, being sort of rhetorically practical. And so that's how I view

01:20:46.560 the wisdom of that approach, whether it can be effective, whether you can actually convince any

01:20:52.500 of these people, whether you can actually convince Noah Smith, for example, to, or Matt Iglesias or

01:20:58.300 whatever, to, um, sort of abandon this default liberalism. I sort of doubt, I don't know that

01:21:06.980 that's possible. Maybe you convince though, Noah Smith and Matt Iglesias is readers or the gen,

01:21:12.920 the gen Z, you know, version of Matt Iglesias or Noah Smith who hasn't yet graduated into their

01:21:20.300 sinecure in the cathedral. And maybe we can push them in our direction. So that's, that's what I

01:21:26.680 think the UR project is about. Yeah, I think that's, that's mostly right. Um, uh, again, people can have

01:21:35.640 mixed feelings on the, uh, on the possibility of converting those people, but I think that is the

01:21:41.600 wider project. I think Curtis has always been a little too sure about the need of kind of blue

01:21:46.820 states and their elites to handle everything. Sorry about the beeping guys. My, uh, my power has gone

01:21:52.120 out, so I'm on battery backup here. So hopefully, uh, that'll all hold and be fine, but you'll get some,

01:21:57.440 uh, get some nice beeping in the background otherwise. Uh, but however you feel about the

01:22:02.020 veracity of that project, I think that is Curtis's, uh, kind of, kind of aim with Grey Mirror. And

01:22:07.600 obviously the fact that he is now speaking to a much wider audience means to some extent it has

01:22:12.180 worked. But what do you think Astral? Uh, first of all, thanks for, for sticking to it, uh, with your,

01:22:17.400 with your power out, man. We appreciate that. But, uh, I, I agree with both you guys. I would,

01:22:22.200 excuse me, you know, I think we would be remiss if we don't mention the dark elves and the Hobbit.

01:22:27.600 That's everybody's favorite terminology that he uses, right? Sorry. The way I see Grey Mirror,

01:22:35.700 especially lately, is he's really trying to push like the whole art right thing. He's really trying

01:22:41.680 to, I mean, he's been like touring the country. He's been doing podcast tours. He's been going to

01:22:46.820 parties. He's been doing meetups. He just put a, uh, thing on his blog about meeting people in New

01:22:53.800 York city this weekend or this week. So he's really trying to make this happen. He's really

01:22:58.580 trying to get the culture thing going. And I got, I got a mute for a second. I'm sorry. I still got

01:23:03.840 this cold. Yeah, no problem. Uh, as soon as Astral gets back, we'll jump into the, uh, the super

01:23:13.780 chats here, guys, we're going to get through as many of them as we can. Like I said, I am on a

01:23:17.640 battery backup here, so I don't want to push my luck too long. So sorry. We'd normally would,

01:23:22.900 uh, commit more time to answering these, but we're going to try to move through them as quickly as

01:23:26.880 possible. Sorry, Astral, you were saying, no, no, I'm sorry about that guys. I just wanted to say

01:23:30.980 that the passage press and the passage prize and the publishing of you are is part of that wider

01:23:35.840 project. I see of like trying to like influence the culture by creating art, by making, you know,

01:23:42.140 he he's got this parallel institutions ideas, what some people think is silly. I don't think it's

01:23:47.540 silly at all. I think if there's going to be a replacement of the regime, it's going to be

01:23:52.240 things like this, like artists and thinkers and shows like yours and companies like passage press.

01:24:02.100 Absolutely. All right. Well, let's go ahead and jump into our super chats here real quick. We've got,

01:24:07.540 uh, Moby seven. Thank you very much, sir. Thanks for all your great work. Well, absolutely. I appreciate

01:24:12.680 it. Thanks for watching guys. Uh, we'll hear for $2, three Kings. Yep. I'm glad to have both these

01:24:19.860 gentlemen on definitely, uh, check out all of their work as well. Well, make sure that you're

01:24:25.540 checking out Astral's podcast and you're checking out everything that comes out of passage prize and

01:24:31.060 Lomas here. Uh, we've got, uh, Nate for five Canadian great show. Orin. Thank you. Really

01:24:36.900 appreciate it, man. Uh, we've got, uh, Justin Palmer here for $10 or in rocks. Keep up the great work.

01:24:42.500 All three of you. We're going to win. Absolutely. Everybody's going to make it. Don't worry. Let's

01:24:48.200 see. Uh, we've got one, uh, Pronomi and Chomsky here for 999. Yarvin has argued that Protestantism

01:24:55.560 evolved into liberalism to get around separation of church and state. Is it, uh, pseudo scientifically

01:25:01.420 to talk about the evolution is separate from biology. Yeah. Again, he does this a lot, especially

01:25:07.120 in how Dawkins got pwned, which again is in the unqualified reservation volume one, how Dawkins

01:25:12.620 got pwned is one of my favorite essays by Yarvin. I think it's very insightful. He explains that idea

01:25:19.340 multiple times. He explains it in the open letter and such, but I think that how Dawkins got pwned is

01:25:24.500 the best iteration of that. Uh, there is obviously some stretching of the biological metaphor when you

01:25:30.900 talk about evolution in this way, but I do think it is a very valuable way to understand kind of some

01:25:37.020 of that interaction. And I think it is, even if everything isn't one-to-one, even if there are

01:25:42.900 some leaps in logic, that kind of thing, uh, as I think, uh, both Lomez and, uh, Astral have said,

01:25:50.060 there's a lot of value in that narrative, uh, at least understanding some of the ideas behind it and

01:25:55.540 the development behind it. So I do think even if it doesn't hit all the best points, it is valuable.

01:26:01.280 Um, Ronald McDougats, $25. Thank you very much, sir. Uh, Reese Bangler, uh, Volkmar Weiss's book on

01:26:09.840 population cycles shows eugenic cultures select for intelligence, hard work, order, and genes create

01:26:15.880 prosperity. Uh, uh, competition elites to redistribute surplus, uh, uh, commences and

01:26:22.840 civilization is destroyed. Yeah. I mean, there's, there's certainly big parts of that also in land as

01:26:29.060 well. And also the consequences of kind of, you know, uh, what happens with IQ shredders when,

01:26:34.640 uh, the population ends up selecting to, to kind of lose a lot of its, uh, useful IQ and funnel it

01:26:42.920 into interactions that don't actually further kind of the good of civilizations, uh, or the

01:26:47.900 continuation of civilizations. So that's important as well. Uh, will for 499 buy based brands. Yes,

01:26:55.880 absolutely. It's really important guys. When you get opportunities to support people like passage

01:27:01.820 press to do what you can. Uh, so whenever you have an opportunity to kind of, uh, do what you can to

01:27:07.860 contribute and help out our friends, it is well worth your time. Um, let's see Ronald again for $20.

01:27:16.980 Thank you again. Very generous, sir. What do you, what do you all think of urine's, uh, definition of

01:27:21.640 left and right? My opinion, right-wing is about making defined groups stronger against external

01:27:26.060 enemies. Christian as a nation state, both right-wing conception, but Trotsky internationalism,

01:27:32.640 neocons cannot be right wing. Uh, well, obviously, uh, Yarvin's understanding of right-wing heavily

01:27:39.640 involves pronomian ideas and, uh, uh, extra P versus entropy. Uh, he has a whole idea of the left as

01:27:47.460 entropy, which is another big, uh, a big part of neoreactionary thought, but, uh, guys, what do

01:27:53.920 you think about Yarvin's definition of left and right and how they've held up kind of over this,

01:27:58.900 uh, intervening period? Yeah, I'll jump in there. Yeah. I mean, um, in short, Curtis defines like the

01:28:05.600 right reactionary as valuing order, stability, security, and, you know, progressivism is, uh,

01:28:13.900 preferencing change and change as like an inherent good. Uh, again, that like ties back to their wig

01:28:21.520 history view of things that all change is definitionally good because change happens in

01:28:26.780 the future and the future is better than the past. I think that's mostly right. It's, it's fine enough

01:28:32.260 as like, uh, uh, a model for following, uh, into more complex arguments about how we sort of situate

01:28:43.240 ourselves and organize ourselves along these dimensions. It's not complete, but like, um,

01:28:49.720 you know, as I think it's good enough for government work. And so when we're thinking about what really

01:28:56.440 matters in politics, it's not really these dimensions of right and left, but friend and

01:29:02.540 enemy. And I think Curtis gets to that. And I think we're at the stage now where friend and enemy is all

01:29:08.320 that matters. It's, uh, and so this idea of order instability versus change or entropy, um, I think is

01:29:20.020 good enough. All right. So we've got, uh, uh, cynical skeptic here. What do accelerationists think

01:29:29.400 of Christianity? Will it be, uh, be the point, uh, disorder, right? Should rally to, uh, rally to 0.96

01:29:36.780 considering it is, it's sorry, guys, I'm reading fast. You're trying to get through everything.

01:29:41.660 Uh, it's endless philosophizing that got us here, uh, got us into this mess. Are we missing something?

01:29:46.680 Yeah. To be clear, like, while I think there are a lot, there's a lot of land that is very valuable

01:29:52.800 and I think he's right on a number of things, uh, kind of his embrace of accelerationism and kind of

01:29:59.920 what comes after has always been concerning to me. That's something that, uh, the, the existence that

01:30:05.240 land kind of looks at seems pretty bad though. I think land's point would be our existence right now

01:30:09.280 is pretty bad. Uh, and it might be the only way of escaping it's further degeneration. Uh, but I think

01:30:14.560 other, uh, other solutions are necessary. I don't think, uh, that the ones he he's pointing to,

01:30:21.180 uh, do create a good future for humanity. Um, and I, being a Christian simply can't, you know,

01:30:29.700 the, that is a central part of, uh, my identity and the identity that I would want perpetuated

01:30:36.600 into the future. So I couldn't, you couldn't persuade me to abandon it either way. Uh, whether,

01:30:42.320 whether it's tactically sound or not would, would not really be a consideration, uh, for me. Uh,

01:30:47.940 so I would certainly think it has to be an essential part of, uh, of kind of where we would

01:30:54.000 rally. And I would agree with you that, uh, while I do love philosophy, I do love political theory,

01:30:59.160 uh, at some point your movement has to be about much more than that, which is, I think a lot of

01:31:04.620 what people are trying to do now. Uh, sorry, go ahead. If I could just jump in, I wanted to just

01:31:10.520 add that I think kind of a central tenant of acceleration ism is the breakdown of morality.

01:31:17.900 And if traditional morality has broken down the idea with acceleration ism is it's like,

01:31:23.320 it's not going to go back to what it was before. So some people want to preserve or conserve

01:31:28.300 traditional morality. I'm one of those people. I'm a pretty traditional person. Uh, my morals are

01:31:34.680 pretty standard Christian morals, but, um, I'm also realistic. That's how, that's how I see like

01:31:41.260 acceleration ism is being realistic about the future. And I do think that like the, the, the,

01:31:49.180 the, the whole Nietzschean thing about like the institutional, uh, uh, source of power and ordering

01:31:55.980 of society that the church once provided is, is gone for us now. And that, uh, what we're seeing

01:32:01.440 is just the long, slow degeneration and breakdown of morals, excuse me. Uh, so I think it's really

01:32:10.400 realistic of acceleration ism not to, to, to have like a need for morality. I'm not saying we don't

01:32:18.360 need morality. Of course we do, but I don't think the philosophy of acceleration ism needs to integrate

01:32:24.560 morality into it because it's inherently baked into the concept that, uh, traditional morals are

01:32:29.760 breaking down. That's why we're in the position that we're in. Uh, and of course they have nothing

01:32:34.720 to do with like a, an AR future. Why, why is the AI Skynet going to care about that? It's, it's totally

01:32:40.000 irrelevant to them. Yeah. That's one of the reasons I found Alexander Dugan's work kind of

01:32:45.360 interesting here. He's, he's not right on everything. I have major disagreements with him on certain

01:32:50.200 stuff, but he also seems to have approached some of the problems of acceleration ism as well. He

01:32:55.080 seems to have followed a different path, some of the same conclusions about what's going on that land

01:33:00.840 reached. And, but he comes to them with instead like the ability to have a rebirth of certain parts

01:33:07.400 of things like mysticism and traditional morality that can exist in modernity, uh, that can't survive

01:33:13.320 kind of the idea of the death of God. And so, uh, I I'm, I'm interested in the fact that there are other

01:33:19.000 people who have reached similar conclusions, uh, to kind of where we're at, but have a different

01:33:23.720 view of where we might go with that. So, uh, that's something I'm exploring, but, uh, but I won't

01:33:29.480 disagree with you that land has very challenging questions for anybody who wants to pursue that

01:33:33.800 project. He thinks Christian morality holds back the potential of technology. All right. And we got one

01:33:42.600 more here wrestling with Wormwood for 499. Uh, glad, God bless, uh, you all. Thanks for all you do keep

01:33:50.280 posting gentlemen. Well, thank you very much guys. I really appreciate a lot of positive messages there.

01:33:54.760 A lot of encouragement really appreciate all you guys do. Uh, you know, uh, audience of this channel

01:33:59.960 has obviously made all of this possible. So many of you kind of came on board as I was explaining a bunch

01:34:05.880 of Curtis Yarvin, mentions mole bug and his work. So I know that's why many people kind of eventually

01:34:11.720 ended up joining this channel. And so it's great to kind of talk with two guys. So I think do great

01:34:17.160 work and kind of look at the legacy of you are, but obviously my battery backups are beeping at me.

01:34:21.800 So I don't know how long we have left, uh, Lomas, uh, once you let people know where they can find your

01:34:28.120 stuff, if there's anything exciting coming up and then ask after him, astral, you go ahead and then

01:34:32.680 we'll get out of here. Thanks, Oren. Uh, once again, uh, honored to be on the show. Really

01:34:37.640 enjoyed this discussion. Um, if you're interested in buying the UR book, which of course I encourage

01:34:42.280 everyone to do, you can do so at passage.press. It's just passage.press. We have a bookstore there

01:34:49.000 where that is as of now, cause we've sold out of our other books, the only book on sale.

01:34:53.480 Our next book in the pipeline is going to be a Steve Saylor book. Um, that hasn't been formally

01:34:59.880 announced yet, but we're working on that. That'll be available probably in the fall.

01:35:03.720 And then we'll have, uh, the passage prize to book, um, we are working on, and that should

01:35:09.000 be available in the summer. So please follow the passage press account, uh, Twitter account

01:35:14.840 at passage.press. Um, and I'll be, uh, providing updates there. Um, yeah, thanks again, Oren.

01:35:24.200 All right, Astral, and where should everybody find your work?

01:35:26.040 Thanks, man. Yeah. I'm on astroflight.substack.com. It's where I have a podcast. You can also find it

01:35:31.920 astroflightpodcast on, um, Spotify and iTunes and follow me on Twitter. My at is Thulian revenant.

01:35:42.640 Um, and, uh, I, I host Twitter spaces quite frequently and we have a group chat, a passage

01:35:48.360 press group chat where we're discussing unqualified reservations. It filled up within three days.

01:35:52.900 And, uh, I actually wanted to, to come on your show. I'm really, really honored to do this

01:35:57.680 as a way to kick off the discussion of mold bug. So if you tune into my Twitter page, I'm going to

01:36:03.420 try to have, uh, one Twitter space a week with members from the group chat reading group discussing

01:36:09.520 unqualified reservations and hopefully all the way through all of passage presses publications. We do

01:36:15.300 that. So we're going to have, uh, winners from last year's passage prize on a Twitter space,

01:36:19.940 discussing their work from last year in the run-up to the publication of passage prize two.

01:36:24.960 And we're going to have the winners from the second passage prize, uh, come on and discuss. So

01:36:28.960 we want to keep this going, you know, in perpetuity, as long as, um, you know, passage presses is publishing

01:36:34.480 books. Excellent. So make sure you check out all of those spaces, guys, make sure that you check out

01:36:41.320 everything that passage press is putting out. If you haven't subscribed yet, you know, join the podcast,

01:36:47.340 everything else, make sure you do so. And we really appreciate everyone coming on. And I really

01:36:53.640 appreciate the fact that my batteries held out till the end of the show. So thanks for coming by guys.

01:36:58.080 And as always, we'll talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - April 07, 2023

The Legacy of Unqualified Reservations ｜ Guests： Lomez and Astral Flight ｜ 4⧸6⧸23

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