Fourth Reich Archaeology - #076 - Fourth Reich Political Theology with Marcus, Side B

Episode Date: January 2, 2026

Happy New Year! This week we are releasing Side B of “Fourth Reich Political Theology,” which is our interview/collaboration with Marcus from the Return of the Repressed Podcast.  In it, Don and Marcus examine how “The Market” and people’s fealty to its bizarre logic has come into actual existence, almost alchemically, or religiously.  To put it bluntly, The Market today fills the role of God in our society. It is beyond human control, beyond reproach, and exercises an omniscient, omnipotent power over human affairs. To capitalists, The Market’s pure rationality also bestows it with benevolence. Don and Marcus explore the historical and theoretical bases for the development of this phenomenon, by examining the transition from feudalism to capitalism and the adaptation of religion to the economic mode of production and vice versa. And don’t forget to check out Marcus’s stuff over on P@treon! You can find the Return of the Repressed at: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/TheReturnOfTheRepressed⁠

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This is forthright is coming. Think it for Thracology. Archaeology. This is Fourth Reich Archaeology. I'm Dick. Don is out this week doing some cultural research at the Great American Pyramid in Memphis, Tennessee, also known as the Memphis Bass Pro Shop. Welcome back, listener, and happy new year to you all. This week, we are releasing Side B of an episode that we released a few weeks ago called Fourth Reich Political Theology, and we'll

get to that in just a moment but before we do i just want to say thank you thank you thank you for tuning in thank you so much for liking the pod thank you so much for subscribing to the pod and thank you so much for spreading the word about the pod we are so grateful for all of you out there who tune in week after week all of you who spread the word and all of you who write us and encourage us to keep going. That brings me to my next point, which is that we do have an email. You can always feel free to write us at 4th Reichpod at gmail.com. And we are also on social media at 4th Reich Pod on Instagram and Twitter. And for those of you who truly believe in this 4th Reich Archaeology Project. For those of you who really want to see this project take off to the next

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So please, if you do enjoy this program, please consider, giving us a financial contribution. And if you are not in a position to give us a financial contribution, that is totally fine too. We love that you are here. Please continue listening. Please continue to enjoy the show. We do ask that if you like the show, please spread the word. and please give us that five-star rating on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, on whatever platform it is that you are listening to us right now. Now again, this week we are releasing Side B of an episode we are calling Fourth Reich Political Theology. Now I should say it's probably going to turn into one of our series that we do. And it's an interview slash collaboration that we are doing with Marcus from the return of the repressed podcast.

I'm sure that many of you out there are familiar with Marcus. And if you are not, I will just let you know right now. Marcus is one of the greatest to have ever done it in the podcast medium. You can find him at the return of the repressed on Patreon and pretty much anywhere. else you can get your podcast so please do head on over there to listen to marcus's stuff i'm not going to belabor the point that marcus is one of the greats and without any further ado i'm going to just get right into it and say the magic words let's get digging So I think now, this is a good time, this is a good time.

to bring it back, to bring it back to kind of this narrative that we're building on. And I know that we did want to end up talking about our friends, you know, of the Enlightenment and beyond of Adam Smith and Max Weber and, of course, Carl Schmidt, the man of the hour. Exactly, the great arch-heurist of political theology. He who wrote the law of the real god of capital. Exactly. Yeah, who's now like reincarnated as a chat GPT voice in like Steve Bannon's head. Right, right, right. Or something.

Which is, I mean, I think something to that effect is probably happening. And it wouldn't surprise me if, you know, they're training all of these. Like, I think the subliminal jihad said that somebody had trained some like chat GPT bot on that, that new Timothy Leary guy. What's his? Hamilton. Yeah, the psychedelic guru who has had some show on like maybe was it vice or something. Yes.

I remember like when this was like 15 years ago. I must have been at least. but yeah that there were like chatbots like trained on his you know articles and essays alone about like and I've seen that like on Twitter I'm not surprised because like as soon as you mention something about like psychedelics on Twitter there are always like two three bots coming in there and being like oh you want to buy some psychedelics yes yeah shut up stupid fucking bot go away man I said I hate psychedelics Oh, want to buy some psychedelics? No. But yeah, yeah, so it wouldn't surprise me if like, you know, you talked about like Steve Vannan, you know, now being really into Schmidt as well. And like, I mean, he was, wasn't his whole role kind of like being the like the media, social media guru for the first Trump term. Yeah, and before even.

like setting the groundwork at the Breitbart News organization. I would like to, just for the listener's sake, work our way up to Schmidt through a little bit, Smith and then Weber. I don't think we need to spend too much time, but I think a little bit. A little bit of time. And maybe I'll set it up by picking on Adam Smith. Our old Brit, the Virgin. What do you think? Is he, wasn't that, you said that to me before we started talking, right?

He was, like, the difference between Schmidt and... Oh, yeah, and Smith. It's actually, yeah, it's very funny. It's the same name, too, right? It's the same name in German and in English, Schmidt and Smith. Aha, yeah, yeah. Wait, is Schmidt the German for Blacksmith? It might be, right?

Yeah, that makes... I think so. Uh-huh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, should be, huh? Oh yeah, it makes sense in Swedish. In Swedish it's Smead, but it's not a really popular name, but Schmidt sounds like what the Germans would call Smead and Smith. Yeah, yeah. But like that they are, yeah, I don't know, you were saying to me, like Schmidt is super horny and Smith, Adam, it's like a little boy virgin, lived in his mother's house. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think we're tapping into the, the Adam Smith, Carl Schmidt, dichotomy, where they form really two sides of the same coin. They're both very, very intelligent guys, both eccentric, but opposites in a lot of ways, including in the personal. So Adam Smith, of course, was a Scottish, you said a Brit, but I will give him his proper national.

as a Scott in the 18th century. And, you know, most people associate Adam Smith with free market capitalism and a lot of shit that has actually been projected onto him and his thought subsequent to his life. Right. And taking advantage, right, projecting and kind of making him into another idol on the pantheon of the religion of capitalism as the guy who came up with the invisible hand, you know, the guy who wrote the wealth of nations, all of that stuff. But in fact, most people don't know that Adam Smith's really most famous book during his lifetime and the contribution that he made to

the discourse that was most appreciated by his contemporaries was not the wealth of nations, but the theory of moral sentiments, which he published some years before the wealth of nations. I didn't know that, actually. I don't think I've read anything in the theory of moral sentiments. But it's, yeah, it's mid-1700s, yeah. So, like, it's almost like he gets popular, like, idea historically. he has a comeback like a hundred years later, right? I mean, because the aristocrats don't really need Adam Smith. Like, he has to wait for the bourgeois revolutions to be like, oh, look at this guy.

Exactly. Right, because at the time, you have, you know, Hobbs who had come before Smith that is also hugely influential to Carl Schmidt, of course, who has this theory of the Leviathan, you know, the absolute sovereign life is nasty, brutish and short. And we're a hundred year again in the future, nah? Like if we say like around 1848, those revolutionary years in Europe, 1848, that would be like, you know, almost 100 years after Smith has written the wealth of nations, right?

Like a thereabouts, right? Like maybe it's mid-1770s or something. and and that's when you know like when those bourgeois revolutions are like you know spreading all over like liberal and nationalist they need smit like you know because he's talking about a nation he's talking about like how does a nation function with you know economically from the point of view of like yeah the bourgeois individual right things that like yeah the aristocrats have given two fucks about right i mean they did have similar theories like it's not that unique right like you have a lot of French aristocrats that Nietzsche draws from as well who are also like I mean quite explicitly you know with moral sentiments being like yeah it's good to be an egoist and that's the only thing that really like you know works like that's the only position one can really like rationally defend and then and then like things sort of develops out of there and it's interesting because even like people who take this like on an individual level to it's out most today

are often people who refer to things like game theory. And I've heard that like actually the French Enlightenment philosophers, the aristocrats who came up with these moral egoisms that sort of became the fundament of capitalist ideology, especially

according to Nietzsche, that they sort of like started around the gambling tables. Like that statistics even started as a way of trying to crack roulette. Which I think it's kind of cute

that it's like, you know, we know that you can't crack the roulette game. We know that the house always wins. Yeah. But it's almost as if like, you know, if you also own the house and you want to play at the same time, we can play that game. You know, otherwise you're going to come

over here to my castle every time and we're going to be bored as fuck. Let's, you know, sometimes you're the house, sometimes I'm the house, sometimes your sister is the house. And then like we can pretend like that, you know, sometimes somebody wins, but it's like, yeah, we're all praying to the god of luck, basically.

What's unique about Smith, I think, is that he has this idea in the theory of moral sentiments that today we would call it empathy. I don't think that he uses the term empathy. He uses the term sympathy a lot, and what he's really talking about is describing the phenomenon whereby... you can feel the feelings of another person by seeing or by understanding their experience, right? So he's talking about everything from... Sounds benevolent.

Yeah, and it's... What's interesting is I don't know that this was part of his thought. And I don't think that it comes through the text of the theory of moral sentiments in so many words. but later on it's used and I guess actually yeah you know thinking back on the text there is the seed of trying to form a selfish ideology that is also not selfish that is also you know generous yeah we that's very randian right like randian like in a way iron rand I mean now we're you know many, many generations later to 200 generations. Like, she's more

contemporary with... Well, even Kant. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cunt too. I was thinking with Rand, she, like, really thinks that the most altruistic position is to only care about yourself. So she still has to

excuse her egoism by saying something utilitarian, right? Like, that it is for the greater good of everyone. Yeah. And I guess, yeah, Kant in the same way, it's like, yeah, It's the only way, like, by, you know, by making your own laws and following your own laws, society as a whole can sort of, like, coexist.

Like, the machinery can, like, sort of run collectively if everybody adheres to, and take their own laws serious enough, right? I'm imagining that is what you were going with Kant. Or what did you want to say about Kant? There are many things to say. Yeah, no, I mean, in, well, in his lifetime, Kant was clear that he was influenced by Smith and particularly by the theory of moral sentiments. And so I guess what I'm trying to trace is in Smith, you have a seed for this way of looking at selfish activity that plays in ultimately to the market logic that, I mean, to remind

to the listener because, you know, we're free-flowing here. We're having a good time. We are off script and we are just jiving and riffen here. But the thesis... Idea historical waltz. Yes. To bring it back to the kind of the point of departure that we started out with, right, is that the market has taken the place in many respects, not all respects,

but in many respects of the role that relates. religion played in feudal society and one part of that that owes or has been attributed to Adam Smith is that acting in one's self-interest will bring about the greatest good for all that the enlightened pursuit of self-interest at you know the kind of moral rationality behind the idea of the invisible hand is that well because your natural feelings and once upon a time these were in the extra the extra supernatural days of your it was believed that there was an actual organ a sense organ that could feel feelings of other people that it wasn't something something in your brain or, you know, what we now understand to be through the activity of mirror

neurons, but back in the day, they believed that there was an actual organ, like, adjacent to or part of the heart that could feel other people's feelings, that sentiment could be transmuted from one person, or transmitted from one person to another. And what's, and it's really interesting, especially, you know, as it kind of warps and spins out into something that becomes a part of this sort of mythology or theology of the market. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, because everybody, it almost has a sort of like Christian esoteric vibe to it as well, where everybody then can become God. Like this mysterious hand of the market is actually somehow your hand and God's hand simultaneously, right?

Because sometimes you do act within the market and you do do things with your real hand in this market. And so it's like a kind of perfect metaphor to sort of, you know, make sure that you can have these instances of like, yeah, being the divine, basically. Yeah. Because... Well, when you were thinking, when you were talking about Ayn Rand just now,

the phrase that came to my mind was Alastair Crowley do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law yeah and that's very much that is and occultic and susceptible obviously to this sort of perverse way of thinking

yeah I made the poem about this recently that I posted on Twitter where I said and I got that from somebody else kind of that specific part but it was like that they are like when

when Crowley says this yeah do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law he's trying to once again the bourgeois crux right of like the relationship between the law

and what you're allowed to do and when you can't do and enjoyment right but he's trying to to neutralize this conflict by making the enjoyous act the law itself but I wonder

does that really work or have you actually now set yourself you know towards the path where you're going to have to come five times a day like Epstein you know like honestly like it becomes a law you know onto itself as well

so it's like oh you're not enjoying you're lazy son of fucking bitch go back to the island and you know do some heinous shit or I will not, you know, look upon you again. Yeah, yeah, no, they don't escape. It's all I want to say, you know, like, don't go for this dear list. It's not an escape.

It doesn't work. And this is the limits of Smith, because what he's trying to do is partly normative, but it's also partly descriptive. He's trying to articulate a way in which human emotions actually function. And again, to kind of go back to what I was saying earlier. earlier about Isaac Newton, to Adam Smith, it's not like there's a hard black line in between ethics and economics and politics. He is operating in the middle of that Venn diagram between all these different areas, and while he's approaching it from a sort

of socio-economic point of view, he's a political economist, right, like what Marx called the political economists. It's a science that doesn't exist today because bourgeois disciplines that have arisen through the institutionalization of knowledge over the last 200 plus years have confined areas of study into these silos that ultimately work, I think, to neuter all of their sort of critical capacity to comment on reality and to do what Marx did and actually relentlessly critique everything that exists and to focus instead on like, okay, we're going to just read what's in this textbook and critique these particular authors and if you want to talk about somebody else,

you're going to have to go to a different department or whatever the fuck. But Smith was, he was straddling the line. Uh-huh. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. They compartmentalize, like, they're all actually silos off a big machine,

which is political economy. But some people call themselves sociologists. Some people call themselves, like, political theorists. Some call themselves economists. But in the end, like, they're kind of, like, They're still, you know, yeah, they're doing the same kind of service that Adam Smith is doing. Or they would hope that they could. I think very few of them can, you know, I mean, they forbid themselves to be as far-reaching.

You know, they compartmentalize because they don't, yeah, it's easier to defend oneself in that way. But yeah, sorry, go on. No, so with Smith, you know, he's trying to describe what he sort of observes and takes away from. his contemporaries he if you read the theory of moral sentiments i don't think that it's highly objectionable there is something that we feel for other people for sure that's really the the basis his main focus of what he's trying to diagnose as a phenomenon and when you combine it with the wealth of nations and what he's again describing not prescribing for economic activity, there's a system and whatever.

Maybe it's not perfect and maybe it doesn't get that far, but it possesses within itself this magic formula that, like you said, is susceptible to later people grasping onto and trying to use as sort of almost a biblical text or a combination of texts that says something about human nature that, you know, human nature, I don't think Smith really talks about this like Habesian selfishness or Machiavellian kind of cunning. That's not really Smith's thought, but it's all put into the stew later on. No, it's more self-interest, like it's self-interest in more in the terms of like self-consciousness, right? Like he's looking for subjectivity as such.

Yes. Like rather than like rather than the depraved French moralists, he is more maybe like, you know, like in what is going to become like the German school. of like idealism, like maybe just 10, 20 years after him, like of this looking for this like subjectivity. Now that there is no like religious subjectivity, because yeah, the absolute subjectivity of God is being questioned, it also questions the religious subjectivity. And so of course like, I mean many people go in different directions here.

You have already the classicists under Goethe, which is contemporary with Adam Smith. then there is you know this the beginning of like historical subjectivity right

with you know Greece and you know which is going to soon very soon morph into yes our like topic there before with the are you heroic notion of like

oh we are Aryans which is a kind of like historical subjectivity as well or that's how they try to make it I mean, they make up a history which they can find subjectivity within, which is kind of like playing that game, but with cheat codes. It's like, oh, yeah. Yeah, well, what they both go to is the validation of the self within the larger narrative.

Because Smith is saying something about you want to feel good. You want to feel good. We all want to feel good. You know, I see my brother suffering in the street. I want to feel good myself by giving him a dollar because even though that's not really going to solve his problems, I did what I could. And I feel good about that. And therefore, I gain something in the act of giving. That's the phenomenon that he's really talking about with like there's a self-interest in feeling sympathy or sympathetic feelings provoke altruistic actions, which then.

reflect back on the ego in this gratifying way and it's a running theme of all we've been talking about which isn't which isn't incorrect i think at all i mean you even see i mean soon we're going to have like hegel with like an immense focus on you know the other and then like you know in the way that like lacan ultimately formulated this hegelian point which is you know around the same time as Adam Smith, right, like a little bit after, uh, during the like the, the high romantic period, I guess, uh, with the genna romantics or even before the, so like, yeah, turn off the century of 1700 to 1800, um, well, Lacan finally like formulates it into this like, yeah, desire is the desire of the other, like, both in the sense that like, yes, you want the other,

but also you want what the other wants. Yes. Uh, which is like, you know, like oh so but what I guess what the problem for Smith is or like it's a problem for everybody but like Smith doesn't even blush when he puts this fundamentally within

you know like a political economy so it's like yeah like taking your example you give the dollar to this homeless person because you desire the joy which the homeless person is going to enjoy once he gets this dollar and then

you can see you know and in a way then you become the source of that joy as well which is i i imagine it's a hell of a kick too but it like really makes that formula spin uh or like per with with enjoyment yeah so but yeah i guess the the perversity if you want to say like with adam smith is a little bit that like it is so obviously within uh yeah political economy it's not like doing good deeds really for each other it's kind of like it has you know i mean of course he has more examples where where it is like just daily life in general but like i don't know it feels like almost all activity has something to do with the market for him like he's uh you know this kind of market fundamentalism which um you know i mean even marks is kind of like uh can be blamed for

for a certain degree of market fundamentalism as well even though he's criticizing it. Yeah. And what's funny about Smith is that he's approaching all this stuff, as we kind of hinted at, from the perspective of a person, right, his subjectivity, he's like a clearly very autistic guy in Scotland, lives with his mom until she dies and never marries.

She got old, man. she had i think he died like four years after she did or something it's almost like a married couple with his mom yeah didn't have romantic relationships talk to himself was famous for walking around and just talking to himself all the time like this is the poor guy that they picked on to become the the like the prophet of of the evil of market religions. Yeah. And you compare him with other, like, more self-consciously evil people who were almost

contemporaneous like John Stuart Mill, right, who is a huge shareholder in the British East India Company, who's talking about the greatest good for the greatest number, very much the basis for today what exists as effective altruism. right like the freaks in silicon valley and sam bankman freed and everything that believe in doing evil today because according to them it will benefit billions of people in the future after we're all dead hypothetically it's a constant reference in what's the mountain head right that film that was made oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah then he's they're always like oh they're talking about There's one really funny scene when he's like lying in the bed

And then Jason Schwartzman's character is like Oh, I don't think that's what Kant actually meant And he's like, yes, because I take cunt really fucking seriously And it's like And you realize, yeah, that's what I always thought right? It was just an excuse to be as evil as possible I thought so I thought so

But yeah, same thing with Mill right, like they love That's when they're plotting to kill Jeff and they're like, oh, yes, from like a John Stewart million perspective, killing Jeff will, yeah, utilitarian, like killing Jeff will actually succeed in speeding up the introduction of singularity where infinite amount of people for infinite time will enjoy infinitely. So basically we have to kill Jeff. Yeah. And it's so funny. But they kind of like, that's what they believe in. because even today, I had, you know, a few months ago a conversation with a family member,

you know, like who's in high school right now. And she was assigned to read some Mill, like on liberty or some shit. And so I got into it with her talking about how John Stuart Mill was the son of like a total imperialist idea. dialogue, James Mill, and was himself a huge shareholder in the British East India Company and all of his worldly philosophy that he's coming up with in this period of time, which again is the period of time when all of these religious sentiments and ideas are projected from God onto the market in this act of kind of collective imagination that is heavily influenced by the imperialist politics of the day and that Mill was just trying to maximize his shareholder

value. I mean, he was really not going that far beyond the earth to come up with these ideas. And selling drugs. Exactly, man. It's... Yeah, it's the, you know, yeah, it's the ramblings of a drug dealer trying to, like, justify his, like, yeah, justifying his trade. But yet this family member just stared at me blankly because it didn't match up anything what her teachers had told her in school, what the way that it was framed in the textbook or whatever. And so it's like there's this disconnect. Hopefully we can bridge that a little bit here. Yeah, I mean, because they, I think this is a very, I don't even think you'll be hard pressed to find at an American university, like where the history of ideas is a specific department, right? It's a very Scandinavian and French and to a certain degree German phenomenon, whereas like in American university, they almost always approach it from the level of philosophy, where it's like, here is this idea, let's compare it to this idea, it's like, no, I want to know the historical context.

of like how somebody was this stupid, man. I don't want to like engage with it until it becomes sanity. Like that's that's completely the wrong approach when it comes to somebody like John Stuart Mill. Like he was even like groomed by his father, right? And another psycho like Bentham, Bentham who thought that like the only way that this moralism and this smithian, you know, self, self interest and the Kantian personal law, the only way that that would work for him was that if everybody was in a

prison and that they felt watched that's like that's the kind of like level of like sheer paranoia that this john stuart mill was like raised up under like bentham and his father uh yeah yeah mill senior i forget always what his name is but you just yeah james mill james yeah yeah like they they had like a project to make him the prodigy of like their own utilitarian philosophy right like they're talking about it in their like in their letters like they're going to train like some fucking Songoku or something you know like

this kind of like creating a monkey king of like and then like after Mill you know with the positivists they sort of take up the mantle right and they don't even try to hide the fact that they want to create a religion like they're like then the circle has gone full

once again and they're like yeah this is a few thing of of you know of science and religion like it's the spiritualism that we've lacked you know we need like a proper like bourgeois religion like the the french revolution couldn't take care of it now we've been going around here trying to like restore order you know that was lost during the french revolution and like we need yeah we need to fuse science and religion and that's like sort of how positivism comes to be right like in the in the make european civilization great again yeah yeah yeah yeah

but yeah shit it's like it's yeah I can I when you say that when you said that the blank eyes of your family member it's always it's like I I I know what you're talking about because it's so funny because that's the big danger man with like like this whole approach of like and I think what they used to call themselves, you know, the intellectual dark web, right? Like the people with Sam Harris, for example. Like, Sam Harris, like, this kind of, like, neuroscientifical, you know, this neuroscientificial

subjectivity, it's like, it's this on crack, because it's like, it, everything is a thought experiment to Sam Harris. Like, it doesn't matter what it is. Like, like, we're going to, like, nuke all the Arabs because they don't believe in my rational understanding of morals and then that will somehow like, you know, produce a more moral society because the immorals have disappeared.

Just a thought experiment. And you're like, no, like you can't just go around thinking everything is a thought experiment. First off, because many times these things have happened. Like, you know, the things that you think are just, you know, quirky little, like philosophical cul-de-sacs are real cul-de-sacs in real history where you know crazy people like you have taken their actions to the most extreme and then find no other way out then to nuke people or to massacre them or you know they aren't just quirky logical errors they are errors of like real praxis by a stupid fucking class of people who who think things like john stewart mill man

Like, because you're always going to be left guessing if you think that you can really be a utilitarian. Like, like, how am I going to do the most good ever? It's like, that's impossible. Stop thinking like this. Nobody can think like this. Man, I think I was reading some marks, you know, in preparation for this episode. Good. Thank you. You know what the medicine is. You know what that is. Yeah, there's this one from his manuscripts of 1844 that I had underlined to, that I think really corresponds to what you're talking about here. Let me just pull it up one second. Hit it. DJ, play that shit.

Ask yourself whether that progression as such, exists for a reasonable mind. When you ask about the creation of nature and man, you are abstracting. In so doing, man from nature. You postulate them as non-existent, and yet you want me to prove them to you as existing? Now I say to you, give up your abstraction,

and you will also give up your question. Or, if you want to hold on to your abstraction, then be consistent. And if you think of man and nature as non-existent, then think of yourself as non-existent, for you too are surely nature and man. Don't think, don't ask me, for as soon as you think and ask, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man has no meaning. Or are you such an egoist that you postulate everything as nothing and yet want

yourself to be? You can reply, I do not want to postulate the nothingness of nature, I ask you about its genesis, just as I ask the anatomist about the formation of bones, et cetera. But since the socialist man, but since for the socialist man, the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the begetting of man through human labor, nothing but the coming to be of nature for man, he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of his process of coming to be. So the real existence of man in nature has become practical, sensuous, and perceptible, since man has become for man as the being of nature, and nature for man as the being of man.

The question about an alien being, about a being above nature and man, a question which implies the admission of the inessentiality of nature of man has become impossible in practice. Atheism as the denial of this inessentiality has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a negation of God and postulates the existence of man through this negation, but socialism as socialism no longer stands in any need of such mediation. Very nice. So you see, I mean, you know, these these abstracting people that just want to imagine bullshit, this is the quasi-religious nature. The manure medium out of which their philosophical flowers bloom.

Yeah. And it's people. The horseshit, the big dick horseshit people, which is kind of like the idea of Aryans today. I remember, you know, in the same vein one time, and I believe that my buddy, Steve, who may be listening, he's a listener of the pod. Hey, Steve, what's up, man? Used to be my college roommate. And one day, I remember his then-girlfriend walked into the dorm room and was like, you know, I just got back from philosophy class and I think I might be a utilitarian. Ney! Yeah. It's like just the

shining soundtrack in the background. Red flag. Come and play with me in philosophically. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean,

I Sebbert, like the guy I make my Skull-Boy series with me, he also, like in this Marxist way, also like goes back to like why they don't understand

when they should stop you know they think that like because there is something useful many times maybe in their practice like let's say like a comparative anatomist or comparative linguist their their practice

like scientific practice is valid many times but it's like they never seem to understand when they just have to acknowledge that what they have produced is an abstraction you know And a map is an abstraction of the real world, and it might be very useful if you want to find yourself, you know, if you want to find your way from point A to point B on a road inside a car. But you can't, you know, put down the map on the ground and, I don't know, build a house upon it and think that you own, you know, acres of land or something.

Like just to try to bring like the analogy back, like they don't seem to understand. like when their abstraction is just an abstraction, you can't take it to be, you know, the real world. Like, because then you're going to start to work from your abstraction back to the real world again when in the first instance you were creating the abstractions out of the real world, right? And this is like, you know, Engels and Marxist's critique of like Malthus as well, where they think that they have access to a nature

which is so influenced by their own political beliefs, you know, Like, that's the whole problem with social Darwinism, that they think that the whole of nature is engaged in some kind of like intramarket relationship, you know? Like you have even fucking, you know, like Neil deGrasse Tyson today and these kind of astrophysists talking about atoms who trade with each other. It's like atoms don't trade with each other, man. You've taken your abstraction too far and you've come back from your abstraction. You've went out into space, and now you come back, and now there is like some kind of currency in between molecules and elements. It's like, it makes no sense. And I think on the level of like subjectivity, because these people want to create a plan for themselves, right?

And I think that's like, I know, you know, like this comes back to like, you know, they also want to escape ideology, right? so they want to have like a path out of this you know this this dreamless year after year sameness and and and and i think like you know Marx like in the 18 Bremer when he says this one that I think if anybody knows any Marxist quote they know this one right like when men make their own history but they did not make it as they please right like it's kind of like one of the nicest Marxist formulas to understand how historical subjectivity actually works, you know, like

that you have to be able to have, you know, two sets, you know, you have to be able to think about two things at the same time, you know, like, yes, you can like make your own history but, but the thing is that because you are making history

that also means that you cannot make it exactly how you want it to be, you know, because you rest you know, like it has been what does I say later right like the weight of all the dead traditions is lasting like on the backs of these people of us people who wants to be revolutionaries you know and we have been given this task from from a past which we can only like maybe retroactively interpret in different ways which is of course like I mean that's my great joy in life to retroactively reinterpret things that

happen before and kind of like changing the future. changing the past I think that is the only way forward almost but but they I think they are incapable of of having this patience you know like they want to change like oh I feel like this today that's why like by the end of the year we're going to go to like Mars you know now I took more ketamine suddenly we're going to be you know at Mars in in only half a year like it's it's so much more subjective and I think maybe like a way out of course then

it's also why they their individualism refuses the only possibility then to become a subject that can make history as it pleases is that you have to

elevate your individuality above self-conscious above self-interest you have to become one with the identical subject object which is the class consciousness of the proletary art And only then can we impose

like, you know, the dictatorship of the proletariat that can dictate history to turn in a certain direction. But no individual can bear that burden and no individual should bear that burden. Like that's, you know, what a dictator does.

Who thinks he himself is that. But if a class can collectively do it, well then now you would start to really feel history, right? Like how Lenin says there are years when nothing happens and then there are weeks where years happen like you know that's you know we want that fucking rush man like it's going to be so much cooler than any stupid like fantasy about going

to mars but they are they have bar their own access to this sentiment they have bar their own access to this freedom of thinking because they wanted the individual to be given all the power and then they have to like cut their losses as well unfortunately but so it is and in doing that they even confine the sympathy that adam smith is describing by excluding from the human community all of these people they consider to be non-subjects right like for mill the indians in the british raj were clearly not on the same level of utilitarian consideration as the whites and the stockholders in the British East India Company, they were of a different species almost. And it's totally selective. And you know, you mentioned what you are trying to do about revisiting and reconsidering and reclassifying these historical subjectivities. And to the extent that the listener is not familiar with your work. I just want to highlight that, you know, you do it in both directions. You both focus on,

for example, in your early communism in the oceans series and all of these very deep, deep historical works. And I'll shout out our mutual friend Fergal Schmoudlach of the kingless generation that, you know, I'm sure we'll get him on the pot. Yeah, he was one of the first encouragers of this approach, I think. And it felt good having a professor at the university being like, you should pursue this pursuit. This is good thing. Yeah, I mean, Fergal is a nice...

Goaded as hell. I mean, definitely shout out to Fergal. We love you. We appreciate you. And everybody should also listen to the Kingless Generation podcast. But, you know, beyond that, you also go in the opposite direction, as we've been discussing, to sort of demystify and deflate the totally irrationally sort of pantheistic or, you know, putting up these philosophers,

these worldly philosophers, and in many cases, they're patrons as well, right? like the thought will exceed to this pantheon of quasi-divine status and so will the economic interest behind them and I think by exposing the relationships between the financiers behind things like you know the geneticist movement in the early 20th century as you've done exhaustively and the philosophers and scientists yeah exactly like you like you said before right like you just simply are not only is it not sufficient to learn about the abstract ideas that have been propagated by so-called scientists and philosophers it is actually counterproductive to view their ideological contributions as abstraction without the material context in which those thoughts, writings, and ideas were produced.

And, I mean, that's what has fucked us so badly that the even elites of society who are supposedly educated view all of this knowledge as capital K, right, as existing on a plane above and beyond human reach almost, almost divinely inspired to kind of return to once again what we're really talking about here, the supernatural powers that are projected onto market ideology, the concept of market rationality, et cetera. And I don't know, I mean, we have given our friend Adam his due,

I want to give you the chance to say anything else, but I think let's just step on the leap fraud. Let's just step on the lily pad of Max Weber on our way to Carl Schmidt. I don't think we need to dig too deep on Weber. We've talked about him on the pod before a little bit, but I do think that it's an important, like, bridge to get to Schmidt. Do you have anything else before we do that? on Smith on no I know more about Weber than Adam Smith I read a lot more by

Weber than him so yeah I think we had them we leave Adam by the candlelight on the island in Scotland with his mother mother cooking in the background or maybe even lived you know Norman Bates like with mom's ah right right when he was writing the wealth of nations. I'd like to think of that. Yeah. Yeah, that's a really interesting image. And he moving in from the basement to the third floor, right? Like that kind of Freudian, id ego, super ego. Sometimes the mother is just sympathy. Sometimes the mother is the invisible hand on the market, you know, slapping you for doing the wrong thing, for not having sympathy. Yeah, bye-bye, Adam Smith. We'll see you later. Let's go to Max Weber.

All right. So the way in which Max Weber has appeared on this podcast before is just in passing, really, in reference to his most famous work, which I don't think we need to get that far beyond that work here. Of course, talking about the Protestant ethic and spirit of capitalism. Marcus, we are privileged to have you a German speaker. If you want to say the title of the book in the native German, I invite you to do it because I get a lot of comments of your German pronunciation. It's too guttural. There's too much saliva. I can almost feel it come out of the speakers. I can do it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, because I'm also like a child of Luther, right? so I can really feel the ethic. So it should be something like the Protestantistice etique and the geister capitalism from Max Weber of 1904 yeah, something like this.

Beautiful. Yeah. That's the danger, I think, of German. That like almost every, like people say that oh, you can swear in French and it sounds like kind of beautiful like quite romantic the problem is that like you can say any

horse shit in German and it sounds like it's kind of something to do with philosophy you know like anything you're just bending a verb and it's like oh wow no things got a whole new like take on them but yeah what's the what's we have Weber's take here like I I had a professor for a long time at university who was like a Weberian and and so I he did expose us to a lot of like Weber's work. I think this doesn't work anymore like I don't even know if it worked in the way that he thinks it does that there is a special link between Protestant Protestantical ethics and and you know the the Geist of Capital I think

precisely because capital is a god onto itself it doesn't need any particular religion's ethic it can sort of like adapt to conservative Confucianism in Korea Japan China even it can you know convert itself to Hinduism in the South Asia it's compatible with you know the oil shakes in In Saudi Arabia, it's compatible with, like, yeah, the soulless Americans of Silicon Valley who has nothing. It's, yeah, I think that's the real problem with maybe capital. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah.

I'm not saying that it's not important to study it. It is. But, like, yeah, that kind of, like, baseline point is, yeah, a problem, I think. but at same time maybe it has also then succeeded in also there might be a specific thing about Protestant ethics you know what we've just talked about with this self-interest in a very specific way that's sort of like you know maybe capital has bribed people of all other religions to sort of make that an ethic of their own as well I mean everybody has an ich, right, irregardous of religion. And if this is a religion of the ich, then why not it works?

Yeah. I think those are all really good points. I think with Weber, the problem is that, again, to go back to the passage from Marx, he's engaging in this sort of abstraction where he's trying to take an ideological phenomenon. and give it some sort of a universal significance when in fact the phenomenon is confined to its time and place. And so to the extent that the ideas that he's discussing of the Protestant ethic, you know, namely ideas similar to what we actually talked about in Jerry World episode two, if the listener has not yet tuned into that,

we talk a lot about Calvinism and the belief system of Calvinism, which is kind of the Protestant ethic that Weber is most focused on of predestination of the elect being reaffirmed in their status among a sort of untouchable divine order of the distribution of wealth, really. and that they're conducting their activities in business in a way that's consistent with the growth of their wealth that then re-reflects back upon them as elect of God, as the chosen people in the sort of deistic, materialistic world order, that the people who are on top, they're selected by God to be on top, their activities are consistent with their remaining on top, it's again importing from Adam Smith the principle

of enlightened self-interest, but in the belief that this just simply circulates the divine plan without any human intervention because according to Calvinism, there is no room for human will to actually intervene in the divine plan, right? Calvin believed that like whatever is happening and whatever is going to happen, that is God's will, regardless of what humans believe they may have as an effect upon that will. So, like, it's, again, very descriptive, but at the same time, it provides in the same way that Smith was trying to be descriptive, but then gave fodder to subsequent generations, making use of his ideas. I think the same goes for Weber, that people glom on to this idea and everything from, like, using it as a critique of capitalism, which I think it's a. idealistic critique of capitalism that doesn't actually hit in the way that Marx's critique hits,

two, on the other extreme, using it as a sort of supernatural justification for capitalism or some kind of a quasi-religious reaffirmation of the principles of capitalist accumulation. Yeah, I think regarding the second relationship one might have to, the to the doctrine put forward in this in this book is that like I think like if you're really like a Calvinist like there can be something good about it like the way that like Bernie Sanders said that I think somebody asked him not too long ago like like if there is no like you know reward like if it doesn't matter you know like it's predestination right like I don't think the question was put with this like Calvinist

overtone but like it's a basic moral question that somebody asked Bernie Sanders about like why would you do something like if you aren't rewarded for it? I think they were like maybe trying to be cute about communism or something and then he said like you know just do it for the sake of doing it you know like it's like it might feel

better to just do the good right thing even though you're not going to get rewarded for it and I think in that sense like Calvinism is a kind of like a good it's a good it's a good religion in to have this attitude I think

you shouldn't be doing good things just because you think you're going to get good karma or because you know you're going to be allowed to enter into a Catholic heaven where there are like you know different levels of like you know somebody was keeping tabs of what you were doing

but the thing is that it's also a very difficult religion. I don't think most Calvinists can rise to that level. Like, I mean, in Buddhism insofar that the Buddha talks about, you know, doing good deeds, you know, and having that good

deed, the highest one is like, yeah, where you don't look for any gratification from the other. Like I think another way of putting it is he says the best horse runs even before the sign of the shadow of a whip.

um you just do it you know there's you need nothing you need nothing to tell you how to do it and and of course all everybody wants to be the best horse but are we really like the best horse and i think uh what capitalism does is that it's sort of like you know like so if you were to live in a calvinist universe where where everybody is just going around some are elect and they just do good uh without any like regard for like later reward, I think like the only value structure that can like if you want to relatively compare yourself

to others then, to be able to see who is elect and who is not elect you just sort of, it all becomes a question of like appearance. You know, the one who fakes it until he makes it the best is probably the one who is elect. Like the one who looks most reassured

in his activity is probably somebody who is the elect one. But capitalism, reifies the relationship with regards to objects and objectively defines the hierarchy with money. You have

this and this much money and we all know that only the really rich what we call old money only they can afford to say things like oh money doesn't matter right for most of us it's not sinful to say that we are a bit stingy a bit cheap

because what the fuck you know we know that this is a pretty harsh world and and like you know I can't afford to go around spending any kind of money and sometimes I have to you know I have to be sinful I have to be greedy cheap

to save money and the you know the perk or let's say like the status of being a truly good religious person is only like allowed to the very rich in capitalism, right? Like who can say, once again, that money doesn't matter or that they, you know, oh, I didn't do it for the money or, you know, it doesn't concern me, you know,

all these Calvinist virtues, right? They are the only ones who can feel reassured in their predestination. For the rest of us, it's a pretty shaky road still. And it does actually connect back to all we were talking about with Smith because that sense of sympathy, the sympathetic desire and motivation is also just like wealth unequally distributed right that's that's kind of what you're saying right it's like in the movie parasite for example that the family yeah yeah the working class yeah the Korean film the working class family that goes to work for the rich family a lot of the criticism of the movie in the American press, which was hilarious to read, was saying like,

oh, but these poor people, like, they're a bunch of assholes. They're just, they're the parasites. They're the ones that are actually, you know, trying to take advantage of this nice, wealthy family. It's like completely missing the point of the film. Yeah. And completely missing the basic premise that, that things like performative generosity are only available. Those are goods or those are, you know, abilities that are unlocked at a certain level of capital accumulation. They're not available to people down the socioeconomic ladder. you can't perform generosity who lives in the basement literally exactly exactly lives like a fucking cockroach yeah if you if you're forced to live like a cockroach

you might start behaving like a cockroach like that's not really you know the lump the proletarians individual fault yeah but i can see like how that would be mixed up in the American cultural sphere. Like, what does he do now that I come to think about it? Like the guy who owns the house. Like the mother is a kind of stay-at-home mom who is like hooked on some kind of like pharmaceutical, right? Which is another like, it's a really well made.

You know, when they claim to find drug, like like the people who are like coming into the house, they put, they plant drugs in the car somehow, right? like so that the dad is going to be the driver instead of the driver or something like for some reason they find drugs in the car I can't remember who it belongs to if it's the driver or if it's a nanny or a cleaner I think the cleaner is taken away by the her peach allergy maybe but like anyway there is like something about drugs and this person gets fired for being a drug user and then later that evening when like they are sort of like you know the the husband and the wife are getting together on the on the couch and and she's like arousing herself by telling him to tell to say to like say to her that she's a drug dealer or something no no she's like okay are you going to give me my drugs right or something like because she's on some kind of pharmaceutical you know like a well respected drug like not like some of that you know dirty illegal drugs that's street drugs yeah yeah exactly

And, but at the same time, she gets a sexual, like, you know, it's sex, it's a, it's a, it's a demarcation line which is sexually irritating, right? And it's nice to, like, jump over it and jump back over it. For her and for him too, right? Like, he's the drug dealer in this case, the worst of the worst, right? The pimp. The hollick. And so, so that they, and then at the same time, the family of like, you know, our heroes, they are hiding, like, under the table right so they hear this whole entire exchange between them and so it's nice that we can sort of like not only do we get there jumping back and forth across the legality and illegality we also are allowed like yeah this this view of like them being inside the house illegally to be able to see the illegalities going on in the world of legality would be my way of like yeah putting it right? Like you have to be almost a parasite to unveil the parasitic nature of the bourgeois sea, right? Only like, yeah, if you go in there as a butler in this case, like, you know, with the intention of like scooching them off, only then will you be able to come so close that you can see what they're actually doing, right? You're going to have to sell some of your dignity and pride to be able to get that close to the bourgeoisie. Yeah, it's the boiling back to the idea of. everybody wants to feel good about their own position and that's something that was present even in the superstitious times of medieval religiosity and it's something that persists today that

the lord is getting that sweet sweet theosophical value validation by leading the crusade the same way that the surf is getting it by participating in the crusade and on and on and on all the way till today. And Weber is trying to put a stamp on that in a way that I think what we've kind of landed on is maybe too narrow in as much as he limits what he's looking at to this Calvinist ideology. But he's at least touching on something that tells us how capitalism recruits people of various religious stripes. Like, he kind of confines it to the Calvinist ideology. But, you know, you could also think about how it works the same way Catholicism, right? Like, the one thing that I think is, and this will maybe help us

transition ultimately to Carl Schmidt, but the Catholics are no less susceptible to the logic of capitalism than are Calvinists. It's not only like that, like it's a different kind of like religious relationship to capital like he also wants to show that sort of like how everybody is also like what's the one article where he has like

science as a vocation I think is the English translation like he often talks about vocation you know because of like your professional status in this world everybody is serving God now like nobody like it doesn't matter if like

a priest or a clergy, they are not no longer the only people of vocation who are in a professional relationship with God. Everybody is now because of capital. And then, you know, yeah, I think like wouldn't that even fit than the Catholic world even better? Like, you know, because it has such a much a bigger, you know, physically actually existing institution out of it. there which like you know of course the you know protestantism now also has an institution but like at least they don't have a pope yet and there isn't this like hierarchy of bureaucrats serving and sort of showing yeah the same thing they give Donald Trump three more years he might be the protestant pope at the time yeah his term is up yeah yeah I've been toying around with this idea of like

the cadaver popes, you know, like that feudalism sort of begun with this like exhumation of a cadaver from the previous pope who was put on trial, like just his like half decayed skeleton was there in the court. And then the new like pope was like holding him accountable for something. And that's like I think the last sort of big thing that happens. And then you have like 100 years of like pure insanity like where you can have like three popes in the same year. Like everybody's just fighting over the palpacy. And then in order to neutralize that conflict, the crusades begin. But and then I don't know, like I just, I've been thinking about this that like it's interesting

that maybe this is a proof then that we're entering techno feudalism because the last like 10 years we've had these, you know, cadaver popes, right? Like Biden and the Trump who are like clearly not there. they're like just kept alive like exhumated from senile seniority with like you know these drugs and you know I don't know like yeah really like being there somehow unintentionally the image of I mean I think like the proponents of capital wants to make it look like oh like capital is only in its like you know knowledgeable face you know like where it has accumulated wisdom and like it is world where it is world where and responsible and full of experience whereas like the rest of us just sees the cadaver popes like this is late stage man starting to smell maybe you should move them away from here

but yeah I don't like yeah yeah we or just entom them in some kind of marble or something like that you know put the turn the thing into a monument for posterity and rob it of all vital forces forever I think that would be a acceptable alternative but I don't know how close we are to that yeah but I think we are already like within the fact that they even can serve as president is that we are within like Weber's

like a bureaucratic despotism that he talks about that Kafka also talks about I think you know like Kafka says that like in an atheist universe the only divine dimension left for an atheist is bureaucracy

you know that's the only place where you can hope that like I like maybe there is you know somebody taking care of things you know just be patient just be patient for you know your benefit check you know maybe you're

Social security will come to you, you know, the grace of God. If you, by some miracle, happen to be put together with a kind soul inside the bureaucratic state apparatus. And again, like, I feel that quite often. Like, I've had to fight, you know, with the bureaucracy to be able to get, like, my family to Sweden. And I failed ultimately. And like, yeah, I've lived like, you know, on benefits at times when I've been very sick. And I think, like, yeah, there's some, you know, true to that, like, the Weber's idea about, like, bureaucratic despotism. That it's another thing where, where, like, yeah, the old bureaucracy doesn't work anymore because it doesn't represent true activities in the same way that, like, you know, these state apparatus

of various nations are much closer it feels like to the real god of capital than let's say the pope you know the cadaver popes of Washington DC are closer to capital than the Pope in the Vatican hey you know who else was really setting his sights against the bureaucracy and the bureaucratic state and the forces embedded in that bureaucracy? I have a guess. It's funny that I've never thought about it, but it's either Karl Schmidt or Elon Musk. Well, maybe they're not as different. Maybe they are just one and the same, but I think definitely, definitely the man, Carl Schmidt he set his his aim you know everybody else that did so did so in his footsteps you know following in his footsteps in his footprints trying to fill out those shoes uh those big old shoes

that he left behind um however i actually i kind of got to got to go okay we can we can i mean schmidt is a big topic so isn't it sweet if we stop here that's what i'm saying i think we've come to a very good point yeah i have no problem uh man like considering everything we talked about today how to spend your time you know what is valuable what is killing time nothing would excite me more than to come back on to the forthright archaeology and talk a little bit about Carl Schmidt with you. From the bottom of my heart, that would entertain me a lot. Man, it has been incredible couple of hours.

Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you. And, you know, listener, we... Thanks to listener for... Believe us. We've left you with a real cliffhanger here because the real meat of what we were going to talk about. And I'll give you just a little here.

hint to whet your appetite for the next time because all of this conversation has been leading up in some respect to Marcus and my discussion of Karl Schmidt, the great Nazi jurist and legal scholar of the Third Reich, who collected all of these pieces and came up with, I mean, I think you don't always have to tip your hat to the Nazis, but when it comes to Carl Schmidt, you kind of do have to give him his proppers because the guy in a much more convincing way than people that we've talked about on Fourth Reich archaeology

who engage in the same sort of conduct of coming from a far right point of view, leveling a scathing and an incisive critique of the liberal bourgeois mentality and system, I mean, the first guy to really master that technique and to master it in a way that, like, I mean, Tucker Carlson couldn't even dream of pulling off. You know, he aspires to and falls well short of the levels that Carl Schmidt had of doing the old Nazi bait and switch where all of the liberal bourgeois ideology that we've been talking about i mean Schmidt takes that and really eviscerates it on its own terms before advancing

what he terms a political theology you know unabashedly so and comes at it from we've laid the breadcrumbs, a Catholic perspective, too. Yeah, yeah. If Weber was, uh, yeah, right, right. Exactly. So exactly where Weber is sort of like, you know, dishing his own idea of a bureaucratic despotism, Schmidt is going to show us how not only that it's possible, but also how you can apologetically, um, define the despot and how the despot comes into being, how the sovereign becomes the sovereign. And I'm always

on the lookout for, you know, like in the same vein as what you were just talking about saying, like, how people like Tucker Carlson and etc. How they lack. Like I'm always on the lookout for real Nazis who really believe in Nazism. I don't even think Hitler, he was a great orator,

a great organizer. I don't think he really believed in the International Socialist project like in so far that he, you know, expressed it. I don't even think Himmler believed in like, you know all his mythology about the Arian. Same thing for Rosenberg. Don't think the chief ideologist of the NSDA appear

really believed in everything he said was their ideology. However, in the grey bureaucrat of Karl Schmidt talking about political theology, I think this guy believes in what he's talking about, which makes him fucking interesting. It's like, it's on another level with this guy because it's so boring, but it's at the same time so vicious,

so cynical and so like dangerous honestly to fuck your brain up to think like this yes yeah and and to Adam Smith's homely

autistic almost in cell point of view Schmidt is the mother hating horny point of view and it brings

that entire inverted vantage point to the same questions and reaches just a much more dark and a much more devious place, which actually maybe does put his finger on the pulse of humanity as it existed in the Weimar Republic with all of its contradictions. So hopefully, listener, we have given you a lot here to mull over marcus i want to thank you again for your time for all that we've discussed it's been a blast and now i can say i'm really really looking forward to wrapping this thing up and continuing it we couldn't even do i'm going to have the

sweetest cigarette mouth we couldn't even do man we have the sweetest cigarette mouth we couldn't even do man we have like very long. I'm sure it's actually going to be like five episodes. We actually get to talking about Kissinger and the Rockefellers and the eugenics of the 1970s. We're going to go on forever. But even in this one, we couldn't fit it in even to like one, two and a half hour session. Man, I am just thankful for you and let the listener here know. you know it to the extent that they don't already work and they find your shit and um and then we'll we'll say goodbye yeah i think uh you can put a link to my patreon it's the show is called the return of the repressed you can find it also on like a free feed similar to forthright archaeology

i have a free feed available to everybody and then quite a big backlog of stuff behind a paywall on Patreon and I live in a small mountain village in Japan so I've managed to do what Dick and Don hasn't done I have almost no rent and I live like a very frugal life almost like Adam Smith and so I do this full time but I need yeah support over there and I would be very happy if you came in first listen to it like it and then support it that'd be lovely and I hope to see Again, when we come back for Carl Schmidt, thank you so much for listening to this rambling today. It was good, good from my point of view. I hope you felt the same.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. No doubt about it. And please, listener, do. I think I've said it on the pod. I've definitely said it on Twitter. Yeah, you're one of my big promoters. The return of the repress, like life-changing shit. it is the best. It is so good. It's so deep and it's so on point. And just the subject matter

that he covers on there is so relevant to everything, everything that's happening now. It's been an inspiration to me to listen to Marcus's work. And I remember something that you said, maybe I don't know when exactly or what episode but at some point you know you were talking about being able to use the podcast medium to reach like astronomically more people than you could possibly ever reach in like a seminar classroom and I'll say like the quality of the work that you put out without saying anything about what we're doing like we're just aspiring to hit those levels but

really it's like you know it really is like tapping in for some advanced study and talking back on what we were talking about like the face that

the visage that occupies my face is like the peasants the drunken peasants in Bruegel's paintings of the bacchanalian revelries of the proto working class when I am vibing with Marcus that is the heath of humanity as far as I'm concerned and my heart goes to you my friend and to you the listener yes well received over here thank you

There will come a payday Oh, bye On behalf of Marcus, on behalf of Dick And on behalf of myself, Don Farewell And keep on digging When I lay my work by I have a home in the sky

There will come a payday someday Where no interest comes due or notes to renew Oh, there will come a payday someday Here I work every day For such bigger pay But there will come a payday Someday

And the title's not clear To the home I'll hear But there will come a payday Someday There will come a pay day Hallelujah, what a pay day All right folks, you know what time it is it is the time to give our shout-outs to all those beautiful people in our doctoral candidate

and research assistant tiers on Patreon. We love you, we see you, we are so grateful for your support, and the world is about to hear your name. Thank you so much to David, to Fern, to Caleb, to Frank, to Simply Anchovi. Thank you to John, to Mike, to Wizard of Choice, to Antiovi. Annie to Kelly. Thank you to Al, McGee, and Raven. Thank you.