Red Scare - Yarvin's Room w/ Curtis Yarvin

Episode Date: July 5, 2022

Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug joins the ladies on America's special day to discuss the cathedral, monarchy, love, Litvinism, and the state of the nation.

Happy 4th. We have a very patriotic episode. We're finally going whole hog and fully alienating our entire listener base. I don't think so. At this point, we have a guest. A very special guest. The artist formerly known as Menchus Mouldbug. That's true. Curtis Jarvan.

Curtis Jarvan. Poet. It's a pleasure to be on your show guys. Thanks for coming on. Curtis, you're like the Anthony Bourdain of theorizing regime change. Something like that. I don't hope I share Anthony Bourdain's fate. And who was that actress?

Rose McGowan. He was involved with? Rose McGowan. Aria Hento. Argento. Right. And it was like this strange abusive relationship or something. It was like his death was very suspicious because it was like around the burgeoning me too moment.

And then she got weirdly me too by that like 15 year old crack head that we were supposed to take seriously. That's really disturbing. Anyway, how's it going? How's it going? Well, you were just telling us how you're going to send your kids to school for late tarts. Yes. I've moved permanently or temporarily or partially to a liberal West Coast city. And partly by my children's demand and also because of my fiance.

And I'm like my kids need to be Americanized. They need to be fully dipped in the river sticks. In the same way that I was dipped in the river sticks. They need to be sent to a public school and especially like to build character and one that is really in the heart of, you know, of power in a way. I mean, not the way New York is, but in its own way and like to feel and also you think it's here to stay. Yeah, I don't think that there's, you know, nothing changes really. So you're rearing your children as Machiavellians? Well, I think actually that sort of level of kind of.

Well, you know, there's this great Persian word Ketman that Chisla Malosh wrote about. Do you know the story of Ketman? So Ketman, you know, in Malosh, and this is from Malosh's book, The Captive Mind, which is came out in like 61, 62 or something like that. And it is really, you know, this sort of marvelous meditation on just Orwellianism and the Communist Poland and the backbone of the book, which is absolutely worth reading or this sort of biographical sketches of four people he knew who he just codenames Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta. But you can look up their names. And these are sort of studies of how people compromised with power or became servants of it or, you know, worked with it in general as Malosh did, because, you know, he was in the resistance during the war and then he became, he was kind of sort of started to be like a diplomat, you know, for the new Polish regime.

And so like it wasn't like the people that were running this thing were all from his generation. And those are great chapters, you know, but in a way, sort of, he has his chapter on Ketman, which is, again, a Persian word, I mean, it's like Takia and not Ketamine. Ketamine is the funny you should say, but the, I'm not on Ketamine. I will disclose that, you know, someone gave me a Ketamine for the first time ever at a party like two nights ago. You mean like a bump of like Ketamine? I don't know. How did you know you snorted it?

I did not go into the hall. It was not, you know, like, I just, like, you know, it takes a lot of drugs to move me at my age, you know, I'm like, I don't know. Ketamine is pretty cool. Maybe I don't do it anymore. Maybe I just didn't take enough, but I was not, you know, anyway. Anyway, let's get back to the important political concept of, actually, what's funny is that another of the chapters in The Captive Mind is called The Pill of Merdy Bing, which is like a political pill that seems to be the blue pill, but also seems a lot like Ketamine. So, um, right.

So, so, so the, um, it's just the dissociate. And then anyway, Ketamine is basically the art of political dissimulation. So you're like, um, you know, going through life pretending you're like in the closet, you're pretending to be a completely orthodox person, even a slightly fanatical person. You shouldn't pretend to be too fanatical. But there are also ways of, like, dissimulating in ways that sort of will reveal yourself to your friends, but not your enemies. Yeah, very, right, right, right. But sort of, you know, with this sort of element of, like, fun and playfulness behind it.

That you don't really find in Strauss. Well, we have, in Russia, we, in Russia, in America. There's a Russian term called STOB that we've covered extensively on this podcast, which, um, basically means it's a form of late Soviet parody that involves an extremely high level of over-identification, so that people don't really know where you stand. Yeah. And you kind of see that phenomenon brewing its head in the United States, especially with Trump. Say a little more about over-identification, like over... Well, it sort of collapses the categories of irony and sincerity.

Right. And sort of makes everything into, well, yeah, because in the late Soviet, in a falling empire. Right. So you might, like, overstate regime propaganda in a way. Yes. In being overzealous or overly fanatical, you are actually signaling to the, in crowd, the cognizanty that you are doing resistance. Right. Yeah.

Right, right, right. Actually, I think that clip that's been circulating of AOC where she's like, I'm doing my nails as an act of reclamation could almost be seen as like... Wow, it could almost be seen as like... Right, right. Because it's actually, she, like, has the sense of humor to know that in a way she's parodying herself. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to say, right?

Yeah. Yeah. But who would actually say that? Like, no one would actually be that, like, ditzy, like... Well, that's this job thing, too, is it doesn't even really matter. Well, you know, it's, I mean, the change that is so amazing. And I was just like, this is, you know, at the time, even in 2020, when all this stuff was happening, I was like, this is going to backfire. Because you basically took the ideology or the sort of way of thinking that was the property, what I would say, of Brown 30 years ago.

This way of thinking was the exclusive property of the cool kids at Brown. Right. And it was the same way of thinking. Which way of thinking? It was wokeness and stuff. Yeah, okay. Right. And so the, like, even in 2020, it's almost hard to remember now, say, even like before 2015, it's like before woke crossed over.

Right? Because it crossed over like punk. It was like basically... Like into the mainstream. What year would you say people crossed over? It was between 2015 and 2020, I would say. Maybe between 2010 and 2020. But it crossed over.

And like, basically, now it's like, you can go and see a movie, like, this Martin Scorsese directed this movie, After Hours. Yeah. You know, After Hours. Right. You know, After Hours. Right, you know. And basically, like, the sort of like the residual, like, punkophobia that is present in After Hours. There's no other way to describe that, but it's like punkophobia.

Right? You know, and it was like punk or alt was like, you know, this scary, scary thing. Well, yeah. That there's still was. The Mohawk. Right? Right. These were bad people, you know.

Well, you could have a protagonist, right? That was like, anormy. Right. Like a citizen who was confronting these other forces. There's confronting this horrible, you know, Mohawk, you know, forces of like, degeneration. And, you know, and then punk like crosses over and like, you know, suddenly it's sort of once punk crosses over, it's like impossible to be like punk again in the same way. Right.

Like there's still a punk scene, but it's like, almost like, what's the point? Who are you trying to like scare? Right. You know. And so with Wokeness, basically, it was just like, wait all of the energy in this thing that makes it so compelling is basically, it's like war against the mainstream. It's a pete le bourgeoisie. I'm ruining the French.

Right. And so, you know, I was reading like the Atlantic recently. I don't know why I was doing this, but I was reading the other thing. Are you okay? I thought it was probably a link. It's probably a link. I've followed a link and I'm open. I'm scrolling down this thing and there's this interstitial ad like between the blocks

of text and it's an ad from MasterCard and it says something like, learn how to make payments safe for transgender and non-binary people. And you know, basically once MasterCard has like appropriated like this, let's make payments safe for non-binary people. Right. I mean, you know, like, where else do you go with that? Right. It's this sort of dynamic front that basically has to move and once it becomes sort of the

universal ideology of everything and just this like syrup that everyone gets in their like food since like kindergarten. It's like the lingua franca now. It's like the lingua franca and so there's no like, there's no tension. There's no energy in it. There's no like voltage differential. It's just basically, and to like younger zoomers, it's basically just this stuff that you're supposed to believe.

And it's so much like the energy of being for it, sort of you can get some of that energy off of like rebelling against your parents or like, it's just harder to like once you're at the point of like, it makes payments safe for transgender and non-binary people. Right. So the energy that created is gone. Yeah. Is that true? Is that like?

Well, I mean, that's where like Pat Monner still comes in. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. Yeah. Why are you so sure that it's sort of here to stay that it's kind of embedded in power? Because it's embedded in bureaucratic rules. It's embedded in when you have like we're, I think that it was either passed or about

to be passed some kind of civil rights bill, making dead naming basically, considering it formally equivalent to racism, essentially. So you're basically at the point where 10 years ago in Canada, or whatever, Jordan Peterson is like, I shouldn't have to use these pronouns, right, which is what made him famous. And now it's basically, you have a social change and a change in power that goes along with that. Which of these sort of proceeds or causes the other is sort of really hard to follow, but they work in tandem.

So it's sort of like COVID regulation in a way where everyone now is at and scurril this stuff. You don't say the C word on this podcast. Just kidding. Go on. Yes. It's like this new virus that's been going on. What?

Where basically, you know, people have like, you know, I mean, I'm a moderate on the virology. Viruses are real. Like I hate them. I don't like getting them. But basically the general cultural trend is that sort of everyone has acknowledged that like you just have to take your chances with the virus. But yet you still have all of these like bureaucratic structures that were set up to take this. And, you know, in some cases, those don't really have any purchase and they just get

ignored. People just see, people establishments don't even notice that they have signs in their windows requiring that. Yeah. But this reminds me of what my parents told me about life in the Soviet Union where there was all this signage and messaging that people simply ignore. Right. Right.

And it's just like, how do you think those Black Lives Matter signs we're going to age? Well, here's my question. What happens if a Black person dead names? Who's more oppressed in the staff? I think actually, you know, the answer to the question is very easy, which is that basically all of the status that you get from being in a protected class accrues from the allegiance of that protected class to the party. So when you basically are like Clarence Thomas and you break with the party, suddenly, actually,

your race card is not only not an asset, it may even be a liability. You get called downward. You get called downward on Twitter. Like by people, you know, someone made up, someone made up one of those fake Black Lives Matter signs with, you know, all the normal Black Lives Matter propaganda, but it sneaks in in the middle one, you know, we believe in science. Clarence Thomas is an N word in this house, we believe, so you basically, like, as soon as you break with the party, like, you know, you realize that it's not actually about having

that piece of status. It's about being with the party. Right. Yeah. Nick Mullin had the best tweet about this, which was your racism is calling Clarence Thomas the N word when he makes a ruling you don't agree with my racism is not knowing the difference between Clarence Thomas and James Earl Jones. I'm trying to imagine that Clarence Thomas up playing Darth Vader.

You know, imagine, I mean, you know, what if, is there any law saying that Clarence Thomas, I mean, we're all looking for presidential candidates in 2024. Imagine, imagine if Clarence Thomas ran. I think I want hell dog v. Trump again, I want to do it all over again, baby. Yeah. Do you think she will? We miss Hillary. Do you think she'll push Biden aside like the decrepit shambling reccy is?

I would love it. Well, who's the decrepit shambling rec? Well, there's all it's like this like nation of, I mean, Trump is a, I want Clarence Thomas to run and to make, I believe I can fly his campaign, you know, there's noises made of a potential Kanye West campaign. Well, he's, he's trying to run before and yeah, he doesn't have the wherewithal as a bipolar man, as a bipolar man. That's good.

But okay, on that note, I have a question about your famous concept of the cathedral, which maybe you can define for those of our listeners who haven't heard it or haven't heard it explained that way. So like one of the key features of the cathedral, right, is how all of these prestigious institutions across media and academia seem to be totally aligned in their like core messaging and cultural values in a way that seems like coordinated or yes, but they're not, but it's not actually coordinated. Well, you've always said, and I agree with you that it's actually decentralized, right?

So then why do people feel so inclined? Why do they want to believe in conspiracy theories? Is it like a matter of finding like a sorority and scapegoat or just a matter of mere self-importance? Yeah, okay, let's go, let's go through the, you know, the two, let's, those, those separate questions. Um, yeah, I think you define sort of the cathedral concept very well, which is that we basically look at all of these very expensive brand names like Harvard and the New York Times and, you know, these in general information or prestigious information organs.

You know, I like, for example, when I talk about, you know, the, what's some call the mainstream media, I prefer to just say the prestige media because that's a term that's understandable by basically both sides. The question is to what extent the prestige corresponds with reality. And so when you look at these institutions, you see something very interesting, which is that they, you could easily mistake them for branches of a single giant. Um, you know, um, for example, the way media worked in East Germany and not in East and in Nazi Germany was that it was basically controlled by the propaganda ministry under

Goebbels, right? And so basically Goebbels had like administrative control of the whole Nazi media. And so everything in Nazi media became Nazi flavored. Um, you know, one, one of my favorite examples is, um, the great writer, Victor Climper, who was, um, he was Jewish and he managed to survive the Third Reich by, um, having a German wife, you know, marrying a chick said, you know, always, always a smooth move. And, um, the, um, gets you out of a lot of jams and it got him basically all the way through the, um, the Second World War.

Um, and one of the, and he, he was a philologist. He was literary critic and he wrote a diary, which, um, sort of came out in East Germany. So it wasn't very famous until like 20 years ago. And one of the things he recounts in this diary is that he had a cat, um, and he subscribed to a cat magazine. And in 1931, his cat magazine was all about cats. But by 1934, the same magazine was all about the German cat, right? You know, and so everything becomes flavored with this Nazi ideology.

And, and, you know, I'm not saying, and when you compare the world in which sort of everything, including children's books and cat magazines and everything becomes sort of flavored with, with woke ideology. The anti-racist cat. Yeah. The non-binary cat, right? You know, um, and, you know, and, and, and, and I mean, there's a lot of rich thinking that can go into this, right?

You know, the non-binary cat and, and, and, and the, you know, you can certainly have, I don't know if you can have an anti-racist cat, you can certainly have an anti-racist dog, you know, and, um, or just a racist dog. Or, or yeah, well, I mean, you can get a really racist, or exactly, exactly. So, so you can see how these questions can like become, you know, relevant even in your cat magazine, right? I mean, the German cat, presumably cat genetics are important, you know, the purest bloodlines of cat are found in Germany, right?

You know, you know, it's like you can make anything sort of have the texture of like important and relevant reality. And then when you step outside it, you're just like the German cat, right? You know, and, and so the question with sort of the cathedral is like, we know the way in Nazi Germany that the cat magazine became about the German cat. And the way that our media works isn't anything like that. It's like totally different, but it somehow produces the same kind of result. And so there's a kind of coordination going on that, um, and, and, and my interpretation

of what that coordination is, is to notice that when you look at all of these sort of this decentralized media sphere is a marketplace of ideas. And we normally assume that in a marketplace of ideas with a lot of producers and a lot of consumers, the best, most inexpensive ideas will succeed, or at least the best ideas will succeed. Um, and the, the problem is that best meaning, yeah, best meaning truest, right? But what does the best mean in this context? And the problem is that basically what happened structurally in the 20th century is that substantively

these information markets were put in control of the state. And so like the most important, you know, if you want to matter and make an impact, do you want to be a foreign service officer? Do you want to be a New York Times reporter? You probably want to be a New York Times reporter. And because you have a much more discretion to change the world. And certainly when the state department says how high the New York Times jumps, right? So what you're saying basically is that the supposedly free marketplace of ideas is essentially

subsidized. And it's subsidized and it's basically, it's like power flows into it. And you know how, Ideologically subsidized. Yeah. It's ideologically subsidized in a sense when, and we basically, it's like the old, you know, question of governance where you say who watches the watchdogs. And you're like, okay, we're going to make the press the watchdog.

And then you're like, who watches the press and you're like, well, they watch, they watch themselves, you know, they watch each other, right? You know, and, and, and what you're doing when you let basically power flow into the media and the universities in that way, where you also are trusting the universities is like the final word of truth, you wind up trusting Peter Dazak that he should go and collect all the viruses and like, you know, and like, it's a really bad result in my opinion, you know, and, and, and so what you're doing is it's sort of like if you like, let, let nutrients flow into a lake, it poisons the lake because things that eat the nutrients

grow. If you give power to the media, these media organs, ideas that feel empowering are going to grow in the same way. And sort of all of the, you know, the woke ideas are sort of ideas that kind of produce the most leverage in a sense. Like exponential growth or something. Right. I'm mathematically retarded.

Don't put me on that. But I think what people correctly into it is that the so-called marketplace of ideas often feels like a keynote presentation. Yeah. Everybody is talking about the same talking point. Because it's optimized for this one thing, which is very, very powerful ideas. Yeah. Like, and so, you know, when you're basically like foreign policy is like one example of

sort of ways to see these powerful ideas, because when Americans, you know, 10 years ago became intoxicated with the idea of the Arab Spring, they basically were like, oh, I matter, you know, why the wine on drinking Chardonnay can help overthrow these nasty dictators in a foreign land and bring down tyranny in Egypt or whatever. And like that made them feel good. And because it made them feel good, it was sort of a naturally popular idea. It was also a terrible idea. But and it also had this strange symmetry where it made them feel good to have this

idea of doing good. But when the whole thing turned into a shit show and went bad, they weren't like, ooh, I did a bad thing. They're like, ooh, well, that's it. Let me change the channel. What was on something else? There's a ballgame. Well, because it makes the whole system also is primed to make things feel outside of your

control anyway. Right. I mean, if you if you get the result you wanted, then it doesn't prove if you don't get the result that you wanted, you know, it doesn't produce any response. There's no responsibility anywhere in the system. Nobody got fired for losing the war in Afghanistan. Nobody at state got fired for their spring, which state basically caused. I mean, sorry, no, you go ahead.

But when we're talking about coordination also, there is a way that things are coordinated right in a purely technical, non ideological way now that like, say gobbles didn't have access to, which is like through the internet and information technology. Sure. Sure. Sure. I mean, I guess when I mean gobbles's coordination was like a top down command hierarchy. Gobbles would basically review the scripts of the Nazi film directors and be like, no,

I need this change. I need that change. Right. There's sort of no gobbles doing that, but there's definitely some sensitivity readers doing that. Right. You know. Yeah.

And so the Soviet Union had the same. Sure. And so the committees and stuff. They were more administrative though. That was more top down. Then the Nazi Germany, no, then here. It was probably less top down than Nazi Germany, but more top down than here. But I guess my question would be like, you know, I think we also think of the shift from

like top down to decentralize as something that was willed into being by like a cabal of shadowy elites when it often, it almost feels like the obsolescence of like top down governance is also like a technical informational problem, not a political one. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I mean, top down governance, I mean, I will be, you know, the first to defend top down governance, basically, you know, anything that works was done by top down governance.

If you drive a car, it was built by top down governance, right? If you watch a movie, it was done by top down governance, right? You know, and, and like the author theory, right? Yeah. You know, that's, that's monarchy for you, right? You know, and, and so in this, in the information sphere, it's sort of, it's very interesting. Like I sort of came of age in the like nineties and the information marketplace of the nineties and it was just like everyone had this like John Perry Barlow cyberspace declaration of

independence viewpoint and like the internet would automatically make the world free and wasn't it free and already anyway, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, utopian ideas. Yeah. And, and, and those ideas really continued through like the first age of like the blog world up through like 2010 and you know, even in like, you know, I'm sort of a terrible fundraiser and even in like 2014, 2015, basically, even though I, you know, built this like decentralized platform, I was totally going around people telling people that like, okay, yeah, this is not really about resisting censorship because there's no censorship and anyone can put anything

they want on a blog, a blogger, Google, whatever, right? Google's not going to like read your blog and decide if, you know, you're like doing a wrong thing, right? You know, and that was simply the reality back then. And where that reality came from was that in some ways is that you were looking at an internet infrastructure that was built by people roughly of my generation with kind of my just built technically by people of my generation with my kinds of like late libertarian John Perry Barlow hippie libertarian kind of views of the universe.

And then it was sort of discovered that actually, instead of using actually decentralized platforms, it was actually much easier and more effective to build centralized platforms and sort of pretend that they're decentralized, right? In the way that the social network is actually you just all have accounts on the same giant server. Or it's funny how someone pointed this out to me the other day, like the way Discord uses the term server to mean channel, like pretending that you have your own thing, but it's not actually your own thing, right?

And so when it's not actually your own thing in any way, shape or form, basically there's this huge button that can be pushed on this saying, Hey, let's start filtering this for X or for Y or for Z. Once you have the mechanisms to filter for X, it's much easier to filter for Y. And so people like start pushing the button. And so, you know, one of the things, for example, when people talk about like Facebook or Twitter or whatever, like censoring, I'm like, you know, as if this was a problem that was caused by the tech companies, it's sort of at their own discretion.

The mindset at least of the like OGs who built these platforms is basically that they sort of get pressured to censor a little bit. And then what they find is that when they respond positively to that pressure, they get more pressure. You know, they don't like when Facebook does X or Y, because, you know, there was a time story the other day saying, my God, who are these people at Facebook who don't do X or Y and they do X or Y, suddenly there's another story saying, but why aren't they doing Z and W?

Well, yeah, this is why you should never apologize. Yeah, basically, it's really bad to apologize. It's like, it's a showing like, it's, it's, I mean, it's showing weakness. Well, I mean, never apologize to her. It's not Machiavellian. Yeah. But you see this even like, this reminds me of like your distinction between like, you know, in the United States, how we live in a operational oligarchy, but a symbolic democracy.

And I was even thinking of the way that like the, the shape of the discourse surrounding the Roe v. Wade ruling has taken on that form, because I think, you know, without going into like the moral questions surrounding it, just like, if you look at the kind of discursive form, right, it's, it's in the interest of the current liberal elites, which also would include establishment conservatives to promote or at least not dispute the kind of widespread popular misconception that this, the, the SCOTUS has gone rogue is hijacking democracy that this ruling will not only cause like a nationwide abortion ban, but will open up a slippery slope of God knows what and all the way to him made still back to

racial segregation. Yeah. It's just the beginning. Yeah. So I guess I'm curious when you, when you talk about these ideas, when you write about them, um, we're basically talking about shifting like the overton windows so that the public or people grow wise to this fact. But is that even?

It's, it's optimal or desirable. I think it's, you know, truth can be used for good or evil, obviously, and truth is sort of when you don't really have like truth is, you know, when you ask, for example, what brought down the Soviet Union, you know, and you say, well, was it the dissidents who brought down the Soviet Union? No, it was Gorbachev who brought down the Soviet Union. But the thing is Gorbachev was part of kind of a flow of ideas, which made Glasnost and Perestroika seem like a good idea to him.

It was clearly not maybe in retrospect what produced the results you wanted. But, um, you know, that, that intellectual subversion, I think played a significant part in the fall of that regime. And so you can't really do when you're not working at the sort of highest level, like what you're trying to do when you do that kind of subversion is you're trying to create a source of like truth and understanding, which does not have more prestige than the New York Times, but deserves more prestige than the New York Times, which you basically knows how to be true and honest and clear when the authorities are not.

And what that will do. Well, how do you discern, I suppose, the truth or like, what is your, oh, it's, it's just like, it's incredibly, um, you know, I think that you have to tell the story of the present world according to the highest standards of history. Um, some, the, the, the historian, some called the inventor of modern history was in Prussian guy in, in the late Victorian world and he had this wonderful saying, um, I'm going to just wreck the, the Germans all say in English, um, um, as it really was, or, you know, which means that basically if you're telling us the story of X, that story should ring true

for example, to the people who are involved in X, like, you know, But doesn't everyone have a subjective experience that's going to, They do, they do, they do, but objectivity is still possible. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's possible. I suppose to approximate objectivity to the best of your ability, which is like what, what journalism ideally should aim to do. But um, yeah, it reminded me.

I don't remember where I heard this, but I liked it where you were talking about like provincial thinking and how, um, when people think provincially, they ascribe like outsized, like wildly outsized importance to events within a more recent time scale, like the last 50 to 100 years, like Hitler, is the worst thing that's ever happened. Hitler is much more important than Louis XIV, right, or even Napoleon. So isn't truth, I mean, we've, I also touched on this in the, on the podcast, um, I think like an objective truth maybe is only visible in hindsight, taking into account longer timescales. I think that that what causes that, you know, it's like the way I usually talk about this

is that sort of once historians are writing, like, say, if we go far, but how far do we have to go back to like, sort of not have a political tinge to history. So you might say, for example, that if historians in the present world are writing about the English Civil War, you can probably tell from the way they write up at the English Civil War, like which side they are and in politics today. But if they're writing about the Wars of the Roses, like, you know, 150 years previous, you can't tell. There's no like Yorkist historians and Lancasterian historians, like hiding out at Columbia, right?

You know, and they're not, you know, um, there's just no like flavor there, right? And so, you know, once there is a flavor there, when you read a 20th century history of the English Civil War, you're sort of tempted to inquire into the perspectives of the author, you know, is he a Fabian? How does he view, you know, Well, isn't that, I mean, to talk about the university, right, the whole function of sort of like critical studies and like postmodern thinking was that you could apply like you could read, I've read histories of medieval sexuality that were written from like a feminist

perspective. Sure, sure, sure, sure. That definitely had like politics and an agenda even though they were talking about something. And so one way to judge this thing is basically if you're writing the history of the 1960s and you're writing it from the perspective of the year 2360, which your story of the 1960s, if it could actually be read by someone in the 60s, seemed like just bizarre and unhinged and full of like weird 2360 shit that like nobody was thinking at the time. Is it full of like anachronisms?

Is it full of, um, and I think you're, um, I think about this all the time, especially, you know, the Cahill. That's perfect. Yeah, I don't think, um, you know, Leopold von Ronca, you know, you know, get a whole lot of ketamine, but he might have appreciated it. He might, I mean, ketamine is just anesthesia in a very small dose. So all it does is, you know, well, you know, you know, history is scary, history is scary. Like, um, and the idea that history is starting again.

Well, I forgot who said this, but, um, the way this is like an extremely like reductive and trite way of like encapsulating everything we've just said, that like the way to think of history is not what we would have thought of the ancients, but what the ancients would have thought of us. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I use that one all the time and people are like, what? Right. Because they're just so used to like judging the past and, and, you know, it's not even that the ancients are necessarily right in their judgment of us. It's just very suspicious that we don't really understand or can't really connect to that judgment. And the fact that we can't really connect to that judgment sort of suggests that there's a thing that they understood that maybe we don't understand.

Or they were ignorant enough to be truly genius. That could be too. I mean, you know, the way I sometimes ask this question is I'll ask people, are you a better or a worse person than the average of your four grandparents? Definitely worse. I think you asked me that actually. Yeah. I might have.

Maybe I don't, um, I think it's very, like maybe a little bit better about kind of the average, you know, I mean, kind of the same. My grandmother's, my dad's mother was like a civil engineer who raised three children. My mom's mother was a librarian who raised two, I'm a podcaster who has a child out of Wadlock. Come on now. Not even close. No.

No, I mean, you know, just to, to like judge, um, um, what about you? What about me? Um, I would say I'm better in some ways and worse than others. Um, um, my grandfather was an American communist, um, between like the twenties and the seventies basically. So he was, you know, supportive in effect of a lot of bad things. Is that like Warren Beatty? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, a little, I mean, Warren Beatty was always chic, you know, but, you know, and, and the, um, the Reds is wonderful, but, um, Reds is just like, it's such a good period movie because all you have, all you have to do to make like the world of John Reed's team convincing is basically put Warren Beatty in some clothes and give him a funny accent and tell him to act naturally. Yeah.

And then you go on Google and look these people up by her own. Yeah. And they're just exactly the same as that, right? Because this is, this is the order culture, this is like the founding culture that created ours. You know, there's, um, a wonderful book that got, um, reprinted recently, which is the romance of American communism by Vivian Gornick, um, which is an oral history of the party. And like you see, like to imagine that the woke experience and like the party experience

in the party line, even though the party was centralized and wokeness is decentralized, but I mean, this was the transition from the old left to the new left, right? And you know, their first generation of like the red diaper babies, you know, like my dad, um, who fortunately went in a less political direction, but the same tropes exist so that like there's this great, um, autobiography by a woman named Bella Dodd who like my grandmother was a New York City school teacher and she had risen up, um, through the party ranks and was, um, on the American Politburo. Most people don't know that the US had a Politburo.

I did not. They had a Politburo. A what? A Politburo. A Politburo. The US had a Politburo. And, and, and these were, these were significant people, right? You know, and, um,

What? It's significant. Where? Um, in their time, they mattered a lot. Like, you know, in the thirties, basically everyone who was cool was a communist. Not necessarily a party member, but definitely like a fellow traveler. Like, you know, they're, Right.

Now everyone who's deeply uncool is a communist. Well, yeah. I mean, what the word even means sort of, sort of fell apart really in the sixties and the transition. Our glossiness in Fristroica, the original wokeness. Hmm, that's an interesting no, because they're, they're, you know, they're actual rebellions I think. But let me finish with the story of Belladot.

So Belladot is on the Politburo and, and, and she's part of the Earl Browder faction and Earl Browder gets purged after the war on orders from Stalin. And because her patron's bird shield, so it has to be purged and the way in which she's purged is very interesting because she's brought before a party committee and she's accused of what has been called white chauvinism, specifically being racist, they didn't use that term quite then toward her like Puerto Rican building superintendent, which of course was complete nonsense. So the one place where you could get canceled in like a kangaroo trial for racism in like

80 years ago was in the Politburo. And if you read Vivian Gornek's secrets, romance of American communism, like cancellation is a huge part of communist culture. They're always canceling each other and like she'll do these amazing things where she'll interview someone and who is a party veteran and these are all sort of very upper crusty kind of people and they'll be like, oh yeah, you know, the cancellation, not using that word of course, it was horrible, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and then she'll go interview someone else who is like, oh yeah, that person was like the chief canceler, right, you know?

And so the spread of this sort of culture of denunciation to become sort of mainstream in this way is again, one of these things that kind of spreads outward from like John Reed's like Granite Village scene basically. Well, it's a snitch culture is what it is. Yeah, it really is. It's like, well, you must know public morals of. Yes. Yeah.

Of course. Yeah. People are literally writing like public moral stories about like people who turned in their parents for January 6th. You've seen that? Yeah, I've seen that. I've actually made that exact reference on this very pot, yeah. And this is like a big deal in the Soviet Union.

I have an uncle who's a dissident and his parents are dissidents and his grandfather was the foreign minister under stone. He was one of the few people who escaped being purged and the family lords that he slept with a revolver under his pillow because if they came for him, he'd take himself out first. But his his son or was this Molotov or Zinoviev or Lytvinov? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Maxim Lytvinov. Yeah. And his wife was Ivy Lytvinov who was actually Ivy Lowe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So his there's a volume of Lytvinov Churchill like correspondence, I think somewhere. No way. There's like Lytvino's diaries. I think. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

Yeah. This is a some interesting analore, but they are family through marriage, by the way. No. It doesn't matter. Anyway. So at any rate, he has these stories about, you know, the KGB going into schools in Moscow and telling the story of Pavlik Morozo to school children to inspire them to move them to Snitch.

Right. And of course. For love of their country. Yeah. And his mother did a very brazen thing and, you know, marched into the school and yelled out the schoolmaster, which was very dangerous at the time. I'll bet. I'll bet.

I'll bet. This is this is why anti-Semitism exists. Well, it wasn't Stalin's opinion of little Pavlik, very negative. I read. I don't know. I read somewhere that he was like, yeah, a little shit. He snitched on his parents. But that's also.

That's another thing. I got a lot of heat for saying that that Stalin was basically a Caucasian satrap and not kind of a Marxist leader, but that that's an exact perfect encapsulation of the Caucasian mentality. Like don't snitch on your parents. Yeah. Right. Right.

No, he was like, there's something very, very Georgian about Stalin and like the like the latest I'm really not into what's the latest big biography of Stalin. You know, this is the one that's like, no, he really believed in communism. Oh, yeah. No. He was. I will die on that. Yeah.

Yeah. No, he was he was a satrap. And I mean, that's the, of course, the great tension in Russia and history has always been this tension between is Russia, you know, influenced from the East or from the West and these Eastern elements keep popping up. Well, it's very funny because there's there's something kind of like delicious about the fact that Russia, a country of primarily slobs is ruled over by a Caucasian. And then in America, you have like an almost similar thing where like the most famous family,

the Kardashians are also that is like, wow, Caucasus Caucasian world Caucasian world supremacy. Wow. We're being infiltrated by these, these, these, these Caucasians, but I guess like to go back to the original thing about the question of whether or not you're better than your grandparents is like a heuristic or whatever for assessing history. Like maybe the answer to that is that we're all in some ways better and some ways worse than our grandparents. Yes.

If we can amass a large enough sample size of those characteristics and filter them, we could possibly glee some insights and just like why we're taking the DNA test. The question, the question just, just requires you to like take their perspective or the perspective of their time. You could also say great grandparents or even great, great grandparents, which is a slightly different question because then you don't know these people and then you're just looking at, then you're just looking at the, at the period, right? Yeah, probably.

But, you know, certainly our dental work, our dental work is only improved, but you know, the, the, you know, you're still basically doing this thing where you're asking what they would think of us, which is the sort of very anti-provincial maneuver. Before we, before we get, you know, we're on the subject of East versus West and I wanted to. Yeah. Well, I wanted to ask you. Can I tell a story?

And then you can ask me. It's a short story. It's really short. Okay. I was, I, I was at, I was at, um, um, last fall I was at Yoram Hazone's National Conservatism Conference and it was late at night and I couldn't sleep and I'd been drinking too much and I went outside in the smoking area and there was this little group of people and one of them was a Hungarian.

So a bunch of Hungarians had come to this thing and they were like urbanists, right? And they were talking about, um, Europe and European civilization and Hungary as like the last bastion of saving Europe and the European tradition. And finally, I'd had enough and, um, so I'm like, Hungary, but isn't that in Asia? Oh man, you almost killed me, but they were really angry. But my debt, you know, I didn't do a good deadpan here. My deadpan was perhaps like sincerely asking the question. Yeah.

Our Hungarians, Fino-Ugric. There's something, there's something. They came from a long ways away on like small pot-bellied ponies. That's my feeling and their language is very strange. And the crazy thing is, yeah, and they don't have, they don't have a discernible national phenotype. Like you go to France, Spain, Italy, people look different of course, but they're, they're certain.

They have a national. Yeah. Like Armenians have like the most typiest type of all Hungarians, like they're all over the place. Well, there's, yeah, the Carpatho-Rus right there. The Carpatho-Rus. Yes. Yes.

Yes. Yes. Um, well, we can come back to that. My question is, do you believe in God? Do I believe in God? Wow. That's a really interesting question. Um, you know, it sort of depends on your point of view in some way, what that question

means to you. I don't really believe in, I'm not a believer in the supernatural. I'm a very materialist person. On the other hand, you know, one way to sort of ask that question is to answer it with another question, which is, do you believe in Hamlet? Right. And so like, what, is Hamlet a real person? No.

Hamlet is not a real person. I believe in Vladimir Vysotsky playing Hamlet. I don't know that performance. He's like a Russian bard, the Dylan of Russia. Oh, right. Right. Right. He was, you know, a raging outlaw.

And he was a very Hamlet like individual. I do believe in Hamlet and also God. Exactly. And so the thing is that if I'm, if you're permitted to say that I believe in Hamlet, which is not to say that like Hamlet is a real person who was alive today or Hamlet ever existed in the, you know, in the form of the play or whatever, but like, I still believe in Hamlet. I believe that Hamlet is a relevant and useful concept, I believe that without the concept

of Hamlet, my ability to understand the world would be somewhat weaker. And I would say that the concept of God is a much more general and useful concept than the concept of Hamlet. Well, yeah. I think you could put it, you could put it this way, Hamlet may not be real, but he may as well be real. He may as well be real. He may as well be real.

And there's a famous story when the Italian journalist Oriana Follacci, I will let you speak. No, no, no. Please don't. When the Italian journalist Oriana Follacci went to John Paul II and she was like a Marxist who then became like at the end of her life, like an Islamophobe, a very interesting career arc, you know, and, but she goes to John Paul II and she's like, you know, holy father, I have a problem.

I don't believe in God. And John Paul II was like, no problem, my child. Just act as if you did. Right. Right. And, and I'm just like, it's, it's hard to, uh, hard to frame a response to that. That's like combative in any particular way. J.P.

Two is a, a heretic, not a real, not a real pope. Well, yeah, I know, I know, I know, I know the last, the last real pope was sometime in the fifties, right? You know, like obviously, but, but, you know, nonetheless, wait, I have an annoying, splitting, a real pope wouldn't say that to someone. A real pope would be like that contradicts Catholic dog. A real pope would be like guards, iris, this woman. Well, that's what it means.

That's, I mean, sure, sure. Shoot me. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I can't. I believe what I believe. I'm not a candidate for the papacy, you know, I'm just saying, that's why, you know, pope being Catholic has also really disintegrated because, you know, popes used to not say stuff

like that because they believed in Catholic dogma that I used to hold the line. But this was like Peter Teal's whole thing in a Straussian moment, right? Like liberalism, liberalization is no match for any truly like ideologically possessed foe. And in order to vanquish that foe, you two have to become ideologically possessed, which is impossible and also undesirable. So they're, they're in Liza. Yeah.

I mean, just, just, just concretely, the Catholic church had absolutely no choice in the fifties after World War II, which was basically the American Protestant conquest of the world. The church had no choice but to become Protestant. And that's what it did. How come? How did they have no choice? Um, they had no choice because they had to be identified with the winning team and they did not have the confidence to basically say, imagine the Catholic church, you know, imagine

it's 1952 and the Catholic church has to choose between the political views of Greenwich Village or the political views of Francisco Franco, right? And Franco is, or Emma de Valera. You know, these were existing, what they call integralist states, you know, somehow the integralists sort of like, are like, oh, we believe in, but they never talk about like de Valera, which is like an English speaking Ireland under de Valera is in the mid 20th century is like an English speaking integralist priest run state. Yeah.

Um, and, Well, and how'd that go for them? Well, that's an interesting question. So when you look at the, those regimes, um, my mother actually was, um, an au pair in Franco's Spain in the early to mid 60s, that was a very cheap thing to do for a Westchester County girl. I love that. And, and, and what she, and she was very pretty too, and, and what she encountered was that

of course everyone in Franco's Spain in the early 60s wanted to wear blue jeans and listen to jazz or maybe even the Beatles, but probably more jazz, right? And so the thing is the cultural tropes of the like dominant military power are always going to be dominant. They just are people just like, you know, there was, um, there was an Arab philosopher named, um, uh, some of them in Latin, um, who said, um, that when people see a strong horse and a weak horse by nature, they like the strong horse. And so the fact, the fact of being losers, the fact of being a weak horse, not only

affected the attractiveness of something like the Franco and Salazar and de Valera regimes, they also affected the nature of those regimes because the nature of those regimes was to contain sort of the losers who couldn't handle the modern world and the Beatles and, you know, trans and non-binary safe payments, right? You know, and, and the, like, so you, everyone just has, who's young and ambitious and talented, has this like powerful urge to go with the flow, which they identify as the urge to go with the thing that's right. And it's like when that flow is sort of stagnant and there's actually nothing cool or useful

or relevant for like young, talented people to do, that's when regimes need to watch out. Because basically like if you're young, say in Franco, Spain, you're young and talented and your father is an admiral, like do you go into the Spanish military? Like, you know, what is the Spanish military? Where is it going to be in 1986, right? You can already smell like death is written all over it. And because death is written all over it, it becomes this sort of has the sense of being a dying thing.

So like, yeah, those regimes were basically. The vibes were off. The vibration is a stinky cologne. The vibes were all wrong. The vibes were all wrong, right? You know, exactly. Yeah. I mean, general, you know, generally some of Francisco Franco is still dead and he's

dead because the vibes were all wrong. Well, this reminds me of kind of your whole thing on banning ideas and your, your piece on Christopher Rufo. And I was listening to some, where I don't remember if it was you or the interviewer talked about how political parties don't have a telos anymore, that nowadays everybody is basically oriented against the thing that everybody else is doing, you know? So like, you have like a binary kind of thing. Yeah.

People participate just because they're afraid of the other party. Yeah. And then they're basically like, come up with a theory that like, it's a tactically good idea to provoke the other party, which is actually true. If you're an overdog, but not true, if you're an underdog, and if you're, you know, yeah, we can get into that. Because the example that you give is like CRT and the kind of average, whatever proverbial right winger who says, I don't want CRT in my schools, my daughter, right, isn't fucking

a black lab or whatever. And then you respond, well, what, what do you want, right? And this kind of thing doesn't really inspire confidence because it doesn't project like worthiness or readiness. There's no sense of like, okay, actually things have gone, you know, let's say the anti CRT campaigners were to embrace Islam. And so they would say, what is wrong with their schools? What is wrong with their schools is that they're not teaching the true Islam.

Actually what is wrong with schools is they're not teaching Islam at all, right? And so, you know, what we need is because like America, there is no doubt was created by a law, you know, we need the seventh century law of Mohammed, you know, enforced in the, you know, Westchester County public schools. And that, you know, having sort of a telos like that, maybe this telos is unlikely because it's unlikely that Westchester County will embrace Islam, but let me tell you, if they were forced to embrace Islam, they would embrace Islam, you know, and the like, and so you immediately have this sort of magnetic spark of like being, you know, like some, you know, before they

were Bolsheviks, like extreme terrorists in of like the Nechayev era in Russia were sometimes called maximalists, right? Like Bitcoin maximalists, like Bitcoin, but with bombs, right? You know, and, you know, and the, you know, you lost, you know, imagine. It sounds pretty gay. Yeah. See, that's the difference between our time and now, like it just like, you know, but But my question is, doesn't a telos emerge from action?

Like it's hard to have. It's hard to have a telos that's made of pure imagination, but that was certainly the telos of like the Enlightenment. Like we're sort of used to these teloi that you're right, because of course, as opposed to a Soviet person, the Soviet, the revolution against the USSR was so easy because it's telos was the West and the West right there. And it's just like, we could be like that, boom, it's done. And like now the problem is much more similar to the problem of the Enlightenment or something

where you're just like this way of living isn't really working, but we just have no idea what the alternatives would be. We have no clear examples from our existing world. And so, you know, when you see even like late Enlightenment, you know, thinkers like Comte, you know, people come up with this just like crazy, crazy stuff that's like completely reinvented. We're all going to live in philansteries, you know, what's a philanstery? It's like a polyamorous.

It's like co-living space, but I don't know that polyamory was part of the you know, the theory, but I don't know that it isn't, you know, and so yeah, people, you know, that's sort of, we have this folk memory of this time when people just went completely bananas in imagining futures that had never happened before. And then those futures were realized and in general they sucked, but you know, that still shows that there's sort of the capacity for that level of imagination. Do you have a vision, an imaginative vision for what a model for the future could be? Absolutely.

Monarchy. Yeah. Go on. Why should they not have, um, of course it like, can you, can you, we should get into the whole monarchy thing, but can you explain, mansplain the Aristotelian forms of power or government, let me go, let me go, let me go into full mansplaining. Yeah. And explain monarchy because I think when most people hear monarchy, they hear off with

your head and not FDR style, right, right, right, right, right, so don't confuse me. Okay. So when I'm really, when I'm really fully came up, you know, with, with, with the, uh, this like wonderfully Obama in line, um, that, um, people are like, oh, he's a monarchist off with his head and Louis the, you know, Henry the eighth, right, you know, and I'm like, you know, but suppose I were to say what America needs is a new FDR with the power to bring us all together. A black FDR.

It could be a black. Ideally it would be, ideally it would actually be James Earl Jones or maybe, you know, Forrest Whitaker or someone, but, um, a black certainly wouldn't hurt. But it's not, it certainly wouldn't, it wouldn't, you know, you know, Obama has the gravitas to do this, but you sure like, you know, um, who's your favorite black academic, um, John McWhorter. Let's say it's John McWhorter. Yeah.

I like McWhorter. I like Glenn Lowry. Mm hmm. Cornel West is nice too. I like Cornel West. Great guys. Doesn't he play the trumpet or something? Eight off.

What's his name? Yeah. Black, right? Yeah. Well, you know, now we're, we're getting past monarchy here. We're getting past monarchy and proposing a whole black junta, a whole black junta, right? You know, and not black Hitler. Do not Google the, whatever you do, do not Google the phrase black Hitler.

But, um, um, don't do it, don't do it, y'all, don't do it, do not do it. It is not safe for work, um, but, um, don't, and definitely don't use like Dolly or whatever. But, um, the, um, I would never, I think they've, I don't know how they cleanse that of, of anything spicy, but they really did. But, um, where were we, um, monarchy, the Aristotelian forms. I was going to mansplain in the style of Aristotle, the original mansplainer. Oh yeah. Uh, so you might have heard us talking a little bit earlier about the two forms of governance

that are contending for power in America today, democracy and oligarchy. And the best way to think about democracy and oligarchy is to remind yourself that the real word for democracy is politics or populism and the real word for oligarchy is democracy. So when politics threatens our democracy, it means politics as populism is threatening our institutions. That means power that is exogenous to prestigious institutions is threatening prestigious institutions. That means democracy is threatening oligarchy, um, you know, and, and that doesn't mean like once you're starting to think in this, um, ultra realistic way, you need to abandon any

idea that, oh, democracy is good and oligarchy is bad. Well, no, actually it could be just the other way around oligarchy could be much better than democracy. They're neutral value. Yeah. They're neutral. They're just structural things. And basically when we look at okay is democracy, especially democracy in which only the lower

half of the sort of political class supports democracy, the whole upper class, the blue staters are all prefer their institutions, so they don't really, they just delegate their power to institutions, um, the lower half watches Fox News and is full of conspiracy theories, um, and other like, you know, um, like there isn't really a high quality information source that is also not aligned with, sorry, reds, yes, of course, of course, in line with the regime. That is not in line. Yes.

Yes. And, and, and the, um, um, the quality and there are just lots of places where regime institutions have so much lingering quality that, um, the, like it's sort of can even override the, the problems with them, like, you know, um, I just got like, you know, proctologically rotoscope by Vanity Fair a couple of months ago and I spent like hours on the phone with the fact checkers and they were really, really good. They were just really, really good. Wait a second.

The, the Vanity Fair article that we were also mentioned in. Yes. Okay. Well, that's your first mistake. You should have just ignored. No one called me. That is my normal policy. Um, um, but, um, the, the, um, you know, like, there were definitely ways in which, um,

Do you have a publicist? Have you ever had a publicist? I have never had a publicist, um, um, and, um, but, um, there's something to be said for that. Um, but, you know, the, the, you could use a publicist as a publicist, a fiance can also double. Yeah. Yeah.

There's, there's some. Well, the most. I mean, that came out of that Vanity Fair article was the stuff about, um, the fiance. The fiance. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course.

Of course. Well, you know, um, and, um, um, yeah. So in any case, basically you're like looking at these two things and they're really very strong reasons to not be a populist. And there are also very strong reasons to not be an institutionalist and you're like, what a pity. There are only two forms of government and they both suck. And then you're reminded of, wait a second.

When I look at all of history, I see that there are three forms of government. Um, and actually almost all periods use this third form. The third form is actually historically the norm. Moreover, the other thing I observe about this third form is that it's actually really, really common and normal in the modern world, just not at the sovereign level. So we observe that basically anything that functions, functions as a command hierarchy with a monarch at the top, we call them a CEO or we call them a director or we call them or her.

Um, thank you. Or them, or them, or them, or they, or they want the form that women want. It's the, it's yes. I mean, and, and, and, you know, being, being the queen is like, it's like a phenotype. It's like basically a world with, you know, um, without queens in it is a smaller world. Of course, you know, we're all queens now. We're all queens. Yeah.

But if you're all queens, if you're all queens, nobody's queen. I know. I know. Right. You know, um, but, but the thing is, you know, this is, you're suddenly like, wait a second. How did we decide that this like normal form, which seems to work in every case is like abnormal or bad or like not worth thinking about. And then you realize something else.

You're like, well, we don't do this in America. I mean, you're like, wait a second. If I go like backward in the past, first of all, I see people who really look like monarchs. They're not called monarchs, but that's super common. The Roman emperors never called themselves king. But I see this guy, FDR, who really appears to have been like completely in control of the government. You know, nowadays you get like a plus release saying like Biden does X, Biden does Y.

Biden reads, Biden reads Q cards and like eats cottage cheese, right? Yeah. And, and, and, you know, but his name is sort of used by this vast thing, but you go back in the thirties and you're just like, wait a second, actually FDR is actually in control of this thing. And what did he do? He built the modern state and conquered the world. What else did he do?

Like, I mean, you know, you go back and then you're like, okay, let's go back another 75-80 years. Lincoln, again, Lincoln seems to really be in control of the government. He's certainly in control of the military, which is, you know, by far the most important thing there. You look at everybody's favorite here in New York, Alexander Hamilton. What is Alexander Hamilton? Alexander Hamilton is a startup guy.

He basically starts up the first version of the federal government, Washington, like the relationship between him and Washington. The relationship between him and Washington is like Larry Page and Eric Schmidt. You know, here's this old guy with like the powdered hair or whatever sits around looking presidential Alexander Hamilton, like, go back to Lincoln though, Lincoln, we don't have to dwell on Hamilton. Yeah. His memory has been totally hijacked.

His memory is, you know, I insist on like hijacking the real memory of Lincoln. Here's the interesting thing about Lincoln. So Lincoln is this hasty politician from like the middle of nowhere, who's, you know, self-educated. This was not taken seriously at this time. Makes all of these like ridiculous gaffes in an era that considered like social nice. He's like, he's like a gorilla. He's commonly portrayed in the press as a gorilla. Lincoln has a big advantage though, which is that working for him, this is not widely

known are a couple of guys in their early 20s who are once again startup founders. There is principal, private secretaries, Nicolay and Hay. John Hay later becomes the founder of like US foreign policy is like the secretary of state in like the 1890s. And you're just looking at these guys and you're just like, this is a founder team. These guys could be in Y Combinator, right? And like, and they're running the show. They're obviously running the show while the gorilla is up on stage, making big speeches

about the nature of God or whatever. And so you see whenever like shit is getting done and shit is working, you see these kinds of same patterns where you maybe can't call it a monarchy, but it is a monarchy. It's a bit of a monarchy. Could you also say it was, sorry, well, this, but don't you think the South seceding from the union was, you know, at least initially a L for, for Lincoln and they were losing the war for a while and the Confederacy also had kind of a monarchic structure of its own. The Confederacy literally got capped in the end.

Yeah. Yeah. By an actor. Well, I mean, I mean, I mean, look at, look at Caesar, right? I mean, you know, like definitely when you're a monarch, like taking your personal security seriously is very important. I mean, Well, being a monarch is a, you, you take on all of the responsibility.

You take on this enormous responsibility. You incur a liability. Sure. And like American history would have been very different if John Wilkes Booth had not leaped from the stage and showed it's a temper to ran us. Just actors doing what they do best. I know, I know. And he was a serious, it was not like, you know, he was a prominent actor.

He was. I mean, it's like as if like Biden had been assassinated by like Brad Pitt, right? Oscar Isaac. He wasn't quiet. Oh my God. He wasn't quiet. Oscar Isaac assassinating Trump. That would be the perfect.

This is why Jesse Smollett chose the wrong career track. He should have assassinated a powerful country instead of taking a hate crime. That would have been an amazing, I mean, that would be an amazing redemption art. I mean, this is Trump country. This is a Mac a country. Well, when he said he was recognized off of that show, is it possible to contact the Nigerian bodybuilders? Could you have them on this show?

We don't have. We tried to have the bodybuilder on the show recently. We tried to get Bodega Brown. We were not reaching out to any bodybuilders. Only intellectuals. Exactly. Exactly. Anyway, so Lincoln.

Lincoln. Right. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. I would say he was not in complete control because half the country sort of. No.

I mean, he was, he was, he, yes, he was in complete control of the union government, certainly not of the Confederate government. People often, there was a historian in the mid 20th century who sort of gave the verdict on the Confederacy that they quote, died of democracy unquote. And their ideology was very much, they didn't really understand that they were the right wing side. And so their ideology was like, oh, we did this in 1776. We did this again, states rights.

And then what they found was that when you're like a rebel country rebelling against the North and ultimately really the whole world, like states rights don't do you a whole lot of good. So Jefferson Davis becomes more dictatorial throughout the war, but also the South just has these just like ridiculous popular ideas, like the King Cotton idea, where they're like, we're going to embargo our main export. Like we need money and like British arms, but we're not going to sell any cotton to Britain because we want to coerce Britain into changing its mind to like, it was, yeah.

Didn't Russia try to do this recently? Russia is running a trade surplus. So like they have a lot of options when you're running a trade surplus, like sanctioning a country that's running a trade surplus is like, it's like saying you're not going to buy drugs from your high school drug dealer. Like it doesn't change the fact that like he has the drugs and you know, you could say you're sanctioning him. But all you're doing is basically condemning yourself to a very boring existence.

You know, and, um, yeah, I don't think that that's what's your view as a Russian from the, like, do you have a sense of like the mind, the mind inside the country these days? Uh, no, uh, Sagar and Jaddy and Crystal Ball asked me this question and I was like, you got the wrong Russian babe. I'm 100% American. Um, no, I mean, I, I think, uh, liberal educated, like globo homo Russian elites are obviously fully, fully anti Russia. Right.

Right. Um, I think your average Russian person cares most of all about their economic bottom line is probably vaguely pro Russia because everybody again, likes to see their country as a winner. That would be my, my guess. Is there a way for Putin to build an actual based elite? Is that possible? I mean, that's a question that you can ask about the United States, right? Actually, it's a question that I wanted to ask you about the United States because when

you talk about, it's, it's fairly understandable how, um, democracy can be used as a tool to elect a monarchy, right? Right. But then you get into like the role of the elites in that equation. Yeah. That's a very, that's a very interesting role and like, I mean, Well, like the question is, do you need an elite to create a monarchy? Yeah.

I think, I think that that's a, that's a, that's a perfect and excellent question. I think let's, can we make that as sort of concrete as possible? Yeah. But can I ask a, a question? So that's like a related question. What is to prevent those elites to then take the reins of power, right? And become an oligarchy, um, excellent question also. So what you're looking for, I mean, that's of course the tendency.

So let me answer the second question first. You know, the tendency of all organizations is to suck power down into the organization. And there are plenty of private companies. I would say maybe even the majority of private companies, the monarchical element is like too weak. You know, it's only when you get like the Steve Jobs or Elon Musk type figures that you sort of see like the true potential of the form of monarchy in some ways, um, the like the sense of like being a, like, you know, who's the CEO of Twitter, right, is

much more. Uh, some Indian guy. Exactly. Right. You know, and, and, and, and, right. So, so. That sounds correct enough. That sounds correct enough, right?

So, um, basically you're looking at, like there's a caretaker, what they sometimes call in Silicon Valley, like a peacetime CEO, and there's definitely a wartime CEO. It doesn't mean the wartime CEO has like a secret hit squad that's going out and like nailing his competitors, engineers late at night, but I mean, he probably doesn't, but, but, but they do, but they do, but they do, they're sort of at war all the time. And so they basically hire kind of like ambient freelance people just to like take the competition off the market. Uh, that's, yes, that's not our hood heard of its scale, right?

So the thing is that, but the sense of being the sense of being at war all the time and the sense of like constant urgency is definitely something that your executive coach will tell you to cultivate, right? So the, um, like how you avoid power slipping back down into the staff is basically only by maintaining sort of executive energy in the executive. There's no other way. So it's sort of an extension of the problem of maintaining like a competent monarch, you know, like you want actually amazing, you don't want amazing to slip down into incompetent

and incompetent to go all the way down into just okay. And then at the bottom of the scale, you get like brutal and corrupt or whatever, right? So actually, you know, maintaining excellence in that role is really important and a really hard problem and something that I can say something about. But let me step back to your first, the first part of your question and sort of answer the question of like where, what the sort of elite would mean. What is the proper place of the elite and what is the proper place of the oligarchy? Right.

So if you're basically looking at the elite of a new regime, which is I think disjoint not in talents, not even necessarily in experience, but like organizationally disjoint from the current regime, there's a saying in Washington that personnel is policy. And so people often think in terms of, okay, in order to change a policy or to change the way things are done, the first way, the way that I need to do this is on a need a cadre of elites who believe in this different policy. That is an oligarchical way of doing things and it's pretty hard to fight one oligarchy with a different oligarchy.

Like you couldn't replace the Soviet Union with anything that was anything like the Soviet Union. And so here's the way basically I would prefer to think about it, which is that you imagine in November of let's say 2024, you elect a candidate who's basically said, hey, if I'm elected president, I'm going to be the chief executive of the executive branch. And I regard Congress and the Supreme Court as purely advisory bodies. And I'll basically behave, you know, FDR, I'll just behave as a unitary executive, I'll be the CEO of the executive branch.

So if you go to DC, one thing you can say to any like DC person is you can say we don't have an executive branch, we have a legislative branch. In other words... I just recently read that on your subs. And it's like, I mean, you know, the agencies are managed or micromanaged or they're managed by Congress, they're not managed by the White House. They issue press releases in conjunction with the White House. And the...

So then you have the question of, okay, given that you have a legislative branch, do you transform this thing in place into an executive branch, which would be like turning IBM into Google basically in like 2000? No, you probably would do better off starting Google and replacing IBM with it. So... I mean, this gets to the core question. Yes. The core matter of the question that we've been asking since the inception of this broadcast,

which is the master's house, master's tools. Yeah, which is that? Can you tear down... Can you or can't you tear down the master's house with the master's tools? Well, you know, the master is a very like, yeah, let me go slightly deeper into the core and then address that analogy. So, so basically, you know, it's November of 2024 and you... Donald Trump's winning it again.

You know, we're imagining, you know, I guess it's safe to imagine Elon Musk because he's not actually eligible, although frankly, to run and win when you're not eligible would be a huge... Why, because he's a South African? He's an African, right? We can't have the first African president and he's a South African. You know, my like, somehow I always like caricature the South African accent is like, hang on. In South Africa, you have this problem with the blicks.

Now you just sound like Hungarian or something. I think that's more of a bore accent. But they definitely do say blicks. Blicks. Blicks. But anyway, where were you? So it's November of 2024 and you're basically like, I'm going to be a real CEO president and actually run the federal government.

What do you do? I think the answer is that you basically have a few billion dollars stashed away somewhere and you basically spend the period between November and January creating a super elite force that's kind of ready to parachute into these agencies and shut them down. You're going to need probably two or 3,000 people. Which agency is like the legislative branch? Yeah. The agencies.

The other branches. Yeah. Yeah. Right. You know, taking down the New York Times and Harvard is a slightly different. That'll follow. That'll follow. Yeah, that'll follow.

Right. But the, please, that'll follow. But like, you know, let's hold it to the, you know, the formal arms of government for a second, even though, you know, the pretence that the New York Times is not a government agency is fruitless and futile. But you basically want to be able to say, okay, you're going to have 20 guys who are going to reboot, say, US foreign policy. And these 20 guys are going to be completely in charge of the State Department.

And if they want to close the Truman Building tomorrow, they can. And in fact, they probably will. Others say the Coast Guard is a little more likely to remain doing the thing the Coast Guard does. But you basically have FDR did this thing where he created the modern predecessor of OMB, which was called the Bureau of the Budget. And he was like, well, you know, efficiency is very important. And so if, because efficiency is very important, he sent, you know, commissars from the Bureau

of the Budget into every level of every government agency ostensibly to make sure money was not being wasted in practice, in fact, to establish a parallel organizational structure that would do as well. And so just the level of the thing is, you know, what's really important in any kind of taking power is to create this perception of irreversibility and like an essentially infinite telos. You can't dismantle half the stasi. Like you can't say, oh, we're going to cut, you know, defund the stasi.

Well, you know, what does it mean? It means that stasi gets a 20% budget cut, right? You know, and then they'll be like, well, you know, actually we can, you know, whereas if you like close the stasi building and like seize the personnel records and lay everyone off, the stasi is dead. And it like, as soon as something dies, people immediately begin to justify that in their minds. And so they're like, holy shit, this was a shit show all along.

Because like three days ago, it was the most prestigious career in East Germany, right? And so that feeling is what happened to Vladimir Putin overnight in Dresden, right? Yeah. Tell me this. I don't know the story. Yeah, that's right. He was posted to East Germany. Operative in Dresden.

Yes. And then the Soviet Union collapsed. Right. And there's like, you know, this beautiful poetic scene of like document class, formerly classified documents, like being kind of dumped out of yeah, bureaus and desks and like kind of floating through the street. Unless you can create that vibe, you're not done, right? You know, like your only goal and any kind of sort of contest for power is to get to

the point where basically the old regime is burning documents as fast as it can. Yeah. But he thought he was, you know, done for it. Yeah. He's an operative. Well, he was, but sort of, but you know, you know, what do you think of Putin? What's your Putin take? He's a zero on the binary for me.

Yeah, I wouldn't. A zero on the binary. I wouldn't let him hit. Yeah. So you would, you would, you would not, yeah. Not even a young Putin. Not even a young Putin. I prefer Putin now to young Putin.

Really? No, not even a young. That's severe. That's really serious. Distaste. Like you'd rather, you'd rather, you'd rather hit young Trump and young Putin. Yeah. Not strongly.

Not strongly. Yeah. And Trump and I would have a great time. Yeah. We would. Young Trump. Young Trump. Yeah.

Either one. We would be laughing. We'd be having. Yeah. You'd be having, we would have a, hopefully Trump comes on the pod. We'd be at the Taj Mahal. Trump Taj Mahal Atlantic City, 1980s. Drinking those garbage martinis.

That would be amazing. But I mean, I can listen to that man talk forever because I, I really appreciate his menacing and threatening house style. Did you see that interview with the BBC by the Lukashenko, where the one where he's like basically just like no attempt to be civil at all and he's basically, he's like says some line to the BBC guy, which is like, we're going to massacre all the scum you've been funding. Lukashenko is a strong, he's been in power since 94, he has complete control.

He has total control over the media as well as all of the bodies of government as well. He shows really no, it doesn't seem like he's going to relinquish control anytime soon. He just made a statement that the Belarusian ethnos was the heart of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Was it really the heart of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania? He's the spy of the backbone, maybe the backbone of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. I love people fighting for the legacy of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, but... I mean, welcome to the war in my mind.

Dasha, how do you feel about the Grand Duchy of Lithuania? I'd like to see it restored. That's a good solid baseline perspective. I think that I think that I'd like to reclaim my right place in the Schlochte class that was taken for me by the Bolsheviks. At the very least, people who don't want the Grand Duchy of Lithuania restored should bear the burden of proof. They should have to understand why.

It's a bad idea. That's a good point here. That's a good point here for everything. Thank you. Indeed. Indeed. Switch it and... What do you think of Putin?

What do I think of Putin? My take is probably a little more positive and optimistic than yours, but not super different. I didn't say I was negative. I just said I... Yeah. You just wouldn't... I wouldn't bang me there.

I wouldn't bang me there. I'm just not into that kind of thing. At that level, I think our judgments are the same. I think Putin is much weaker in some ways than most people think he is. I don't think he has a very firm hand even on Russia. He doesn't have a firm hand on the basically criminal elements of power in Russia. Not just like... Not so much the old oligarchs, but more like the Zuloviki, like the post-KGB world.

I don't feel... But isn't this exactly the opposite of what we in the West are taught, right? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And he doesn't have... He would love to have a loyal intelligentsia and he just doesn't have one.

How do you build a loyal intelligentsia and get back to that old question? You know, I was... I mean, like I'm going to say something you won't like. I was talking about 10 years ago, I was at a birthday party for my daughter and I was talking with a guy who was a Russian. It turned out that he'd been to NYU film school and he was also a member of the old Petersburg intelligentsia. And he'd known people who'd known like Joseph Brodsky, you know, that world, right?

So I'm basically like, you know, where is the... And he'd like directed like bad historicals for Russian TV. And this is what he did with his NYU degree. And I asked him, I'm like, how is the intelligentsia now? How is that community doing? And he was basically like, well, they kind of barely survived Soviet times, but like the end of the Soviet Union just destroyed them. They just scattered to every end of the earth.

And so the Iron Curtain was one way for the Soviet Union to keep its intellectual classes. It didn't really keep them loyal and then at least kept them there. Well, didn't it make them more disloyal? It made them more disloyal. We were talking about the example of like Franco's... Yeah. It made them more disloyal. And one of the things...

I mean, you see this split between the intelligentsia and the Tsarist regime, of course, that happens over the course of the 19th century where the start of the 19th century, like the modal Russian aristocrat is this figure out of Tolstoy, who mainly speaks French and is a noble and is part of like Peter the Great's table of ranks or whatever. And then by the late 19th century, the modal Russian intellectual reads Tolstoy and is basically a liberal, if not an anarchist, if not like a bomb thrower, and considers the Russians who still like work for the government as like tools. And so...

Well, the thing that you have to always remember about the Russian intelligentsia, which for all intents and purposes now is like a global liberal intelligentsia, is that they are far more elitist than anything you'll find in like London or D.C. or anywhere else. Like elitist in what sense? Like they have a real contempt for your average, like your Russian everyman or like Muzhuk or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure.

Like truly. Sure. But I guess I don't know if... I mean, the contempt is pretty high here too. It is, but not like... Really? Okay. There's like a delta of separation.

I'll take your word for it. Yeah. And I guess I mean, is the intelligentsia by nature like definitionally disloyal? I don't think so. I think that, you know, what you see, I think that disloyalty is the result of a couple of different things. You know, certainly to say that the intelligentsia of the court of Elizabeth I is like inherently disloyal is wrong.

You know, the intelligentsia of like Louis XIV is not inherently disloyal. Well, my question right about monarchy is that I really associate it with like divine rule that in those situations people were loyal to their monarchs because they understood that they were, you know, divinely empowered to roll over them. How do you get people to fall in line and like a secular... I think it's possible, you know, when you say divine, you're really saying spiritual. And I think that it's very powerful. It's very possible that sense of spiritual kingship is very possible to achieve without

literally believing that you're the son of the son or whatever. I think we see a kind of deification of celebrities. I think you see, of course, echoes of monarchy in the way, for example, Americans respond to like the Kennedys and so forth. And I think it's possible to actually sort of, you do have to sort of construct that sense of grandeur and greatness and you have to do it in a way that resonates with the most cynical and ironic media audience in history. I think that that is possible.

I didn't say it was easy. It's simple, but not easy. It's a simple goal that is not easy to achieve because you could easily become a self-parity. But actually, no, like, you know, the sort of... Like one of the things you see, like I think the most optimistic interpretation of present history is that it's a lot like the late Roman Republic and I really want to be like the late Roman Republic and not like the late Roman Empire because the late Republic was followed by something that was kind of a golden age, whereas the late Empire was like blood

in the streets, dogs eating your intestines, things like that. So preferring to avoid that, one of the things that we see in the late Roman Republic is this conflict between Marius and Sulla, which is sort of like the conflict between Nazism and communism. You're seeing this conflict between these dictators who are sort of both proto-ceasers, like proto-emperors in a way, but they sort of can't figure out the trick of founding the Empire. And the reason they can't figure out the trick of founding the Empire is that they're like

partisans in this really deep way. And so when they come to power, all they can think about is exterminating their enemies and like taking their money. And that just creates this sort of oscillating conflict between these factions, neither of which is strong enough to like or vicious enough to like completely eradicate the other. And then when Caesar and Augustus come to power, they have this totally different approach where they're just like, no, the whole point of this new system is to get rid of these damn civil wars.

And we don't have hot civil wars right now, but we definitely have this cold civil war. And I think that, you know, there's a lot of desiderata that can come from anything like a modern monarchy or modern FDR or just basically a complete rebuilding of governance in this country. But the one that's very, very basic, that has to succeed, otherwise you're just failing is like an end to the cold civil war. Could we ever have a hot civil war again? I don't think people have the balls.

I think they're actually literally genitals are too small. The distance between the scrotum and the butthole. Yeah. It's constantly shrinking. It's constantly shrinking. It's constantly shrinking. Well, that's actually what we think are testicles are no more than a sort of mobile hemorrhoid. But I guess the Confederacy was winning the first part of the war because they really

had something. They were fighting against a, but their ideas, their ideas were wrong. Like your ideas were wrong. Yeah. But they had the, you know, their ideas were not even just morally wrong. They were tactically wrong. You know, it's like one of the things. Yeah.

Sure. I mean, it's like one of the things that sort of sums up that effort and it's like a lesson for everyone who's like resisting some kind of power that is greater than in some kind of way is like the Confederates win the first battle of the war. They win the battle of bull run, right? And at the time that they win the battle of bull run, there's basically no organized union forces between them and the St. Lawrence River, right? They could literally like be like, you know, they could go on, like be washing their boots

in the St. Lawrence. They could go on day trips to Toronto. Well, it was hard initially to mobilize the union forces because they didn't have the batch of slavery to fight against, but they had, but these Confederates who've won the battle don't have that mentality at all. You know, Boston wants to govern Charleston, but Charleston doesn't want to govern Boston. And so basically they're playing defense, they're playing defense. And so they're like, yeah, we showed those Yankees.

We sent them home. Guess it'll be a while before they try that. You know, and that's their mindset rather than being like, oh, let's, you know, walk for another eight hours and we'll be in Washington DC, right? Which had nothing like left to defend it. But you know, that that sort of feeling of basically whenever you fight in a conflict in your mindset is fundamentally defensive, you're going to lose at the same time, you know, the set would be utterly ridiculous for the south to fight this war and say, yes,

our goal is to actually have slavery in Boston, right? That would also be retarded, right? You know, and, and the just from a tactical perspective, it doesn't work. But having a vision of a conflict in which your goal is simply to not lose is like almost always guaranteed that you're going to lose. You need that. Talos, they didn't even have to have that fight because there still is and will continue to be slavery in Boston.

But I guess the question is like, it's very clear that we are experiencing like a crisis of faith, right? And I think one of the best frames to put it in is in this like religious fashion. But like, how do you even create the conditions for people to have the balls to grapple with that? And that's a really good question, and I think I think the answer, the answer is kind of an assumption that is implicit in the question that I think needs to be revised. And the assumption is that sort of the only way to do it is with balls.

And I think that when people look at, for example, from the 1920s, looked at the Soviet Union, the fall, the Soviet Union, they would find it a surprisingly untesticular matter. There's no fighting in the streets. There's no, you know, actually, the people do not rise up and rip the apparatus, slim from limb, you know, the KGB special forces do not attack the crowds, etc., etc., etc. It's actually this like really low testosterone production. In fact, there's really, there's something of the estrogen in it, right? And so the thing is, when you look at sort of regime change in any world, regime change

has to use the tools that you have. The master's tools. The master's tools. So basically, so the tools, the tools that you're using, you know, the tools of like violence and war do not belong to you and are not in your, you know, you can't, I mean, think about all the people who, you know, in the 1940s were like, we're going to rebellion Stalin by being revolutionaries like Lenin and we're going to have revolutionary conspiracies, right?

You know, not only did they arrest the people that didn't do that, they arrested the people that did. And it's actually just very easy to overcome that bullshit when you're Stalin. And so those were sort of the wrong tools and the wrong metaphors to which to think about it. And so if you expect regime change to come from like virtuous, righteous indignation among the people at how poorly they're being treated, you're really barking up the wrong tree, I think, because you're expecting like the minute men, you know, these guys are

had to have their trousers, like specially adjusted, they're going to fight the British or the strongest, you know, force in the world, right? You know, and okay, there were ways in which that war was really a forest, but like these were men, you know, most how many guys, you know, have ever been in a fistfight? Not that many, right? You know, right? I mean, Have you been in a fistfight?

That's impossible. I've been in some fights. Yeah. Like a slap fight or a fist fight? In like as a teen and as like a scrappy, Las Vegas teen. Yeah, I hit a girl with a spray paint can once. Okay. Nice.

Yeah. But it's the master's tools. But men fighting is just not a thing. And so, you know, the question of like, what are the tools that you use to me has a totally different answer. I think what we're seeing, you know, the political audience and the media audience are basically the same audience. So, you know, one of the things you can do is you can go back and look at like World

War One propaganda posters or like there's this film I recommend to everyone called Hitler Lives. It's a post war American propaganda film directed by the guy who directed Dirty Harry with a script by Dr. Seuss. And you watch this thing and you're just like, when you look at old propaganda, it's so literal and it's so hard sell. And it's just like the new Chrysler with its rich Corinthian leather, right? You know, and it's like they expect you to be like, oh, rich Corinthian leather.

And if you play that kind of straight up hard sell to people now, they think it's ironic and campy. I went showed like, you know, Hitler lives to this like film, film dude. You know, it's like a 17 minute film. It like not a political person. It was only by like minute 13 that I convinced them that the whole thing was not camp. Like that it was actually dead serious. And you know, because it's like basically the theme of Hitler Lives is the point of

World War Two is that it was a race war against the eternal German and his eternal desire to conquer the world, right? It's just completely not only is it factually unhinged. It smells unhinged and like really scary and weird. And like this was normal at the time. This was like normal. People were just like, oh, they're telling us to believe this, right? And if you look at sort of film from that period, the level of irony and reversal and

like breaking the fourth wall in it is also really, really low. And then as sort of the sixties go on, people start discovering drugs. You start getting more and more irony and reversal and complexity in things. And you eventually, by now, this is the most like frivolous, sophisticated, ironic population that has ever existed in human history. And it's not just an upper class thing, even we're all like deeply, deeply over socialized. We're deeply over socialized. We're deeply ironic, deeply overactive, internal monologues, like everything is over and so

it, and so it responds to a certain level of meta. And so it's like when you compare even Trump, even trying to compare someone like Trump to someone like DeSantis or whatever, who's just much inferior entertainer. You basically see, you know, you see that like DeSantis is just on the nose again and again, whereas like Trump realizes that what makes his outrageousness work is this like tone of meta and irony where like you can't even tell if I believe this stuff is like what he's always saying. That's incredible because he's a person who's basically intelligent, high IQ, but does not

have an overactive internal monologue. That's right. That's very talent. And even. He's like a natural person in a way. Yeah. And people attribute, you know, people who are his fans, right, attribute to him a great level of verbal talent.

I don't think his talent is particularly verbal. It's like spatial. It's like syntax. Yeah. I think it's, yeah. It's not necessarily. He has presence. I think presence is really like, like he's just, you know, some people have screen presence

and some people don't. Like, you know, some people, yeah, start power, you know, I don't mean to be overly controversial or cruel, but even like the discourse around abortion these days is the discourse of people who have the privilege, the leisure to overthink having children because the cruel thing about most poor people is that that's a fact of life that runs in the background. They don't even think of it in the ways poor people, religious people. People don't think of it in the ways that like, uh, over analyzed overeducated bug men in cities who are, right, who have 0.75 children or whatever, not you, bodily autonomy, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So you guys, we have to wrap it up. I do have to. I'm sorry. No, no, no, we can, we can ask you one last question. Yes, please. Um, so after the vanity fair article came out, um, there was a big discourse on right wing

Twitter about your new fiance, Lydia Lawrence, and people were shocked that you had a matched up with a woman whose politics are ostensibly very liberal, right? And who is a, she's a sex writer and activist. Previously. Yes. Yes. Previously. Um, my question is, why are men such libtards for pussy?

Why are men such libtards for pussy? Um, uh, you know, I, you know, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, you know, um, um, Lydia's perspectives are complicated. Yeah. Yeah. This is not a referendum. And, and, and I, you know, do you think men are libtards for pussy? Um, I think that, um, no, I think that, um, um, men are, um, um, like romantic?

Yeah, he's a hopeless romantic. But I am a hopeless romantic, I'm a hopeless romantic, so, so, but, but I think one of I think one of the things that, you know, as a hopeless romantic, I like is I like aristocracy and you know, part of the whether you like it or not, you know, the shit lib class is the ruling class. And as a result of being the ruling class, they have many sort of just real characteristics of rulership that are very hard to find outside that ruling class. There's a sense in which, you know, I once asked my my first girlfriend, you know, 25 years ago to give me, she's I'm like, what are women attracted to? And she gave me, you know, one word, which of course is the right word, which is confidence. Right. Women are attracted, right, obviously, right.

You know, and so, but you know, men are attracted to confidence too. Well, why are women such fascists for dick? I know, I know. I know. All right. Yeah. And on that note, perhaps. Yeah, I got to run off.

Thank you so much for coming on our show. All right. Thank you. It was a great convo. It was a pleasure. It's Independence Day. Independence Day. See you in hell.

See you in hell. All right.