 Good day, May 40 here. I've been on something of an intellectual high this past week. Just been reading so many exciting books. And I love that feeling where you're just pumping with excitement. Your life is just stuffed with meaning. You can't wait to get onto the next idea, the next book, the next author to just follow your intellectual obsessions to the logical conclusion. The one downside of this is that you tend to wake up at 2am, 3am, thinking I want to get up and I want to read the Hubs Leviathan and Hubs Leviathan is a very fine book. But it's just too damn exciting. I mean, have you even read Hubs Leviathan? It was published in 1651. It's one of the founding classics of realism. John Mearsheimer says his intellectual predecessor is Thomas Hobbes. So Hubs Leviathan probably the most important work ever written on a realistic approach to international relations probably even more important than Niclo Machiavelli's The Prince. But Leviathan was subtitled The Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, right? And Hobbes wrote all his important books after the age of 60. He lived to about age 92. All right. Much memory or memory of many things is called experience. Again, imagination being only of those things which have been formally perceived by sense, either all at once or by parts at several times. The former, which is the imagining the whole object. I mean, you can see why I just been totally carried away with intellectual excitement. And I mean, Hubs Leviathan. What more can I say? The sovereign state, all right? Hobbes case for the total state that the state is going to protect you from that very nasty state of nature where lives are short, nasty, brutish and short. Okay. So the downside of this is that I haven't been sleeping very well. And right now, if I don't live stream, I don't know what I'm going to do. Because at least when I live stream, I have enough stimulus that I'm forced to pay attention, right? Because at any moment I could say words that will forever ruin my life. Right. So that's a pretty good stimulus to stay awake and to notice what I'm saying and doing. Because otherwise I can't even summon the energy or the will to do the most basic of exercises. Oh, Elliot Blatt, he's not reading Thomas Hobbes. He's been reading the life and times and thought of that great philosopher, Northern Hobbes. So anyway, do you remember the Flight 93 election that was an essay published by Michael Anton in the spring of 2016, where he analogized the 2016 election between Trump and Hillary Clinton to the Flight 93 election, meaning if you elect Donald Trump, he might still crash the plane. But if you don't elect Donald Trump, the plane's going down anyway. So at least with Trump, we've got a chance to rescue things. And I first heard about this essay on Steve Saylor's blog and Michael Anton entered the comments and he said that Steve Saylor was the most important political thinker alive today, the most prescient observer of what's going on in politics. And when I was reading the Flight 93 election back in, I think, spring, April, May of 2016, I thought this was an amazing essay. I was just so excited and really excited about Michael Anton. And now, from the hindsight of six years later, it does no longer seem that the 2016 election was a Flight 93 election. I mean, how significant is it that Donald Trump was elected in 2016 instead of Hillary Clinton? Would our situation in America in life in the world be significantly different if Hillary Clinton were elected than Donald Trump? Now, I think, yeah, it would be different. It would be different, maybe 10% 20%. So I'm a structuralist in international relations. I believe the structure of international relations, the structure of power politics has more to do with what happens in politics than any individual personality. So even if Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were elected president of the United States, America wouldn't change that radically. The American political system is set up in such a way it's really hard to make radical, profound changes. So there'd be like a 20% difference, perhaps a 10% difference in what matters if Bernie Sanders were president or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. So I'm not a quietist. I'm not saying turn you back on politics, ignore politics, because politics will still hunt you down. But I don't try to exaggerate the importance of politics and say, oh, this is the most important election in our lifetime. Notice how every election seems to be the most important election in our lifetime. So after reading Michael Antone's ridiculous reactions to the 2020 election and his spurious allegations of a very significant voter fraud, very possibly deciding the results of the 2020 election. And it wasn't so much that point. It was the lack of supporting evidence that he assembled for his point that I thought, wow, this guy's not nearly the intellectual lion that I thought he was. And then seeing the nasty January 6 riots on Capitol Hill and how people like Michael Antone, very possibly Donald Trump, had laid the groundwork for that catastrophe. So I became a disillusioned with Michael Antone. And now I was just reading a book on the 2016 election. And it gave me some new insights into that Flight 93 essay. And it makes me realize that the apocalyptic approach to American politics is very American, right? Every election is the most important election in our lifetime. Every election, there's the heroic protagonist, and then there are the forces of evil. And it's life and death. And this is just how American elites discuss politics, not how ordinary people by and large regard politics. But American elites often regard American presidential campaigns in particular, as matters of life and death. Let's hear from some of the sharpest minds in the American political scene right now. Louis had this idea, you know, me and Godwin's and talk with documentaries about who always want to convey a story, or at least he does, in a documentary, you want to tell a story. And, you know, you have a narrative that you want to present to people. And I think Louis came in with this preconceived notion of what he wanted it to be. He's like, I want this to be the next David Duke, the next Richard Spencer, the next white supremacist bogeyman for a new generation. I want to present this as scary and dangerous and evil. And what he was increasingly presented with, or a bunch of jokers, a bunch of clowns that he couldn't make fit that narrative. Then he's like, shit, do I portray them as the loser angle? Or do I portray them as this evil, you know, Nazi angle that I wanted to that's extreme and dangerous? And I felt like his vision on that got a little bit muddled, for sure. I feel like he didn't quite tell a completely coherent narrative with it. And I don't think he was 100% sure of what to do with it. That being said, there's some incredibly funny footage in the documentary of amazing stuff. I'll say this. Nick's segments came off I thought a little bit better than they would, to be 100% fair. I think that Fuentes, although he could have been a lot stronger in his views and just owned up to what he was, at times he came across a bit waffling and weak and disingenuous. He still came across a bit more coherent than I expected him to a little bit, but certainly more professional than the other two fucking idiots that were in it. And if it was just Nick's segments, in my to come out okay, but for whatever reason, which at the time I questioned this and thought it was fucking insane, he let Louis go and interview baked Alaska, you know, and go on a whole fucking IRL stream with baked. So I can't show anything from the BBC Louis Theroux documentary on Nick Fuentes and baked Alaska because you just get an immediate worldwide ban. If you show any segment of that documentary, so that's what's going on with that. It came out about a month ago. So you're saying 40, give me some of that rich intellectual sustenance that makes makes your show so exciting. So in response to his critics back in 20, Hey, by the way, I'm still getting compliments on my, my, my new jacket. My new suit. I mean, I can't believe I bought a suit on amazon.com for $90. I just chose medium and it fits like you're thinking 40 that suit looks tailored to your physique. It's such a snug physique. It shows your muscles in such a flattering light. You know, how much did you spend on that suit and the tailoring and I spent nothing on the tailoring. And I think I was so steadily he sensitized people to what they can expect from me as far as clothes and the suit that I've been wearing the same suit to show for the past five years that when I just show up with a new suit, I just blow people's minds. Anyway, I go to shore to connect with God, not for trying to boost my ego. All right. So after his, his essay, Michael Anton made a more nuanced approach about what would be the consequences of a Hillary Clinton victory. There would still be a country. It will not be a tyranny or Caesarism night yet, but it will represent an irreversible triumph for the administrative state. Well, guess what? There are no alternatives to the administrative state. There's not Max Weber teaches this. I think that the greatest sociologist that the German dude, I mean, the father of modern sociology is there ever been a more influential sociologist Max Weber? I don't think even Emil Durkheim comes close. And oh man, did I get muted again? Here I am. So you generally can't sue if bureaucrats make rulings that you don't like. And the executive branch generally can't force bureaucrats to conduct themselves or to enact policies that the bureaucrats don't want to enact. And the the legislative branch also struggles to have have power over bureaucrats. So everywhere in the industrialized world, you have administrative states, there are no alternatives to having an administrative state. Like give me a first world nation, give me an industrialized nation that doesn't have an administrative state. There aren't any. So I don't think Michael Anton's on particularly strong grounds in his critiques. So the central fire of this 2016 essay, which was turned into a book is on conservatism incorporated. These are the conservative intellectuals where the guys of opponents of the hijackers, but essentially acquiesce and even collaborate in their maligned work. So did you see the the movie Flight 93? There's some German tourist who says no, no, we should not fight back against the hijackers. That that would be too dangerous. We should just allow them to fly the plane. So Michael Anton in the Flight 93 election compares conservatism incorporated to these, these, you know, this German tourist who says, Oh, you should fight back against the hijackers. And how is that treasonous betrayal demonstrated itself that the country is clearly on a trajectory in which most what they claim to support. So traditional morality, family values, commitment to public order, local communities, resistance to big government, under concentrated attack or in the process of advanced decay, and conservatives yet cannot bring themselves to act as if they believe what the Flight 93 election claims is self evident that we are headed off a cliff. And again, I think that's vastly exaggerated. We're not headed off a cliff. And America is on a trajectory to be even more powerful in 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years on a relative basis compared to other competing powers that it is right now. So Michael Anton claims it's logically impossible to believe that conservative beliefs are true. The current trajectory of the culture can be maintained about obliterating everything those beliefs cherish. Now, everything takes place in time and space. So conservatives, for example, they were for very much for states rights when they wanted to oppose civil rights legislation. But in other times of places, they'll be opposed to states rights in favor of a strong executive government. So many family values, all these things that we, you know, tax cuts that we think are part and parcel of conservatism can depend upon time and place. So tax cuts may be of not much consideration to many right wing movements. So those who don't accept the Flight 93 metaphor claim Michael Anton objectively enemies of conservative principles and values. And that some of those purported conservatives have made out personally like bandits by playing the Washington generals of American politics is a further indication of the betrayal, that these individuals must know quite well that they are acting this honestly. So the chat says doesn't 40 have the chat open at all times. Yes, I do. But occasionally, I'm trying to develop an idea or a thought or I'm moving between various operations for a show. So like this PPP guy, I don't know anything about him. He seems to be to have a fair amount of common sense. So PPP what does that stand for? Boris Johnson has told the nuclear industry bosses that the government wants UK to get 25% of its electricity from nuclear power. So even greens in Europe are recognizing that we need nuclear power. So the invasion has has forced a reckoning with reality. So we live in a much more serious world than we lived in two months ago. And you see that in Joe Biden and Kamala Harris removing their pronouns from their Twitter bio. Let him go interview Beertson the fucking incel hobbit himself. And that's where it all fell apart for America first and optically it became totally fucked. And then like a complete joke. And then there was Britney Venti waste of a fucking eight minutes of the documentary in my opinion. I was like, who gives a fuck about what Britney Venti thinks. Wait, that was particularly a compelling segment. I mean, Britney Britney Venti don't don't trash Britney Venti. She's absolutely adorable. Like she she she found a way to smuggle herself in by yeah, the victim. Oh, yeah. It's so funny to watch her play the victim. I was just why did I girl and they threatened to rape me. Yeah, that's where like, you know, and that's where the most optically fucked part comes in where they play the clip of Beertson being like, I'm going to rape Britney Venti, I'm gonna rape her. Okay, that's a horrible thing. I mean, I have sympathy for women who are the objects of, you know, such vitriol. I wouldn't want to hear some dude talking about how he's going to rape me. Right. That's that's a heinous thing. Right. You're saying 40 cut it out with the populism. Give us that that meaty intellectual gruel. So the symbolic key to the flight 93 election is about demographic change in the United States because of the 1965 Heart Cellar Immigration Act, which opened up immigration to the United States from everywhere in the world. Prior to 1965, essentially you could only immigrate to America if you were of European descent. About halfway through the piece, Michael Anton tries to bolster the rhetorical excess of the parallel of the election of flight 93 by describing three reasons why conservatives would face little chance of political success in the wake of a Clinton presidency. The most important of these describes as the ceaseless importation of third world foreigners with no tradition of taste for experience in liberty. So that then skews the population in a left wing direction and in a multicultural direction and away from traditional American cultural values and ideals. The left, Michael Anton argues, wants more such people in the country because they heavenly lean left in their politics. So there is the promise of imminent electoral invincibility for the Democrats. So I think that claim is exaggerated. Plenty of immigrants will side with the Republican Party under certain circumstances. So you saw Trump in 2020 doing particularly well with certain segments of Latinos. The ruling class seek cheap and easily manipulated labor which open borders gives them in abundance. The mainstream conservatives who make up Michael Anton's core audience are too terrified of being accused of racism to challenge the situation by calling for more restrictions on immigration. They foolishly hope to gain by showing themselves on the as on the right side of history on this crucial moral element of the post 1960s American culture and politics. So there I partly agree with with Michael Anton. We should skew immigration to the extent that we have immigration in in the framework of what's the benefit of America. So if we're going to import immigrants they better have special skills that Americans don't have. They better be bringing something significant to the table and they shouldn't just be leaching on the welfare state. So immigrants there are significant portions of immigrants to America who take significant amounts of welfare and do not contribute back much in the tax base. So we don't need those. Now few commentators recognize the full importance of this in the symbolic structure of the piece. So in the Flight 93 myth there's a core symbolic binary driving the entire symbolic machinery that is of us and them inside or outside friend enemy American non enemy well the friend enemy distinction can usefully be understood as the whole basis of the political. So the enemy is he who threatens to annihilate you. The entirety of the Flight 93 narrative the identities and characteristics of the heroes the moral meaning and terrifying difficulty of their deed the radical malevolence of the hijackers all this rests on the base of this binary symbolism which is charged with the most primordial and powerful emotional energy. Well yeah if you want to get people to turn out to vote you better fire up your base and see if you can do it without equally firing up your opposition space. So here's the logic of his argument. Here are the contours of his political perspective. So it made explicit if he made this explicit might have come under critical scrutiny which can be corrosive to the power of myth. So it helps if you can put myths out there without making them too explicit. But his essay came to clear focus for others who were able to tap into that source of primordial emotional power. Now the response in response to critics of the Flight 93 election published a week after the piece first appeared Michael Anton pointed again to the demographic problem noted the brokenness the American immigration system. I think people on the left and right will largely agree that the American immigration system is broken and would if unabated in short order produce a situation in which the right was never again able to realistically compete in national election I think there he is wrong. As you see even in Brazil you had a right-wing Yair Bolsonaro taking power. So the 19 foreign visitors to the country who carried out the four hijackings on 9-11 nearly a third were in over state status or had failed to fulfill some central requirement of their visa. Leader of the operation Mohammed Atta had been pulled over in a traffic stop while there was an open bench warrant for his arrest the failure to appear in court for an expired driver's license. He was not detained because of the failure to effectively coordinate databases on immigrants with such warrants. So I think people on the left center and right can agree that this is a big problem. Now the left wing response to the flight 93 election was energetic. Conor Friedersdorf who is centrist wrote in the Atlantic just days after the publication accused the author of xenophobia and he pushed back arguing conservatives are keepers of the status quo by definition or he didn't argue why that definition is accurate. The most symbolically extreme responses from the left did not content themselves with recourse the general tropes of xenophobia and racism but extended it further to accuse the flight 93 author of articulating a special fascist or Nazi perspective which is absurd right. Nazism died in Berlin in 1945 and so did fascism. We haven't had a fascist government since 1945 anywhere in the world. Michael Goson claimed that Michael Anton's reference to my people is functionally indistinguishable from the Nazi articulation of Volk. Oh that's crazy. You have all sorts of discussion in Judaism of essentially my people, the people. So normal nationalism is nationalism for a particular people at a particular time and place. Now common objection about the left and right response to the peace was a sense of the apocalypticism so that the end of the world was now was exaggerated out of keeping with normal political discourse about American presidential elections. So all this talk about the most important election of our lifetime over the last 50 years in the generation in a century in American history but this is nothing new in American politics. We've had these claims going back to at least the 1990s so we had the New York Times discussing the phenomenon in the 2004 election documenting such claims going back to the 1864 election of the New York Times writer in 2011 discussing the 2012 election captured the spirit of this phenomenon. So Michael Tomaski of The Guardian wrote in 2008, 2004 many Americans particularly liberals fearful about a second Bush term put to calling that election the most important of my lifetime and it was for a while. Now this one is and now this one is. So if we just add another and now this one is for the 2016 and 2020 and 2024 and just add a repeat add-in for an item right that's that's American political rhetoric it is apocalyptic. The New Order order had Shane Warren killed because they didn't want Australia winning the Commonwealth Games. I had to start watching Britney Venti bro my wife got triggered. People's populist press oh that's PPP I really didn't know anything about him but it seems to have a fair amount of common sense. Okay so that's the broader cultural context of the Flight 93's apocalyptic pronouncement right that's how intellectuals talk. So in February 2016 writing in The Nation Joshua Holland called the 2016 election the most important election of our lives. A climate scientist quoted in the article said a victory by the Donald Trump or Ted Cruz would potentially be catastrophic for the planet. A jet here in the New Republic the month before the election noted that the bias that every election is portrayed is the most important in the history of the republic but he then nonetheless wanted him to predict that a Trump victory would mean the destruction of the system. Well Trump won and we didn't destroy the system. In the Los Angeles Times a Jamie James Kerchic argued that if Trump wins a coup isn't possible voters must stop him before the military has to. None of them freedland in the Guardian predicted a new age of darkness in the event of a Trump victory and described America standing on the brink of the abyss. All these predictions and claims are obviously foolish. Whether Trump won or not in 2016 it was not the end of America. Trump was in office for four years and America survived. If you unpaid any attention to politics over the past 10 years I don't think your life would have been particularly affected by these major political swings. The far reaches of this symbolic herbally are reached only in the intellectual classes typically. The general population resists these symbolic extremes. They may participate to some degree in the binaries and Flight 93 election essay acknowledges this in its category of fools. So politics is a sacred realm especially for intellectuals in a culture that has progressively removed traditional religious pathways to the sacred from the public sphere. So we're no longer such a religious society but we all have a need for good and evil binaries. You can be the most secular atheist and there will still be things that will strike you as objectively evil. It's just hard wired into us. We have a need for good and evil and so if people can't get those needs met in religion well they'll increasingly get the met in politics. So for the social and cultural elite who dominate our secular educational and other institutions it's also hard wired into them a good evil binary. So politics has become the new religion for a large segment of the intellectual and other elite classes that have lost the religious music a little less likely to go crazy with these apocalyptic political visions. So apocalypticism on the left was not limited to pre-election commentary after the election. It was widespread. So the New York Times gave a selection of writers responding to the election results on November 9. Plenty of apocalypticism meaning the end of the world coming from the left. Paul Krugman predicted an immediate economic freefall from which markets would never recover. That didn't happen. Viet Thanh Nguyen and Denis Rodrik imagined the possibility of a plummet into fascism. Once Paul Krugman's market collapse took place obviously that didn't happen. Seth Grossman multiple Hollywood and pop music celebrities insinuating that moving out of the country might be the proper response to Trump's election. Robert Stevens announced that we could now assert the say goodbye to the climate and the title of Peter Wiener's piece fairly summed up the entire proceedings when the decent drapery of life is rudely torn off. Then beyond the New York Times you have Eric Zorn in the Chicago Tribune expressed his serious doubts that the American experiment will survive Trump's reign. Well I think it did. Neil Gabler wrote America died on November 8, 2016 not with a bang or a whimper but at its own hand via electoral suicide. In July 2016, Franklin Foyer at Slate described Trump in the cultural mythological language that has become a symbolic functional left-wing equivalent to the cultural strategy of the Flight 93 election by Michael Anton on the right. So Franklin Foyer caught on the deeply mythological background in the US hostility in the US of hostility to Russia described candidate Trump as Vladimir Putin's plan for destroying the west that was in power for four years did not destroy the west. So we have the same set of binaries good and evil following from the 2016 election. So you've got two apocalyptic myths one on the right flight election flight 93 election myth and then one on the left the Russian takeover election myth and they're remarkable in both deep cultural realms of plumb to find terrifyingly emotional mythical and foreign enemies Islamic terrorists Russian spies to whom the political foe can be linked and thereby made the antagonist an apocalyptic mythical drama which the very existence the American Republic teeters on the brink and then the total war leading to the utter defeat of the inhumane enemy can suffice to cover it. He does his evil Joker laugh and look fucking horrible horrible and she's like there's a camera she's like I don't know I don't know why he would he would say that and she's like holding in laughter she's like holding you know what I mean she's like like just you can see her fucking cheeks tremble and like and I'm like Britney shut the fuck you're fucking full of shit like you know it's so ridiculous. Um I think I in my view here at the Keto casino and on DACA DACA in general your channel on your previous videos before the show was fired up you have done way better coverage of the Nick Fuentes stuff if anything Louie should have called you. Well if Louie had called me and I had the budget that Louie had in the footage that Louie had I could have made it better there's no doubt that I would have made it a better product than it actually was in the end. I'll say this for Louie presenting it to a mainstream audience people that have never seen America first before don't know anything about it. I think he did do a really good job in terms of smearing them making them look fucked. I think to the average person in the UK it looks and sounds insane and to the average American like I don't think there's very many people that are going to look at it. And and I think that the flight 93 election essay would have seemed insane to many regular Americans but it is how the political elite the cultural elite do talk in in either direction and the flight 93 election was denounced by a large number of mainstream conservatives as well. So Ben Howe at Red State Chastise Rush Limbaugh who came out vigorously in support of the flight 93 election. So he said this is not the flight 93 election rush and then others on the right spoke in remarkably Trumpian vernacular in denouncing the flight 93 election Ben Shapiro described it as an incoherent mind numbing horse SHIT. Post-Election 2017 May article in New York Times by conservative writer Brett Stevens says writing in the wake of the dismissal of FBI director James Comey who Stevens believed was the Trump presidency was collapsing he called the flight 93's lurid imagination unhinged argumentation with with barely concealed disgust he described the efforts to imply the Barack Obama was a hijacker in the United States with the equivalent of a doomed airline as vile and absurd that he concludes his essay with the exact same symbolic move but reverse to target Michael Anton and the Trump administration as the real agents of apocalypse it is the mark of every millenarian fanatic to assume that the world stands on the verge of a precipice is the kind of thinking that has expired inspired extremists from time immemorial including the people who grabbed the planes on 9 11 maybe 2016 was the flight 93 election maybe the pilots are dead maybe the passengers failed to storm the cockpit maybe the hijackers reached their target by landing on the White House after all and there's no indication from Brett Stevens that any of this has to be read ironically so I in retrospect I thought it had the flight 93 election that was vastly overstated and now I realize this is just normally how we talk about American politics how the intellectual elite the Americans most engage politically that maybe there's just something about Americans that they're an apocalyptic people that we're somehow uniquely drawn to this mode of meaning and this may be a permanent feature of our way of conceiving and settling complex or maybe there are new developments in America since the 1960s that have brought this apocalypticism to the form my father did a PhD in apocalyptic right he did a PhD thesis on Daniel 814 and the investigative judgment that was his second PhD he did it in in England so I grew up in an apocalyptic religion so if the average is aware where the world was always coming to an end so apocalypticism of the sort events by the flight 93 election and its opponents is not going away anytime soon in American politics that's how the essay concludes right so this is from a book that came out in 2019 politics of meaning and meaning of politics cultural sociology the 2016 US presidential election there's another essay in there that I liked on Steve Bannon and he says Steve Bannon functions as a performing performance enhancing drug for Donald Trump I thought that was that's a great summary that was Bannon's effect on Trump during the campaign he have functioned as a performance enhancing drug the secret of his power over Trump and over a large swath of the American people it's been his mythic poetic abilities writing the script setting the stage finding the actors directing the scene so effectively that anti- democratic ideas have many Americans come to seem sensible and inspiring or democratic ideas appear rational and perfect well there's plenty of content for democracy on the left as well they they would not want a an up-down vote on say immigration policies right there's plenty about democracy that people on the left hate as well so there are concerns about democracy on the right there are concerns about democracy on the left Bannon called Trump a flawed vessel but into that striving overheated human container Steve Bannon poured a magical potion a fearsome brew Steve Bannon is a mythologist he scripted and produced a new and pernicious political movie and he would like to craft its sequels in the first social performance Donald Trump played the heroic protagonist Hillary Clinton Barack Obama Democrats and Enlightenment ideas played at the dark beast that the barking leached blonde populist entered the arena to slay Steve Bannon once confided to Variety magazine that he had a kinetic editing style that seeks to overwhelm audiences a little bit how Ben Shapiro talks right if you slow Ben Shapiro down and just look at what he's saying it is nothing special right it's just as far right as you can go in conservatism and still be allowed on nationally syndicated radio but there are no insights there's not there's something extraordinary or special it's just hack work but he speaks so rapidly is in such a kinetic overwhelming fashion that that many people you know regard Ben is particularly smart and I do think he's smart I just don't think he really adds anything so yeah I think Americans are an apocalyptic people okay let me let me share with you some of the other books I've been reading but first of all I heard up from Facebook from a friend John Douglas he said hey I watched the first 45 minutes of your video on Will Smith slapping Chris Rock and he said I was waiting for you to comment about you was you slapped and punched several times when you were logging on the porn industry and I wanted to hear your your references to that I didn't bring it up and I guess I just never wanted to talk about that because it's tricky as perhaps why Chris Rock is not talking about it because it's you can very easily promote or to slap you around so I thought it was a Rubicon was crossed when when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock that we've taken it as a social norm that at especially an event like the Oscars you have you have a host who will make fun of people but you don't respond with physical violence and many of these norms of you don't respond with physical violence to feeling disrespected have been under assault in America since George Floyd's death and I think I think that's a bad idea now there's nothing inevitable there's nothing I don't take the view that the speech you know must be sacred I think it's a good idea to have that social norm that you don't assault people for making jokes but there's no special protection for for speakers that just woven into the inherent fabric of life right I'm not surprised that there were times when I was writing things that were highly provocative that other people responded by punching me and smacking my head into a light pole and you know various other assaults and death threats and things like that so I like the social norms that we construct see civilization western civilization in particular is not natural it's not normal it's the product of a great deal of hard work and so we kind of assimilate these norms it's not so much that society morally deteriorates us society generally speaking elevates us from our natural state our natural state is to be brutish and selfish and nasty often and so we have developed social norms to make life better and now we're seeing parts of civilization decaying and collapsing and so I did not enjoy getting punched and smacked into a light pole and physically assaulted but I wasn't so naive as to think that there would never be any physical repercussions with things I'd say like all my life people have responded things that I've said by smacking me around so it's like complaining about terrorists like oh why can't they confront us in open battle well if terrorists confronted the United States in open battle they'd get wiped out so instead they use terrorism right if the Palestinians confronted Israel in open battle they would get wiped out so people use the weapons that are at hand and that are best suited for them I remember many pro-Israel people were saying for the decades oh why can't the the Palestinians make their case without violence well last 10 years Palestinians have done so very effectively with the boycott and BDS boycott divest and well suspend BDS movement against Israel trying to boycott Israel it's a nonviolent movement and supporters of Israel don't like it right but it's the very thing the supporters of Israel were asking supporters of a Palestinian state to do for decades now they're finally doing it and supporters of Israel are not too happy with the boycott divest and sanction movement and it's a very effective anti-Israel nonviolent movement so people will look for your weak point and I remember when I was writing on the porn industry or just when I've been writing on dangerous people in general that you have to be aware that not everyone is highly disciplined that some people just fly off the handle and so you have to you have to thread your way in life and I like the social norm that you don't go up on stage and smack the speaker around I think that's a really good social norm and I think it's disturbing and dangerous to see this social norm trashed I don't like it particularly and I'm speaking in large part from self-interest right I've had a smart mouth pretty much all my life in second grade the teacher said Luke is always very willing to share his opinions with the class but he needs to learn to be more considerate with the slower thinker well some of the slower thinkers would just smack me around chat says the act itself wasn't so outrageous but the joke was not nearly cruel enough to warrant it yeah I thought the the joke was fairly mild let's play a little bit more from commentary here on the louis through documentary on nick pointy serious people responsible adults and go oh I'm interested in that even people on the fringes are going to go this kind of looks fucking ridiculous the only people that I think that this will reach in the only positive benefit for the groipers and I guess this is what they were after all along was to reach 12 to 13 year old children on discord uh that are edgy that like pink Columbine shooting was really cool and shit like that they may get some more 12 and 13 year old kids now some of them in a few years may already be getting access to their trust fund so maybe it'll pay off in that way and maybe they'll be able to groom some like child porn from these kids on discord or whatever I guess that whatever Beardsons into but aside from that I don't really see the benefit to the movement of this documentary I feel like the only purpose it ever had was to stroke Nick's ego to make him feel like he was one of the important people and I also thought I thought a lot about it and I really start to think that maybe they're all in on it together where this was Louis's intention and Nick's hey let's get a little commentary here from Richard and Ed on the slap around the actual Lexis Arquette pointed out Smith's history on the down low he and Jada's mutual beard marriage Smith's history with men ended up dead long after drawing conclusions I don't think I find whoever this is to be a credible witness all right you said your piece I'll look into it I'm not sure I buy it do you have any comments on that or should we just power through yeah this message is a thread to Ed this is so this person has given a number of messages this is to you this is regarding your this is regarding your article on the evolutionary strategy of rape so you can check us out on sub-stack yes we are now in sub-stack so go and go to sub-stack and just google radix or my name or Ed's name and you'll find it let me go back here so regarding your article on the evolution strategy of evolutionary strategy of rape in Hinduism there's a Hindu goddess of fertility known as Bahukchara mata this is a story of a man trying to rape her so she cursed him with impotence and only removed the curse if he promised to act like a woman she also cut her breast off to make her unattractive to avoid being raped again do these stories point out that trans women are men of such low social genetic quality that even religious stories had to be written about them representing how transgender women are simply just low status exiled or castrated men who are cursed for being male sexual predators also oh that's interesting also the trans woman in India Hijjara live oh yeah the trans women in India it's interesting I say I've actually read an article on that live in their own secluded Hijjara only communities is this a byproduct of sexual of a sexual mentality to form rape gangs with other like-minded rapists okay there's a lot there I'll just let you take that all right okay so with regard to the Hijjara Hijjara um no I don't I my understanding of those of those people is that they tend to be what you would call homosexual transsexuals so they are they are males from a very young age who from a very young age believe that they are female they are highly feminized and because of I guess there's some sort of myth that it draws upon of the male or female or something I'm afraid I don't know which one it is um they're able to give blessings to people but they're but they're also they they they they're brought in at certain rituals to give blessings but they're also considered to be extremely unclean and on the borders of the community and and that sort of thing so I don't think that the Hijjara are comparable to autogynophilic transsexuals the Hijjara are homosexual transsexuals they're extremely feminine they're extremely perhaps some of them are autogynophilic transsexuals but in general I get the impressions from interviews I've seen with them that from a very young age they've always thought they were girls um there may be some of them that are that are autogynophilic transsexuals but but that's that's my experience so I think the autogynophilic transsexuality is a different thing and I think that it's a reflection it's a reflection of borderline personality disorder narcissism 82% there was one study of people that are autogynophilic transsexuals have either borderline narcissistic personality 57% or borderline personality the rest of the 80% so ah comment in the chat why does Ed have eye bags well I think he's got young children so most parents with young children don't get much sleep I don't think that there's a I don't think there's I think it's a new sort of phenomenon I think I don't think there's much reference I think the nearest thing I could think of is transvestitism as opposed to transsexuality and you do get that among shamans and people like that in certain tribes and they tend to indicate evidence of mental disorders and things like that so they're transvestites and there's what there was there was some Native American group where they do things like smear blood on them around their crotches as though they're menstruating and dress up as women as part of rituals and things like this but they also have religious experiences which of course culminates with being neurotic so there's things like that but no I can't I don't I don't think that that is related to what a guy feels transsexual I remember I met this one woman at Jewish singles event and started dating her and she ended up dropping me because I wouldn't intervene and protect her and solve her life problem so she was getting into feuds with various people and I just stayed out of it and she said a real man he steps up and takes care of these things and if she's getting her tires tires slashed because she's having disputes with people no I just I just stayed out of that so I had several no two two girlfriends at least who were getting into feuds and I thought no I just had to keep them at arms length and I very quickly viewed them as millstones around my neck I don't want to be with woman who's getting into unnecessary feuds and I don't want to be protecting her constantly from herself some degree right in a relationship there's some degree of protection for the other person I remember I was driving down the one freeway driving north up towards Monterey and I passed a car and then I stayed in the passing lane so I was driving in the incoming lane straight ahead and my girlfriend at the time like tapped on the dashboard and reminded me to move over okay so I was just unaware of what I was doing and so in any relationship you can both parties can point out to the other you know they're doing something incredibly stupid or dangerous or they're being insensitive or they're laying themselves wide open for trouble in any relationship usually you have one party that takes care of certain areas of the relationship because they're more skilled and then another party takes care of other areas of the relationship because they're more skilled in that area but about this idea of just coming in and just exhaustively they're protecting a woman from herself or from the feuds that she's created just like sounds like too much bother from my perspective here's a is a bit more from Richard Spencer on a slap her around the world one of these things that it's kind of over determined and so everyone is ambivalent about it and in some ways it has something for everyone in it so you could look at Will Smith slapping Chris Rock as like the return of the alpha male or you know Scotch Irish values of you know how dare you sir insult me all that kind of stuff yet it's also kind of I think you'd also look at is like the ghettoization of every even Hollywood the kind of you know temple of Oscars is the temple of elegance and so on you can also kind of dig deeper I had heard about this but I read about it a little today but Will Smith seems to be in some sort of open relationship with Jaden Pickett Smith and it seems almost like a asymmetrical open relationship where and the chat says how many people has Luke glassed in his life I didn't even know what that meant so I looked up the slang glassing is a physical attack using a glass or bottle as a wet weapon glassings can occur at bars or pubs when alcohol is served as such items readily available of course never I'd never do that and when is it justified to to slap someone I think if a if a woman is dating someone and the guy gets inappropriate then yes the slap is is a good response also remember there was one time according to to one parent that he slapped his kid when his daughter was becoming hysterical and he just slapped her kind of brought her back into reality and that's the only time it happened according to him anyway so I suppose there are probably extreme moments when slapping someone's that are appropriate but if there's there's an insult of your wife at the Oscars no I don't think that's the the appropriate time to slap someone she is you know publicly dating younger men he seems to keep it on the down low I mean who knows what's going on I don't really want to know I've never been much of a fan of Will Smith but he obviously he's a big movie star and so you could also kind of take this as you know him Will Smith kind of finally snapping and he just can't take the attacks on his dubious marriage any longer and he is going to lash out there's just kind of so he is a kind of puck so there's just kind of something for everyone in the scandal but anyway that's all I actually really wanted to say probably one of my least interesting intros it's you know it's kind of fascinating but you know I don't care that much it is I don't know I guess there's some other things I could draw out of it I mean even in when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s I mean getting into scuffles at school with something that was expected to some degree that was changing by the late 90s you started hearing talk of you know so I basically did everything I could to stay out of fights I've never won a fight in my life and they just seem dangerous right you get into a fight you could very well suffer permanent you know cognitive damage the down sides to getting into a fight was so big and the upsides seem to be to be so small anti-bullying and how bullying was horrible all of this seemed to lead up to a lot of the you know trans awareness and things like that that are occurring today but it was a little bit more violent I mean if you went to a bar in some little town in the middle of the country you could on a Saturday night you could pretty much expect there to be a scuffle we are now in a culture where it is just you know it's viewed as horrifying and John says I think the only time it is justified to hit someone on your wife's behalf is when someone lays hands on her but it depends on the circumstance I give the person is much bigger and stronger than you if you're surrounded by his friends and you have none of your own then going to war with him when what's most likely to result is that you're going to get smashed and your wife's going to get smashed probably not a good idea sometimes the best thing to do is to take it and just try to get out of the situation as quickly as possible yes other times it is appropriate to smash back but it has to be well judged to you know defend someone or defend your honor or war to even just fight because for the hell of it I think most defense of honor is absurd you know honor is a social construct it's something that we make up it's not inherent in the natural world so according to Judaism there are only three things that a Jew must give up his life for he must give up his life rather than commit murder or to bow down publicly to idols or to have incest so let's say hello to Elliott Blatt what's going on bro blessing from blessings interesting little topic about slapping and personal violence you've heard of the caning of Sumner vaguely is that an American politician who got caned yeah so he was a northern I think he was from Boston Sumner yeah and he was an abolitionist this is sort of civil war times yeah and uh you know he had you know he had some sharp political rhetoric directed against the southerners and I forgot his name actually look it up but one day I think he was a senator he came into his chambers with a cane and just kind of blindsided him and just whacked him just whacked beat his beat him with a cane and kind of like sort of a Will Smith situation but the idea behind it is sort of interesting when you talk about sort of Scotch Irish values and the idea is most of the time if you're a gentleman and you have a dispute with someone you challenge them to a duel all right and it's sort of a way of it's the honorable way of fighting right but if you're so low if what you've done is so low and so beneath dignity you sort of have you reserve or you can honorably cane somebody you're saying that you're just not even a human being and I don't even have to abide by the fair the rules of fair fighting it's an interesting chapter I notice a big male female difference with insults because middle class women generally speaking haven't been smacked in their lives so they get away with insulting people in a way that men know you can't do like most men have had the experience of being punched in the face and so that makes men more polite more careful about not insulting people but most middle class women I don't think have had that experience of being punched in the face and so they tend not to fight fair often absolutely yeah it's totally observable and I remember this firsthand at a company dinner so you know years ago it was a holiday party and you know sort of a semi-formal occasion suit jacket whole thing we all pretended to be you know sophisticated people and so we had this dinner and this my girlfriend at the time she just started shrieking at the wife of one of my colleagues and the two of them just started just the complete cat fight situation so you know that was so so shocking and horrifying and then you know that point was driven home to that women just women can shoot their mouths off and they don't expect repercussions they don't realize that then you know she was trying to put me in between the two like I needed to you know sort of that the woman was saying aren't you going to restrain your girlfriend yeah so I managed to defuse the situation I had a girlfriend quite a lefty and she hated police and she was walking her dog in a park that was not a dog park and so you had to have the dog on a leash and so she took her dog off the leash and she got warned by a police officer and then the police left she took the dog off the leash the police officer came back and wrote her a ticket and then she just started spewing at the police policemen and and I shut her up I said you cannot you cannot speak that way and I apologized to the officer so I recognize that sometimes need a man to step in and to stop them from self-destructing and to stop them from from spewing yeah yeah and it's like you know it's so funny that you know it's so counter-tight so you know you hear all of the woke stuff about women and oppression and that just no self-awareness whatsoever yeah and and the decide and the the look that that gets on their face when you explain to them that they were in the wrong and they literally have no idea that they were in the wrong you know it's like this you can see this I'm just trying to process the idea and they just can't do it go ahead well men learn about this real yeah yeah they learn about power really early on in life right and when we just go through the life completely insulated from this powered real true you know forceful power dynamics because there is such a taboo and a stigma associated with you know hitting a girl right so they they get to just walk through this coon of of pseudo protection they don't realize how dangerous the waters of real problems are so this this left-wing girl Jewish girl that I was dating she owned a pit bull and so like I'm I'm making love to her and this is killer pit bull like right beside us sort of adds to the excitement doesn't it I didn't I wasn't really into it and and I also didn't understand why she she was a co-owner of this pit bull with this other guy and and like a year later she says oh he's not just he's an ex-boyfriend okay great so she's in you know constant contact with her ex-boyfriend over you know care duties for this pit bull I'm not a big fan of girlfriends who are in frequent contact with their exes no no it's not a good signal and I'm not a big fan of women who own pit bulls I'm not a big fan of anyone who owns a pit bull particularly in a big city I mean it's insane I mean in the eastern suburbs of Sydney there were just like little gay dogs I mean they were absolutely harmless but when you start going inland you know then then the dogs become or when you go into the country then the dogs become a little meaner well you know I noticed that if you're if you watch you know women jogging this is the more fearsome the dog the hotter the woman yeah yeah there's a it's a direct proportion there fun times fun times so what was your reaction to the slap sort of like you know I've been sort of trying to keep a distance from these kind of dramas and things and I would just sort of made a point of like thinking okay this I was trying to estimate the air time this is going to be a one-week thing or a two-week thing you know I'm just tired of this sort of merry-go-round of issues of the week that need to be debated and shrieked about then forgotten you know remember like that when that's Neil Young thing erupted with Joe Rogan and like it was just a lightweight scandal and I just said I commented to a friend it's like next week you won't even remember this you won't you you know it'll take a week for this one to wash off and so I'm just starting to see the whole news cycle as this kind of ritual bath that doesn't have any particular meaning so I'm trying but but that said if you want my thoughts it does seem like it's a rung down we've sort of climbed a rung down and I may have a bit worried about casual violence or or capricious violence remember once upon a time in New York people were people were what were they doing I think they were pouring like they would pour gasoline into the booths of subway attendants then light the gasoline yeah remember this yeah like these just and then the what was the knockout game you know I just feel like this is going to be more and more common and it does just feel like a a decaying society I'm hoping go ahead and finish your thought well I'm just hoping that this doesn't happen I'm hoping that there's you know the other thought I had is can you imagine if it wasn't Will Smith but it was a white person yeah had done that yeah right like would that be like you know that would outdo George Floyd wouldn't it in terms of national repercussions and you know and then what if it were reversed you know what what if the the joke whoever telling the joke what was Jimmy Kimmel was of Chris Rock and that Jimmy Kimmel was slapped by Will Smith you know the apologies for Will Smith would just be thick and fast for weeks you know I'm sounding like Dennis with all my good news which Dennis Dennis Dale oh you know my my my best Dennis is Dennis Prager that's right of course but yeah what but yeah then there's this whole sort of sub drama was it planned was it faked you know and this is sort of a rough we've talked about it yeah it's definitely not planned and not faked I mean there is too much real emotion going on there and it was such a self-destructive act he's got he's got a hundred million dollar movies that are being placed on hold as a result really yeah well you know the reason I know it wasn't fake because if you could see his eyes were like blooded yeah you could kind of see through that's not fake you can't fake that I don't care how like if you're not angry you can't you can't bring that up you know what real emotion looks like and so but it is funny that as you point out the conspiracy theory mill just started right up no hesitation and that is definitely a feature of our side of the political aisle and it pains me to admit it so you mentioned you're kind of tired of the the the drama of the week so I'm just curious are there any things that you're not tired of in my personal life or publicly puppy dogs walks on the beach Chinese food playing tennis oh well I'm on this I'm on this big like I'm tending to the minutia kick you know taking care of things so listen to this hack I did I think you can be impressed so you know Costco right the big behemoth warehouse store yeah right so apparently if you get this souped up membership and you use their credit card they you can they offer a credit card so you get like 2% back on your purchases for being a member and then the credit card gives you 2% cash on a nice and this includes gas you know in Costco sells gas so basically you know I paid off all my credit cards you know three or four months ago and so I lowered the balances all of those and I didn't close the credit cards on the other cards because I heard that negatively in fact impacts your credit I just lowered the available credit excuse me and I opened a credit card it gives my better vision so now I'm going to put all of my expenses through this credit card and what it's going to mean is I'm going to basically save 4% on everything I spend in a year yeah you know and so this little hack I figured would would net me about a thousand bucks for what amounted to be like less than two hours work so I'm really pleased with myself for having done this I'm just attending to the details yeah unless unless these incentives cause you to spend more money than you otherwise would they're not doing this deal so that they can lose money they're doing this deal because on average this makes them money of course right because you know people regard and I'm certainly guilty because they record credit as this sort of free money free money or semi free money or they just don't do the math and I'm going to be extra vigilant not to fall on the trap but that is a trap I have fallen into many a time but I think I'm just not amused by things Luke I don't there's nothing I can buy right I'm just you know you have a massage gun like it's just a hundred dollars it's uh it's really good yeah it's like I mean I'm not impressed by things either but this massage gun is awesome and then have you ever used an activator yeah the kind of practice adjusting to all I've just 150 dollars and the textbook is is just another 150 dollars I mean just will change your life yeah yeah well I've come to think you know the best thing is in line for free Luke that said now here's the giant hypocrisy I did buy an air purifier yesterday oh yeah I got one of those do you yeah no um out of in Los Angeles I carry it with me everywhere no no no oh no we're talking about something different no no no I know I do I've got it in my house in my okay okay fair enough fair enough so uh do you feel like it works oh yeah definitely like if there's a smell in the room and I just turn it on high it goes I mean not that they're very often smells in my room but the very rare occasions that there smells in my room poof goes but what about like I'm more concerned like dust and oh yeah it picks up a lot of dust and crap no it's it's awesome big believer and I've been using them for like 20 years yeah so okay and uh can I ask how much you spent on it I think I spent 80 on this last one and I've had it for about 10 years 80 dollars yeah oh man it's got like ultraviolet blue light that kills bad things okay okay I I uh I went I spent 300 bucks wow on a used one wow because um you know you know just go big or go home so uh I'm eager to see if this could work I'm trying to uh I'm sort of just doing a lot of things but the other thing I'm curious about I don't know if you've experienced with is this red light um warm lighting counter seasonal effective disorder that kind of stuff you hear about this no it sounds like a good idea yeah so there's these bulbs you can buy they're very expensive but you can you put them in your place and this is important San Francisco because you have to remember the summer here is overcast for like three and a half solid months it's just daily overcast and it really affects me so you never know what from talking to you well we're we're not in the summertime you haven't seen me in the summer um I think you're making a joke I'm not quite getting it no I'm fairly cheerful but like if it's overcast I get very depressed really well not depressed but legubrious just a little like it's barely noticeable I don't know I do I are you saying that I'm are you being ironic here? are you saying that I'm often seeming depressed? you often seem depressed I do? yes no really no that's interesting because this is new information to me not just grumpy but actually depressed yeah I'm trying to think what's the what's the this this thymia like chronic low-grade depression so you don't even notice it because it's chronic low-grade it's chronic um I think that's certainly possible that's certainly possible but depression I sort of think about as having a sort of sense of sadness to it and um I don't feel that's the case I feel that uh I feel like I have like this low-grade ambient hostility yeah maybe anxiety do you some however on a one to ten with ten being extreme anxiety how much anxiety do you think you normally walk around with? um I would think a four okay I'd put it at a six or a seven a six for you or six for me six for you really but the thing is you won't notice it probably till it's gone like if you ever you know get into a or when you do get into a relaxed state often like we put forward a false self or we we just get so used to anxiety or sadness or depression that we only notice it when it's gone so I'm sure there are times that it completely lifts and so those would be the times when perhaps you'd get the the best accurate understanding of what kind of role it plays in your life well I feel like maybe it's maybe that's true but what I do is I think I sort of attribute it to work right just my work right something external I'm displacing it right yeah that's just something else outside myself that could be very uh I'm open to that I mean I feel like you know what about apathy what about apathy or do you just not care ignorance and apathy I do have to say that um yeah I mean I do follow myself sinking into apathy um sort of like you know doesn't matter who cares yeah sort of a you know it's a cousin of nihilism or it's sort of the gateway to nihilism yeah but and then the next one okay here's the what is the caring like you know I spent a long time you know I put a lot of energy into caring about political outcomes right and I you know learned a pretty tough lesson in that regard and so now now I'm you know very disciplined to get involved now is that apathy or is that just bringing self-care I think it's apathy yeah now look do you suffer from apathy um I would say anxiety I have some chronic anxiety so probably you're probably around a five apathy I would say less I did think I suffer from much apathy but go ahead good job well okay do you think when you think about apathy or you think about anxiety do you think of it as a psychological conditioned or do you think about it differently like I think it's the problem of hegemonic capitalism now I think it's a it's a psychological problem yeah I don't think it's inherent in living in the city for example um well I do now tell me if this is true of you I when I was younger you know I would uh I would see other people you know I see you look at people you look at their faces you look at their you look at how they carry themselves you look at their demeanor you know and I just remember being awed by a lot of people like these other people just striking me as being you know really respectable and worthy of admiration at one level or another for some characteristic or some other characteristic but then now I walk around and I just see a lot of people and I just I just get such a negative feeling about them they seem to be uh you know they just fill me with a certain content you know just the just the way they carry themselves the thing that they say it just seems like the dumbing down it does feel like it just doesn't feel to say no two things have changed that either people have changed or I have changed but do you do you get this sense yeah I mean there are definitely problems in in society and there's definitely like a dumbing down of society now there's like there's like the the psychiatric perspective on what we're talking about and then there's another perspective which is that we've medicalized sadness like sadness is a normal response to loss or not having things that one wants so you could make a strong case that whatever anxiety depression whatever psychological symptoms that you and I suffer from and the audience suffers from is a realistic normal a natural response to the sadness of their life yeah but you could objectively make a case for the sadness of my life and the sadness of your life you know you could you could with with actual accuracy you could paint a narrative that a normal person would see this and go okay a normal natural reaction to this life is to be sad right and so okay so so yes but within that sort of sadness and disappointment there is a certain amusement like there's a certain well I think that's what why this sort of online space is growing it's sort of an outlet for all of this negative feelings these these toxic interactions that you have with people you could there's never an outlet to sort of discharge that and now on the internet there is this like a sewer pipe you can go in and just pour it into like okay so put it this way so like so you're playing a lot of PPP stuff right so I've been wearing for PPP for at least two years now oh okay and uh so he's basically this counter Ralph of faction on the internet and he's um so there's a whole basic culture around hating Ralph now I don't know if you know this I'm starting to sense this yeah but and uh it's very bizarre but like you know big if you see some of Ralph's behavior you will just be Godsmack with how it charges it is but then you have people like Kevin Michael Grace has appeared on the show you know Richard I've appeared on this show oh you were did I miss that I must have missed that I can't believe I missed that or forgotten about it how recently was this I don't know six months ago with Joseph Cotto and oh that's right okay you two were debating the election the election okay right and uh but the video is coming out of that and then this whole thing in the baked Alaska thing it seems like collectively everyone's sort of going through some self-reflection and basically PPP and Andy are now on the side of sort of maturity and encouraging this you know more adult approach to life but uh it's been very funny to watch and very uh informative to watch but then you know like I said I I'm like why am I listening to this stuff this is ridiculous you know and I'm sort of taking pleasure like well I'm not as bad as Ralph you know which is just a really low bar you know where are these positive where are the positive people I'm meant to compare myself to and I don't know does that make you feel good do you feel good like just being able to behave when I behave better than Ethan Ralph yeah yeah it's a it's a major source of happiness in my life but so that is the the attraction that this stuff has so I'm like okay so put it this way I've been trying to like just okay what I wish looking back in the past the Pepe years 2016 to present right was what I wish had happened is that there were sober voices out there talking about skills and skill development and you know when I when I see somebody like a lot of these streamers don't have any skills outside of streaming and to me that is just that is going to cost them over the course of their lives in measure and I don't know it seems like you know if you talk about why people are being displaced why why Indian immigrants are so attractive to you know corporations why Chinese immigrants are attracted to corporations is that they have some skills and I don't know it just seemed like that was seen as a a concession to the system to somehow develop a skill and boy the effects of this aren't going to be I think you're really bad hey Microsoft really wants me to install Windows 11 and I'm perfectly happy with Windows 10 do you have any thoughts should you do it or not yeah well I don't use Windows but I hear every time there's a Microsoft upgrade something that you've got accustomed to using will break so has that been your experience in the past on occasion I wouldn't generalize I'm not transferring over to Windows 11 because I don't have any problem with Windows 10 but yeah there are sometimes problems but do you get these annoying alerts please upgrade please upgrade essentially force you and so I upgrade I upgrade my iPhone whenever it says to upgrade my iPhone 99% of the time I didn't find a problem so why do you use an iPhone and Windows why would you stay you know because I've used Windows for 20 25 years and I like the iPhone so they both work for me interesting now tell me about this red light thing red light you bought some red light device especially I haven't bought it yet I'm contemplating it your reason I'm blocking is because it's rather expensive the stuff is very but and it's expensive for something that if it doesn't work I'm going to be furious right that doesn't sound like tranquility now well the thing is is like you know I've seen so many hyperbolic planes you know made on the internet all the time and like I've fallen prey to some of these like if I fall prey to another one I'm just going to be furious but yes I wouldn't wouldn't you like to have like like a buoyant mood all the time Luke and if all it took was just the right amount of red light yeah tell me about this device let me look it up for you I'm sure they get your good deal on Amazon I mean it's like humor I think humor how do you spell that infrared infrared light therapy yeah some great M.A. light great deals on Amazon really good products so so yeah a lot of these products have great reviews red light therapy infrared heating wand I don't know I don't have don't have a strong opinion on red but I I do use a sun touch plus so I use something that gives you know bright sunlight I put it on pretty much every morning when I wake up and I mean oh man what do you mean sun touch plus some touch plus work so yeah it gives like a bright shining sun in my room so yeah okay well this is coming to me from a guy that I know who's into all of this kind of stuff like hyperbaric oxygen all of this sort of you know Tim Ferriss kind of optimal you know human optimization type oh and there's a lot of that in Silicon Valley there's a lot of this around you yes exactly exactly exactly and you know I you know I dip my toe in the maroon of mushrooms and you know mixed results and but now is my inability or my my reluctance to dive into this to sort of a feature of my generally depressive negative character I think appropriate skepticism I mean you should just look at the studies and see how strong the evidence is for for these things but also let's what if it just like I am fine with with many of my devices and supplements if they simply have a placebo effect you know I'm fine by that the placebo effect is incredibly powerful would you would you be okay just getting a placebo effect from this um um no because I I would think well why did I need this placebo why couldn't I just talk myself into being better improving you know but yes I guess I would ultimately if the effects were real yeah how could you not be happy with it so anyway all right so it's nothing you've heard of right I've I've only just started researching this but yay you know this just feels like another weird immortality project that I'm sort of doing well let's uh let's have a look at the the next symptom for depression here let's tell me if this oh it's who got sorry HOOGA who got okay great I had okay um general discontent do you experience general discontent Elliot yes absolutely yeah HOOGA is that what you said yeah yeah okay now with my amazon credit card I get five percent back on everything I purchase which I think is pretty good deal only on amazon or everything on only on amazon but in debt is anonymous there was a big debate for decades about whether or not it was okay to use one credit card if you paid it off every month and the the consensus after several decades was that it was better off that people would have no credit cards and only use a debit card I'm not saying that's right for everyone I'm just saying that's the experience of data yeah I would have that belief and I could certainly make sense you mean if the temptation is not there you won't take advantage of it so why not put a build a wall between you and the problem I mean I I use that one one credit card and pay it off and fall every month so yeah well now now that you can sort of set you can just set the payment to be automatic every month exactly there's no reason not to do it the problem is in the old days you'd have to sort of write out a check oh and then they would take Previta to cash your check so I think mbna which I think more bank of America used to routinely screw me I would send off my payment like 10 days early and then they would still count it as late and slug me an extra 25 dollars they did this routinely they got sued for it there was like some class action where if I jump through hoops I might have gotten you know $10 back but yeah they took me time and time again yeah and the rage and then I remember you know yeah then they then they jack your interest rate up to like 29 percent something sadistic like that and uh but so anyway I love the idea of sort of getting back with the credit card company it's like having them pay me just just so enticed just feels uh feels like justice oh when I got my American Express card I it gave me $500 just for getting an American Express card like I just paid me $500 so normally the advice that I've read is don't get a new credit card unless they give you the equivalent of at least $200 so the American Express gave me $500 and I splurged it all on buying ads for my Alexander Technique business and I think I spent ended up spending $600 or $700 on ads and I got one client who came one time for $100 so yeah it sort of just feels like a casino yeah it's the same thing you know you go in and you get your 20 fruit chips or something like that I've heard being with a lady friend will cure a lot of these mindless purchases yeah how long has it been Look so did you look about Switzerland I haven't done much Switzerland I mean I used to get in a sauna when there were cute goals in there But other than hanging out with Duke Gauls, I haven't spent much time Switzerland. How about you? Well, it's funny you'd say that. I was, there's a whole like, what do you call it? Thermal springs, you know, hot water, natural hot water spas up here in Northern California. And so I was going to treat myself to that for like, for four hours. You go up there and just do like a deep hot water soak, you know. Oh, okay. Because I've been doing epsom salt baths, and they've been really helping me sleep. So if you have this insomnia loop, like it sounds like you do, treat yourself to a little epsom salt bath. I've got epsom salts. I sometimes soak my feet in them, but I haven't had any foot pain for a long time. So I got out of got out of that habit. Okay. But I mean, if you really are having trouble sleeping, it will, you will sleep really well after an epsom salt bath. I'll tell you that right now. So I have not seen the movie Dark City. Have you seen the movie Dark City? No, I haven't been to a movie theater in six years. Do you know that you can often watch movies on the internet? Yeah, I know. But I would prefer to listen to internet drama. Yeah. I don't recall watching Ducks. They're causing Dark City. So I don't like science fiction. So no, I'm not going to. I'm not going to watch science fiction. But I mean, that schvitzing thing, anything is funny if you go do it with friends. Sure. I mean, I'd go do yoga with friends. I'd go to schvitzing with friends. I'd go pick up trash with friends. You know, I'd go volunteer with the homeless for the homeless with friends. I mean, anything is fun with friends. Or is it? So general discontent. I'm sensing some general discontent. Yeah. I think it's positive. Look, it's creative discontent. Yeah. Right. All great artists were discontented. So it's a good thing. It's a good thing. How about hopelessness? You experienced much hopelessness? No. What about loss of interest or pleasure in activities? Yes. Yes. Mood swings. Like, do you ever get angry at work? Yes. Yes. But only sadness. No. And it scares me that I don't get sad. Because I think my, I've replaced sadness with apathy. Maybe it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a numbing technique or What about agitation and irritability? Sadly, yes. Social isolation? Yes. Excessive hunger fatigue or loss of appetite? Fatigue lately. Yeah. Do you have weight gain or? Yes, badly. I have to get back in the water. Do you find yourself repeatedly going over the same thoughts? I don't think so. The same thoughts. Let me think about that. So you mean like just ruminating a one thing over and over and over? Yeah. I don't want to say never, but I would say often. Like, like reliving an event from history? No, no, the same thought. It's like repetitive. So let me, so in 2007, I remember 2007, 2008, I kept having the thought, you know, I'm so fucked. You know, I'm a fucker. I'm such a stupid fucker. What a fucking dumb thing to do. No, I don't have that. But I definitely have a lot of self-criticism, for sure. But sometimes it's warranted and justified, right? Did you ever watch Black Mirror where the politician got Black mailed into having sex with a pig on national TV? No. Sounds compelling. Glyb found it despicable. I mean, it was certainly edgy. Oh, I started watching the British TV show Fresh Meat. Really enjoying that. It's made by the same people who did Peep Show. Oh, I liked Peep Show. Peep Show was good. Fresh Meat, huh? Is it the same cast? No, different cast, but one cast member makes an appearance as a geology professor. But it's six kids who start university. But it's, yeah, it's pretty amusing. I need funny things to watch before I go to bed. Oh, by the way, have you heard of this guy? What's his name? E.O. Wilson? Moon. His last name is Moon, I'm forgetting his first name. Moon, Reverend Sun Young Moon. No, Kiwi Farm. Josh Moon. You heard of Joshua Moon? Is he the owner of Kiwi Farms? Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And he does a weekly, so he does a weekly stream. Yes, I'm out at the internet. Oh, okay. So you listen? Yes. I don't listen. I've checked it out. Okay. I've been listening. I've been listening to the back catalog. And I just sort of like his voice. I think his takes are really interesting. And he has some really keen insights. And he's sort of part of the counter Ralph movement that's a foot on the internet. He's sort of vaguely related to the PPP scene. But Ralph hates Josh Moon, right? The rage that Ralph expresses not keeping for Joshua Moon is just amazing. But so I listened to this stuff in the background. I find this type of content far more engaging than sort of produced theatrical content that's been scripted. I like the spontaneity and the frankness. The frankness that the internet has spawned has been so nice. I feel like it's helped me clarify my thinking by people simply speaking frankly about what they feel. It's encouraged me to state very frankly, both publicly and then with myself, about myself and sort of get out of this sort of hemming and hawing and a hedged conflicted conversation that I used to have with myself. I feel like I've kind of grown past that through internet blood sports. Yeah. Yeah, no, no, I understand that like better living through internet blood sports. Right. The healing power of blood sports. Yeah. So maybe that's the book I should write. The healing power of blood sports. My journey through internet, my healing journey through internet rage. When you hear something really good, you should note the timestamp and send it to me. Okay. All right, I'll do that. I'll do that. I mean, I just don't know what the line between spamming is and not spamming, but I'll let you know. But I'm wondering if that makes me think, though, is there like better content out there? Like, you know, it seems like this little silo that you have, right, where, you know, the characters kind of orbit around you, your show and so forth. And then there's generation, there's concentric circles that go out from that. But is there like a better? A better circle, a cooler party. A cooler crowd, better. Yeah. Is there a cooler crowd out there? Can I get invited to it? They put me where I belong. That recognizes you for who you really are. Instead of like the slum version of you. Right. So, but I'm wondering, like, do everybody I know that they have like this secret little internet community that they're a part of that sort of supplants? Yeah, I think, yeah, the Ted, Ted, Ted talks. Oh, yeah, I know. He has Ted talks. How often do you find yourself listening to Morrissey? Are you saying that I'm a hopped up pantry boy who never knew his place? I have no idea. I mean, I listen to Morrissey, but I don't know the deepest significance of it. I'm just curious. I like it in high school for sure. I thought that was a word I like. The Smiths were great in high school. I mean, it's the perfect like teenage music. I don't listen to him currently, but I can understand you. So do you not get in movies because you're afraid of getting shot? No. Well, I used to work in a movie theater. And I actually, as soon as I crossed the threshold of a movie theater entrance and I smell that sort of ambient smell of popping popcorn, I get triggered. It's like I get like a Vietnam flashback. And I just have to get out. I don't even like being in the building. Part of it is the smell and part of it is like the expense. And then, you know, I think the last movie I saw was Kristen Wiig. What was it? Are these real movies or these porn theaters? No, they're real movies. They're real movies. Oh, I had a question for you. Speaking of porn movies, though. Do you ever hear of a porn movie called Thundercrack? No. Okay. What's the plot? Okay. It is the most high IQ porn movie that has ever been made, right? It's basically a takeoff on the Rocky Horror Picture Show plot. You meet like a mansion. You go to a mansion, your car breaks down, and you have to go to this haunted mansion. So it takes place in a haunted mansion? Yes, I have heard of it. It's a pornographic black comedy horror film. You just Google it, right? Yeah, no. But I vaguely remember hearing about it. I saw this like 30 years ago. Somebody gave me a DVD and told me to watch it. But it's not even available. I mean, it was like an art film made in San Francisco like 30, 40 years ago by these crazy people. But there were some very funny dialogues, you know? In that movie, the double one on in that movie were just amazing. What was some of the best lines? Maybe it's on IMDb. Okay, so here's, so we have to understand it was shot in black and white, right? And there's, so they get separated inside of this haunted house. They can't find each other, right? This is the quote unquote plot. And then at one point, this guy goes into this room, right? And then he sort of jerks off with this device, right? He has this long, slow motion device that they play, right? And they show him jerking off. And then his companions, uh, finds him, knows he's in the room and he knocks, she knocks on the door and she's got like a southern accent. She goes, what you doing in there jerking off? Which in the context was super funny because that was like, it was like a 10 minute slow mo. Okay, here's some, there was some drill, there was a drill, some very drill humor. All right. Yeah, there are a whole bunch of quotes on IMDb. I'm waiting to find a funny one. I can't even, I just remember laughing. I can't remember the actual quote. Bond says, I'm young and restless. I'm not to be trusted. There's a lot of energy in this body, Waleen. And it hops around from bed to bed like a flea to be bit by a love bug like me. It could be a pretty scratchy situation, Waleen. I don't care my love. All I ask is that when I start itching, you start scratching. Okay, so Toydy rubs up behind Gert as they prepared to have sex in the kitchen. Gert, I should pull away, but I can't. Toydy, why not? Gert, because I would fall into the oven like the witch in Hansel and Gretel. That would leave you alone in this gingerbread house to eat all the cookies and peppermint sticks. What's wrong with that? You would get sick and no one would be around to give you an anima. Wait, you can't hear me? Okay. Bing, it's not the quadrupeds that are dangerous, it's the gargantuan biped. What the hell is a biped? You're a biped, dummy. Now look, Chandler, I don't mind you calling me a dummy, but don't be calling me any dirty Italian names. Oh, this is appropriate, Sash. You can't threaten me anymore, Roo. I don't care what you say. For the first time in my life, I'm in love with a man. You sure about his credentials? You mean you let some nun stick an elephant syringe in your organ while your husband beats his meat and weights? My husband does not beat his meat, he fluctuates his firmness. Evidently, true love cannot be quashed by religious or traditional taboos. Bing has expressed his love for the gorilla and she in turn has pursued him across four continents will not be tamed until she gets him. I can sympathize with her. It's been a long time since this house has seen happiness and love. Once these walls did echo with the gayest of laughter, but that was when my husband was alive and my son existed. So you're going to track it down and watch it? No, I think I'll skip. I just don't see how it serves me. There aren't any yets, though. There aren't any yets? The coin of sexuality always has two faces. Luke, you keep dropping out. The coin of sexuality always has two faces. That's too obtruse for me, Luke. I don't like you. Okay, bro, are you reading any good books lately? Not a one, Luke. Not a one. Not a book. Not a reader these days, my dude. I'm a doer. There's those who read, there's those who live, those who act, and those who read about those who act, Luke. I'm in the former category. Okay, good talking to you. All right, bro. Catch you later. Catch you later. Okay, this is the exciting time in the show where I share with you the books I've been reading and we get to rejoice. Okay, I read The Politics of Knowledge, a 2011 book here, and it's become more difficult for intellectuals to sustain the type of vertical authority, right? So that's where you're talking down to your audience. You're up here, you're talking down, so that's a vertical authority. With education comes a growing awareness of the fallibility and contested nature of scientific findings or philosophical positions and an increased willingness to challenge those views and to rally support to mount such a challenge. So the intense public debates and parliamentary inquiries into academic conduct at the University of East Anglia's Climate Change Unit, after leaking of emails back in, what was that, 2012? Illustrate the great openness of intellectuals to public scrutiny and criticism. See, I'm a dialogical public intellectual. I'm not up here talking down to you. It's like, we're all here together surrounded by incredible amounts of radical love and inclusion. And we're having a dialogue, like, you complete me. I could not do this show without you, right? So intellectuals are coming open to increased public scrutiny and criticism when they pronounce on issues with wider social and political impact. So the increased use of academics as expert witnesses and criminal trials has exposed their reasoning to critical scrutiny, which leads to arguments being undermined in the courtroom and subsequent re-analysis. So after the testimony of eminent pediatrician Roy Meadow, led directly to a mother's imprisonment for the deaths of her children, re-examination of his statistical methods suggested that he had substantially overstated the odds against their dying of natural causes leading to the woman's release and the expert's disgrace. So increasingly, laypeople feel entitled to be involved in debates of this nature. Although if you're equipped to read the scientific papers and question the conclusions directly, they have found ways to force intellectuals from lecture mode into dialogue, probing and publicizing the sources of evidence, deploying dissenting intellectuals who can move the peer review process into public forums and forcing intellectuals to state their case in ordinary language, which sometimes leads them to use metaphors and examples that are more easily attacked than the underlying model. So the more vertical, top-down and intellectuals pronounce it to become, the stronger are they assailed by counterforces aimed at knocking them down from their high perch if their pronouncements significantly impact upon other groups or individuals. So Climategate happened in 2009. Can't catch this now. Will it be uploaded on another platform? There's nothing that's been said today that would keep this show from being upload staying up on YouTube. But if for any reason it is removed from YouTube, it's always on SoundCloud and on Revver and on BitShoot and on Odyssey. So an increasingly educated public like you is more resistant to being talked down to and more inclined to demand a voice in conversations involving professional intellectuals. This kind of in on it where he wants to be portrayed as this white supremacist leader so that he can be a David Duke to the next generation or something like this. And I think that if Louis had really wanted to punish Nick, he wouldn't have portrayed him like he did. Because Nick wanted to be portrayed in this way kind of. When you look at the closing shot of the documentary, which is Nick at that podium, you know, kind of looking Hitler-esque, giving his speech, you know, a movement whose time has come is unstoppable, it's inevitable. That's the way he wants to be portrayed. I don't think he wants to be portrayed as like an incel, loser, shut in. I mean, he keeps portraying himself that way. Which is why I was shocked, you know? I was like, I don't get the angle here. You know what I mean? I'm like, it seems so scattershot. Like all the America first stuff, like I'm like, he doesn't want to be an insane once, you know, he wants conservative values. He wants insalatum. You know, he wants more viewers, but not like certain. Okay, you're saying 40 cut out the populist nonsense. Get back to the deep and heavy intellectual analysis. Okay, so the gap is certainly widening between intellectuals and the general public, all right? Education is not narrowing the knowledge gap. Academic journals are rarely as understandable to the educated lay reader as they were, say 50 or even 20 years ago. So the epistemic, that means how do we know what we know? The epistemic distance between intellectual and lay conversation has been lengthened by increasingly technical use of language, especially mathematical and statistical, increased use of references to past contributions of knowledge, which is a required to make sense of new contributions. What narrows as a result of expanding education is the evaluative distance between intellectuals and the public. So lay audience members become more competent at assessing the nature, coherence and effectiveness of intellectual arguments and more confident in expressing skepticism or demanding clarification. So this increases the public inclination to challenge reserve judgment or even outright reject intellectual arguments without fully understanding the technical details of these arguments. So education leaves lay readers and listeners better equipped or believing themselves to be better equipped to assess the structure and coherence of intellectual arguments without grasping their full content. Separation of evaluation from technical understanding is assisted by the enhanced formalization and empirical testing of arguments that accompanied the rise of the professional intellectual. So formalization means the conversion of verbal arguments into models. So the intellectual trend in pretty much every discipline is to become particularly, now I'm talking primarily about the humanities and the social sciences, to become increasingly abstract, reflexive, mean coming back on you understanding the observers integral part of the data. So that's why math, the various social sciences and even the humanities are becoming increasingly mathematics because that's the most abstract. So we're making all sorts of verbal arguments into mathematical models, which the public can then consider and challenge even without understanding the intricacies of the modeling, because professional models can usually be reduced to a skeletal form that the public can understand. So many laypeople challenge complex economic models on the basis of assumptions that wages are just to create full employment in labor markets, or that individuals or firms make rational maximizing choices, empirical testing confronts models with data, whose provenance and accuracy can be judged by a lay public independent of their assessment of the models. So climate change skeptics challenge global warming models on the basis that calibration uses data that can be alternately interpreted, or whose accuracy can be disputed. Education confers the ability and the confidence to identify and challenge the style of intellectual argument, even when the arguments technical contents are beyond lay comprehension. This is Richard Spencer last week on The Slappered Round the World. And I noticed this in particular in 2016 with the alt light, where there's this very funny video of Mike Cernovich squealing about people assaulting him and things like this, you know, they'll get your hands off me, don't assault me. It's just very, it's very sad. Obviously, you know, I didn't take any pleasure in an Antifa activist, you know, coming out of nowhere and elbowing me on the side of the head, you know, the sucker punch, basically, while I was talking to a camera. So there's a terrific Nicholas Cage movie, The Weatherman, who is a weatherman in Chicago, and he's just constantly being assaulted by his audience. They throw milkshakes at him. And so anyone who's been the recipient of this type of behavior, they're very ginger, they're very concerned about providing more incentive for this behavior. So that's why Richard doesn't want to provide more incentives. I don't want to provide more incentives to get smacked around publicly. And that's why there's a lot of kind of dancing around what happened to Chris Rock by Will Smith, if it's not outright cultivation. I was completely focused and coming out of nowhere and doing that is obviously extremely immoral and unmanly way of doing things. But, you know, I don't know, I think it can go, you don't want to take that too far. And yeah, I mean, I think there is balance between civilization and violence. Dueling was, you know, in many ways, a terrible thing for Western civilization. It is a brutal practice. It's just, you know, the amount of people who were insulted, you know, over a woman. And, you know, I'm thinking of Union and iPhone. And he said, oh, we're giving you two albums for free on iTunes. And everyone was mad. So they're like, I don't, can you take this album off my iTunes library? They're like, I hate this. Okay, this is so so invested in Trump and not in the dominant platform of a technological society. And that is a like seismic shift. And so it is kind of a problem when you don't have that you don't have that unifying force in culture. I've mentioned this, I mean, this is like a total anecdote, but I think it's really telling. I think I mentioned it before elsewhere. So this was like 10 years ago at this point. And it was an Apple event for the latest iPhone. And Tim Cook came out. He's like, all right, you're welcome, folks. You know, here is U2. So it's his band. I like U2, by the way, but it's his band from the 1980s, basically in the 90s, to a extent. And so it's like a band that, in its heyday, pre-existed most of the people or a lot of the people buying an iPhone. And he said, oh, and what we're doing is we're giving you a U2 album for free. And everyone was mad. So they're like, I don't, can you take this album off my iTunes library? I hate this. Who are they? U2? Is this my dad or whatever? No one appreciated it. And it was kind of these boomers, and I'm not saying that in some derogatory sense, but it's like these boomers who remembered a uniculture from, say, the 80s, where you could say U2, even though they were an alternative band, pretty much everyone liked U2, or at least like 60% of the population and 80% of young people or whatever. And now you reach this point where like 5% of them like U2. And it's people like me, like Gen Xers in their 40s or whatever. And so we just had this massive fragmentation where, again, in previous generations, the Pentagon would have briefed the Nightly News reader. Oh, we need to talk to while Tom broke off. And we can't tell him what to say, of course, but we can give him some talking points, give him our perspective, and kind of get him going. Now they're like, oh, we need to do this with selected YouTubers who are YouTubers or TikTokers who usually talk about like makeup in latest fashion or whatever. But even they, even though they might have millions of followers, even they are kind of like small time, like there's no uniculture, that it's fragmented to such a degree. And I think it is like a huge challenge because it does open up the possibility of these like, you know, fragmented groups that almost become cults, like QAnon being, you know, the ultimate example. So I do think it's a really serious issue. So this space has been nostalgic, nostalgic, written. I remember being a kid where we would watch the Oscars and we had basically like seen most of the films. And we would, you know, like I would watch it with my mom and my sister and her friends or whatever. And we would always kind of like take bets. Like I can just remember being like, Silence of the Lambs, I love that movie. And I was like, oh, I'm betting on this, it's going to be Godfather 3 or whatever was going on that year. And I just think that is totally gone. A lot of this is like polarization where conservatives just hate Hollywood, you know, for good reason. But a lot of it, again, is this like, there is no monoculture and the only movies that are seen by everyone that have cultural salience will never win Academy Awards. It's like, it's basically Marvel movies. And so there's just this total disconnect. Further, what kind of society has to break down whether something is true or not? Like analyzing a slap like the Zapruder film that that goes. Yeah, it's true. But it's kind of fun to do it. Back into the left, back into the left. It's fighting force existence. How dare they? We told them to give up their nukes and not going to talk about my principles or so on, but not going to talk about my principles or so on. But I think they'll be like a global audience as like the friendly black guy, basically, because he's the protege of Quincy Jones. So he's kind of like picks up where Michael Jackson left off. He's like the black figure. Yeah. He's kind of everyone feels safe around and he's always his marketing of his image has been like very carefully crafted. You can tell over the years, he's been kind of under the tutelage of, you know, people that kind of that are masters of this. Definitely. Yeah, you can ask a question. Okay, you do all these spaces and you sort of do analysis of society and internal what you think. But my question is, and what do you actually want to happen or do you want to be elected or what policy do you want to be implemented? Because I feel like several years ago, you had real things that you wanted, but you don't have anything that you actually want anymore or anything you stand for. That's my question. I think in terms of what I want to stand for is deeper things that I don't think are just going to happen. I mean, there was certainly a time when it was like, this is an amazing thing. Let's let's elect Trump and so on. But even then I saw Trump as Richard struggles with this question because now that he can no longer advocate for no one edgy white nationalist position that got him a lot of attention, that there's there's like an emptiness inside of him. Or perhaps he realizes as I've come to realize that generally speaking, you know, I'm far better off not advocating for anything or to be quite limited in my advocating because I'm better at being in a state of awareness rather than a state of judgment. A kind of chaos vehicle for changing the paradigm. And yeah, I mean, look, this is a rather relaxed space. So, you know, I'm not going to talk about my principles or so on, but I think there's a lot of use in analyzing society. But yeah, does Richard have principles that go beyond extracting the maximum of attention for Richard? Or ask yourself, does 40 have any principles that go beyond extracting the maximum of attention for 40? I'm not no holier than thou. I hope I mean, I think what I hear about deeply is our matters that are more spiritual. And I don't think we're going do you think that's really what's going on that what Richard primarily cares about matters that are more spiritual to change society by playing politics, you know, on a day to day manner. And in terms of big political things, I like, for instance, they were in Ukraine, which I think is dramatically changing global situation. I do think there's a lot of kind of serious analysis that needs to take place that can't really take place if it's just a kind of like right wing partisanship. But I don't think, you know, I mean, you can call me cynical or jaded or whatever you want, but I don't think we're going to see like a dramatic change in society due to electing someone for something in the next 20 years or more. Okay, you're saying 40 get back to reading these fascinating excerpts from the books you've been reading. And I just read a 2021 book. Stephen Turner and the philosophy of the social. So Stephen Turner has been on the guest on the show a couple of times. He's turned 70 years of age. And so they did a celebration of his work. He's a philosopher of the social sciences. That's a picture of Stephen Turner as a younger man, Stephen Turner and the philosopher of the social. Remember, Nathan Coughness once ran across a footnote by Stephen Turner and realized, Hey, we've got a crime thinker here. So here's some highlights from this new book. Alexis de Tocqueville claimed that when he visited the United States in the mid 19th century, most people did not genuinely believe in God or in Christian dogmas. Right. So America is ostensibly a highly religious nation, but it's incredibly shallow. My father would tell me religion in America is a mile wide and an inch deep. So most people believe that atheists and agnostics are small minorities and don't want to pay the social price of nonconformity such as social ostracism. So most people in America have professed publicly that they believe in God and they behave outwardly in many ways as though they are true believers by regularly attending church or temple. But for many people, this is entirely hypocritical. Right. They know that most people in their social context is no longer a true believer, but due to the social stigma attached to atheism conformity to the religious norm has persisted in America. I think that's an excellent point. And it's also true in much of the Muslim world. In Soviet Union, people were chronically scared and intimidated by police security agents, but they could trust their friends and relatives in East Germany. People suspected that even relatives and friends could be secret police agents. So in Russia, people dared to express their intimate opinions in private when it was the Soviet Union. In East Germany, they dared not. As a result, everyone was quite possibly mistaken about the nature of the intimate beliefs of everyone else. Similarly, with regard to Islamic countries, observers have noticed more and more frequently that people's relationships to Islam are far more diverse than is often thought. So just knowing that some was a Christian, a Muslim, a believer in God, a Jew, doesn't really tell you anything about them. Like Alexis de Tocqueville a half century earlier, Max Weber was also struck by how many Americans, especially businessmen, declared belief in God and behaved outwardly as Christians, but nevertheless did not seem to be genuine in their beliefs. So Max Weber claimed that the reason American businessmen often affiliated with very demanding sex, such as the Baptist, the Anabaptist, and the Quakers, was that these affiliations were seen as guarantees of trustworthiness, a priceless quality in business. So many members of the sex were arguably not motivated by ethical rationality, but by pragmatic rationality. And Stephen Turner writes, the sexual revolution followed the pill and appeared to be a rapid change in society by contrast to removal of the threat of hell in most people's minds, which the Victorians thought would unleash moral chaos at little effect. So we mistook the justificatory and condemnatory language people used in the theories that justified it for the real determinants of behavior. There are two reasons we do something, the reason we say and the real reason. So when you operate within a niche of a particular religion, you learn to speak and to respond nonverbally in a particular way and to do so consistently. And this reorganizes your brain in a particular way, just as living within the niche of, say, university life and an academic discipline does. These effects are powerful. They differentiate people from other niches. And so we tend to have empathy for people who are like us and are in our niche, not people in a far off niche. And then this is perhaps the most important paragraph in the New Stephen Turner book. In the study of race relations in the U.S., there have been a few career of John Paul Sartre through the prism of positioning. So when an intellectual comes out with a paper or makes a video, writes a book, appears on a TV show, you can judge whether what they're saying is right or wrong. Also, you can analyze it by what does this do for him? So I'm making a video now. What does this video do for me? So sometimes that can be much more empirically understandable than trying to understand the truth or rightness or righteousness or goodness or accuracy of what I'm saying. So why am I making this video? What is it doing? Ford is shockingly unaware. He becomes more like Christ every day. I believe that Alex Jones is a sincere Christian. So we think that intellectuals have a clear sense of their own identity and values and that these understandings of the self guide their work and the choices they make. So we tend to have an authenticity bias. We think other people are authentic, that they're acting from within their own beliefs. So there's a particular genre of intellectual biography that attributes particular significance to the author's self-description as a guide for understanding the various intellectual moves he's made. Or I don't think you can trust what people say about themselves. So intellectuals tell stories about themselves to themselves and to others. And these stories tend to be of certain types and these stories shape their creative outlook. That's one perspective. So Patrick Bayett's analysis is not proof or to conceive of intellectuals as pursuing authentic projects that correspond to their views about their identity and values. Richard Spencer sounds completely different now than he did in 2016. Has he really been on this authentic journey or is he simply positioning himself? He's clearly positioning himself differently. He's choosing to put himself in a different intellectual position to make his life easier and better. It's not that he's on this authentic inner journey. The intellectuals operate within competitive arenas. There are other live streams that are going on right now and intellectuals struggle over symbolic and institutional recognition and scarce financial resources. So am I just whoring myself out for the superchats? So you need to recognize the extent to which intellectual contributions, whether books, articles, speeches, podcasts, live streams are an integral part of this power struggle rather than an expression of some deeper self. So look at the intellectual production, look at struggles over scarce resources such as money, power, fame, influence, and then establish the way intellectuals try to portray themselves to their audience. So being an intellectual is in large part a performance for various audiences. So intellectuals tend to depict their own intellectual trajectory as untated by material, symbolic, and institutional constraints. So I'll tell you about my conversion to Judaism, but I don't tell you about my conversion to Judaism as grasping for material, symbolic, and institutional rewards. So there are remarkably few intellectual autobiographies that acknowledge the full extent to which considerations of money, fame, power, institutional access interfered with the intellectual choices that they were made. Intellectuals respond to incentives. That's a more effective way to understand how intellectuals operate than by having the authenticity bias of expecting that they're coming out of some genuine part of themselves. Autobiographies, intellectual productions position their authors and they position their allies and they position their opponents in certain ways. Now, an individual's formative years can have a considerable effect later on, but it doesn't really do justice to the complexity of an intellectual's trajectory. It's rare for intellectuals to stick to a single self concept or to a coherent project throughout their lives. Intellectuals continually reinventing themselves, articulating new perspectives, taking on new positions. So this is called positioning theory. Why is this intellectual positioning himself in this way? So intellectuals' orientations remain relatively stable, but they will continually position themselves within their general orientation to maximize their success, fame, power, access to women. So speech act therapists pay attention to words. They follow Wittgenstein rather than representing or mirroring the external world. The words accomplish things. So there are performative utterances, utterances that are neither true nor false, but they do something. Everything I say today may be neither true nor false, but it's obviously doing something for me. So consciously, I'm thinking about it's waking me up from I was feeling tired, lethargic. I had all those symptoms that I was just talking to. I had apathy and loss of interest in doing anything. And so I thought I might as well do a live stream because the downside of behaving like a total jerk on a live stream will wake me up and it will force me to focus and or force me to discuss all these books I've been reading. When I come on here and talk about the books I've been reading that ingrains those books in my mind in a way that they would not be ingrained if I had not done a live stream to talk about them. So when I say something, ask yourself in addition to whether it's true or false, what does saying XYZ do for 40? How does it benefit 40? How does it position himself in his world? So promises, compliments of threats or examples of performances. So through the second half of the 20th century, fewer philosophers thought it proved for the conceivable language as copying the external world. So more and more philosophers developed a different intellectual orientation. They became committed to the idea that language is an act that does something for the person speaking the language. So this is the performative perspective looking at what intellectuals do and achieve rather than what they represent. We tend to think of intellectual tracks and productions as representing the world, reflecting something true in the world rather than acting on the world. In contrast to other interventions such as policy briefings, music, performances or military actions, intellectual interventions seem passive. We tend to conceive of intellectual presentations and interventions as coming out of some authentic part of the intellectual that they belong to some semi-autonomous realm separate from the world of power, money, fame, politics, economics, institutions. So we tend to think of a journal article in a highly specialized academic journal as representing something through words, models or equations. We tend not to see it as something active. So the basic intuition underlying this perspective is that even the esoteric journal article does something for the intellectual. The article might not have obvious direct repercussions for the broader world, but it does a wide range of things for the author. The author is cited for the discipline for the institution. This is positioning. This is the process by which certain features are attributed to an individual or a group or an entity. So positioning as a field of thought was initially introduced in the context of military strategies. Marketing experts have used this concept of position to indicate how the right kind of representation of a product or company or a brand can fill a previously untapped niche in the market. And it's just way too exciting. You're blowing my mind. I have not had this quality of intellectual insight and this degree of intellectual excitement in my life since I was listening to Dennis Prager show last week. So intellectual interventions involve positioning, right? Any intellectual intervention, a book, an article, a blog, a speech, a podcast, a video, right? These interventions locate the author within an intellectual field or within a broader social, political or artistic arena and situate other intellectuals depicting them as allies in similar ventures, as predecessors of similar orientations or as intellectual opponents. So any intellectual move always brings about two types of effect. The first type is the positioning itself and the second effect, the types of positioning help to diffuse the ideas and enhance the agent's career and material prospects. Other types of positioning have adverse effects. They limit the further dissemination of ideas or halt the intellectuals professional progress. So Hayek, Friedrich Hayek, he was ignored for decades and decades during the Keynesian aftermath of the Second World War. But then around 1974, he got the Nobel Prize for Economics and he became this big huge name. So how did he do that? He successfully positioned himself as this important intellectual that needed recognition. I think about Karshmet's attack on liberal democracy for promoting a neutral state that resolves differences, thereby failing to do justice to what he thought to be the natural enmity between people. So intellectuals publishes journal outlets and the choices of references give subtle hints about what type of intellectual they are, where their allegiances lie. Sometimes positioning is achieved overtly and intellectuals often use the introduction or concluding part of their text to situate their intellectual intervention and themselves in relation to others. Equally explicit is the use of labels which can act like brands. Intellectuals often use labels to flag their own position. These labels tend to capture the core idea in a succinct fashion. So this is obviously the case for Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism and his notion of the engaged intellectual. So existentialism was the most powerful philosophy, most widespread philosophy probably ever and it was dominant after World War II, but then it just dropped from the stage from the 1970s on. So intellectuals use labels not just to refer to themselves but also to others, the aim of criticizing or ridiculing the work of opponents. So take humanism. So in the mid-1940s, humanism had clearly positive connotations. Over the next couple of decades, it gradually became a negative referent point often used to denigrate any assumption of a coherent or transparent self. Edward Said's notion of Orientalism and essentializing provides another potent example. Initially introduced in the specific context of literature as caught on, it has spread to various disciplines, has been invariably used to denigrate allegedly flawed attempts to generalize about other cultures. Generalize about Jews, Muslims, Christians, blacks, whites. That's essentializing. Essentializing is to say that people have certain essential traits if they're Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Black, White. So the introduction of a label facilitates the dissemination of ideas often, but the clarity of its meaning and its distinctiveness is often undermined once others start subscribing to the same label. So the term existentialism, which was initially used by journalists, then it was adopted by Jean-Paul Sartre, then was used to reflect the ideas of a whole variety of other intellectuals, including Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir, eventually was used as a broader culture of malaise and angst. So as the term became nebulous, Sartre abandoned the label. So Charles Pierce, he's a 19th century American philosopher, his pragmatism demonstrates the precariousness of labels. So once William James Schiller, a literary figure started to adopt the term he had coined, Charles Pierce switched to pragmaticism to distinguish his intellectual orientation and Friedrich Hayat adopted the term catalaxie to refer to the spontaneous order produced by market interactions after its earlier terms like free market and liberal economics had been adopted by the Chicago School, the University of Chicago School of Free Market Libertarian Economics, which had very different underlying philosophies and methods. And otherwise, I've just been reading about ancient Egyptian viruses and things, but yeah, that's pretty much been my way home. How do you? Interesting. I've just been working on a few different projects, finishing up your book, among other things. And so that will be, I think we'll get it out this month, I'm going to send it in sometimes these things take a lot of time on the printer's end, but should be out so spiteful mutants the book out soon. It will be huge. If I do say so myself is a very good book. Yes. Well, I think it is, I mean, yeah, I mean, unironically, I mean, it it brings together, there's a lot of interesting episodes in the book, like QAnon, Black Lives Matter, SJW, these will be kind of salacious for people to read about because they're contemporary and so on. But I think it's really the best way of bringing together the general spiteful mutants theory about child mortality and all sorts of things. So I think that's the best kind of thing, salacious, but also intellectually intellectual, you know, academically underpinned. That's the best kind of book. I think it's fascinating to read. It's a bit like a play that's a series of jokes followed by death or, you know, something like that. So you laugh and cry. So yeah, that's the way forward. Yes. But anyway, before we get started, let me just mention this. So, and I won't leave this up the whole time, but we do, we do super chats of course. So if you would like to have your question read on air, I know I keep promising that I'm moving to... I think it's broke up and during that period of where they were apart, she had some sexual intercourse with another man. And so I understand that there may be a certain degree of tension in that regard. I also heard rumors, although they could be nonsense, that she'd had, she'd been involved with Chris Rock, but that's probably rubbish. But certainly she'd had some, she'd had some sort of relationship anyway. So one imagines there's a great deal of tension anyway. And then, and then he feels kind of cuckolded and to beat her male. And then this person is disrespecting his hoe. And by disrespecting his hoe is disrespecting him. And because that's, his hoe is his hoe. And so this results in him losing his temper and having to go up there and give him a slap. So that would be, if you wanted to see it in terms of honor culture, then that would be it. But the way I would see it more is just simply, they had this complaint a few years ago, Oscars so white, because apparently African-Americans were underrepresented among Oscar winners. This is despite the fact they only make up 12% of the population. I can't help thinking that they weren't underrepresented, but anyway. They were underrepresented among Oscar winners. And so they had, but this was very much Oscars so black, because it seems to me that it is the, the ascent of black street culture, but I'd say brawling fighting violence, that sort of thing, into the Oscars arena. So this was very much now Oscars so black. And my take on it is simply a scientific take, which is that I had a paper published last week in the journal, Mankind Quarterly, called with my colleagues, Helmut Neiborg and Emil Kierkegaard, entitled Europeans have larger testes than sub-Saharan Africans, but lower testosterone levels. I gotta, I gotta disavow this kind of scientific racism. Kind of allow this on this fully show. All right, let's get back to Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and the world of intellectuals positioning themselves. So positioning for intellectuals takes two ideal and typical forms and intellectual intervention may be an intellectual positioning or a political ethical positioning. So an intellectual positioning locates the agent primarily within the intellectual realm, it might identify a specific intellectual orientation, defend that stance, elaborate on its significance, claims about the intellectual things about the importance of and come down to claims about the originality or intellectual power of the intellectual orientation. And maybe all about linking the intellectual to more important figures in the field, possibly a mentor, political ethical positioning refers to a broader political or ethical stance which surpasses the narrow confines of the intellectual sphere. So intellectuals often locate themselves in relation to a sacred realm, an opposition to the profane world of the market of party politics of grubby everyday life. The modern university, for example, academics often evoke a sacred world and applying to higher academic values such as intellectual autonomy, truth and excellence. So an intellectual intervention in and of itself does not necessarily involve a political, a particular positioning positioning only takes effect because of the agents operating within a particular context. So first, you've got the effects of an intervention in terms of positioning depending on the individuals who bring it about on their already established status and on their position within the intellectual field. Secondly, effects of intellectual interventions depend on those of the other individuals at play within the same field shifts in the positioning of one intellectual effect, other intellectuals positioning and self positioning. So in the mid 1940s, intellectuals became increasingly convinced of the writer's political responsibility. This may today's notion of art for art's sake as untenable. Similar ideas were once used in defense of collaboration as intellectuals, those intellectuals who collaborated with the Nazis. And this became regarded as pernicious. Then you have a new generation of intellectuals born after the First World War, who treat Jean-Paul Sartre as increasingly insignificant. They turned to different authors. They proposed different interpretations of the same authors. Foucault found inspiration in Nietzsche, Lévi-Strauss' route lied on Emile Durkheim. Once even Sartre's previous allies moved on to different intellectual traditions, so his philosophical program started to look outdated. Third, the actual effects in terms of positioning depend very much on the specific intellectual and socio-political context in which the intellectual interventions take place and on historically rooted sensitivity. Though by arguing in elements of law and the book Leviathan that the sovereign is the sole judge to assess a threat, Thomas Hobbes positioned himself in line with Charles I in the context of the ship money crisis depending not only the king's right to tax people, but also his right, not the public's or their representative's right, to judge whether the Dutch were a sufficient threat to the crown to warrant increased military expenses. So the same type of intellectual interventions in different time periods bring about different positioning even when the same people are involved. So the same intellectual intervention might generate different positions in different contexts. An author's self-presentation within the local field is familiar to them, might acquire different meanings and connotations in a different context. Even when intellectuals are carefully constructing and calculating positioning and self-positioning not all effects of their intellectual interventions are within their control. Though one extreme scenario is when intellectual interventions are posthumously reassessed by others in pursuit of their own intellectual agenda. Though what appear to us now to be iconic literary figures or key intellectual interventions not necessarily considered so at the time. Though those who have been crucial in this process of re-membring often had their own agenda positioning themselves in the competitive intellectual and political arena. So at the end of World War II, Jean-Paul Sartre used the alleged non-engagement in politics of previous novelists as a foil to remark his own intellectual agenda. Now in the West, in the Anglo-World philosophy is dominated by analytic philosophy, which is supposed to be unconcerned with past philosophers. Now for all this they're disdain toward the history of philosophy earlier British analytic philosophers that are remarkable interests in their sub-discipline. They repeatedly positioned their own intellectual agenda in opposition to what they saw as the dangers of foreign strands of thought. They coined the term continental philosophy, that bad philosophy by the French and the Germans. So all these Anglo-analytic philosophers such as Russell and Eyre depicted the alleged model thinking of Hegel and Heidegger as causally related to the emergence of totalitarian regimes such as the Nazis and they link their own preoccupation with precision, logic and science to more responsible and liberal forms of government. And subsequent British-based philosophers such as Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper did not strictly speaking operate within the framework of analytic philosophy made their case for piecemeal liberal democracy by depicting German philosophies as pernicious because they allegedly promoted a problematic notion of liberty because they proposed or because they proposed closed utopian schemes that were immune from empirical refutation. Well Thomas Hobbes Leviathan is a totalitarian almost a totalitarian approach to government and that's from England. So it's rare for a single intellectual intervention to bring about the desired effect. In most cases several interventions often repeating the same position necessary to get a message across. So the networks of an intellectual comprise a large number of agents who often engage with him and confirm his position even if they disagree or overtly hostile because intellectuals often work more effectively in groups. A group strategy usually outcompetes an individualist strategy. So the status and recognition of individuals of intellectuals depends on where they acknowledge which journals which books you know which other intellectuals acknowledge them precisely who acknowledges them and what is the position the status of those who acknowledge them. Positioning is more effective when accomplished in teams. Teams are narrower the networks teams of intellectuals cooperate in positioning themselves by grouping around a school or research program. They often use a label that make their work an agenda immediately recognizable. Teams are effective but they come at a cost. The exception of the intellectual leaders members of teams find it more difficult to position themselves as having an independent voice or being innovative. So the writings of the leaders will be remembered while the other works fade away. That team membership is crucial because positioning rarely goes uncontested. Intellectual might be able to position himself a certain period of time. Eventually rival intellectuals will mount a challenge will portray him as outdated, insignificant, pernicious, erroneous or misrepresenting his proclaim position. So individuals who carefully position themselves often end up pigeonholed differently by others than having to extricate themselves from labels attributed to them. So teams capture the cooperative side of intellectual life but what we call individualization is equally intrinsic to the realm of intellectuals by intellectual individualization referred to the process by which intellectuals distinguish themselves from others make themselves look different from them and possibly unique. Individualization is achieved through careful self positioning. Often involves conflict because the act of differentiating tends to place takes place through the criticisms of others. Almost every formal presentation of new intellectual work begins with a position statement identifying the work on which it builds the work that complements and supports it and the work by which other authors are contradicted and possibly superseded. People and it's like what do you want? Like what is this movement about? Yeah and I just wish that Louis had played more so up on because he said how I described Nick Fuentes as a walking contradiction. I would have liked to see a bit more of the contradictions. Nick says this stuff about race mixing and about the white race like he himself is Mexican. Louis didn't bring that up because number one that would have humiliated Nick completely and totally discredited him in the eyes of any white supremacists and I think what they were wanting is for maybe people to come on board with that because it's completely controlled now. I'm not 100% sure but he didn't grill him like with that in terms of like the Catboy stuff that was never brought up which I think he missed out on that a lot. The in-cell stuff is new and I think that's kind of why the in-cell stuff wasn't in there. It's always been around but they've really doubled down hard on it now but I wish some of that stuff would have been included in for sure but definitely the Beardson segment pays off. That was the best. Yeah that's pretty good the Beardson segment in the Louis Thoreau documentary on America's New Right. So there's an article in Tablet Magazine, The Red Peel Prince, how computer programmer Curtis Yavin became America's most controversial political theorist by Jacob Segal. I read the whole thing. He concludes after two years of COVID following the disintegration of the liberal state and the emergence of eccentric ideological impositions coordinated on what seems like an hourly basis by an invisible yet apparently all powerful hand which has no need to account for its nakedly invisible contradictions and failures. The answer seems obvious either you see it, the cathedral or you don't. So I have not found investment in the thought of Curtis Yavin aka Mordbug worth you know just doesn't pay off. So I've never gotten much out of him. I'm sure he's you know be interesting to have a conversation where he usually goes under their mentions Mordbug. Just just don't get value for money when I read him or listen to him. When he's like man. When he's talking to Beardson about you know you did this Nazi salute, he said you know the whole point of your movement is optics like to not have any of this Nazi imagery or any association with white supremacy. You had one job Beardson, one job and you failed. That was a fantastic moment where he just really nailed Beardson to the cross there. Beardson spurred out Beardson's spiral big time. If you want to see our live reaction to that with all the clips, check out the link in the description for the gum road. There's other content on there as well three and a half. Yeah, I can't wait. Can't wait to do that. So what is knowledge? She said, whoa, I want to spend three months studying this and she got her money and she went over to the Norwich and she spent three months and she read the whole thing and she wrote it all up and she handed it to her committee and in an hour and a half they sent it back and they said, you've got to be kidding. She said, well, I'm going to get my dissertation, I'm going to get green now, right? They said, you've got to be kidding. Of course we're not. This is the head of the writing department at University of Chicago. Going to give you your PhD and she said, but nobody in the world knew what this woman said. Right, they said, and we still wish we didn't know what she said because we do not care. And she said, but it's original research. She said, I guarantee you it's new. And they said that's right. It's new and it's original, but it is not knowledge. And she said, that's ridiculous. It has to be knowledge. No, it's not ridiculous. She was living in a positivistic world where knowledge looks like this. In a positivistic world, knowledge is just built up over time. And anytime you find out something that people didn't know, you get to just add up to this model and knowledge just keeps on growing and everybody's happy. And that is dead, dead. Well, mostly dead. Here's the model now. Sorry, these are people. These are human beings. There are conversations moving through time and there's a bunch of people and they get to say what knowledge is. And that horrifies you. Why would those people get to say? Why do they get to say? Especially because historically, of course, they've looked just like me. As my niece says to me every time she sees me, to male, to pale, to stale. Why on earth would these people get to say what knowledge is? Get it. I get it. Big problem, what they do. And that's a fact. These people get to say what counts as knowledge. The good news is they are changing way too long, way too late, way too slow, but they're changing. Great. That comes as a big relief. All right. Another book I've been reading comes from 2012. Intellectuals and their public's perspectives from the social sciences. Professor Jeffrey Alexander, he's a sociologist at Yale. He's an academic entrepreneur. He founded cultural sociology, which is very different from sociology of culture. He's a founder of cultural sociology. So he says, being a public intellectual, not just a matter of telling the truth, it's a matter of performing. Politicians win power by convincing voters to believe, to politicians win power by becoming symbolic representations of the hopes and fears and dreams of collective life after they take hold of power and gain control of the administrative state. The new rulers cannot just order people about and expect them to obey. They need to make government meaningful to align the administration with the stories citizens tell each other about what they hope and what they do and where the best society should be. So the powerful couch their commands as requests and frame their administration as the last best hope of humanity. If they cannot, they end up just issuing commands. People will not see government as a symbol of their values. And in a democracy, they will take the rulers power away. So individuals, organizations and political parties move instinctively to hook their actions to the background culture in a lively and compelling manner. They work to create an impression of sincerity and authenticity rather than one of calculation and artificiality. They want to achieve various similitude, like make it real, keep it real, bro. Social movements, public demonstrations display a similar performative logic. So just think more about how much performance goes into our daily life and into the lives of people we watch on the news. Movement organizers are intensely aware of the media's organization's control over the means of symbolic distribution. They direct their citizens to perform in ways that will communicate that they are worthy, they are committed, they are authentic, they determine to achieve acceptance and inclusion from the larger political community. So social actors are embedded in collective representations. They work through symbolic and material means. They orient themselves towards others as if they were actors on a stage, seeking identification with their experiences and understanding from their audience. So it's a struggle to fuse the speaker with the audience, to connect with the members of civil society through a good performance. That is what democratic struggle for power is all about. Those who want power must be elected, they will not be elected unless their performances are successful. The politicians and advisors put their heads together, they run focus groups, they do daily interpretive battles with journalists as well as with the other side. To become a hero, one must establish a sense of great and urgent necessity. The times demand Donald Trump. The moment is precarious and burdened with terrible significance. America has fallen on tough times. The American dream lies in tatters. The nation has fallen off the hill. We have been destroyed. This American carnage ends right now. We have been polluted by the previous administration. We must be purified. We need a new hero. So Obama presented himself as having overcome great personal adversity for addition for this position of national hero. He was born into a deeply polluted racial group from the perspective of the majority of America. He was inspired by an earlier African-American prophet, Hero's rhetoric about the dream of justice to become deeply etched in the collective consciousness of Americans. So after Obama secured the nomination, joyous proclamations of imminent salvation were offered by African-Americans and circulated around America. His victory seemed to presage an end to race hatred and the realization of the true solidarity promised by American civil society. And in Africa, Obama's Kenyan relatives in their countrymen describe his ascension as signaling redemption and the possibility of global solidarity. So to become a hero is to enter into myth. It is to cease being a merely mortal man or woman, develop a second immortal body. An iconic surface allows audiences an overpowering feeling of connection to this transcendental realm of a nation's idealistic political life. So Obama grew the second body. He was no longer just a human being. He was no longer just a skinny guy with big ears, a writer and ordinary man, but he became a hero to many, an iconic hero, a symbol who would not die. But most politicians cannot grow such a second skin. They may be respected or liked or deferred to, but they never develop a mythology. They remain a politician rather than myth. So they will become overshadowed and wimperfied by their opponents, wounded in political battles, revealing their mortal natures. Jimmy Carter was wounded by Ted Kennedy's late primary run. He was injured further by Teddy's overwhelming and vanglorious speech at the Democratic Convention. Carter faulted in the general election campaign, which helplessly is the once mundane Ronald Reagan grew a sacred and mythical second body. Bill Clinton versus George H. W. Bush ran this play in reverse. So decades before Richard Nixon's five o'clock shadow, not properly covered up by makeup, darkened and polluted him, allowing John Kennedy to shine like a bright young guard during their decisive presidential debate. I remember I was basically bedridden by chronic fatigue syndrome. In my 20s, I used to complain to my stepmother that she didn't listen to me. And a friend of her said, Luke is a wounded young guard. If you are well and at UCLA, you'd have hundreds of people listening to him. Well, I've got 12 people listening to me. So the blogger is not just a new kind of factual gatherer, but a new kind of interpreter, one who speaks openly and ideologically and personally, even while supposedly on behalf of the people themselves. But the point is, that's the way it works. You may not like it, but that's the way it works. They get to say. So they get to say, yep, you're right. That was new. I didn't know how many people were in 302, but it doesn't count as knowledge. It doesn't have any value to us. Uncount. The good news is this thing just does move through time. The other good news is this boundary is permeable. Stuff comes in. And unlike this model, stuff goes out. I like to think of academic conversations as sort of excreting as they go. Stuff gets left behind. It's not like this. Where everything gets added up is always there forever. That's not the way it works. They go along for a while. They think things for a while and they say, whoop, that was dumb. Don't think that anymore. They go along for a while and they say, whoa, we were doing that. Don't do that anymore. It's not this build-up model. This build-up model assumed that everything was right. We don't think that. We think a lot of what we think right now is wrong. We just don't know what the wrong is. And we don't know what better is. We want to know. We do. We want to get better at it. But in order for us to do that, you have to be dealing with the stuff we say is knowledge. That might not feel good, but that's how it works. So important isn't going to do it. New isn't going to do it. Original isn't going to do it. Because I talk to people and they say, you know, people don't think this is a value. They're not publishing it. Well, and somebody says they don't think it's important. So you know what they do? They say, this important study, what is it about B that makes it feel important? What is it? Tell me the words on the page. Here's what I literally want you to do. I want you to literally, everybody in the room, I want you to literally go through 1B and circle the words, the specific words that are making it valuable to the audience, to the readers. What's the first verb you see? A word, not verb. What's the first word you see that makes it valuable? Nonetheless. Next. Accept it is, but actually widely accepted. Next. However, next. Although, although. Next. Inconsistent. Next. Report it. You have to speak the language of the powerful, right? If you want to be powerful, you have to learn to speak the language of the powerful. Next. Anomaly. Here's my first piece of advice to you that you can do is to make your writing better starting this afternoon. Spend 15 minutes a week for the rest of this year. Taking articles in your field, print them out so you have a hard copy, go through and circle every word in the writing that is creating value to the readers. If you see an article that you think doesn't have any of those words, send it to me. I'll give you my email. Send me your email and say, Larry, I found an article that doesn't do it. Here's what I bet. You will see none. I will see 10. I guarantee you 5. Likely 10. What's going on? How come you don't see them and I see 5 or 10? You missed them here. I see them. I know the code. Every community has its own codes. The communities you're entering have their own codes. A set of words that communicates value. You must know the codes of the communities you're working in. And they are particular to communities. Some codes are shared among a bunch of communities. Some aren't. You've got to know. You've got to know. You spend 15 minutes a week for the rest of this year. You'll be doing two things. One, you'll be training yourself to look for the code of what's creating value. The other thing you'll be doing if you're smart is you'll be writing down each of those words and you'll be creating an invaluable word list so that when it's a week before something is done and you're doing one of your revisions, you're going to do what? You're going to do the same thing on your own work. And if you can't underline 10 words in the first two paragraphs, you're going to do what? You're going to go to the word list and you're going to jump them in. Right. Sometimes, sometimes it's that simple. Sometimes we take articles that wouldn't get published in an hour. We do things and they get published. Sometimes weeks. I'm not suggesting this is always magic, but sometimes it's magic. Because sometimes the problem are pretty simple. The problems have to do with these people. You have to know them. As I say to undergraduates who look at me and they say, why does it take six years or five years or even four years to get a PhD? Aren't they just learning more stuff? No. Half their time is spent learning more stuff. The other half is learning their readers. I will say this again. If you do not know your readers, the particular people in a community, if you do not know these people, you are very unlikely to create value and you are very unlikely to be persuasive. Because persuasion depends on what they doubt. You don't know what they doubt. How on earth are you going to overcome those doubts? You must know them. It's not enough to know your subject matter. You've got to know your readers. Okay, so what is it about, there's two things going on here then. One of them has to go on with the community of readers. Tell me the words you underline that has to do with the community. Of the words you underline and be. Which words have to do with the community? Widely. Accepted. Reported. Those are words that queued that there was a community of people who want to understand this. You don't have those words? You're not signaling any community. What do the other words do? Nonetheless, however, although what do they do? They do and find the synapse in your head that has that word. Here's what's going on. He has been told or taught or learned that in order to have persuasive, clear, organized prose, you had to have what are sometimes called flow words or are sometimes called transition words. Words like the cause and if and unless and however and although and and and but. All right, now those words bad, those words aren't bad. I must, is it bad to have flow? It's not bad to have flow. They have nothing to do with value. Why? What's the difference between and and but in creating value? Imagine if you go to your readers and say, hey readers, hey community, hey community, I've read your stuff. I've thought about what you think and I have something to say. Hey readers, I've read your stuff. I know what you think but you're wrong. Which one are they going to pay attention to? It's hard when you try to publish on journals because if you say the people are wrong, those are your editors. Here's what I will say and if somebody wants to do it right now, check it. He can name a journal. We will go to the every edition of that journal in the last 20 years and every paper will say that somebody's wrong. Everyone. Now he just, what's the difference? He says and he's been and I understand it. I can't go to these editors and say they're wrong and I am telling you that every article published in that journal in the last 20 years has opened by saying readers are wrong. It's looking at me like I don't believe it. What's the difference? Yeah, one way to put it is you have to know the code. You have to know the code. If you say to the people who are the dominant figures in your field, you know what? I've read all your stuff and you're idiots. It's not going to go down well. Right? Don't say that. What did you say to them? The dominant figures in their field. I say, what did you say to them? Yeah, but if you want to learn the code, what do you suppose the code is? Yeah, but the code is, wow, are you smart? Wow. Whoa, I'm just amazed. You are so smart and you've contributed and you've advanced this. You've advanced this community through in fabulous ways. There's this little thing you got here. And now they say, oh, yeah. Thank you for appreciating that. What do you think we have wrong? And then you better have an argument. Not an explanation. Do not explain. Argue. You're talking to people who wrote this stuff. You don't have to explain it to them. You have to predict what they're going to doubt when you say they're wrong. So you say to them, you're wrong about this. And they say, why should I agree that I'm wrong? And you say, well, here's why. That's what introductions do. They give a quick version of why these people should think that they're wrong. And they say, well, okay. Preliminarily, I've read your first two pages. Now I'll start reading the rest of it. Why? Because you cause them to think that your work might be valuable for them. Imagine if you go to them and say, wow, your work has been really great and now here's something new that you didn't know. See, here's what happens. People say to me, man, if I say that they've done something wrong, I'm taking a huge risk. True. You think you're not taking a risk if you do this? What's the risk you run if you do this? Hey, really smart people, I've done all your work. I've studied all your stuff and I have something I want to add. No, no, no, that's actually a really good reaction. What's the risk you run there when you say there's something I want to add? We don't care. Or worse, I'd like to put my voice into the conversation. Say, we don't have any reason to listen to it. Let's pause on that one for a minute. The University of Chicago Writing Program is not real popular in the world of writing programs. And you can see why. A lot of people think we're fascists. I don't dispute it. Here's what we teach people to do. We say identify the people with power in your community and give them what they want. That's what we teach people to do. Lots of people have said to us in some version or another, you're supposed to teach people to challenge the existing community. Well, actually, I just did. But notice that I did it inside the terms of the community. People say, why don't you teach people to have their own individual voice? I'm going to say, I get that argument. I get the moral and ethical pressure to teach people to have their individual voices. But when I sit with somebody up in my office who's worried about their career not going anywhere, it can't be about their individual voice. It's about what's going to make it valuable to their readers. You need to understand that this program that we have is motivated by those people who have come to us and said our writing is not succeeding and the whole program is aimed at them. How do you make them help them succeed? There's a ton of ethical issues involved in that. You don't really care. I just want to put them out there. There's also the person. Okay, let's check out some of the leading thinkers of the modern ages. Three and a half hours. Yeah. But that was a really solid moment in the documentary. All the Beardson stuff was fantastic. The big stuff was really funny, too. When he plays him the rap song, like a Twitter is gay or whatever the song was called. I was like, you know, he looked completely like mentally ill throughout the entire thing. Like he looked completely mentally ill, totally unhinged. And at the end, like when he asks for Louis validation, when he asks for Louis approval, what do you think of the entertainer, Bake the Laska? And Louis just says like, I think you're poisonous. I think you're scum. You can just see the dagger put into Bake's heart. And there's just a moment where his face like he looks like he's about to cry. He looks like he's about to cry. And that was another amazing moment in the documentary. The Bake the Laska stuff optically really fucked them because can I think the whole mistake they made about this whole thing with Louis is to argue about semantics. Like if the whole argument is about am I or am I not a white supremacist, you've lost. At a certain point you have, okay, let's talk about the actual ideas that this is what I actually believe. You know, okay, Louis, use whatever you want. But here's why I believe this stuff. Here's and be strong about it and don't be ashamed of your views. Don't try and hide and run away from what you actually are. And because of that, because of their weakness, their timidity, and overall the in eloquence and stupidity of Bake the Laska and Beardson and Spokespeople, it all fell apart. And you know, Fuentes was humiliated. And a lot of these groifers faces weren't blurred during the aft pack part, people were, you know, those faces have been revealed. I think overall it is a complete disaster for the movement. I think it makes it look unserious to anybody who would view it. Because Nick somehow chose to allow the groifer representatives to be Beardson, Bake the Laska and Brittany Vency. Where was Vincent James? We found him in one fucking frame. Yeah, one frame where you have to pause it. And you don't even recognize like you barely recognize that it was him. He was in it for one frame. Where I think Spokesman Vincent, where was where was he? I think in our, in our like review, there was like a part where me and you were like, wait, what was that? And then we had to like frame by frame rewind. They were like, Oh, that's Vincent James. Because you were like, who the fuck is that? And they were like, Is that Vincent Jay? Like, he's like one of the leads of America first. But also, I want to say the angle. So you said, you know, he had this like point of view or this like angle to attack America first, which is make it look like the new bogey man, the new Richard Spencer, blah, blah, blah. A better angle would have been to be like, look how ridiculous they all look. And there are people who are subscribing to their viewpoints, even though they're ridiculous. I think the entire essence of the, what makes making front of America first funny is it's funny. It's not like we're like, we'll get passionate sometimes about it. But it's like there's a lot of comedy behind it. And if Louis leaned into that, it would have made for a better documentary, at least in my eyes, I guess, maybe for like the general UK populace, maybe not. But it was still overall good. It was, it was interesting. It was really funny. It was well edited too. Well edited. Yeah, it was amazing to see Brittany Venti's filthy apartment also. The cats. You know, her dishes, her cat shitty litter box. Louis made sure to film it. He made sure to get all the dishes in the sink. He made sure to do like, I swear to God, you could count to 10. There was a 10 second close up on a fly. No, I just was hearing Louis's voice. Imagine the smell. So he's trying to convey to you without having to say this. Imagine the smell of this bitch's apartment. It was so funny. She had to microwave the tea for Louis. Oh, he doesn't even have a cattle. She doesn't have a cattle. She's microwaving it. Not even like a stove cattle. Like, you know what I mean? Like, what is going on? Her just going, because knowing, like she has a troll, right? So seeing her going, you know, I didn't know what I was signing up. It's just like, you know, come on, you were trolling. Just admit it, you know, the Beardson bit was the fucking, it was so, you know, though, it was so funny because he's totally disjointed, right? He's like hunchbacked. Like, he swear to God. He's got the Louis shirt. He has the Louis shirt on. He's like two full feet shorter than Louis. Louis is just completely mocking him. Like, Louis's fucking wrist is like the whip, the fucking Beardson's thigh, for fuck's sake, was like the size discrepancy. Beardson's just full on lollipop guilt, full on hobbit mode. His facial hair, like his mustache was like uneven. His chin was like non-existent, and he just got totally humiliated. And then Louis's like, who knew a troll had such thin skin? You know, just fucking fogged up. And the whole thing that like, there was like one and only question basically Louis had, Beardson was being very disingenuous with it too. We could have just like neutralized it with one sentence. So the thing was, when they were leaving AFPAC 2, I believe, they're in like a convertible. And Beardson says, buy to everyone and does like the Roman salute or whatever, right? The, you know, the Hal Hitler thing, right? And it's clearly like, he's doing it as a picture with him doing it as well. Now, so, so Louis brings this up and instead of Beardson being like, oh, I was just fucking around because it's like, it's, you know, it's offensive and it's, it's funny. That would have been easy, right? An easy like, and then he would have been like, oh, do you think that's funny? Like, yeah, I defended you. Who cares? Beardson acted as if he was like, so we found your, your mind comp book, you know, your manifesto, your Hitler manifesto on your, on your website or something. Like Beardson was like, I wasn't, I wasn't doing that. No, I wasn't. It was just, I was waving. I was waving. And then smash cut to him in his live stream after kicking out Louis saying, well, yeah, maybe it looked like it. Like, you know, it's just ridiculous. So what do you think? Okay, that's going to do it for today. Take care everyone. Bye bye.