The Pomp Podcast - #1090 Michael Millerman On How Colleges Tried To Cancel Him

Episode Date: September 14, 2022

Michael Millerman is a Philosopher, the Founder of Millerman School, and Author of the book “Inside Putin’s Brain”.   In this conversation, we discuss the declining state of education, what Stoicism teaches us, the importance of philosophy, being a free & critical thinker, controversial thinkers like Alexander Dugin, the new world order, and institutional collapse. ======================= Bullish is a powerful new exchange for digital assets that offers deep liquidity, automated market making, and industry-leading security. Combining the innovations of DeFi with the regulated environment of traditional finance, Bullish empowers users to trade with certainty and earn passively at scale across variable market conditions, in an environment backed by multibillion-dollar liquidity contributions from the Bullish Treasury. Visit bullish.com/pomp today to learn more. Note: Bullish is licensed by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission. Virtual assets and related products are high risk. Consult your investment advisor and trade responsibly. Bullish is available in select locations only and not to U.S persons. Visit bullish.com/legal for important information and risk warnings. ======================= The bridge between iGaming, online sports betting, and emerging technology, such as Blockchain, NFTs, fintech, GameFi, metaverse, and AI, is loud and clear. The largest global summit of this kind is heading to Malta from November 15 to 17. Over a thousand exhibitors and 25,000 industry leaders will be there, including top executives from Draft Kings, Bet365, Socios, crypto exchanges, betting software providers, operators, gaming affiliates, and more. Log on to AIBC.WORLD and SiGMA.WORLD to see all our upcoming global summits! See you in Malta, November 15 to 17 for the leading global event in Gaming & Emerging Tech! THIS IS SiGMA! ======================= Valour (formerly DeFi Technologies) represents what’s next in the digital economy -- providing simplified, trusted access to crypto, decentralized finance and Web 3.0 investment opportunities. Institutions and investors can gain diversified, secure, compliant, and easily tradable access to a diversified set of industry-leading equity products and protocols, through a single stock purchase on a regulated exchange. Currently listed on U.S. (OTC: DEFTF) and Canadian (NEO:DEFI) exchanges. For more information or to subscribe to receive company updates and financial information, visit our website at valour.com ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp ======================= Compass Mining is the world's first online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware and hosting. Compass was founded with the goal of making it easy for everyone to mine bitcoin. Visit https://compassmining.io/ to start mining bitcoin today! =======================

what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano most of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast simply the best podcast out there now let's kick this thing off michael millerman is the founder of millerman school he's also the author of many books including inside putin's brain he's a philosopher and someone who is not scared to think differently in this conversation we talk about the state of education the importance of philosophy why you should study the Stoics, how you can learn from history, why credentialism doesn't make a lot of sense,

and what exactly he believes around the new world order, institutional collapse, why he has studied people who are deemed controversial like Alexander Dugan, and much, much more. I really enjoyed this conversation with Michael, and I hope that you guys enjoyed as well. I enjoy talking to people who are willing to think differently, think independently,

and think critically. Once you get done listening to this episode, please let Michael and I know on Twitter what you thought, what you agreed with, what you disagreed with, and how we could actually make the conversation better the next time that we do it. All right, let's get into this episode with Michael. I hope that you all enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement

to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, bang, bang. I'm very excited to talk to Michael here. I feel like the best place to start is just the importance of philosophy.

I think a lot of people have probably heard of philosophy, maybe even taken a class in college or in high school, but they kind of threw it out. They don't pay attention to it anymore. You spent a ton of time studying this and also understanding why maybe some of your thoughts, your ideas have been blacklisted or kind of blackballed from kind of traditional academia.

So why are you so interested in philosophy and why do you feel like it's so important to really understand this? Well, people have whatever impression of philosophy they have from their first year classes or people they know who are into philosophy. And maybe at times it can seem like hair splitting or logical exercises that don't really matter very much.

but in fact I believe and will argue that there's a lot at stake in how we think philosophically especially about politics so political philosophy is that part of philosophy that thinks about things like what is justice what is the best way of living together what's the best way of life what's the relationship between violence and power and all of those kinds of things so we know that we're affected all the time by law for the better or for the worse depending on whether the laws are good or bad, by power, by domination, and these kinds of things. So political philosophy raises those issues and gets us to think clearly about them. So that's one thing. Another is that the classical political philosophers, they thought that philosophy as a way

of life is the happiest way you can live. So some people chase money, not that there's anything wrong with that. Some people chase honor. They want to be recognized. They want to have maybe eternal fame, you know, as a great conqueror or as a legislator, you know, like a founding father type of status. But the question, what is a happy life? What is happiness is right at the beginning of the philosophical tradition. So Aristotle, Plato, they inquire into philosophy as a way of life and argue that's where you can feel most fulfilled. And that's sort of the peak of human existence in a way. So when we look around at the woke state of affairs today and at all of the craziness, if you scratch beneath the surface of that, you can find philosophical disputes

about, again, who is the human being? What does it mean to live well? And what's possible politically? So we need to think clearly. We're facing really big challenges and we don't want to be careless in assessing them. So a lot of people deal with that at the economic level, at the legal level, and the philosophical level just gives us a comprehensive overview of what the big issues are. And as I say, walks us through what the smartest people in our history have had to say about them in a way that we can resonate with and learn from. As I've learned more and more about philosophy, about Stoics, and many other things that we'll just throw in the bucket of kind of intelligent people throughout history. You learn that many of the problems we face today

likely aren't as new as we'd like to think that they are. As you've looked backwards, how does it give you a better understanding of what we're actually facing today? And as you describe some of the insanity of what people are feeling in day-to-day life. This point you just brought up is crucial because it can seem like we live in unprecedented times. Everything is always totally new there's a new crisis on the horizon or we're in the middle of one as though nobody's ever faced anything similar and it's reasonable why people could think that way like we have all of these new technological developments and advancements we have nations of such a huge scale not like small ancient democracies or something and you might just think there's no

commonality between us and somebody who lived 2500 years ago what could we possibly learn from Plato or Aristotle, for example. But one of the beautiful things, you don't even have to read very much. You can read the first few pages of Plato's Republic, the first little bit of Aristotle's Politics, for example, and you'll see that this distance in time between us now and them then just collapses. So it's not like everything is the same, but what becomes interesting is what is constant in political and human life? Because if there are constants, then we may be able to find some guidance, some answers about our current problems when we turn to those older thinkers. Well, that's just the most rewarding thing you can do. So for me personally, it was

actually pretty funny. In my first philosophy class, I hadn't had this experience yet of collapsing the distance between us now. And my professor said something along the lines of the fact that the Romans also had graffiti in their bathroom stalls. Something like that, some comment. And it just clicked in my mind that the same types of people we have now, you know, this guy's going to be a clown, this guy's an oddball, this guy's a genius, this guy's a poet, another person oriented religiously, that all of these types, they can be represented in the old accounts as well. so for me reading Plato reading Aristotle reading those old philosophers it also allows us to get questions clear that today are forbidden they're off the table in a in some sense so you know and your listeners know we live in a time where you have all kinds of enforced ideological orthodoxies what if you want to think about the alternatives well first of all

Socrates thought about some alternatives I don't know how much people know his backstory he raised questions about the law about justice he eventually was killed okay he was found guilty of corrupting the youth of not believing in the gods of the city you could say not believing in the ruling ideology and he was sentenced to death so in the very life of Socrates for example we don't even have to go to the Stoics in just studying the life of Socrates we learn about the potential conflict eternally built in to the nature of political life versus people who try to think about it you know because political life demands a certain kind of obedience to authority that is incompatible with free thought it's incompatible with philosophizing well that

gives rise to a genuine tension and some people say well you know just everybody should be able to think openly what they want and say openly what they want. But we learn from Plato's writings and from the life of Socrates that it's not so simple. You need law to live together in a political community, but law has its power as a function of our habit of obedience to it. So if you're constantly criticizing the law in public, you are removing that habit of obedience to the law, You see? And so it like the philosophers pose a threat to the political community and vice versa. The political community poses a threat to the philosophers. The philosophers cast doubt on the orthodoxies and the political city tries to kill the free thinkers.

This is a longstanding problem, you know, as relevant today as it was then. How do you think about the balance in what is supposed to be free democratic societies today where free speech is not only encouraged but it is protected? We know from the lessons of history that those who critiqued, criticized, or even just pontificated new and alternative ideas, they were seen as that threat. They were treated as a threat and sometimes ended up either being jailed, killed, or other kind of atrocities. how do we see differences or similarities to those pastimes today in these free democratic kind of free speech driven societies that we supposedly live in so our task in my view is to focus in on the problem as clearly as we can so the problem in a sense is everything we can think about and say should it be aired publicly like what are the costs and benefits in some sense

of free speech what does it mean to speak freely are there times where it's better just to stay silent because you have a truth that's dangerous now today that is considered an offensive idea that there are some things that are true that should not necessarily be publicized you know because there's this notion that oh look the superiors are lying to us because they think that we're the plebs who can't handle the truth and so they're concealing something from us and if only you know they hadn't done that then we could have made the decision for ourselves that's a natural democratic sentiment it's probably correct so far as it goes but the interesting cases are where you know there's an argument on the other side so i'll give you a

classic example here again plato's republic a go-to source for these kinds of issues and really we're dealing right with the first part of the book socrates is talking to a character about he's getting the other characters getting old he's about to die socrates is asking him you know what have you learned from uh getting old and what are you worried about that kind of thing the question comes up about justice being paying back your debts to people returning what you owe so socrates asks this character he says imagine your friend gave you his weapon and now he wants it back but he's out of his mind and you know that if you give him his weapon he's going to go commit some atrocity with it and he asks you do you have it wouldn't it be just to lie to him and

say that you don't and even though it's his it's his property so you might say like according to a property rights argument you should give it to him wouldn't it be more just not to so aren't there limitations on telling the truth and on property rights when it comes to justice depending on the state of mind of the person who's making the claim so the other character is like yeah you know that sounds it sounds right like i probably would lie about it and wouldn't give it back and then he goes off to do something else but we're left to think about it are there times where it's just to lie or is it always just to tell the truth another way of putting it if we're committed to free speech and truth-telling are we sacrificing some important political considerations

the important thing is not necessarily what we think about that right away but the fact that it's such a crucial inquiry and therefore that we need to look at these sources to get our heads straight around it. I know, again, Democrats, and in this sense, we're all Democrats. I don't mean Democratic Party. I mean people who grew up in liberal democracies don't like that idea. And yet, if people as brilliant as Plato and Aristotle had a defense of it, we should probably consider their arguments. So when we look at this, what it requires is a level of critical thinking that doesn't seem to be taught in schools. And what I find so fascinating about you is that you appear to be a very serious critical thinker. You are able to separate out different components and

different ideas from a single individual. So you don't seem to label someone as good or bad or because they are associated with one movement or another that all of their ideas must be good or bad. And that has led to a very interesting situation where you've essentially been blackballed by traditional academia, university systems, and all of that. Can you tell us a little bit about that journey and that path and kind of how you got to a point where you essentially were forced to either give up the craft that you had been so interested in, or kind of strike it on your own, go direct to students and say, I don't need the university and the credentialism that they provide in order to actually carry out what I'm interested in. That's right. I was effectively

blacklisted from academia during my PhD program because I worked on a thinker named Alexander Dugin. I don't want to assume that anybody's heard of him. He's been called Putin's brain, Putin's Rasputin, the most dangerous philosopher in the world, and a bunch of other things. And I gave an interview based on my research at the time where I said, look, there's a lot that we can learn from him. There's a lot that's good about him. There's a lot that I like about the substance of his teaching which in short opposes totalitarian liberal globalism okay it says there's more to being human than being a liberal and on that premise he develops this account of politics geopolitics international relations philosophy and so on well my professors at the

time didn't like that they thought it was apologetics for neo-fascism for a genocidal maniac as they see him and it's no surprise everybody has heard stories today of cancellations I went through my version of it. But here's the thing. When you have something that is deeply important and interesting to you, in my case, it was what's the relationship between politics and philosophy? Whether we think man has a soul or not, whether we think the world is created or not, whether you think time is cyclical or linear, let's call that philosophy. How does that relate to our opinions about political things? That's the question I was in effect studying. So if you have a question that's so important to you you just go to the end of it and there will be obstacles

that arise along the way opposition and sometimes it could be not opposition maybe for example there's fanatical support and that becomes its own kind of temptation but you need to stick to the straight and narrow path of the question you're pursuing which is what I tried to do but yeah I was blacklisted it was a pretty brutal experience as far as academic politics goes but the great thing is that I was able to open my own school after the fact, go directly to students, as you said, microphone, camera, lecture notes, and suddenly the world is your oyster. And I think it's a sign that a lot of the traditional institutions, including university, they're experiencing some hard times because they're enforcing ideology instead of encouraging

thinking. And so students and their parents and people who are professionals are looking for genuine alternatives where do we go if we don't just want to be lectured about race and gender where do we go if we don't just want to be told that whites are guilty of oppressing everybody around the world where do you want to go if you actually want to read the classics so in higher education today there's a kind of war on the classics because if they taught that there's beauty if they taught that there's excellence and if they taught that there's truth in some sense they're all enemies of global liberalism because global liberalism wants to tell you don't think about truth don't think about beauty don't think about that kind of thing so it's been a blessing

it was a blessing in disguise at the time i only felt the brunt of it but it's proven to be a real blessing because i now have students all over the world and we just get to discuss the greatest books ever written and think about them clearly and help them illuminate our understanding of today's world uh but yeah cancellation is something that students if you're listening to this and you are drawn to, quote unquote, controversial thinkers, you know, some of them you've had on this show, you have to wait for yourselves, you know, because you could get kicked out of your job, you could get kicked out of your school, and you could be branded, as so many people are being branded today, a semi-fascist, a total fascist, the neo-fascist. And the biggest concern in my

personal opinion is that it's a few steps from calling someone a fascist to saying all fascists should be eradicated to you know jailing or killing your political opponents and it's not so far-fetched the guy that i work on alexander dugan one of many thinkers but probably the one i'm best known for his daughter was killed not long ago in russia in the act of political terrorism so these things happen uh right now they don't happen very much in north america hopefully they never do but you know there was an attack on salman rushdie and uh it's it's a stone's throw from calling someone a fascist to saying that they should be imprisoned or attacked.

Well, the straight and narrow is we need to think, we need to think, we need to think, that's it. There's no threat should snuff out our desire to think about these issues carefully. One of the things that's so fascinating to me kind of about the line of your work is these are ideas. This is thinking, this is literally reading books, reading the ideas that other people have put forward

and contemplating them, critiquing them and also figuring out where do you agree Where do you disagree? Where do they get things right? Where do they get things wrong? And what is fascinating to me about that kind of attrition, if you will, of analysis is that every single student who went to any level of education in a democratic developed nation probably thought about some individual, their ideas, their writings, and kind of their work. And it was put through some degree of critique. Now, sometimes that was very elementary. Sometimes it was very, very kind of sophisticated. But when most people, and maybe most is an exaggeration,

maybe it's many people in the Western world first heard of Dugin, especially in recent times, it was around this political act of terror. And so the headlines read, you know, Russian, name your descriptor, whatever kind of adjective they wanted to use or noun. And they said his daughter was killed. And a lot of people said, wow, that's crazy. They read the headline and they kind of moved on. What I saw on Twitter, which was fascinating, was a heavy degree of controversy between this person is a good person, this person is a bad person. And I didn't know anything about them. And so I started to go and Google a little bit more. I came across some of your work and the

book that you wrote. Can you tell us a little bit about this individual and maybe do so calling out along the way? What are the critiques of him? And then what are the things that maybe you've separated away from those critiques and say, hey, actually, I think that these are the ideas that are interesting or worth kind of spending more time on? Sure. So Alexander Dugin is a Russian political philosopher, ideologue, and activist. So it's important to understand that he combines several roles in himself that often are parceled out among other people so you could be very fascinated by him as a philosopher and repelled by some of his activism that would be consistent because it's all contained in one person he started his intellectual activity so far as i

can tell in the 80s in the ussr where he was looking into figures who we know as traditionalists that's renee guenon julius evola as well as all kinds of movements of thought that are weird for us or that we're not used to thinking about like hermeticism gnosticism mysticism occultism and stuff like that at the collapse of the soviet union you had the onset of american liberal dominance geopolitically and ideologically and intellectually dugan rebelled entirely with all of his forces and they're quite powerful with his writing and thinking he rebelled against the dominance of american liberalism and he began to develop a political theory that drew on all of the intellectual resources available, past and present, that could oppose global liberalism.

It was like a grab bag to a certain extent. Some of the sources, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Jung even, you know, Jung, sources from psychoanalysis, from geopolitics, and he put together a model that reasoned as follows. In the 20th century, there was a war between liberalism, communism, and fascism. Fascism was defeated. You had the Cold War, a bipolar world, USSR and USA. That came to an end. You had the unipolar world. And if you want to oppose American global dominance, you can no longer do so on the basis of the old political theories. So he opposes the fascist response to liberalism. He opposes the communist response to liberalism. Their time is gone. It's time for something new. And that something new he declared as the fourth

political theory. He said, people are so used to thinking in terms of liberalism, communism, fascism, which I think is true. If you look around, you'll see they still do it. If you're not a liberal and you're not on the left, you're a fascist. That's the way people think. Well, he said, let's declare the space of something called the fourth political theory. And he developed it over a series of books. The reason why he's so toxic, there are a few reasons why. One is that in opposing global liberalism, he met with many of America's enemies, many people who don't like america many anti-liberals who aren't communists therefore you know he had in his circle people who maybe are in their own way neo-nazis or fascists so he wanted to have under his umbrella

all kinds of tactical alliances even if theoretically he was developing something else pro-ukrainians don't like him because he has said things against ukrainian statehood that they can't get on board with so he doesn't think that ukraine should continue to exist in its current state form. He's not against Ukrainian ethnicity or Ukrainian people, but he doesn't like the Ukrainian political project and he thinks that that should be undone. So there are those kinds of reasons why people find him obnoxious. If he's anti-American and you're pro-American, that's one reason. If he's anti-liberal and you're pro-liberal, that's another reason. So all of those kinds of things are in a sense understandable but now we go to the opposite side and we say well look

there are some very pro-american american people in america who also don't like globalism who also don't like totalitarian liberalism who are also tired of woke culture cancellation who also don't think that america should be the world's police officer and so what do they do when they're trying to understand their own situation well in my view it makes sense to look at intelligent people who have articulated an alternative and then we can sort of pick and choose work our way through it that kind of thing so the parts about dugan's thought that i like the most i would say his use of okay i like philosophical supremacists people for whom philosophy is the most important human activity they have a special place in my world okay he's a philosophical supremacist so i pay

close attention when he talks about the relationship between philosophy and politics he says we should take seriously the beginning and end of western philosophy as we try to think through our situation the beginning that's plato the end that's heidegger so for dugan plato and heidegger are crucial thinkers for understanding politics i would say that's indisputable there's no way you could ignore that kind of argument i like about dugan that he's got a comprehensive attitude towards politics and society he studies many disciplines and he gives us a way of thinking about them without the ideological blinders of liberalism. What I don't like, yeah, I don't like some of the cheap propaganda shots. I don't like it when a lot of his arguments, you can almost

tell at the outset that they're all going to end up in a certain place. So there are times where he's limited by his own dogma. There are times when he's limited by his own ideology and his geopolitical commitments like a mirror image of western thinkers the only thing is that on balance in my view he's freer than most western thinkers western thinkers are totally trapped in their ideological situation and he has some you know he's outside of it crafting it shaping it thinking about it and that's why i think he's valuable for us but yeah he's not uncontroversial either on a purely philosophical level or all the more so on a political level.

And is this kind of anti-liberalism or anti-American stance the reason why he's considered the most dangerous philosopher in the world? Or are there other things? It's not just that he's anti-liberal. It's in a sense that he has the energy of his activism behind his anti-liberalism.

So he's not just a thinker. I mean, he is a thinker, but he's not just a thinker. So when he's active politically, when he's organizing or doing outreach or something like that it can seem like i'll put it this way russia is a ideological opponent of the united states and dugan is the most comprehensive russian ideology ideologist so he's dangerous in the sense that he's providing a worldview alternative to the dominant one and he's not just somebody with no possible political power behind him he's a thinker in a country that could actually help to shape a multipolar world

you know so it's a combination of these kinds of factors like if he was just a guy on an island somewhere writing these books it may have been considered less dangerous than if he's somebody whose ideas are percolating through the Russian policy establishment directly or indirectly. And is that why he would be considered Putin's brain? Is that many of these ideas get filtered through and potentially end up getting implemented or at least helping shape some of the thought processes and actions of the Russian government? Or how do you look at the relationship between maybe Dugin's ideas and then some of the actions taken by that specific kind of government organization? I'll tell you how I see it, because there's a dispute among people who watch Dugin and

Putin, and they say they've never met. There's no sign of a direct relationship. But here's the way that I would characterize it. Whenever Russia acts as a distinct civilization, not part of the Western world, not part of the European world, but in opposition to them, or at least on their own path. They're going to need a set of ideas to understand themselves and to justify and elaborate their policies. And those will be Dugan's ideas to a large extent, whether they go through directly or indirectly, whether they get mediated through other parties and think tanks or whatever the case might be. Because it's like Dugan has been developing this conceptual system for 30 years or however many and he's now seeded the cloud of ideas so that as soon as you turn on your mind

and start to wonder what is russia if it's not a european country what is russia if it's not part of the west dugan's concepts will come raining down you may not know where they came from but when they land that's what's going on so that's my view you know he's sort of like the behind the scenes mastermind of Russia's civilizational path. He's not the only person in Russia thinking about these things, but it kind of follows in a strange way from the nature of genuine philosophical thought that you don't have to be in the spotlight to be relevant or influential. In some sense, the more profound a thinker you are as a hidden philosopher, the less easy it is to see the real nature of your influence but the more that influence is actually operative over time

so i put dugan kind of in that light uh when we try to read if you read putin's speech speeches uh february 24th speech and whenever he declares a multipolar world wherever he's speaking out against american unipolarity wherever he's talking about russian values and the degradation of values in the west and you wanted to know where is the most fully formed version of that worldview I would suggest it's worthwhile to look to Dugan as that. And when we begin to understand, you mentioned earlier, there's been these kind of three specific categories of political thought. There's liberal, there's communist, and there's fascist. What is this fourth one? Does it have a name to it? Has he gone as far as to kind of completely

construct it? Or is it more so just, hey, there's something else and it yet isn't fully formed? This episode is brought to you by Bullish. They've reinvented the digital asset exchange. They give you access to DeFi features like automated market making and liquidity pools in a regulated environment. It's a whole new way to generate alpha. Bullish's total trading volumes have exceeded $25 billion just in the seven months since it launched.

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See you in Malta November 15th to 17th for the leading global event in gaming and emergent tech. This is Sigma. Go to Sigma.world today. it's experimental still so it's not fully formed but it's not merely a rejection of the first three so he starts his argument that way he says the fourth political theory is neither liberal nor communist nor fascist and the next step for example is as follows says well liberalism thinks in terms of the individual communism thinks in terms of the class fascism thinks in terms of the state as a matter of fact and nazism thinks in terms of the race so nazism and fascism for him are the two parts of the third political theory so he says the fourth political

theory is going to be neither individualistic nor class-based nor racist nor statist first and foremost it's going to be something else then we raise the question what's it going to be and here he has a kind of obscure answer and a kind of clear answer the obscure answer is that well ultimately the obscure answer is the philosophy of Martin Heidegger which talks about human existence using a kind of unfamiliar jargon Dasein is a key word for Heidegger Dugan says we're going to construct the fourth political theory on the basis of the view that Dasein is the key player not the individual not the race not the state not the class so again that's kind of obscure because it requires some familiarity with Heidegger but on the other side he says

the actor of the fourth political theory is the in russian narod the reason i have to say it in russian before english is because in english it's the people but people for us usually means it can mean like a collection of individuals like a lot of people met in the park today but it can also mean like people in the sense of peoples with the sort of ethnic dimension and so dugan says this idea of people like peoplehood is a powerful pillar of our thinking about politics and so he has a book on that called ethno-sociology and he's developed that idea in different places like what's the relationship between people and state people and civilization people and morality but again people in this very specific sense uh you should understand as well he has like 50 or so

books okay they're probably not all brilliant and i haven't read all of them but they develop these intuitions and insights in to various directions so that you know geopolitically the fourth political theory implies a multi-polar world of many civilizations in the realm of education the fourth political theory implies that there's going to be an alternative to the study of economics and law which he sees are the two most important disciplines for liberalism and so on different authorities different approaches different texts that kind of thing uh what's missing in a sense there's no like what we would expect from a political theory could be well what's your system of constitutional law how do you apportion rights between uh citizens and what's your

doctrine of uh economics for example that's not where he focuses his attention he focuses it on more you could say foundational questions more of the ideological side how do you justify an alternative to individualism, for example. What should we be thinking about when we think about destiny or history or purpose or meaning for a political community? You see, it's different there from just economics. When you think about Dugan, he seems to be on one very far end of the extreme based on, let's just call it kind of the central conversation that's occurring. There's positives and negatives, which I think you've done a great job outlining. On the other end of the extreme may be the Western worldview kind of liberal philosopher or a political thinker.

What I'm very interested in is on the surface, they look very different. They look on opposite ends of the extreme. They look at a unipolar world versus a multipolar world. They look at US dominance versus a non-US dominant world. But it also appears that there's lots of similarities between these extremes. One, you already mentioned, which is that these thinkers are both at ends of the extreme, but they are held hostage by their ideologies and maybe even their geopolitical kind of alliances or allegiance. Also, they're just pure geography as to where they live, how they grew up, the society in which they operate in, the need to be accepted in those societies, things like that. How do you look at similarities, right? Other than just being held

hostage by the ideology to some degree. Are there other similarities that you can point to and say, listen, the Western philosopher or the Western political thinker is exactly the same as a Dugin in certain ways? Yeah. So you could say that people are trying to defend their side. You know, there's a kind of mirror image here. So for Dugin, it's important that he's developing a russian political theory that helps russia establish its civilizational sovereignty in a world that is seemingly dedicated to eradicating russian identity and you know there are similar projects among western intellectual circles depending on what identity people have so we need to defend our gender identity or our racial identity or our

republican identity or whatever the case is the parallelism is in some sense the love of one's own and the vigorous defense of one's own the difference is what you consider your own so that's the main similarity i would say people know in these circles that ideas somehow matter they legitimate certain policies they make other policies possible so one similarity is that you know the importance of ideas and that you want to put the ideas in the service to a certain extent of these political loyalties and political identities now that's par for the course in a way because when it comes to education there's always been the understanding that one way you could educate is by taking a political or theological principle or dogma and saying what kind of

education would help this dogma you know so catholic education conservative soviet liberal doesn't matter the point is in all of these cases the education is in the service of the ideology so that's another similarity when things get really interesting is when you turn it in the opposite direction you say well what if we begin to philosophize about our dogmas about our identity about our first principles maybe they're not as compelling as we thought they were you know so So that's the way these things shake out. People like to defend their side, and they can be very creative in the defense of their side. With all of these authors and thinkers, that's not necessarily the same as critical thinking. That's still just a very elaborate defense of your team. Obviously, on a geopolitical scale, what we've seen over the last couple of months and maybe even two or three years in the immediate analysis is somewhat of a backtracking from the globalism. And so if you think of the pullout in Afghanistan, if you think about Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the US and NATO's refusal to directly participate, if you think about the potential conflict between China and Taiwan,

If you think about supply chains and manufacturing trying to be reshored within the United States after the COVID-19 pandemic, there's all these little data points that on the face, each individual one doesn't seem super, super important. it definitely is noteworthy. It makes headlines, but it doesn't tell the full story. But when you then add them up, it does feel like there's a shift from a pure globalization is good to now maybe nationalism is good to some degree. How do you think about through the lens of so many different philosophers and the learning of history about this shift from potentially a globalism kind of pursuit to something that is more nationalistic and maybe not so interested in the integration on a global scale? Well, you're right that there are these several events taking place. We'll probably see more of them. And in some way, that's the fault

line. The globalists want to make sure that all of those conflicts are resolved in the direction of a stable globalist world and other people want to exploit them to have the alternative take shape well this too is an old problem just think about the tower of babel can we have a unified humanity is that desirable is it possible or is it necessary to have humankind scattered into multiple communities speaking multiple languages so as we're recording this there's a national conservatism conference taking place organized by yoram hasoni who defends a world order of nations and who opposes a globalist agenda and there is a competition now i would say in the intellectual space of alternatives that may not be strictly nationalistic they could be

something else including dugan's dugan this is weird for people because we don't have all the distinctions we need to think clearly about this but dugan is not a nationalist in a sense and in fact russian nationalists often don't like him he's more of an imperialist and he tends to defend large spaces of a multi-ethnic or multinational kind but not all the way to global so these we're like in a situation where eras are ending and there's this uh ferment about what will come next and it's another reason why it's so important to study it creative thinkers okay to study people who are articulating alternatives. What will come next? What should come next? What might it look like? So I'll give you an argument, you know. One is that a globalist world is not possible

because there's always going to be some spirited desire to have the dignity and honor of your particular community better represented. You know, somehow to become part of the globalist world, there's a lot that you have to give up. And not everybody's so ready to give up things that they hold dear so you know if you're going to defend the things you hold dear that's like trying to puncture the shield or you know the front of the globalist world so that's just a simple psychological fact of the human soul you know we're not willing to suppress our desire for honor and there's a loss of honor somehow in becoming part of the globalist world this is both an old question as i say with the tower of babel example and one where we have to find new solutions to it

You know, Dugan's model, many civilizations. Yoram Hazoni's model, national traditions, nations, nation states. That's what we have to stick to. Other people may have some other alternative. But what I think everybody can sense is that the order of world affairs is in the process of being renegotiated from a bipolar world to a unipolar world to now we have a question mark. if russia gets how could you put it if russia is not successful in its war or in its special military operation if it's not successful in asserting its state sovereignty and civilizational sovereignty that's a setback from the point of view of opposition to globalism and that's a big win for the supporters of globalism so all of the things that are happening geopolitically they have this ideological moral theoretical philosophical dimension and it's it's in the air right now because there's been no decisive blow. You know, you could say that Trump's victory was a kind of anti-globalist moment. Biden's victory was a one, you know, put one back into

the globalist side. But now with all of these conflicts that you mentioned, we don't know yet the final state of affairs. But a lot's at stake more than just, oh, you know, the totalitarian country lost and the democratic country won or vice versa, the worldview behind the scenes that's at stake in all of these battles is a little bit deeper and more complex than that. From the point of view of the globalists, it's pretty simple. It's totalitarian states versus dictatorships, the open society versus its enemies. But if we look from the side, we have to consider the alternative. How do other players kind of enter into the fray? So if you take – the United States obviously stands for something very specific and has kind of implemented their view of how societies, democracies, capitalism should operate and done so with great success around the world in many areas.

If you look at somebody like Russia and kind of their actions in Ukraine and then more so just the political philosophy that they seem to be embodying and kind of even openly talking about this multipolar world, it looks like it's a – OK, there's two different sides to this debate, this battle, this conflict, this clash of ideas. But then there's things like China or India or the entire continent of Africa or even South and Central America. And so how do some of those places and ideologies and kind of, you know, billions of people who live there play into what appears to be a simple kind of clash of ideas that maybe isn't so simple? Yeah, I don't have a great answer except to say this. You had the moment of American global domination. And if you're somebody in another country, not Russia, not the United States, let's say not China. if you're in India or you're in South Africa or wherever you happen to be, you're faced with the question, what do we do? We can sort of merge into the global unipolar world, giving up our

interests to a certain extent, giving up some of our values, our traditions, and doing whatever we need to do to protect ourselves under the new circumstances, making friends with the right people and becoming enemies to the right people, that kind of thing. But there needs to be some system of self-understanding. America has a system of self-understanding. I've just been mentioning that Russia has one, particularly as elaborated by Dugin, but not only. So the question is, in these other countries, do they have some native traditional resources to draw on that would help them oppose, if they want to, the new situation at the level of ideas? Because again, we have to interpret what we're doing in the world we need some system of self-understanding so one of the

things that i think is important about dugan's model personally is that it is in a way exportable to other countries so when it is applied specifically to russia it takes on a specifically russian character but the general idea of a fourth political theory as he's developed it throughout these books it can take on a specifically indian character it can take on a specifically brazilian character and Chinese and so on. So I think that as an ideological export, in a way, Dugan's fourth political theory has proven to be a resource for countries other than Russia who are looking to find their place in this world separately from what the United States sees for them. So for example, Dugan definitely has interested readers and followers in Iran, where he meets, as he said

before with some of their crucial figures and discusses the application of Heidegger's ideas to Iranian civilizational identity. These aren't things we normally think about, but they're important to see as background processes that are helping to build a kind of international anti-liberal front, not just on the basis of some reactionary anti-Americanism. Like we used to worry you know we just marked september 11th a few days ago we used to worry about islamism as a threat but somehow that was narrowly constrained to certain islamic radical sects but now you have a broader theoretical umbrella that's not just pinned to a single religion and that has these serious philosophical pillars so it's a it's a new kind of challenge i would say but that's how i

think about those other countries and if you look to see who's supporting russia or at least who's not voting against it at the UN General Assembly, that kind of thing, you'll see you could say roughly you have the West and the rest. And this rest category, this rest, they look to Russia in a way and they want Russia to be successful in a way because under the umbrella of the political victories and under the umbrella of the ideological model, they can start to feel like they are civilizationally sovereign, or at least not just under the thumb of the globalists may not work out that way. There's no guarantee, but that's the idea. When you begin to think of these periods of transition where, you know, we lived in a kind of multipolar world or, or whatever you want to

call it, we went to this kind of unipolar world. And now there's this question mark that you described. And there's people polling at two different, you know, kind of outcomes. Institutions seem to be a pretty interesting kind of aspect or a detail here. And institutions can be national institutions, they can be made up specifically for the protection of individuals, if you look somewhere in like the United States. And then there's these global institutions, if you think of the World Bank, or the World Economic Forum, or these types of organizations, even NATO, to some degree, being a kind of more globalistic institution. There's a lot of folks, I think, in the West who would agree that institutions are degrading, maybe in the most watered-down version,

or full-on collapsing in the most extreme version. Sometimes the conversation makes people uneasy. So rather than talk about governments or kind of collections of countries, they prefer to point to mainstream media organizations or higher education institutions. Those seem to be a little bit less taboo to kind of discuss as part of this like institutional collapse. How do you see institutions and their role and kind of their ability to survive these transition periods, regardless of whether we end up on either end of the spectrum? Institutions have, okay, classical political philosophers put it like this in a sense. you can't expect the institution to do the work that character building would normally do for you

now maybe you have institutions that build character but you can't just rely on the institution to solve the problems and ignore who's in the institution how they're formed it's kind of like you know i have a building on the street but which kind of shop is in the building is going to make a difference you know so you have these various institutions but what's the moral and intellectual training of the people in them how have they been formed to see the world and to understand themselves so there was a time where it's kind of like policymakers kicked the can from moral training to just relying on the institutions and their rational processes to make sure everything works out smoothly and efficiently and that sort of you could say

removal of the question of the education of character, we see it in a way. The institutions that I know best and think about in this relation are the universities and the regime type, you could say. So classically, a regime was the set of institutions that you could say are responsible for the ruling of the country. But here's the key thing. Each of those looks up to some ideal. So, for example, you might look up to the ideal of freedom. You might look up to the ideal of honor. You might look up to the ideal of wisdom. And depending on where you look, the institutions will operate differently.

They'll place their emphasis differently. So I think that some of our institutions of education are looking up to equity, diversity, and inclusion. and in doing so they're looking away from beauty wisdom truth insight and those kinds of things so when you ask about institutions that's always where my mind goes you have to see what are they aiming at where are they looking to and wherever we see a sort of misfunction or a dysfunction it could be in the institutional design but sort of the more interesting place to look from my point of view is the intentions and aims educationally you know this is a big question why should every discipline in the university be first and foremost concerned with diversity inclusion and equity

that seems strange are there no other goals of an education than that that just shows you the ideologization of the university so that's always and again this is really what the political philosophers teach us. They teach us, look to the ends, look to the principles, whether they're the first principles of our thinking or the ends of our action. That's sort of what determines where we're going, why we see something and don't see something else. One of the ideas that I find interesting and worth considering is this idea of diversity, inclusion, equity, or kind of in a more simplistic manner, the conversation around race and how that impacts various things in our society. Is it possible to analyze race without being racist? And what I mean by that is the

introduction of the idea inherently now you are putting people into buckets. And once you put people into buckets, it's kind of human nature. Like we aren't as smart as we think we are. And as we meddle in things, sometimes we actually create worse problems than what the original problem was. And what that would hold constant is if that is true, then the people who are attempting to address a problem that they have identified, they're well-intentioned. They're good-natured. They're trying to do the right thing. And it's less about these individuals are wrong or that they are doing something that is nefarious. And more so just it is human nature.

It's a story as old as time where when humans meddle into free markets, they end up actually causing issues with that intervention. We can't help but think. And so it's not in a sense a question. If you're going to think from the point of view of race or think from the point of view of class or look at the latest speeches from the Democratic Party, thinking in terms of fascism and labeling all of their opponents fascists, also putting them in a bucket. well what's worse to label half the country fascist or to think carefully about these other controversial issues so in some sense if you're in the political arena or you're outside of it but thinking about politics no matter what concepts you're employing there's going to be controversy politics is not something that you can just think about without there being some dividing

lines without it feeling like someone's getting characterized and catalogued and put into a bucket what we need to do when we practice our thinking is be cognizant of that fact and make sure that we are not having a slippage from trying to solve a problem to creating new problems just like you said with market intervention so that is a challenge like you don't want either extreme there what are you going to just stop thinking about how to solve problems in politics because it can create new problems no that's not feasible we're going to leave everything exactly the way way it is that's not feasible so it's a process of feedback and modification in other words no you're not a racist if you include racial considerations in your thinking unless those

racial considerations are like you know white people shouldn't do this black people shouldn't do this and other races shouldn't do or should do something else the task is to think carefully similarly with the semi-fascism alt-right and stuff like that are there no domestic terrorists in the United States you know that's probably too extreme are there no like actual neo-fascists no there probably are some does that mean we should label everybody who supports Trump's agenda or everybody who opposes Biden's agenda a fascist or a neo-nazi or something like that no so the whole task whether we're thinking about politics or something else is to learn to fine-tune our thinking there are so many pitfalls just like we said ideologically you know one pitfall is to come

to hate your own country. You fall so in love with some other country that you like turn your back on your own. Another one is to love your country so much that you don't see its flaws or you can't think about its limitations. So these are exercises. And that's one of the things that philosophy helps us to do. It's one of the reasons why we study old books like Plato's and Aristotle's and new books, you know, like Nietzsche and Heidegger, Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt. It's one the reasons we need to train our thinking like you know people go and they do brazilian jiu-jitsu or they do whatever they do and in your first class you're probably getting completely wrecked and maybe 20 years later you're still getting wrecked but you have to practice why should it be any

different in drawing political distinctions and in thinking carefully our mind also needs to go through a training program it's also not going to get it right on the first try but you know then when you get into a street fight so to speak okay intellectual street fight here things go wrong quickly so i hate i just have to say this to be super clear if a person has the genuine intention of understanding a problem and in pursuit of that genuine intention they think in terms of whatever it happens to be race state nation class okay destiny individual religion god satan whatever if you are trying to think a problem through and that's your intention then under the right circumstances you should completely be able to go with that and anytime we shut it down

we're just snuffing out the human soul we're snuffing out the human spark what's the point if you're going to do that what's the point of even having a republic a country a political community if you're taking what's essential to the human being and just destroying it one of the other distinctions that i think gets lost is the difference between thinking and talking now Now, usually people today don't spend as much time face-to-face talking as maybe you would do in other countries even, but definitely in history. A lot of the talking gets done on Twitter or via email, maybe even on a YouTube video or some other social media platform. And what's fascinating to me is when you're thinking, and again, you're coming at it from a genuine perspective

of trying to understand, of trying to learn, of trying to critique, and trying to advance your own thought process and kind of mental models, nuance is a core component to that. And in some ways, the nuance is incentivized. You have to understand the nuance, or therefore you cannot be successful in your pursuit.

Where nuance is discouraged is pretty much on every social media platform. And so if we use Twitter as kind of an extreme example, you and I can sit here and we can talk for hours and have a nuanced conversation. And I think a lot of folks will say, okay, there's things I agree with. There's things I disagree with.

There's open questions that I still have. And there's new viewpoints or new mental models that I take away from the conversation. But if they go and they simply read a single tweet of less than 280 characters, they may walk away and say, I hate that person, or that person is a moron, or that person is a genius. And so talk a little bit about kind of the medium being the message, if we borrow that terminology, and how the nuance gets lost in today's conversation. And this idea of a republic

and a free democratic conversation is being influenced, maybe for better, maybe for worse, by the actual products that we use to communicate these ideas with each other it's a crucial matter andrew tate when he did his video i think it was on rumble he explained his side of the story after the mass cancellations he said exactly what you just did that he can talk for two three hours overcome objections explain his position and express it but if someone wants to take a 20 second clip especially if it's something that they believe they can build their audience on or that they can monetize or that they can take all of the hate and direct it in a way that helps them you know sell their product or do whatever they want to do then it's impossible in a way to

stop today because that's what people are consuming tiktok clips and youtube and facebook and all the rest of it so that is getting in the way obviously of long carefully reasoned discourse but look it's not only today's problem so again classical political philosophy i like to use it as an example because we might see there what has stayed constant the fact that there's a gap between what we think and how it's taken when we express it isn't just because of tiktok instagram facebook and twitter the thing is you never know whether your audience has the background that they would need to understand has the intention of understanding is hostile at the outset wants to learn so people who are looking for enemies they can find them very quickly and people who are

looking for insight it's a different you know they may be listening to the same thing but deriving something completely different from it so in some sense it's a question of the motivations of the listeners why do people listen to these conversations they're looking for a cheap shot twitter has made it easier but you could do it before twitter you could do it in a pamphlet you could do it with a loudspeaker you could circulate rumors to get somebody killed that's not something that has started recently that's a old part of the human story so as somebody who's in education yeah an online education as someone who works in philosophy my appeal in some sense is always to people's intention why are you listening to something what are you trying to get out of it

you know there are always going to be people who are just looking for the attack and they have to be as it were treated separately or dealt with separately and we need to understand when we're giving them red meat and when not but even so you could stitch together a person's speech as you well know and make it say anything you want it to say so we just need to keep our eyes on the prize we need to be focused education learning understanding understanding the alternatives when it comes to people who are super hostile i don't know maybe that's an example where you would say look should hostile listeners whose whole modus operandi is to take little clips or to take falsely constructed clips and use them to direct hate mobs maybe those people shouldn't

be on those platforms maybe there are basic rules of engagement and if you don't follow them you should be off I know people don't like it when someone they follow gets kicked off Twitter I'm not a big fan either I hope it doesn't happen to me and to the people I follow but you know is this so bad that a account solely existing for that purpose gets pulled off the platform you know then you have to say so it's all there are all of these considerations truly in some sense the technology is making it much harder to reach the sweet spot of like listening how do you listen when everything is going so quickly, when everything is so polarized, and when everything is so heated? Well, it's never been a mass occupation. Learning has never been a mass

occupation. Critical thinking has never been a mass occupation. What has been is instant reaction to red meat that just riles you up. So you're going to have to deal with it with or without Twitter, with or without TikTok, but I wouldn't say they're helping. This episode is brought to by Valor, which represents what's next in the digital economy. They provide simplified trusted access in crypto, decentralized finance, and Web3 investment opportunities. Institutions and investors can gain diversified, secure, compliant, and easily tradable access to a diversified set of industry-leading equity products and protocols, all through a single stock purchase on a regulated exchange. They currently are listed in the U.S. under the DEFTF stock ticker and on the Canadian

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LMAX Digital, secure, liquid, and trusted. Go learn more at lmaxdigital.com slash POMP. Again, that's lmaxdigital.com slash POMP. This brings me to a conversation around the Stoics. And I think that many people in today's society look to the Stoics and they say, wow, it is amazing how they could be so thoughtful, how they could control their emotions,

how they could be a version of a human that I wish to aspire to. As you've studied history, you've studied philosophy, and I'm assuming the Stoics as well, what are some of the lessons that you've taken away that you feel are most applicable to today's modern society? Are there certain things that stick out in your mind as things that folks could spend a little bit of time, learn, and have a outsized impact in a positive direction today? yeah at a most simple level that the philosophical life is the happiest life that's sort of a basic claim for Plato Aristotle Socrates the Stoics the philosophical life is the happiest life

everybody is after some form of happiness you might think more money will make you happier more power more lovers more fame and popularity whatever the case might be but you also have some sense that you know there are people with a lot of money who aren't happy people who are very famous who seem miserable people who have as many lovers as you could ever dream of and you know they don't seem quite satisfied fully so philosophy raises the claim that the examined life is not only worth living but is in some sense the pleasant the most pleasant the most just and the happiest life so that is i would say philosophy's major claim and it's the one that if you are trying to find happiness you should take seriously and they defend it they present it

and i think for myself and for so many people who have fallen in love with philosophy over the course of our lives it has proven itself to be accurate you know you're happy when you think about the fundamental questions you find yourself less desirous of things that don't bring you satisfaction it's i'll put it to uh put it to you this way my first philosophy professor who i i credit him a lot with giving me this path forward when he was introducing philosophy to us he said that philosophy gives you a well-ordered soul so that your reason your will and your desire are working together you reason about what is it good for me to desire you desire the things that your reason has shown you are good and your will is acting in consonance with your reason and desire

it's like a harmonious life uh kind of symphonic life as well in that sense that is the main takeaway and another one i would add is that questions that i think everybody raises from time to time about the meaning of life or about why good people suffer or why bad people seemingly seem to do well in the world you know those kinds of elementary questions whether they're moral or existential philosophers can it's not like those questions have no answers it's not like nobody has given us a step forward into thinking about them philosophy of all disciplines you can learn from religion needless to say from literature obviously but philosophy i think is underappreciated as an inquiry that takes us into the heart of human life and in doing so brings us as i say pleasure

joy, decency, and insight. When you say that a philosopher's life is kind of the happiest life, one of the things it begs is the fundamental questions that I think philosophy ultimately tries to spend time contemplating, analyzing, and getting answers to. Are there right answers? Are there individual single answers? Or is there an ever, you know, kind of constant pursuit, and the pursuit in some way is the answer itself. Like you can never get to what is the purpose of life. There is no right or wrong answer. There is no, you know, multiple choice,

make sure you get it right, pass, go, and move on to the next question. But in some ways, the whole idea is that there isn't one single answer or do I have that wrong? Well, there's progress in understanding. So you could develop your understanding of a question, of an issue,

but it's not the same as a clearly correct answer in some other discipline you know if somebody asks you the answer to a mathematical equation that's pretty straightforward if they ask you is it raining outside or isn't it here and now there's a pretty straightforward answer to that but if someone begins to ask you ask you what is the nature of human thought what is time how does time affect our categories of understanding? Was the world created or has it always existed? What does it even mean to raise questions like that? They don't have the same kind of correct answer as an inquiry in these other places does. But as I say, there is a sort of progress in philosophy where you step further and further into understanding the issue that you care about

and that you're talking about and thinking about it may not culminate in a correct answer that you could just distribute to everybody in the same way but somehow all of the philosophers are thinking at this level that the first task for people new to philosophy is to just enter into that world you know you could say at the outset why do we even want a correct answer about some of these questions. In other words, what would a correct answer look like about the relationship of time and morality, whether time is circular or linear? Say, okay, time is linear. Okay, you have a correct answer on the nature of time. Have you even understood what time is? There's always some further question. So it's hard to convey for people who aren't doing it. But one of the beautiful

things about progress in philosophy is in other disciplines, it's kind of like progress goes forward. Progress in philosophy, it's like it goes backwards. It goes to a more fundamental level. You're always getting closer and closer to some basis point, as opposed to going further and further along the development of a set of answers. Now, in some sense, to just paraphrase that very prosaically, no, there aren't correct answers, but people can have the completely wrong impression of that and be like, why would I want to study something that doesn't give me any answers? I'm looking for certainty. Why do I just want to be around people who are raising questions? Isn't that just like some sort of mental masturbation? It isn't. It isn't. There's a

realm that you can enter into more and more completely in the process of asking these questions. The questions don't keep reality away from you. The question drives you further into the heart of the matter but you sort of have to do it to um to experience it uh that's one thing i would say and then another pretty amazing it's kind of like this think about the five best movies you've ever seen or your five favorite songs or something where each of them has a claim to be particularly outstanding and now if someone were to ask you well you know which is which is the best one or rank them or, you know, compare them amongst themselves, they may each have a total right to their claim of greatness in a way that's not commensurable with the other ones and in a way

that can't be ranked. Philosophical inquiry is also like that. It's not always the case that Plato has refuted Parmenides or that Aristotle has refuted Plato. Refutation is not always the name of the game in philosophy. At times, it's just these great thinkers who have staked the claim to our attention. And it's like, you know, a beautiful song that you can't compare to another one or five beautiful artistic expressions that aren't reducible. When we think about the work that you do on a daily basis, the art of learning immediately jumps to mind. Talk to me a little bit about how you actually learned so much. When you're reading a book, what does that look like?

Are you just reading through it? Are you highlighting? Are you taking notes? How do you then explore some of these ideas? Do you just get on Google and kind of Google around and have 200 open tabs? Do you go when you seek out one specific source of information?

Like, how do you actually learn so much about topics that, frankly, are pretty ill-defined and can take you in so many different directions all at once I was lucky early on in my development because I was taught the way that I now practice which is read primary sources and read them carefully if you rely on google if you rely on a secondary source if somebody's telling you what you should think or what Plato thought then there's a big risk that something could go wrong so I learned my teachers taught me if you want to know what Plato thought you have to read Plato if you want to know what Aristotle

thought you have to read Aristotle now that's only one step because it's you know why would I have a school if that's the case I would just tell all my students go read Plato go read Aristotle the second piece of the puzzle that is so helpful is to have a guide who has also read that work for a long enough time to understand how it relates to the big conversation among the other thinkers and who can walk you through it help you see things that you wouldn't necessarily see on your own. So the study of primary source materials together with guidance is for me at any rate everything that I've learned I've learned that way. I don't usually rely on Google to learn something fundamental about these thinkers although don't get me wrong there are good

sources Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy there are good articles people do publish in academic journals and in other kinds of journals so you can learn in different ways but the lesson that I was taught early that stuck with me was that imagine you go to an intro philosophy class and they tell you Plato's Republic is a book about the ideal state which some people think Plato's Republic is a book about the ideal state and then you later learn well ideal is not a platonic concept Plato doesn't have a notion of an ideal that's something different from what he's talking about and he definitely doesn't have a notion of the state because what he calls the polis is not what we call the state so if I'm relying on a secondary interpretation a short form and someone

tells me yeah Plato's Republic's about the ideal state I actually haven't learned anything about what Plato thinks really so there's a challenge because what do we do when it comes to translations for example now the school of thought that I follow they paid a lot of attention to this they're like a translation of a Greek or a Latin or Arabic or Hebrew book it should be as literal as possible so that if Plato uses one word in the Greek it should always be translated as much as possible one word in the English you know so the translator could also be getting in the way of your understanding of the original book so these kinds of ideas here you know we don't want to take shortcuts. We want to understand Plato or whoever it is that we're reading as much as

possible on their own terms. That's what informs my study of these books. And I think that's one of the reasons I have had a kind of unique experience reading Dugan compared to a lot of people who work on him. You know, they will just Google him, read a Wikipedia, quick throw away, you know, that he said something crazy once or whatever the case might be. And on that basis, still dismiss him but because of my training you can't really make a judgment until you've read as much as possible of the original ideally in the original language thoughtfully carefully and precisely in doing so that's when all of the riches open up because you see there's more going on there than could be dismissed i do take there was a time where i wouldn't write in my books

because i thought it was sacrilegious that time has passed so i do now i underline i dog here i don't do any highlighting but it's uh it's very helpful whatever works for you whatever works when you're working through a book but you want to see like what's the argument how is this key term operating how does something he said here relate to something he said 20 pages ago it's not easy but it's worth you know what that's worth doing is so easy everything that's worth doing takes a little bit of practice and comes with a lot of frustration along the way but the reward is worth it. That's why we do it. Same, I think, with reading, especially reading the great books. So reading is obviously a core component of this kind of art of learning. But one of the things

that I personally find incredibly valuable is the conversation around the reading as well. So I can go and I can read the primary sources. I can go and I can even read maybe other people's critiques or support for those pieces. But then having the ability to converse and to challenge ideas, to have my ideas challenged, somewhat this like war of ideas ends up actually forging much more powerful, much more well thought out, better articulated ideas. How do you think about conversation and the intersection, if you will, of like the art of learning? Like what, where does that fit into your process? Yeah, conversation is crucial. Plato's dialogues, after all, are conversations. Plato doesn't write under his own name. He just gives us conversations, usually

Socrates and some other people but sometimes without Socrates and then the great books themselves are a conversation so Plato is responding to his predecessors Aristotle's responding to Plato Heidegger you know they're all talking to each other across the ages in their books so even just the reading is still a conversation across the books but yeah so I have a lot of people that I have private zoom calls with I do private tutoring I have seminars that I lead when I was in graduate school in an undergraduate school I had close friends that we would discuss these topics with it's nice because you have to be able to restate at least the basic arguments so that takes a little bit of practice and then other people may have seen things that

you didn't see which is beautiful and it's that back and forth that helps bring things to light i mean that's what the that's what socrates calls dialectic dialectic means through speech through logos through conversation sometimes it's a conversation we have with ourselves that's somehow thinking right we raise objections in our own uh silent mind in our soul so to speak but when you can do it with somebody else another beautiful thing about conversing especially around in my view philosophy but other topics as well with other people is it's a basis for a genuine friendship because the community of people who are assessing arguments about what's good what's just what's beautiful what's important how should we think about this we're all directed towards

truth together and so there's a community of inquiring minds that gets formed in those conversations and in those discussions which is really satisfying i should say that this is going to differ for different people like i'm pretty introverted and not particularly social as a rule so my first inclination is not to put together like a big study circle or a lot of people to be talking others will find that you know they need to have that in order to be getting into the ideas to remember them and to understand them but i personally am like you know the text the teacher also a book the conversation among the books and then my students that i work with and uh my friends that i talk to in small circles when you think about the school that you created

some of it or many would see that this was done out of necessity after being blacklisted from kind of the traditional university system. Talk a little bit about that process. How did you think to just go direct to people? How did you initially get it started and where did you find the first students? After I graduated with my PhD, I went to work as a financial services copywriter and I was doing private freelance tutoring. So I don't know if you could tell, I really love this topic. I love to talk about it. I love to teach it. And I had students who were working with me privately. Then I had somebody named Justin Murphy he runs otherlife.co invite me to teach under his rubric so he was also bringing some exiled academics under his umbrella to have them teach courses

for example on Rene Girard and on other thinkers he invited me to teach a class on Leo Strauss Leo Strauss is for me the gold standard teacher of the history of political philosophy he's a big part of what I do and why I do it so I accepted I taught this class on Strauss and what I noticed was that teaching scales. When I was doing the private tutoring, I was putting a lot of time into preparing for a single hour of one-on-one. I mean, I might do five or six hours of prep for $50 of one-on-one time, which is what I was charging when I started, okay, $50 an hour. But I couldn't do an hour of tutoring without really immersing myself in everything. I wanted to feel like I could be extremely valuable and it just wasn't sustainable. So doing the course with

justin showed me oh i could put in the same amount of work the same amount of time have 40 50 people in a seminar record it sell the recording scale the teaching reach more people and make better use of my time so that was such a success that i turned my existing notes on other courses that i had been teaching privately into video courses like this and uh it proved to be a success people are really happy with the materials and i'm glad to have them it's been economically viable and that was really how it got started you know i had to continue teaching after the blacklist thing because i just can't stop and uh it wasn't sustainable to do it it scaled well and it's proven to be better than i thought in a way because this was during covid in a way that i started to

scale and the universities are taking a step in the wrong direction as a rule a lot of professionals have come to be my students people in tech people in law people maybe close to retirement who want to reconnect with an original love for philosophy as well as students who just aren't satisfied with what's going on at the universities and colleges so i think the timing was right and uh i just consider it to be such a fortunate opportunity to teach that way outside of university because you know it could have been like blacklisted therefore no more opportunity to teach thankfully i have more now than i ever would have hoped for before when you think about uh what you are teaching now, how is it different than if you were a professor at a university? Like we

talked a little bit earlier how some of these universities are held hostage kind of by woke culture, by censorship, by the online mobs. Are there specific differences and things that you're able to teach now that maybe wouldn't be possible if you were inside of the legacy institutions? Yeah, it's not just the subject matter. It's everything about what I teach and how I want to teach it so I don't have to finish something in any allotted time you know I don't have just two hours a week or just four months a year or whatever the case is if there's a book that requires a deep dive then I can do a deep dive whether it's video lectures supplemented with seminars or some other format there's no limitation you could say the market is a limitation but

people who really want to learn they're already willing to go to whatever it is here that's required another thing is that i have a couple of courses on dugan i have a course on carl schmidt who was a actual nazi but a great legal thinker on leo strauss who in some circles is considered to be too reactionary on heidegger you know and on other figures who may be considered in many departments just too right wing that's a simplification but that's how they would be seen in many departments. And here, it's not an issue. If somebody has something important to say and I want to teach it, I can do so. That's on the left as well, by the way. I think Jacques Derrida is an author and a teacher worth studying. So that freedom, pick my subjects, pick the way that I want

to teach them, what I want to say about them, nobody hanging over my head telling me or my students what they are obligated to do or to hear or to see or you know not to see and not to hear we decide um it's just liberating it's brilliant it's a breath of fresh air not only for me as an instructor but the students who take the courses they tell me this is what we would have wanted from a university or this is what the universities once were or you know we've been looking for this type of thing everywhere but we couldn't find it uh incidentally too in a department of political science let's say i may not have been able to just propose a course on bitcoin and art but if i want to have a course on bitcoin and art in the millerman school i can do that if i want to have

guest lecturers i can do that so it's like you know you're the master of the house you decide and i'm always trying to provide value for the students i'm always trying to make sure that i'm meeting a need that's there but otherwise it's total freedom now i hope it doesn't come to the point. And I certainly am not doing anything to hasten this, that the platform I'm on tries to kick me off or, you know, that I can no longer reach students or receive payments. Everything is very decent. There's no sort of ideological indoctrination in this school. And we're not trying to be just controversial for the sake of controversy. As you can see, important thinkers, important books, important questions. That's the name of the game. So I don't see cancellation in

the cards here. But, you know, there are people who can no longer receive PayPal payments and who are kicked off other kinds of processors. And here maybe is something where, you know, Bitcoin and other kinds of technologies like that can also serve a place in the educational, on new educational institutions moving forward. What's fascinating to me about you and your work is that you can look at an individual, take somebody on the left and somebody on the right. You just described an individual who you said was a literal Nazi, yet you can separate out the disqualification of some of their ideas, the distaste and the – in many ways just malice or nefariousness of their ideas, but not yet disqualify all of their ideas. And so it's – in many cases in society, we try to put people in these buckets, good person, bad person, good ideas, bad ideas. But what it seems like you're able to do is you're able to study an individual, their writings, their teachings, their thoughts, all of the content they've created, the conversations and interviews they've done, whatever, and then separate out and almost go idea by idea or thought by thought and then say, I like these ideas.

These are ones I agree with. these are ones I find interesting and I want to spend more time on. And then these other ideas are things that are classified in your view as negative or something you don't agree with or that you don't want to spend more time on. Why do you think you're able to do this when so much of society just labels at the surface level, at the individual or at the kind of collection of ideas? They don't have the ability to actually break down the individual ideas and be able to agree with some of the ideas of one individual but also disagree with other extreme ideas they may have i'm not sure what the reason is for most people but in my case my family's from the former soviet

union i think there's a kind of autobiographical element to this my dad's family is jewish my mom's family is german so have like germans jews former soviets you know there's on one hand the german intellectual tradition is full of brilliant thinkers who are also you know kind of like anti-semitic or not very favorably disposed toward the jews and the jewish tradition has many brilliant thinkers who maybe aren't favorably predisposed to other figures and then there's the russian and i was born in canada so there's like a sort of politeness that allows me to be with all of these different positions in the first place and my training you know so all of these factors and influences together they just produce to this result i guess that i don't find it

necessary to shut down a thinker when you can see that there's something there like i'm not saying that you have to go out and you know hug a nazi or something like that we're not just talking about anybody with a controversial opinion here there are all kinds of knuckleheads and much worse but what do you do when it comes to someone who's obviously brilliant what do you do when it comes to someone you can clearly learn from. We all know the proverb of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. So you have to decide in each case, do you want to do that? Or do you want to raise the baby and see what comes of it, so to speak? You just learn with enough experience that there are people who would like you to throw out a thinker entirely, not because that thinker was

a Nazi, but because in studying them, you will learn something that's dangerous for these people's control over your mind. They want to control what you think. They want to control how you feel, and they don't want to give you any outlet, any escape. And so it's very convenient to raise this guilt by association charge against people. Oh, the only reason you're reading Heidegger is because he was a nazi and you must be one the only reason you're reading schmidt is because you're a neo-nazi or a semi-fascist that's bogus that's manipulation that's gaslighting in a big way so separating it out helps us to be free now i know people listening to this care about their freedom well if everything is getting collapsed you know the roof is falling in on us and everywhere these

accusations of guilt by association and fascist and nazi are affecting our ability to move we're just trapped under the rubble there's no freedom in that we need to separate things out we need to make these distinctions and just find our point of orientation so in that sense it's a little bit of the autobiography it's a little bit of the experience it's i see i think it's seeing through the way that these accusations are being used to blind us and to control us and you know it's philosophy philosophy teaches you that you just have to be patient with great ideas. Doesn't necessarily mean you follow them everywhere they lead, but you don't even know where they're going to lead until you start looking at them carefully.

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go check out compassmining.io today. I thought that we could wrap up with a couple of rapid fire questions that I'd be fascinated to hear your perspective on or your answers. The first one is, when you talk to individuals, are there one or two questions that you ask them that help you get at how they think, what their worldview is, or who they are as a person? Usually if I'm working with a student who's just come to me, I'll ask them, what are you thinking about right now? like what thoughts are on your mind right what questions are concerning you what have you been reading lately because everybody has something present to them you know they're worried about i have one student he's really worried about where things are going in education somebody else is really worried about masculinity the attack on masculinity traditional masculinity what does it

mean to be a man somebody else their primary concern is with how do i be a believer how can i be a believer today in a world that seems to be attacking faith so i like to ask people you know, what, what's there for you now? What are your concerns? And then that's where we start. What about your favorite book? If you had to answer the question, you know, I want to learn more about philosophy. Where should I start? What would that answer be? So the two major philosophers for me are Plato and Heidegger. They're difficult to approach if you're just starting, but I would recommend Plato's Republic or something by Plato just to get your feet wet even if you don't understand it even if you feel lost it could be Plato's

apology which is where Socrates is speaking before the Athenians in defense of his life after they have found him guilty of corrupting the youth and sentenced him to death Plato and Heidegger the beginning and end of philosophy those are my sweet spots although like I say you're not going to get it at first glance so here's where I mention all the credit everything I've ever learned in philosophy, I want to give like 99% of the credit to this guy named Leo Strauss. So one of the best ways to get an introduction to the history of political philosophy is by reading Leo Strauss. He's the one who taught a generation of students that you should read the whole book carefully. He's the one who taught a generation of students not to rely on bad

translations. And he's the one who showed that it's possible to think about the old questions. they're not irrelevant anymore. We don't just learn about Plato, we learn from Plato. All of those kinds of insights I owe to Strauss. And so that's what I would recommend, Plato, Heidegger, and Leo Strauss. When you think about your daily schedule, somebody who studies philosophy, someone who is familiar with the Stoics, people may think that you just sit in the dark all day and just think to yourself and you're meditating and so calm. What does your daily schedule look like in in reality it doesn't look like that i have three kids okay i have two boys and a girl i work from home my kids just are uh in the other room right now home from lunch so it's always

hectic it's always crazy married 10 years uh in two days so life is full it's very full it's not empty i'm not on a mountain i'm not all by myself and i'm not in the desert okay uh students business business partners family friends kids it's everything it's a full life but you just learn to navigate that life in a different sort of way uh i read in the evenings i read in the mornings i read in the day i made my work obviously my study as well so when i'm doing work tutoring or teaching or recording i'm also that's just lucky in my case not everybody's going to be able to do that take your desire to read philosophy and merge it with your work but um but that's what it looks like. It looks like a full life, family, friends, kids, the whole shebang, and finding

some time to read, to write, to take classes, to listen to people, and to think. What about diet and sleep? Do you do anything special there? No, I don't think I would be a good role model here in any way. Sometimes I sleep too much, sometimes too little. I was a vegan for a long time. Now, I'm not so sure that's particularly healthy. So I have no advice about that. Everybody's got to find what works for them. I'm surprised anybody could just eat steak all day like Jordan Peterson does, but I guess that's good for some people. Um, what can I say? Yeah. I wouldn't take myself as a role model here in any case. We got to get you a, uh, eight sleep mattress. We've got, uh, these, uh, these mattresses, uh, a company that I invested in and as a sponsor of the podcast,

they, uh, have like a, a thermo regulated, uh, mattress. So you can make it super cold and hence the name Eight Sleep, Get Eight Hours. It's the one thing I'm religious about now. My last question for you is kind of a fun one. Do you believe in aliens? You think that there's life off of earth and is there anything in history or via the study of philosophy

that would suggest a kind of non-human life that we should consider? There's nothing in the philosophers that I study and that I teach on this topic. Although in my opinion, that shouldn't stop us from thinking about it because if we're trying to consider the meaning of human history human life in the cosmos obviously aliens are a relevant consideration so except for that which is that i think they have a place in our thinking i don't really have

a position on whether there's evidence whether they do or don't exist i only think that uh it would be a relevant piece of information you know because let's say somebody argues that human nature is fixed and then when humans and aliens first mix or meet some sort of weird transformation happens by osmosis well okay that kind of thing would have to be taken into consideration but otherwise i'm agnostic about i don't know enough about it i used to be pretty sure well okay who's this guy's name is like uh stephen dreer or something like that anyways aliens probably do exist but i don't really know the details yeah it is um uh it is one of the questions that fascinates me. Because if we discovered aliens tomorrow, it would be absolutely mind bending for billions of

people here on earth. And it would have an impact on so many different things. Yet, when you think about the importance of it, so few people actually care to think or investigate it. And so there's just this dichotomy between, wow, that would be pretty crazy. But nobody really cares too much. So I don't know. I just find it very fascinating. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, thinking through what would it be like, what if they were this, what if they were that, right? What would we have to change in our own self-understanding if, if there were aliens? That's not my primary area, but for sure, there's a lot to think about there. And in general, you know, there's so much worth thinking about. We need all the help we can get from the old books up to date with our new situation,

our new science, our new technology, our new insights. It's brilliant. You'll never be bored. It's an amazing world and it's there for us to consider. Michael, where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about the school or any of the books that you've written? So the shortest link is duganbook.com. You'll see my two books, my school, my newsletter, my social media, and all of that. I have a lot of free videos on YouTube on political philosophy. And that's where I would go, duganbook.com. That'll take you everywhere else you need to go. Awesome. Well, Michael, thank you so much for your time today. I've learned a ton, and I've really enjoyed looking into not only the work that you've done, but also just kind of your worldview and understanding how you think about investigating these individuals, your ability to separate a number of their different ideas, and really the commendable ability that you have to hold various ideas that may conflict with each other kind of in your head at once and not necessarily go in either direction, but just contemplate, you know, where have we been? been? What have people in the past thought about and spoken about? And then what is the impact on

today's society? And what does that mean for where we're going? It's a task that I don't think ever ends. But watching you do it and kind of learning more about your work has been pretty cool for me. So I appreciate you taking the time to talk today. Thanks. It's been my pleasure. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive three-week training program with over 50 live events. We teach you

exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the world's best Bitcoin and crypto companies, go to thecryptoacademy.io to learn more. Again, that's thecryptoacademy.io. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with your friends, and I'll see you all for the next episode.