TRASHFUTURE - Bastards of DOGE feat. Quinn Slobodian

Episode Date: February 25, 2025

Quinn Slobodian joins us to discuss his new book, Hayek’s Bastards (subtitle subtitle) - which traces the syncretic relationship of scientific racism, techno-solutionism, and the quest to destroy the cathedral to Neoliberalism’s crisis of mission in the 1990s. Check out HAYEK’S BASTARDS here! Get access to more Trashfuture episodes each week on our Patreon! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s UK Tour here: https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Hello everybody, welcome to this free episode of TF. It's the free one. It is indeed the free one. And it's also the November is unwell one. However, worry not we have a Full compliment of ourselves here today. Nevertheless, it is Riley Milo Hussein It is Nate and we have returning for I believe the three Pete I believe this is his third time on the show if you count left unread which I do it is Quinn Slebotian Author of a new book high ex bastards the neoliberal roots of the Neoliberal Roots of the Populist, right? Thank you, a guy with, by the way, I have to say, great taste in first names.

How is it going? Great to have you on the show today. Yeah, good to be here. I love what you guys are doing with the future. Yeah, it's, it's pretty great. Well, you know what, hey, the other thing, we're gonna talk a lot about your book. We're also gonna talk about Alex Karp's new book,

which kind of could have been written as a postscript to yours as a worked example, I think. And we're also going to be talking at the same time about a almost IQ Christian revivalist nationalist meeting that has been taking place in London in the last couple of weeks called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. And really all of this is quite, yes, the arc. It's arcing. All of this is, I think, quite instructive because what your book does is I see it as basically your book draws together the fact that Big Balls is planting a bunch of C4 charges under the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It connects that to the sort of very specific ethno-nationalist dimensions of the modern right. And more importantly, situates that in a clash

between elites, an intra capital fight, not some kind of reaction against elites as it's so often portrayed. So I am very excited to be talking about that. But before we get into that, a couple pieces of news. Number one, the CIA is reportedly planning its largest mass firing since the church commission. Oh, no.

It seems like America's going to a well-regulated militia deep state rather than any of this bloated public sector nonsense. But it is very, you just know that the Jews, the Dulles brothers brought to that organization has been just gone for decades when they can be given like a Bay of Pigs level gutting. And then the guy's doing it's just on stage being like, I've actually become meme to an audience of stony silence. While two of his children who've been spliced with spider DNA start developing uncontrolled chitin growth. And they're doing fucking nothing about it,

I guess because they're all millennials with anxiety or something. I remember when something when they were reported in their anti-Woke, anti-DEI muscle movement, they had covered up a bunch of photos at CIA headquarters of any women on the Board of Honor or whatever it was. There's something with people's either official portraits or in memoriam stuff. And all I can think of is just being like the facile comparison there is going to be like, oh, it's Iran or the Taliban. It's like, no, like I would imagine the Iranians are like, no, we wouldn't even do that. What are y'all doing? This is just weird. You guys are just being freaks.

What if it was, what if the CIA was dudes only? What if we made the CIA into a real sausage? I've read enough Norman Mailer books that basically explain exactly what that was. And it sounds really bad. So I don't, I don't want to go back. At the same time as they're doing this, they're just like, oh yeah, we want to get rid of every USAID program. That's like developing state capacity in Iran or whatever. Like how come we're giving them state capacity?

I like to imagine a kind of just a remake of all the John LeCarre novels where there's just nothing happening. There's just like cattle grazing quietly in like an underdeveloped country. People are just living their lives. It's just still meaningfully a democracy. They sort of have a few social programs left and it's sort of fine. Yeah, consent's just bubbling along. Yeah.

Why can't the US government do some capacity building in the UK? Yeah, but I was going to say, right, even like the dismantling of the security state, it fits into a lot of what you're talking about, Quinn, which is this dream of some people on the right of taking the state which exists to like make sure that capitalist social relations keep getting rebuilt and like, like, quote unquote woke CIA is genuinely kind of part of that. And just like saying, no, we have a different dream of how a society could be built. One that doesn't even pay lip service to like building consensus among the governed, right? Yeah. I mean, I think it's the kind of technological republic carp thing, which is,

you know, surveillance capitalism is global, which it is, that everyone is quite literally telling on themselves at all times anyway, you know, to as many people as will listen. So the kind of function of intelligence kind of becomes called into question, right? When I think, you know, all you're doing is kind of funding pro-freedom hip hop groups, while everyone else is already sort of announcing their radical politics to anyone who will pay attention. Yeah, in effect, it's like on the one hand, they are destroying a thing that is explicitly there to help and support what it is that they're trying to do. But the thing that they're destroying, it appears to have sort of, when looked at in the context of like today's world, like funding an anti-Russian hip hop group in Georgia does seem a little bit anachronistic, you know, in a world that is so complex.

Yeah, it's all drill now. Yeah, that's right. Before we get into this in earnest, which we will, I wanted to talk about one other story, which is revisiting an old friend. This is of course, Klarna. I think this also fits into some of what we're talking about in the book and some of the concerns of the people you talk about in the book, Quinn. And of course, Klarna, as you may or may not remember if you're listening, is a quote unquote fintech, meaning it's an unregulated bank that lends money to people so that they can make consumer purchases. And it's like a Swedish tech unicorn. It's very successful.

It's like micro loans for fancy pants kind of thing. Yes, exactly. Wasn't there a thing about like they were trying to do it, you could pay for your Deliveroo on Klarna kind of thing, like your British equivalent of DoorDash. And they're like, oh, you can do three easy installments on your dinner. And it's like, I think, yeah, on a long enough timeline. It's like the Grameen Bank for Comme des Garcons. The price of Lutifisk has gone up on Deliveroo? It's BCCI, but for buying a Shine order. So this story though, is that if you remember,

Klarna, a couple years ago, or about one year ago, was very, very proud of laying off huge numbers of its staff, especially staff and customer facing roles, because they can be replaced with AI. So in an interview with Bloomberg TV, Sebastian Simitkowski, the CEO of Klarna, said, I'm of the opinion that AI can already do all the jobs that we as humans do. It's the question of how we apply and use it. And by the way, this is from February 15th. This is from like 10 days ago. I think that what we've done internally hasn't been reported so widely, but we stopped hiring a year ago.

We're only 3,500 people now. Last year we were 4,500. We have a natural attrition like every tech company and what we're simply shrinking. We have less need for photographers, predominantly the creative stuff and less of the day-to-day stuff. We've gotten rid of our entire customer service department and so on and so on. Now, this was him. He's also doing interviews with Sequoia. This is a guy who is doing a lot of talking up the value of his company to Wall Street on the basis that there is soon going to be not a single person working there except for him. And then the cold and that's for like a year he's doing that. And then he does that on February 15th

again. February 19th. Four days later. Four days later, Sebastian Simitkowski tweets, I have just had an epiphany. Oh, in a world of AI, nothing is actually as valuable as humans. Wow. This is like, this is, this is absolutely a line that you would say to your wife if you were trying to like convince it to open up your marriage. I've just had an epiphany. I can buy those hideous Balenciaga shoes on Deliveroo. Yeah, I can buy the Mickey Mouse ones, the ones that make you look like a Disney character. It says, okay, so you can laugh at us for realizing it too late,

but we're going to kick off the work to allow Klarna to become the best company in the world at offering a human to speak to when you contact technical support. Oh my God. They gloated! They were talking up their book. They were, they were, they wanted everybody to know that they have fired fucking everybody. If Klarna has accidentally cleaned out your bank account because it thinks you've bought two pairs

of Balenciaga shoes, right? There's not a fucking human you can talk to. And that was the case for a year. And they're like, oops, actually, that's super important that there's a person there that can't be replaced by AI. We fucked up. But of course, it's because this is a CEO.

He's like, what an inspiration. But it's like, oh yeah, it's weird. This is coming out at the same time also that Microsoft is like, yeah, we're not building any more AI data centers. There's not enough demand. Okay. Okay, cool.

Yeah, well, I mean, isn't it kind of captured in the Musk thing that Trump then re truthed this week where Musk said everyone needs to say five things that they did that was productive last week and nobody did it. And then Musk sent to Trump the fact that you can just feed that prompt into grok and say, make up five things I did last week that are not provable, but are very easy. And it just made five bullshit bullet points. And Musk and Trump are both like, look, it's easy.

I mean, in the end, you actually do need someone to feed the prompt to the plagiarism machine to lie. Right. And maybe that's what Clarence is realizing. Like, oh, shit, we actually do need that. Like first instance of like human locution to set off this like cascade of nonsense. The other thing though, right. And this is something that I think where I sort of tie this back into your book and we can sort of start with a bit of a view from 20,000 feet of what your book is and does and what it, you know, well, the claims that it makes.

A big part of why the neoliberals that you've written about now in a couple of books, I mean like Mont Pelerin society people, the kinds of people who are on the board of Prospera, like the ER think tankers who have been on this mission ever since basically the New Deal to protect wealth from democracy. How in the 1990s, and sort of when we talked about William Rees-Mogg's book a few years ago, this is something that I think he was very concerned with, which is at some point the value of human labor will be nothing and we need to figure out what that world is going to look like, or at least the value of organized human labor is going to be nothing, and we need to figure out how to stay on top in that world. And I mean, I see Clarida as

just making a move in that direction, but prematurely because the technology they were trying to do it with is sort of stupid. Yeah. So like, I just wonder, can you, with that in mind, can you sort of start situating us in what the concerns that your book deals with are? So if we can begin putting them into history a little bit. Yeah. I mean, the book is interested in this development over the last few decades where neoliberals who had actually been kind of a bit suspicious of basing truth claims in hard science, like Hayek famously was actually kind of suspicious of people who claimed to be able to have access to the hard only truth.

He thought that that's what Marxists did and social engineers did and Sam Simonians did. They tried to act like they had access to the one true price or the one true value and you actually needed to have like a looser form of social organization which is what the market was. It was like set a bunch of laws in place, put in a price system and then people discover knowledge for themselves. But in the last few decades, partially in response to like big pushback against the civil rights movement. Feminism, climate change activism, the right wing of the market neoliberal world has become much more interested in grounding its claims in hard science. So the case in point is the IQ fetishism of Silicon Valley and elsewhere that really kicked off with the bell curve in the 1990s that I do a

kind of deep dive into in the book. And the idea there was like, actually we can basically rank humans and there is no such thing as human equality and we have to stop pretending like there is. So how can we rethink systems so that they can plug into people's like, hierarchically ranked capacity to be good market actors and persons of

value and individuals worth dealing with. And then as you're suggesting, what do you do with like the great dross and deadweight of people at that bottom of that hierarchy? And the solutions are pretty dramatic. And some of them, for those people who get really into gold and crypto, they're basically embracing a naturalized understanding of money that is not compatible with modern capitalism, right? If you think that like a gold bar equals a certain amount of money and needs to always be that way,

or a Bitcoin can never be, you know, created more than what already exists, then you basically make a credit economy impossible and you crash the world economy through your free market radicalism and then you deal with the dross of the humanity by, you know, building walls and keeping them out, which is the Rees-Mogg and Davidson model. Like how do you remedievilize and re-fortify like spaces for the high net worth, high IQ individuals who can still make use of the hinterlands and the surplus populations without of course, you know, empowering them or giving them even basic social rights.

So that's the kind of conundrum which seemed pretty speculative and farfetched even when I was writing this book over the last few years, but like obviously feels a lot more like what you read about in the news when you look at the headlines now, like when you wake up. Yeah, I mean, like it's funny, it's almost a bit of a parallel with Alex Carp's book, right? Because Alex Carp, CEO of Palantir, wrote a book called The

Technological Republic, which we're going to get into. And this to me feels like a book that he wrote as a kind of, I don't know, Jeremiah against like a Kamala Harris administration that hasn't just turned the CIA over to Palantir.

And that is like just maintaining the kind of institutions of what you might call center neoliberalism, you know, things like USAID, things like the CIA, all these things. And so when it comes out now, it's like, oh, you're just describing the world that is, right? And it's much the same with your book where it's like, oh yeah, no, this is just what, you know, like I say, this is the connection between big balls planting C4 under the Department of Housing, Urban Development, a bunch of like race scientists, essentially. Yeah. And also I think that like there's a degree to which anecdotally at least, you

don't have to be within the inner sanctum of like the eugenicist circles because I do think that the idea of IQ and the idea of, yeah, this, oh, we've got this objective thing that determines what your all human potential is, is something that I've encountered like in university settings, for example, that like there's that kind of like paternalism and, and call it maybe even soft eugenics. Like that is a really common thing in my experience, at least in the United States. But then it's like seeing this happen where you realize that like, there isn't really any paternalism or gentle touch about this in the way these guys talk about it. They're basically like, it's somewhere between... Yeah, you said re-medievalization and just

the plot of H.G. Wells, the time machine. What you're describing and all the surplus humanity is just all I can think of is like, oh yeah, Moorlocks and Eloy. You guys have just decided you're Eloy and everybody else is a Moorlock. And it's just like, yeah, they're just cave creatures and whatever. Lump and proletariat but physically deformed somehow. To me, it's like lots of non-reactionaries believe in IQ but I think IQ as an objective measure is a reactionary thing. And it's very, very strange to see how much this is pivoted from the way tech and the people in the circles like Palantir have represented it to what seems to be just a switch flipping and immediately turning into like,

oh no, no, these people have no intrinsic value as humans. Their social thing is equality. It's basically... I mean, you woke up one morning and all of a sudden, stuff that you would just see from the guys with statues and glowing eyes as their avatars on social media is now being said by people like who have been tapped to be in charge of the, I don't know, the FBI. The Munich Security Conference. I mean... Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and you know a lot more about this than I do. I just see what I see in the headlines, but it's just, it's a shocking acceleration of that, I guess. And so yeah, to me, like, I didn't expect it to happen

this quickly. And I also, like Riley said earlier, didn't expect so much of it to be kind of like an insure conservative, intra reactionary spat, I guess struggle. Yeah, exactly. There, it's of course, important to get to the last couple chapters of the time machine, right? Because then you find out that the Eloi are being raised as food for the Morlocks. They're like, they are basically like, you know, it doesn't end well for the Elohi. And I think that's actually kind of part of the story. So one of the things I start with in the chapter I have about what I call neurocasts, like

this idea that there's like IQ social groups that now should form the basis of ruling hierarchies in the minds of right-wing libertarians is the Michael Young's book, The Rise of the Meritocracy from the early 1960s. Michael Young, Toby Young's father. Toby Young's father. Toby Young's father. That coined the term meritocracy. It's interesting because very early in that book, they come up with a computer named Pamela,

which has a perfect IQ of 100, and everyone's IQ is then measured against it. But that book is about, you is about the sort of Obama, Kamala, Biden-esque meritocracy arrangement where people who are better are given more access and rise educationally and socioeconomically. And then there's an uprising led by women, actually, and workers on the 1st of May of like, this is like literally 2028 or something.

That's quite soon. And the idea is that the rejection of the meritocracy will come from like the mob, basically the angry mob, which feels excluded from the privileges of everyday life. And I feel like the Silicon Valley embrace of IQ is trying to figure out how to game that outcome, right? Also trying to game the outcome of time machine, which is like, how can you basically get

the Morlocks on your side? How can you conscript the Morlocks to attack your enemies? How can you make sure that the mob attacks the other people while you still enable and empower people who you think of as being qualitatively better than others? And then meanwhile, carp style,

how can you sort of use the prosthetic of computers or Pamela in the rise of meritocracy example as like an extension of your capabilities. So there, I feel like the interesting thing about the Silicon Valley, right? Is they're quite concerned and aware of the possibility of like backlash and resentment and envy. And their whole project is kind of trying to co-op that, preempt it, get out ahead of it. And, you know, that absurd spectacle of Musk in the big black dark MAGA hat and the sunglasses dancing around on stage at CPAC is like him thinking he's accomplished that perfectly, right? That he's somehow synthesized, like,

the populist anger of the left behinds and made it work for the smallest number of elite super geniuses. Someone said that it was like the nerds in the football team getting together or something on Twitter and he like reposted that saying like, exactly. Yeah, because it's all high school for him. God, I hate him so much. He's such a fucking loser. And that's what I hate about him the most. Like, yes, he's evil, but why does he have to be such a fucking dweeb? It's just, oh, oh, it's like nails on a chalkboard anytime he does anything.

If we wanted to talk about what you're saying, Quinn, in a bit of a different way, this like campaign to get out ahead of and harness the resentment of people who are being even more immiserated by a world that's designed to lift you up, right? You could really do quite a bit worse than a story about humanity where inequalities are natural, in fact, beneficial and necessary and are not contingent, right? Where it's just like, no, there are some, the people over there who are suffering are suffering because they're dumb and they need to suffer because they're dumb. And if they don't suffer while being dumb,

they'll inflict their dumbness on you. And that's really the flip side of like the crusade against DEI, for example, which is dumb people who are naturally dumb are being put into positions where their dumbness can be inflicted upon you. That's, that's the story that the right is telling about this, right? And you know, when you look at what it actually is, it's like, okay, well, no, it's a system to build consent to be governed among minorities because it is sort of paying quite a bit of lip service to a lot of minority concerns

about a quite majoritarian world. Yeah. DEI was not eliminating structural racism and rolling out Marxism through the institutions, obviously. It was an apology eliminating structural racism and like, you know, rolling out Marxism through the institutions, obviously. It was, it was a apologia for it. It was an apology for structural racism. Yeah, that's what it was doing. It was, it wasn't fixing it. It was just trying to make it more palatable. And so when you think of it in those terms, it's like, oh no,

you want to ratchet up the inequality in your favor so much that the idea, even the idea of making it more palatable except by saying what you're going to get out of this is that somebody's below you. That's really all you're going to get from this is someone's below you. It's like that belief in natural hierarchy, isn't it? Like just that like hierarchy is indisputable that like it's sort of it's natural law. Yeah. Yeah. No. And I think that the way that nature plays into this is kind of important.

Like it might seem that in my book, the attention to things like anthropology or even sociobiology might seem kind of beside the point, but I've been thinking a lot about Elon Musk recently, as I'm sure we all have. And one thing that I've realized is that for him, the woke mind virus is not a metaphor.

I think he thinks about the mind and the computer and social media in an interconnected sort of seamless way and drawing on explicitly Richard Dawkins, who was the person who wrote about viruses of the mind first in the early 1990s. And he thinks that open AI and Gemini, as he says, ingested the woke mind virus in their training data and was infected with the woke mind virus. And now his explicit goal, as he sees it above all, even seems to have eclipsed the Mars mission for the time being, is to build an alternative network through Grok, which is free of the woke mind virus, but even maybe better put, is infecting people

with an alternative mind virus. I think his obsession with memes is not symbolic or sort of superficial. I think he actually thinks that he is, you know, spreading meaning in politics in a literal way into people's, like, their frontal cortex through the posts that he's making. Like I think that's science for him. In this blurry, wired magazine ass, like Kevin Kelly, 1990s swarm way of thinking about what a mind is and what the internet is. That's what I've come to realize.

They do see themselves as scientific thinkers. So understanding how they see science is actually kind of important to getting at the root of their project. Yeah. It also, I think it illustrates why scientifically they will be like, well, we have a definite and impenetrable set of interlocking beliefs that automatically exclude anything vaguely egalitarian as wrong and therefore a kind of, as a mind virus, right? As anything like that. There is an egalitarianism is seen, any kind of egalitarianism, even token egalitarianism is seen as a foreign body. It's seen as an infection.

Well, and it's also, you know, it's the same way and you get a tickle in your throat before you get a really full blown cold. Um, I think that DEI programs, as superficial as they are, they actually saw them as like that tickling in your throat. Like this is the beginning of what could be, you know, a full blown infection, so to speak, like in the social network. Would you say it's an infection of the body politic caused by fundamentally lesser humans that has to be rooted out root and branch?

Yeah, absolutely. Where have we seen that before? I'm trying to play. All I can say is that the worm in RFK's brain must be relieved about all this discussion of a different mind virus. Who do you think's running the show? Yes, yes, that's right. We have to look for theoretical brain parasites.

That's the most important thing. Does this kind of reach the point? Because so much of this is obviously the sort of endless search of the the cathedral, right? Like what we've spoken about on the show. You're constantly looking for phantoms and constantly looking for demons and people that you believe are haunting you or undermining you and so on. And this must end with the RFK virus going to war with the work mine virus that someone will accuse as infected Donald Trump or something, right? Like at some point the viruses do have to like have a showdown. Like RFK's worm will meet somewhere on the mountaintop with the woke man virus like incarnate.

But will the RFK like mind virus be like the anti-woke virus? I don't know. I mean, it will be sort of interesting to figure out which of the sort of like Trump administration people will be accused of being woke first. Yeah. I mean, I think that first of all, I want to know about more about the difference between a virus and a bacteria, but that's sort of a side question. I mean, I actually think it's more about which discipline they come from, because

I think basically these guys are actually scared of biology. I think they're, I mean, the Brian Johnson stuff is perfect, right? Bro's like on a laptop in a hyperbaric chamber, like sending emails. Like they're trying to create clean rooms for their own existence. And I think they're basically engineers that love physics and hate biology.

They don't like the messiness of mutation and the strange outcomes of complex orders. They just want to be able to create spaces in which it's totally controlled. And when they're not, they go crazy, which is what happened to Musk with Twitter. It was it was too much of a biological space and he wanted to be able to keep the viruses under control.

It is very amusing that Brian Johnson is doing like Goku style hyperbaric training, but to get really, really good at generating emails. That is endlessly amusing. There was a disco clip that went around that I just could not watch even a second of, but he is apparently dancing, he's hitting the dance floor too. He was re-engineering the plot of the film Bubble Boy.

I want to read from your book to situate some of, because what we're talking about, right, what we are talking about is the culmination of something. It is the culmination of an attempt that has been happening since the 1930s to strategically reorient the US state and the British state as well, but in the global north to reorient the state and what it does away from anything that looks like vague egalitarianism, Keynesianism, and so on. Redistribution, yeah.

Yeah. Anything that looks like that, to make basically to try to make it more Victorian essentially, right? And you have, you've written several books in this subject, right? Crack Up Capitalism is about, I think the geographical dimensions of that, like where are there places where these kinds of hyper-libertarians have been able to like make their beachheads into reality? Places like Prospera, Hong Kong, Singapore, Balaji Srinivasan's network state, like all these things. Dubai.

Yeah, exactly. And so I think this is in many ways a continuation of the same story, but a little bit more recent and drawing to sort of contemporary politics a bit more. So you write, moments of global economic crisis allow for the breakthrough of eccentric and exhilaratingly novel forms of politics. They don't appear from nowhere. They have their own intellectual lineages and material preconditions. And we can understand the peculiar hybrids of extreme market ideology, far-right authoritarianism, and social conservatism without familiarizing ourselves with the tangled genealogies traced in this book. And one of the things that I really like, something that I mentioned to you before we

started recording, is that your book highlights something that I agree with that I don't think is talked about enough, which is that the ongoing battle over the soul of what neoliberalism is going to be now that the global neoliberal order is basically dead, right? Is not being, it has been, the one that's been being fought since like the financial crisis, which is like a big inflection point in your book. It's not fought between, you know, hoary handed sons of toil who want to return to a more vigorous life before

Deloitte had pride floats and like then woke capital on the other side. But it's a family squabble of how to be capitalist, how capitalist should we be, how much consent should we build among the people we're exploiting. And rather than trying to build support for capitalism by managing its more corrosive influences, which I think we can agree is a mission that would always fail. We know that because it has, so that hegemony is nice and predictable and undisrupted and everything can be insured and financialized and so on. And another that was trying to revel in its destructiveness and cut the Gordian knot of its contradictions by reifying every

equality by making every equality natural and good and fuck you if you're not rich, as opposed to making it, trying to make it seem contingent. So I think, and you say, the book shows that these contemporary iterations of the far right emerged within neoliberalism and not in opposition to it. So we've sort of alluded to this a little bit. Like these Mont Pelerin society thinkers who are virulent anti-communists to the point where they're like McCarthyist about their own state departments and stuff. They begin, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, having a bit of an existential crisis, which is where some of these focuses on like race,

IQ and gold become completely unavoidable. Right? But let's, let's start the story there. Yeah. I mean, the nineties is a really interesting, it's sort of like the crux point of the book because on the face of it, of course it looks like the neoliberals have won, right? The Soviet Union is dead. Communism is discredited. It looks like there's only one game left in town. I mean, literally, Mayak is getting the presidential medal of freedom. And yet they, there's even like this great Wall Street Journal profile from 1991 that

I include in the book where the journalist is at a meeting of the Mont Pelerin society. He's like, for some reason they don't seem that happy. And why are they still worried? Well, they think that the red menace has gone green and that environmentalists now are the ones who are out to strangle competition and free markets. They think that feminists and civil rights activists are now becoming the new kind of shock troops of collectivism and anti-capitalism. And this is happening even now through the institutions, which they kind of thought would be the protectors of the capitalist order.

So there was a fear that Jacques Delors was turning the European Union into something that was going to roll out socialism from above. So they needed to make these kind of more, these different alliances to block, you know, the rise and take over of, you know, what you would call now kind of woke politics. I mean, that's that story written back now almost 35 years. And the way that they go about it, though, I think is really interesting. And this actually connects to a lot of what we're seeing today, which is like what Gramsci talked about was you can either have a war of maneuver or a war of position, right? So using like an analogy to the First World War, you can either build trench lines and move close, slowly towards your enemy or you can kind of go over the top and try to like quickly take their position by force. And a lot of the neoliberal project has been about a war of position.

I mean, you think about slowly building up institutions so there it's like international investment law or like changing laws around antitrust, you know, corroding the rights of consumers and workers and bolstering the rights of managers and investors. But one of the wild things about the nineties is you get these thinkers like Murray Rothbart, especially who's like, wait a sec, we don't need to just slowly restrain, you know, the masses from above. The masses are on our side. Like the masses love competition. They love rich people. They love to like take libidinal pleasure and like crushing people who are weaker than them. So we just need to like let the mob go. So the inspiration from the 90s into the 2000s was like,

instead of being worried about populism, you make links to populists. So the Alternative for Germany party started by liberal economists, but then they quickly hook up with like New Right people, people who are getting out the crowds, the anti-Muslim mobs, because that's the kind of the tinder that they can use to kind of blow the top off of things. So it's instead of a top down project, a lot of that radical neoliberalism becomes like a bottom up thing and it ends up then, yeah, making claims on all kinds

of essentialized differences between men and women and, you know, whites and non whites and so on. Because really it's that the story is one of I would say extreme paranoia on the part of like the Mont Pelerin Society guys, Rothbard, Lou Rockwell, you know, and again, these are very paranoid people, like their style of policy has always been paranoid and they were never going to let the fall of the Soviet Union get in the way of their paranoia about communism. Yeah. And it's like, and so, you know, it's, I said this in a previous episode, it's like a stomach turning inside out and digesting the things that are supposed to, that are supposed to like protect and

serve it. And you know, they simply cannot stop. And I think that if you want to talk about where the contradiction really comes from inside the neoliberal world, it's that the neoliberals are slowly building a set of institutions that lock in directions of travel slowly, down with workers' rights, down with climate change, stuff like this. And those things get locked in. Life gets progressively, slowly shittier, except in moments of crisis, like in 2008, you know, that they have essentially, again, by winning the war of position have locked anyone else out from any other change. And so they're so it's like, imagine a line.

They're so vulnerable to being gone around because they never really anticipated that they were ever going to have to fight anyone to their right. Yeah, but then when people arose to their right, they quickly made alliances with them for the most part. Yeah, I mean the sort of centrist neoliberals have been so unable to like defend their project because the right neoliberals realized, oh hey, wait a minute, those guys are just the communists now. They were on our side the whole time. We have to quickly blitz them and destroy all of these institutions. They spent a huge amount of time building. Because it all just starts to sound like John Birch Society, like Barry Goldwater sort of stuff at a certain point. And then you also factor in that like, I mean, you talk about

the idea of thinking about this notion that the masses are on our side, they love this, etc. It's like, but then if you look at sort of the grand neoliberal accomplishment, in my view, it's hard to not point to the Iraq war. Like not only is it a disaster in terms of like their stated aims, but also people hate it. And not just people who are anti-war, just Americans hated it. Like they supported it in the beginning. And then eventually at the point like now, it's very, very difficult to find someone who's going to be like, actually know it was a really good thing and a good idea. And like even taking out, like it's difficult to get Americans on your side when you appeal to human rights, but even from the purpose of just the

money expended, people will say, that was a huge waste of money. It was stupid. And it's like, that is the kind of Dick Cheney, the new conservative capstone project, if you will, of a lot of that. So yeah, maybe they just weren't prepared for the fact that for one, there are lots of people on their right who are not going to defend them out of any kind of solidarity ideologically. And also just like, there's a part people on their right who are not going to defend them out of any kind of solidarity, ideologically. And also just like, there's a part of me that also just sees that a lot of the really rabid far right stuff that I see, it's like they're using things like social media, using things where they can reach people to build that kind of momentum.

They're far better at that. And then AFD is an example, you cited that earlier, AFD is an example of people, you know, it's like, I don't think the politics is anything new, but the approach is in terms of like, how they have used communication, used what's at their disposal to get. A lot of people, you know,

who probably were thinking this before to be willing to go out and say it. Yeah, I mean, I would say a couple of things about that. I mean, one on the thing of, you know, not letting a little thing like the death of the Soviet Union stand in the way of your paranoia about communism. I mean, there's a kernel of truth to what someone like Milton Friedman even was saying in the nineties, which is like, okay, socialism is dead, but the Leviathan lives on. Political scientists too point to the fact that the

size of the state in the United States, the UK, Germany, it doesn't really shrink after the Cold War. Like the number, the percentage of GDP that's spent on social expenditures actually kind of creeps up mostly because of entitlement programs. So for them, there was still that kind of, that mandate was still there. Like the final victory had not been won. But I think the kind of ruptures like Nate's referring to, like the Iraq War, are really important because it's not for nothing that people like Murray Rothbard and Lou Rockwell

were paleoconservatives who were doggedly opposed to the idea of neoconservatism, the idea that America had a role to go out into the world and find dragons and monsters to slay. So I think that 2003, the invasion of Iraq is kind of still underplayed as a way in which a couple of things happened. One, a lot of legitimacy was lost for the ruling class.

Two, the idea of like scrambling sovereignty and just like remixing borders and just like fucking around and seeing what you could do out in the world was like normalized in a way that it hadn't been for a while. Right. You didn't have the US just like going in a way that it hadn't been for a while. Right. You didn't have the U.S. just like going in and like invading countries on false premises and, you know, try to install puppet governments that much in the 1990s. And that actually, I think, then gave some kind of energy to and some and gave some weight to the argument of people like Curtis Yarvin, for example,

who at that time was writing about this and saying, look at what is this neocon BS in Iraq? It's like, it's an empire by contractor. Well, what are they even doing? Trying to roll out democracy. That's not working. Look at Dubai. That is a functioning polity in the middle East. Why don't we do that? Why don't we do Dubai in Baltimore? He writes in like 2009, you know, we can have clan based autocracy, it can be more on a CEO model. And I don't think you're hearing people say stuff like that unless the Iraq war has like overstepped kind of conventions of Westphalian sovereignty in such an intense

way. So I think that vision of like grabbing the golden, you know, the brass ring of like fully taking apart the post New Deal state and the post civil rights state became something like imaginable in a new way because of the grandiosity of the American imperial ambitions of the early 21st century. And also just moving into as well the sort of Alex Karp and Nicholas Zeminske book, The Technological Republic, this is what intends to then step into that gap that couldn't account for itself. The Technological Republic, well, what is it? What does Alex Karp want? Alex Karp is

the CEO of a publicly traded company, Palantir. Alex Karp wants the US government to hook the big money printer up to Palantir. That is all he wants. They are. A lot of places are. But this is from the New Yorker, it's a good enough intro to the book itself. They write, the technological republic is equal parts company lore about Palantir, Jeremiah and homily. So it's a lamentation, but it's supposed to be an inspiring speech. It begins with a bracing, pracy of cultural, political and technological posture of the

West, a concept that they say has always been discarded by too many people. Our government has retreated from the pursuit, this is a quote from the book, has retreated from the pursuit of the kinds of large scale breakthroughs that gave rise to the atomic bomb and the internet. Why aren't we building more, something as great as the atomic bomb? What if we combine those two? Yeah. What if we mute to the internet?

Silicon Valley turned inward, focusing its energy on narrow consumer products and abdicating its more profound responsibilities. So again, it's like, we know that the economy of hyper-exploited gig workers, we know that's very bad because it's hyper-exploiting gig workers. But to Alex Karp, it's like, no, this could be creating more misery. Don't you see this could be actually maiming people instead of just hyper-exploiting them? Silicon Valley turned inward. They have Klarna, but what they really need is Klarna also has to have Navy SEALs to be its loan sharks. You should be able to buy your own nuclear weapon on Klarna.

Yeah, there you go. Yeah, found your own microstate on Klarna. I don't know. I think about this too sometimes that a lot of this stuff, I mean, it is a little bit surprising to me because the degree to which it feels this is so much the beneficiary of a lot of government large assets. It's like, aren't you guys against that? I realize

pointing out the hypocrisy doesn't really accomplish much, but it's just the degree to which it's like, we have to destroy the post-New Deal society. We have to go back to the perfect market or at least the idea of a lot of the... You mentioned gold bugs earlier Riley and that idea like the people fixated on the gold standard. And it's like, right, but then you also are aligned with people who really want deficit spending so long as it's dumping money into their, yeah,

the immiseration project. But if you look at the way like Palantir is selling themselves, you know, and they're doing it openly on their website, the CTO has a piece there recently called the Defense Reformation, like 30 theses or something like super grandiose like that. You can scroll down and one of the graphics shows all of the big defense companies by

market cap and when they were founded and how many employees they have on staff. And it makes a pretty striking point, which is like Palantir has a bigger market cap than any of them, bigger than Boeing, better than Lockheed Martin, bigger than Raytheon, and has about a tenth of the staff. So yeah, they're still selling themselves to the state, but they're saying, hey, you can do it cheaper with us, so stop messing with these legacy freaks and come over to where the innovators are. Convert to Anabaptism.

Palantir is gonna lead its own monster rebellion. Yeah, maximum efficiency paying for Palantir through Klarna. There'll be no people involved whatsoever. The other thing to remember about Klarna is its market cap is enormous because it is also a meme stock. This is something that retail investors have been pumping for ages. And the institutional investors who are investing in Palantir, they're doing it largely because they think that Palantir is the same thesis as why you'd invest in Teslix. No, I'm not going to buy a car company at like 600 times earnings. What I think I'm buying is the future of all autonomous

transport everywhere. It's the same thing with Palantir. You don't think you're buying a service provider to the government. You think what you're doing is buying the thing that replaces the security state, but is sort of directly accountable to the oligarchs instead of just via smoke filled rooms. Yeah. And it's true for some extent, right? I mean, Tesla, as Musk describes it, is not a car company. It's an autonomous robot company and it has, you know, 12 sensors and eight cameras on it. So it's not really just getting people from point A to Whole Foods. It's gathering a huge amount of data along the way and sending it straight into the perfectly calibrated anti-woke mind virus mainframe of Grok to, you know, power a better, cleaner planetary

consciousness. So there's like a shred of at least credibility to that sales pitch, I think. I mean, I think the weird part is where this all goes from Carp's vision of a hyper connected technological republic to just like post-apocalyptic, like trading, you know, potatoes for ammunition kind of barter economy. And in one of the books that I cite in the Hayek's Bastards, Riley, you might remember this called Alongside Night, and it gives this kind of image of the world after hyperinflation. And the only thing left functioning is like a gold based underground republic, where when you go into it, you have to sign a long contract

agreeing to third party arbitration. But then when you get in there, yeah, you can buy nuclear weapons. You can do sort of gold back credit. You can buy anything you want, but it's like a totally militarized, grim, bad future. Like there's no way, at least for me, that I would look at this and say, this is the way I want things to end up.

But that's the kind of inversion of optimism and progress that I think is so crazy and dominant right now. It's like the wealthiest people in the world are imagining like the shittiest possible future I mean, I guess I'm really preaching to the choir here, but like but it really is happening I mean like this is is is happening in real time now way I see it is the people who are most able to bring about the apocalypse not by like launching nuclear bombs or whatever But the people who are most able to bring about the apocalypse simply by just kicking away all of the

Supports of everyday life, right? Like this is a huge amount of what Doge is doing, right? A lot of them are openly fantasizing about the apocalypse all the time. That's what this book really that's what the technological republic really is is it is a fantasy about a sort of liberal democratic apocalypse and a return to a I mean, we've seen this reference over and over again in like anderil and and palantir apocalypse and a return to a, I mean, we've seen this reference over and over again in like Andoril and Palantir and stuff, a return to a kind of honor based warrior republic, but with, you know, fucking drones instead of samurai. Right?

And also like, whatever it is that Elon Musk seems to be on is like, okay, we're preparing for the camp of the saints to become real, but we're gonna do it with invaders and memes. Like it's a strange kind of cultural thing. Like, and I don't think it actually has that much purpose. We're preparing for the camp of the saints to become real, but we're going to do it with Invader Zim memes. It's a strange kind of cultural thing. I don't think it actually has that much purpose. It's just he's a particularly weird guy with a particularly weird kind of like base of

references. But like, I guess 10 years ago it was like, oh, Peter Thiel is building a compound in New Zealand. And now it's like these, you know, it sounds to me as though like a lot of people who are more public facing in terms of like their worldview are basically like you're saying, just starting to prepare for... They're like, oh, we're absolutely going to have like, I don't know, sort of 70s and 80s, you know, post nuclear war kind of sci-fi film. That's just going to be real. But it's going to be because things got too woke.

They're excited about it. They want it. They want it to come about. Maybe we didn't give Peter Thiel enough credit for building a bunker in New Zealand for the apocalypse. I mean, it sounded pretty dumb because in a global apocalypse, what's that going to do for you? But actually, in the case where they're basically just trying to make the apocalypse happen only in the U.S., USA number one, baby, moving to New Zealand will pretty much solve all your problems. Yeah, that's true. But they say basically, look, we came away from Silicon Valley's original purpose, which again, if you want to look at the politics of rightward movement since 2016 as being

about the discarding of pretense, right? They're saying, hey, we forgot Silicon Valley's original purpose, which if you read Malcolm Harris's book Palo Alto or listen to our podcast episode with him, you'd remember is building better bombs and building information systems for the military. Right. It was also explicitly doing it in somewhere that's as anti-union as you can possibly get. That seemed to be a big part of it at the time too. And it just feels like, yeah, we hate labor rights. We love government largesse, et cetera.

Well, what do you want to woke bomb? Well, specifically you say that, right? This is Karp and Zeminska are saying, well, actually we have to remember our roots. When we tried to build consent among like the, you know, idiot Eloy, like they think of like your sort of ordinary urban dwelling, you know, 30 something as the Eloy, right? When we tried to build consent among these people, we gave them like a limousine for their burrito. We gave them the yo app. We gave them the fucking juice arrow. We gave them things that are given the apes. Yeah. We gave,

we gave them board apes and none of that's good. Metaverse. We even gave them legs in the metaverse and they rejected it. And none of that was actually what we're really here to do. We are here to build better and bigger bombs. And that's what we should get back to. And Quinn, you even say in your book that CARP sees the major turning point. This sort of alludes to what Nate was mentioning earlier about labor rights. The major turning point in his thinking was when Google engineers protested and Google's involvement with the U.S. military, which again, given like Eric Schmidt's position

now seems like laughably quaint to have happened. Right. But that really freaked CARP out because he was like, oh my God, the people we're still kind of having to rely happened. Right. But he, but that really freaked carp out cause he was like, Oh my God, the people were still kind of having to rely on at least for now to build our better bombs. They want to build the Yo app. They want to build fucking, you know, Uber for whatever Uber for Tinder or Tinder for Uber, you know, they don't want to do that. I hadn't really thought about them as like high IQ more locks, but I guess that does kind of land. Yeah. That's how sister podcast.

But that genuinely that, that was their turning point where you say, okay, that's when Silicon Valley truly lost its way when it decided it didn't want to be defending the hierarchies that are here in our nation, which is ethnically defined, which has to have hard borders, which has to be like highly stratified by hierarchy. And by the way, which totally aligns with our mission to basically take apart the last vestiges, good or not, of the post-New Deal state and replace them largely with our company.

That's to me what that looks like. Yeah, and their labor model of Silicon Valley is really interesting there. Like I think it was telling that the immigration kind of created this momentary little like, you know, blip in the mega coalition in the late kind of created this momentary little like, you know, blip in the mega coalition in the late months of last year, because the H1B model is really, it's kind of like a Dubai, it's a Gulf kind of temporary visa model, right? I mean, you

bring in guest workers and you put a cap on how long they can stay and then you, and then you boot them out, which has always seemed to me like a necessary part of any future kind of hard right libertarian hybrid model and the fact that Bannon in his diluted you know Evolen New Right fantasies or whatever thought that that wasn't going to be part of the model was kind of like hmm I guess you haven't really been paying attention to this project that you're part of because like Trumpism is not actually, you know, a project of the kind of real autochthonous pre-modern blood and soil right. Like it's something much more amenable to, you know, creating deals with the model of globalized movement of people and investment in certain ways and keeping it out in others. Like just

narrowing the channels between within which things can run for certain outcomes and, and, you know, closing them off for others. And that's what's been obvious to me since 2017. And I've been so frustrated by, you know, endless pundits and commentators kind of being duped into this non-existent national conservative counter project, which has never had any legs. There's no such thing as workerism without unions. There's no such thing as like prunatalism without the welfare state. Like all of these nonsensical Catholic integralist sort of like

discussions that go around never actually translate into policy. What we get instead is like really pragmatic, you know, anti-union, pro bottom line demands from the bleeding edge of capital. It's you get from the people who exploited the collapse and legitimacy of the liberal state that was created by the Iraq war and the financial crisis, you are getting soaring inequality that is being used to build more and more and more weapons. Because they say so what they say. Many of these weapons, by by the way are to be used domestically. So, Carp writes, this country spent $25 billion to protect soldiers in Afghanistan from the threat of roadside bombs. But when it came to preventing the loss of American lives in our nation cities at the hands of the depraved,

the mentally ill or well resourced and ruthless violent gangs, the collective reaction is more often one of apathy and resignation. And this is basically an argument to be like, hey, all of those fantastic military techniques we used in the empire, we owe it to the Metropole to bring them back and we, the Silicon Valley- Where's my boomerang?

Yeah, we, the Silicon Valley geniuses, are gonna be able to do that. And I mean, for me, the line in the book that stuck out so much was it was saying, we must hand the keys to the government over to Palantir and Associated Acts because within the state there are depraved, mentally ill, and organized ethnically drawn gangs who need to be dealt with. Right? To me that's a line that you, if you had finished writing Hayek's Bastards a month later, right? That's a line you could have

easily quoted in the afterword as well this, this is how this all comes together. Yeah. Well, and it's not for nothing that, you know, Musk and the host at the CPAC conference were talking in such glowing, even kind of like slavishly admiring terms about Naib Bukele. I don't know if you remember that, but it was like, yeah, man, wow, he got 2% of the population in prison, man. I mean, those are hard home braids. Like, I don't know how he pulled that off. Like hats off. Just like literally just speaking so highly of someone who's just done

the biggest act of mass incarceration in his country's history is extraordinary. I mean, of course, you know, waves of applause from the audience and so on. But yeah, the hard the hard edge part of the market based vision is really not to be overstated. And it's like we must perfect the market so we can deal with the brutes. That is ultimate. And who of course is stopping us? Again, this goes back to echoing what the 90s neoliberals were talking about.

Who is stopping Palantir from having the real free market so they can eliminate the brutes for you? It is the left, of course. It is simply like some kind of, again, ill-defined but utterly ubiquitous egalitarian conspiracy that is more concerned with protecting victimhood or whatever, right? That's sort of squeamish about what needs to be done. It has to be rooted out, rooted branch, so that the union of the state and militarized capital can proceed apace and exterminate the brutes. Like the subject of Alex Karp's thesis,

or like someone who he praises, or I think he sort of thinks about a lot, is Michael Walser. And you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Michael Walser is like a kind of, I guess we could say like soft Holocaust denier, Germany, who doesn't so much deny that it happened, but he's like, hey, Auschwitz should not be used as a perennial cudgel to enforce this like this shame on Germany for what

it did. And Karp's thesis was like, hey, what Michael Walser managed to do was he managed to rescue by making these claims that actually the real victims were the sort of Volkisch Deutsch who are, you know, being like cowed by political correctness. He was able to channel his audience's feelings of like aggression and resentment and all this. And he's saying, hey, I'm going to make you feel proud again. We're not going to feel bad about the Holocaust anymore. And it's like, it's appropriate. I think that again, it's like what's, what's, what's the call to action of the technological Republic? Let's finish the job. Let's not let anyone make us feel bad.

In fact, people are trying to make you feel bad about who you are naturally because you're a white man with a high IQ. Also, if you think the problem with Germany is that Germans are too ashamed of themselves and they're too upset about the fact that they did the Holocaust, I feel like you need to go to Germany

and talk to at least three Germans. Well, I mean, Alex Karp is German, right? I mean, he's like, he has a PhD from a German university. That's the weird part about him. He's like a Frankfurt School product in a weird way. But yeah, definitely, you know, denouncing all the insights he could have gained along the way. But I mean, for real, the part that I find in a way the most confusing

is how they produce these imaginary worlds for themselves on a day to day basis that scare them that they scare themselves so much with. I mean, I live in the United States. I travel around the United States. None of it resembles the sort of post-apocalyptic horror show that evidently they think we exist in because we need to. I mean, I've been to the Mission District or whatever parts, like Baltimore, New Orleans.

I don't know what. The inner city of Detroit. I mean, yes, there's places that could have more buildings in them, but I don't understand short of the one kind of hypothesis I have is just doing video games on Ketamine. Like I think, you know, when, I think when Mosque dungeon crawls and is super high, I think he scares himself in a way that he then brings with him into the waking life

and thinks like, I need to do something about this. We need to do something about the Kobolds that are that have been like clogging up the subway. Because otherwise it's like the first 20 minutes of like Bo is afraid as if that were real, you know, like which is an interesting idea, but it's not true. I think I know how they get here, right? Which is if they're not just lying, which is perfectly, that is a possibility. I think it is, like there's something that I think about a lot on this show is elite isolation and the isolation of elites from the real world that they are the elites of. I mean, it is a billion times one of the most important factors in British politics is that

like they are so insular and they are so, they are so just protected from ever really having to be challenged in any way. But I think that what the product of a lot of the Silicon Valley, America must be rescued by the application of counterinsurgency tactics comes from the fact that these guys tell each other horror stories about San Francisco that they barely live in every time they get together. Right? It's why I'm in Las Vegas. Ben Horowitz is like basically treating the, uh, the, the Las Vegas police department like the fucking Mujahideen in the 1980s. He's just like being like, Oh yeah, I've given you like three new predator drones from Anderil to have their donation to the police department.

Have fun guys. Right. It's because their experience of the world is mediated, but so much by one another's anxieties about it, that it's very easy to imagine that they're sort of what they're living in is like, you know, the world from Elysium and they're too afraid and they're just they've scared themselves into believing that that's what it is. And so they have to make the space station as quickly as possible to get out of here. Right? It's this completely self referential, self reinforcing process. And the thing I want to come back to is that the thing that allows them to make such an effective attack on the last vestiges of the state was a lot of the 1990s thinkers who

we've been alluding to this whole time. Because the whole point of the technological republic is to rearm the United States with Silicon Valley doing much of it privately. Silicon Valley never have a church committee. So the CIA, it's woke, it's statist, it's out. State Department's out, these bureaucratic bodies. They belong to a world of large companies and large regulations managing global complex systems

of distributed knowledge. They're out because they're too easily politicized. They're run by people, or at least they're not easily runnable by like quote unquote, our people. Silicon Valley needs to like take over and run the show. But really- The paper belt, what biology calls the paper belt. Really what they've done is they have been able to look

at institutions that have been so ossified by their war of position and have made themselves so incredibly unpopular by just attritting everyone's lives down to nothing that like, there was very little organic support for the political project that was like, let's not let Palantir sort of walk in and just replace the State Department

with Alex Carp, basically. And I'd also say really quickly, I mean, I remember this in the United States too, is that I think it's a pretty bipartisan thing to sell this idea that kind of taking Reagan's words and puppeting them through different strains of whether it's Democrats or Republicans about this idea that government is the enemy, government's not the solution, that private

sector can always do it better. I think that that goes so unchallenged. I think my brain will always have a little space for that thing where the young student asked Nancy Pelosi in a town hall about, does the Democratic Party have any sort of ideas about moving beyond capitalism? And she's like, we're capitalist and that's just what it is. That's just how it is. Like, her mentality is like, yeah, there is no such thing as beyond capitalism, because like, that's just, sorry. That's like saying gravity isn't real. And it's like, I think there's so little challenge to that, that like, yeah, there's not exactly a... And when you also factor in the kind of distorting aspect of money in

politics in general, there's not much that's challenging this worldview. It just feels like it's kind of recursively bouncing off other. It just feels like it's recursively bouncing off other insane billionaires and the 50 moonlighting cops that provide their private security. And it just gets massively worse, more intense, more paranoid. Yeah. I mean, that was sort of the argument of the Hayek's Bastards book is like, because the war of position has been so successful, eroding away the social state and, you know, exposing everything just to market metrics and making things harder and harder to access for everyone, then it actually produced a sense of anxiety that led people to seek safety.

And the rights offering of a language of race and gold and borders was a kind of a flight to safety for a lot of people, like using the term from the investor world, like it was a way for them to feel like something was anchored and secure, but it wasn't something outside of the market. It wasn't like a kind of Polanyi thing where like the market makes you scared and so you return to society. It was like actually drove them harder into market dynamics and made them more dependent on, you know, the idea that gold must always have value or that like whiteness is something that should be monetized basically. And borders are all about just filtering out useful versus useless, low and high IQ immigrants. So the kind of double movement that someone like Polanyi

and a lot of social democrats and leftists assume would come when people challenged slow motion neoliberalism actually went in the other direction. Like it went harder into neoliberal logics to the point that now it's blasted through into like techno monopolism that doesn't even look anything like an idea of competition in markets. It's just Carp bolting on his company onto the state and letting things work. I think it's like the assumption is that, well, the opposition to slow world neoliberalism will be the opposite of neoliberalism, when in fact the opposition was to the slowness.

You know, it's like, you have promised that these things will make our lives better. And then you look at all of- Where is it? Where are the fruits? Yeah, you look at everything. If that is your ideology, and you are so in, whether that is like, you're so ingrained

through media, think tanks, the things that produce what people think of as common sense, right? You're just so ingrained that that's the direction of travel, then it's so much easier to turn up the speed rather than change the direction, you know? Well, and the, I mean, instead of the kind of image of the person immolating themselves, you know, on the, on the steps of the Capitol building about the injustices of the person immolating themselves, you know, on the steps of the Capitol building about the injustices of the system. Like a perfect figure is that guy from this week, Mr. Fuck You, the meme coin guy who

blew his head off because he lost his last $500 in a rug pull. And then he said to his followers, like, make a meme coin out of me. And immediately people started making them upon his suicide and asking only momentarily if that was maybe unethical. But that's like the act of a radical member of this libertarian vanguard. It's like someone who is saying like, I wanted everything now and you didn't give it to me. And so like I have to kill myself. And ultimately, right, I think what I've been wanting to do in this episode is I've been wanting to tell the story of how something like Doge or Stargate or whatever, like the race science that we talk

about, how these two strands of things that seem kind of tangentially related, I mean, Doge maybe not because it's so directed at DEI, but even without its direct DEI focus, how these crusades for like privatizing like social security or allowing Palantir to just single-handedly take over intelligence services or whatever. How a lot of those things are deeply connected to the race scientists and goal bugs. The paranoid thinkers of the right, as ever, have been the most important ideological entrepreneurs of the last however many years, right? That ultimately this is, this is their story as people who were anti-system from within the

system. Yeah. And I think if you've embraced the idea that the vanguard of technology is AI, as now, you know, we, as a society collectively have, then the question of the utility of humans immediately gets posed and the response that they have, they have an answer ready, which is like there's a ranked order of humans and we can actually quantify who is able to be useful inside of this new system and who isn't. And then the idea of there being just outright surplus humans in a world where many of the normal tasks of

employment and work are being automated away and turned into AI governed processes, then it just makes that question not one of membership or non-membership in a nation, or are you part of the polity or not, but it's kind of more fundamental. It's like, what is your use value as a fleshly being? We have a long- running joke about running government like a business, because it's like, well, what?

With a great business, of course, sells off all of its assets for pennies on the dollar and then rents them back, you know, stuff like this. But when they say running government like a business, what they mean is they want to treat the state's monopoly and the legitimate use of force as something that can be turned on people who would otherwise be fired like employees, right? Yeah. Well, running a population like a business is actually something a bit more intense.

Yeah. I think that's really, I think the story that we want to tell here, right? Which is how do these things come together and in what sense is the thing that's happening now? This is the culmination of what those guys wanted in the 1990s. They might not have known the exact people who would have been involved. They probably would have been surprised if you said that like Donald Trump was gonna be pretty important to the whole thing, right? This is the culmination of what they wanted. This is their... Maybe they wouldn't have been that surprised because you know Rothbard and Rockwell were working with

Pat Buchanan on his campaign in 92 and 96 and he was very much like a proto Trump as now we have several books explaining. So I think there was always Pat Buchanan on his campaign in 92 and 96, and he was very much like a proto-Trump, as now we have several books explaining. So I think there was always, the way that they were wise political thinkers is they were able to find people who could act as kind of battering rams, even if those people themselves

didn't have like consistent ideology. And that's obviously what like the high IQ Morlocks have figured out, is like, oh, this guy does good work for us. I more think maybe they would have been surprised that 1992 Trump would have been their guy. Yeah. Wait, that guy, the musical theater

real estate developer, him? The guy who had just gone out of business in Atlantic City in epic fashion. The only guy who could fail at running a casino, really? That guy? He's central to like, he's the linchpin that makes the whole thing happen for us? I mean, it would be very, it would be like having,

going back and be like, oh yeah, there's a 1920s German movie where it's a children's movie where Hitler makes a cameo for some reason. And it's just sort of like, I didn't realize Home Alone 2 was gonna be such a world historical event. It just runs, a small like, toe-headed child runs into Hitler at a beer garden

and gets directions. And then later, 20 years later, oh my God, this is so beer garden and gets directions from an up-and-coming artist. And anyway, like it's this is now just the like another example just before we end right of the state being retooled to protect not just capital as a class but to protect individual companies from democratic like oversight even through regulation. Another example is, again, I shed no tears for the CIA people no longer having jobs, but it was like vaguely overseen by someone who was elected and just dropping even the pretense that these things should be overseen. Just like the SEC regulates the financial sector, it doesn't

regulate the financial sector to protect you, It regulates the financial sector to protect the sector as a whole. And that has changed to just now, no, we're just protecting the companies from oversight. For example, the SEC has dropped all charges for illegal lobbying against Coinbase. And Coinbase is like, yeah, we spent $75 million. We made all of our problems go away. And now we're a favored company. We were sort of... and yeah, that's the transformation of the state that these guys ultimately wanted. I mean, the amazing thing of just literally the last few weeks or month is, is you can feel this shift that will be very familiar to you all as either citizens or residents

of Britain, which is like that kind of balance sheet of empire discussion, you know, where people are like, hmm, on that, you know, well, it delivered on this and it delivered on that. But of course that was an atrocity. I mean, that conversation is now, I think, beginning to start about the American Empire where like it's spoken of almost in the past tense. It's sort of like, well, now that the security umbrella is about to be withdrawn from Europe, we can sort of put things on the scale and say, well, you know, USAID, they did some water filtration, but on the other hand, like too many libertarian hip hop groups.

Like that kind of attitude of looking at things in the rear view mirror is very new, actually. I feel like there's been a lot of, you know, crises in the US empire, but I've never had the feeling until now that it might actually be in the past tense, which is PhD student in 2040 being like on the one hand, the creation of ISIS on the other hand, the creation of the Furby. No one can say if it's good or not. Anyway, so look, I think that's probably all the time we have for today, but Quinn, I want to thank you very much for writing this excellent book, which I recommend wholeheartedly that if you are interested in the question of why these things were such good fits together and why they all really share a common lineage,

I must recommend you read when it is out in April. Where can people preorder it? I guess you can get it at bookshop. I think you can, if you go to the Penguin website, it's coming out on Allen Lane, so they should have a link there for preorder. Well, so do preorder as soon as you can. If you're interested in this, HiExBastards, the neoliberal roots of the populist right. Once again, Quinn, thank you for coming and talking to us. This has been a bit of a long one. Also, don't forget there is a Patreon and there is a second episode every week. This week we are going to be going back to riding the rails with perennial guest favorite

Gareth Dennis, so do look out for that. I'm sure that the railways have now fixed all the problems. Presumably. Yeah, that's right. And other than that, I think we will see you all in the Patreon in a few short days. Bye, everyone, unless Milo has cities he wants to list. Yeah, Perth, Brisbane, New Day added in Brisbane.

So please come to that. Sydney, Melbourne, as ever, Canberra also. Yeah. All of those buy tickets. Thank you. Right. With the cities now listed, I think we can all say goodbye for another couple of days. Thanks everybody. See you later. Bye. Bye. Bye. Thanks for watching!