Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to the exit podcast.
Speaker: This is Dr. Bennett joined here by degree studies.
Speaker: Degree studies is an exit member who roots out Russian disinformation online for the Biden administration.
Speaker: He analyzes your tweets for latent disloyalty or heterosexuality.
Speaker: He catalogs them in a database and he prepares supports for superiors to target you for gang stalking, seed oil advertisements, microwave radiation attacks, et cetera.
Speaker: Welcome to the show degree studies.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: And you know, just so we're clear, I work under the czar of heterosexuality enforcement.
Speaker: So
Speaker: You know, that's not my particular title, but that is my my pervia.
Speaker: Tell us about your actual job.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I think it's easiest to start with travels a little bit.
Speaker: After college, I was trying to get better at Arabic.
Speaker: So I spent some time in Lebanon and Syria.
Speaker: And after I got back, I had like a OK network of both.
Speaker: friends and knowledge of sort of the players and stakeholders in the Syrian civil war.
Speaker: So did a bunch of things related to that, but ultimately both for private institutions and institutions that ultimately worked with the government, I was doing sort of social media analysis of jihadi content online.
Speaker: And that has sort of developed over time into just social media analysis of
Speaker: a number of political questions, you know, heterosexuality, the most important, but just, just one.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: We have to root it out.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Well, I'm happy to report based on my, I mean, this is anecdotal, but my cursory review of the internet is that there's very little heterosexuality remaining.
Speaker: We're so close to beating it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: One day, inshallah.
Speaker: So tell me first about your experience with doing the analysis on jihadis.
Speaker: What did you find about sort of their corner of the internet?
Speaker: Yeah, well, I think there's a couple of things I should say up front just to, I mean, I am sort of,
Speaker: I have a very specific background and there might be certain things I'm missing, but one important clarification is that I think the government and the private organizations that do this work, at least the parts of it that I've seen, there's a big bifurcation between the people who are working on sort of automated algorithmic capture of online content that's bad versus like human analysts who
Speaker: who are not even working with those tools, but are looking for very specific things.
Speaker: And I'm in the second group.
Speaker: So everything I'm going to say is sort of about this by hand analysis and what I think the challenges and problems with it are.
Speaker: And, you know, if there's someone listening who says like, you know, actually,
Speaker: we have a Palantir terminal and we can totally tell when someone's, you know, in underwear in their mom's basement versus is a real terrorist.
Speaker: Like for all I know that that could be true, but you know, if that is true, then I don't know why I still get paid to do what I do, but there's lots of redundancy in government.
Speaker: So maybe I shouldn't look into that too hard.
Speaker: But yeah, so I think a big like meme in, in Washington DC that I think is, is very typical of,
Speaker: so many things that have gone wrong is after ISIS emerged, there were a lot of people saying like, oh, the jihadists have beat us in the digital space.
Speaker: The jihadis have beat us in the digital space.
Speaker: We need to we need to up our game to be on par with them.
Speaker: And I think like this basic premise
Speaker: is just sort of like a misunderstanding of what asymmetric warfare is.
Speaker: Like we would never say, you know, if some terrorists walked into a mall and shot people, we would never respond by saying like, our mall murder game is really whack.
Speaker: And like these guys are walking...
Speaker: You know, like there are certain things that we're just not going to be as good at as them.
Speaker: And maybe we shouldn't even try.
Speaker: That's the that's the basic point.
Speaker: So it's like, yeah, the State Department is not going to be as good as at shitposting as like Algerians in France who, whatever their ideology, are like young and funny and, you know, have this this corner of the Internet that they participate in.
Speaker: So I think.
Speaker: And also, like, you know, there's defense contractors and consultants, and they really got in the heads of, I think, the generals and other folks saying, like, if you guys were good at the Internet, you could stop this recruiting flow.
Speaker: And, you know, like the stuff they're doing, their graphics are so good.
Speaker: Like there was this.
Speaker: If only we had the right graphic design.
Speaker: Right, exactly.
Speaker: I mean, and this is where like the, you know, the sort of, I mean, I don't want to overdo it, but you can probably already see like the sort of echoes here of how things played out in 2016, where, you know, you'd have serious people on TV being like, the potency of the frog, like, what can we do?
Speaker: And, you know, they were like generating probably billion dollar memes somewhere.
Speaker: But I always looked at it as like,
Speaker: yeah, like young men who are dispossessed and angry are going to be good at the internet.
Speaker: And like, you can't really, but I also thought like the way they were attempting to establish causality was really misguided because I think, and I sort of understand it, but it's like they were looking at sort of this dynamic,
Speaker: you know, language developing on the internet in like jihadist groups and saying, this is so sophisticated, like this is why they're pulling people in.
Speaker: And I think what they didn't want to say, what maybe some people knew is it's just like, no, like there's a critique out there of, I don't know, a global world order.
Speaker: And I think for young Muslims, there's like a critique that's very appealing.
Speaker: And the internet's capture of that critique is,
Speaker: is like symptom, not disease.
Speaker: And as with so many things, like the disease is really difficult and treating it demands answering some hard questions about yourself.
Speaker: So it's like treat the symptom as the disease.
Speaker: The symptom is they're really good at the internet.
Speaker: What do we do about this?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: They're owning us online because their memes have this magic power, not because we're like stupid assholes who look stupid all the time.
Speaker: Right, or even on a more basic level, it's like you do encounter people who are just like, well, there's nothing fundamentally appealing about archaic religiosity.
Speaker: We know in a competition between... Coca-Cola.
Speaker: Yeah, sincere connection with the transcendent and sexual liberalism.
Speaker: We win every time, so what the fuck is going on?
Speaker: It's like...
Speaker: You know, and if you have a certain perspective, you can see why that wouldn't necessarily be accurate or a good way to think about it.
Speaker: So I don't even know, you know, there's also like a whole counter messaging part of this that I know some people in government do, but I was much more in, and again, working for private institutions that interface with the government, I was much more on just like,
Speaker: observing and capturing and identifying trends.
Speaker: And like, I think, like, I brought this up to you when we spoke before, but I think a perfect example of sort of where all this falls down is like, I would see a meme where it'd be like a woman in a hijab
Speaker: and then a bunch of American college girls at spring break.
Speaker: And the caption would be, who is free and who is a slave?
Speaker: And it's like, there was no ability in the room.
Speaker: I always sort of just wanted to look around and be like, look, I want to win against these people too.
Speaker: But this is true, right?
Speaker: If they don't want their daughter or their sister, if they prefer the left picture to the right picture, I sort of doff my cap.
Speaker: I can't...
Speaker: Which is to say, like, don't get in an ideological confrontation with some shit that's true.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Because, like, choosing battle space is a lot of... And I don't know what it would mean, like, because I haven't spent a ton of time thinking about, like, how would I do this if I were actually constructing the observation mission?
Speaker: But I think it's like they were putting so much under the
Speaker: a headline of sort of like troubling jihadi content on the internet, you're capturing a lot of stuff.
Speaker: And I think obviously we see this as a problem with every kind of censorship the government or any institution does, which is like, if you're capturing a lot of stuff that most normal people would agree with, then you might already be in some trouble because you're sort of, you're sort of revealing that you're opposed to things
Speaker: And I would say like, this is sort of more broadly, this is where I can zoom out and sort of articulate a critique of the war on terror generally, which I would just say like, the US government would never call it like reforming Islam or whatever.
Speaker: But I would say like, that's what they want.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And this never should have been a confrontation with people's religious values.
Speaker: It should have been a confrontation with
Speaker: a form of tactics that used violence against civilians.
Speaker: And like, once you create a linkage between, uh, certain sincerely held religious beliefs that are extremely broad in terms of who, who considers them, uh, you know, like, uh, in line with scripture, like holy, righteous.
Speaker: Once you're like throwing a lot of stuff in that bin, I think you're just, you're, you're in trouble.
Speaker: And, and another thing we were talking about before is like,
Speaker: The question of who posting these memes is a real terrorist, who is a supporter, and who is just like trolling.
Speaker: I think that's actually a question that is not well suited to this environment.
Speaker: Because I think like,
Speaker: again, the nature of the young man on the internet is like, he is boundary testing.
Speaker: And the question of like, is this man capable of, of, you know, putting a pipe bomb somewhere?
Speaker: Or is he just a shit poster?
Speaker: Like, because I'm a religious person, and I believe in free will, and I don't believe in fate.
Speaker: It's like,
Speaker: That's a question that's going to be answered in his heart and in his relationship with God.
Speaker: That's not a question that can be answered by like an algorithmic analysis of the content of his tweets.
Speaker: So it's like, you know, shit poster today could be terrorist tomorrow and vice versa.
Speaker: And it's not going to be.
Speaker: And I think that they, I think there's a level of not understanding, like not, this isn't even political misunderstanding, but there's a, there's a level of,
Speaker: misunderstanding the role of shitposting as trying ideas on.
Speaker: Trying ideas on and also the psychological warfare of convincing your enemies that the ideas they're scared of are more prevalent than they would like to believe, which I think is something that jihadis love doing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I mean, you know, when you're, when you're, the problem maybe from their perspective is it's comparable to like,
Speaker: If you lived in a nation that had like legal religious freedom, but like half of the people were like Aztecs with like, they wanna roll heads and severed hearts from the steps of the temple.
Speaker: And like, well, I'm sorry, you just don't get to have religious freedom then, I guess.
Speaker: And so like from their perspective, like the whole suite of traditional sexual ethics, traditional gender ethics, even like tribalism and nationalism per se, it's like those are just sort of not acceptable things.
Speaker: in their, in their cosmos.
Speaker: And, and, and so like, they're in a really tough situation because like, yeah, it is stupid to go to war with someone's fundamental identity that when there's millions of them all around you, but that's kind of their religion too.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I think what you say is, is interesting.
Speaker: This is where I'm going to get a little, I don't know, tin pot or whatever, but I think in some ways, um,
Speaker: Part of why maybe Islam, radical Islam, was an appealing enemy for the United States as the leader of sort of a certain Western, you know, global cultural and political hegemony or empire or whatever you want to call it, is that in their case, all these ideas that we like to think of as archaic were like relined with
Speaker: what are in some sense, pre-modern societies.
Speaker: Whereas like, if you go to Asia, it's like, there could be a very modern political institutions.
Speaker: It's like, what do these people care about?
Speaker: Well, traditional gender roles and a nationalism.
Speaker: Oh, does that come from God?
Speaker: No, like they have a parliament.
Speaker: They just, this is what they care about.
Speaker: So it's like, that's sort of like a, that would be a confrontation where you can't contrast what you want.
Speaker: Like, I think the sort of global empire people would like to say,
Speaker: if you are modern in your political institutions and your technology, you will inevitably end up as untied to any sort of land or God as we have become.
Speaker: And there's lots of places on earth where that's not true, but in the Middle East, you can create this, uh, this strong contrast where you're sort of like, well, you can nail it all to the door of the mosque and like, and like make the sort of make that the enemy.
Speaker: And it's really handy because like you can go after like,
Speaker: There's a, there's a certain, there's that story of the English Raj officer who they told him like, you can't stop us from burning our wives with Sati, the Hindu practice of burning wives.
Speaker: You can't stop us from doing that because it's our, it's our custom, our national custom.
Speaker: And he says, well,
Speaker: In my national custom, we take people who burn their wives alive and we hang them and take all their property.
Speaker: So let's all act according to national custom.
Speaker: And I think there was a way of, there was a way of turning Western chauvinism and Western sort of pride in our accomplishments against sort of fundamental moral principles, gender ethics, sexual ethics in the name of like, well, it's,
Speaker: The problem is that those brown people have taken it too far.
Speaker: And so us and sort of maybe the harder line liberals were able to sort of align and they were sort of able to deploy us.
Speaker: And I mean, in a literal sense, deploy people like us into the desert to go fight those people.
Speaker: When the daylight between the grunt on the ground from Alabama or Tennessee and the jihadi is just way smaller than that we were led to believe.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I also just think like,
Speaker: the thing that always frustrates me, I mean, I know it's a, it's a huge people on the right or young people on the right get mad about like when boomers are sort of like Democrats are the real racist.
Speaker: And I, I, I get that.
Speaker: I get like not wanting to play by the established virtues of the other team.
Speaker: But I also think like, I do, I have been in many conversations where I'm like, no, I am the real like at Islam respecter because it's like,
Speaker: Here's what I would say to, you know, my Muslim comrades.
Speaker: And I think that this is almost universally felt as a more respectful position where I'd say, I do not think Islam is true, but I have no desire to change the content of your religion.
Speaker: Whereas what's so messed up to me is like, no American official would ever say Islam isn't true.
Speaker: They would just attempt in all these ways to change the content of the religion.
Speaker: And part of my whole thing is that like that position is actually a much more belligerent, uh, position for a dominant culture than what I'm saying, which is sort of, Oh yeah.
Speaker: No, unambiguously like, Oh, Islam isn't false, but all of you are bad Muslims and, and you're all betraying the truth of your faith.
Speaker: And, and therefore like you're not entitled to, um,
Speaker: It's not an exercise of religious freedom for you to believe those things because those aren't really what your faith teaches.
Speaker: You're just using that to be whatever.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I could, I'm not going to, but I could go on a rant about mainline Protestants here where, you know, their definition of religiosity is innovation.
Speaker: And so, of course, it makes sense to them to be like, yeah, to be the real Muslim.
Speaker: You just do like, you know, Thomas Jefferson Islam.
Speaker: But, you know, we love our mainline Protestant brothers and we won't go into that.
Speaker: Oh, boy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, and I mean, I spent some time in the Middle East myself on an internship, again, trying to hone my Arabic just like you.
Speaker: And one of the things that I encountered most often in that culture was conspiracy theories.
Speaker: And it was an element of, A, you know, because there's no...
Speaker: I was, I originally like at the time I thought it was because they don't have a free press because they don't have an independent media.
Speaker: And that's why they have all these conspiracy theories because they don't have anybody they can trust.
Speaker: And.
Speaker: I sort of started to realize as I got older that like, oh, I also don't have an independent media.
Speaker: We just really believed what they were selling us.
Speaker: And so we didn't buy conspiracy theories because we were stupid.
Speaker: And like, I would dearly love to go back to the Middle East and just be like, you guys are right.
Speaker: I was wrong.
Speaker: I'm an idiot.
Speaker: I'm sorry.
Speaker: Like, and it's been weird to watch that phenomenon explode in my own country.
Speaker: because we're all schizos now.
Speaker: Yeah, I think what our betters have been coasting off of is that the way in which both market attributes and cultural affiliations within a society distort media narratives is very different than the way a centralized regime attempts to coerce media narratives.
Speaker: But I think this had led us...
Speaker: a lot of us to the conclusion that in a, you know, in a society where the pressures on media narratives were coming from the market or from a sort of cultural allegiance felt by the journalists, that that was much less perverse than one in which the regime was directly controlling speech.
Speaker: And I think what we're all just getting a lesson in is that, like, if the cultural conflict dial is sufficiently dialed up,
Speaker: it can start to get much more perverted than you might expect.
Speaker: I'm also like really persuaded.
Speaker: I didn't know about this at all, but there's a certain perspective you encounter online where people are like, America's always been a crazy country.
Speaker: You know, there's all these ways in which
Speaker: we're more like a developing nation than a, like a, you know, post-industrial European nation.
Speaker: We're just rich.
Speaker: So people mistake us for a first world.
Speaker: The phrase I like is we're just a very rich third world country.
Speaker: And the thing they point to is that like,
Speaker: American media now and its interaction with politics is actually regressing to a much more normative American mean, which is like in the past, it would have been more regional differences as opposed to like cultural blocks.
Speaker: But that there were big parts of American history where like there was no newspaper that a lot of Americans would agree wasn't trash.
Speaker: And like.
Speaker: I think for people our age, you know, our parents, the boomers, like they were the three television channel people.
Speaker: So they were the Walter Cronkite people.
Speaker: But like pre-Walter Cronkite, there wasn't actually that kind of cultural consensus.
Speaker: Probably if there was a difference, it was just that even if it was this crazy before, there was also space and lack.
Speaker: Yeah, you just didn't come into contact with...
Speaker: the, uh, the, yeah.
Speaker: I mean, until you did, and then there was a war, uh, right.
Speaker: And I actually feel very positively about like the sort of sorting that is happening in the country, like where people are moving to be more with like-minded people.
Speaker: Like, I don't know, you could view it two ways.
Speaker: You could say like, if this ever is going to become conflict, you would actually need geographical separation.
Speaker: So that's, I mean, you'd sure hope, I mean, otherwise it's the Balkans.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But I do think like it is possible that,
Speaker: just people, you know, I always am sort of excited about like some sort of renewed federalism where some deal could be brokered where like, you know, in, in another 50 years, like Louisiana and California are just basically different countries.
Speaker: You know, if we were in Europe, that would be the distance between like Greece and Scotland.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So like, why don't we, uh, we, we can start thinking about it that way maybe, but I wanted to, um,
Speaker: piggyback on that conspiracy theories thing.
Speaker: I think that, um, so martyr made, did a really excellent podcast on like the early history of Zionism.
Speaker: And he was just sort of talking about how there were like different blocks within the British government.
Speaker: Some were very pro Zionist, some were very pro Palestinian and at a number of points, uh,
Speaker: sort of like the pro-Zionist faction within the British government ended up winning out.
Speaker: But how that looked on the ground to the Palestinians was the stuff that the British told them about assurances about not allowing certain levels of state development to take place
Speaker: they all seemed like lies in retrospect.
Speaker: You know, I think that there really were like British officials who were trying to advocate for the Palestinians at that time, but they lost.
Speaker: And so the way that history played out just looked like the British government was sort of in league with the Zionists regularly lying to the Palestinians about what was going to happen.
Speaker: And I think that, you know, I'm not like I don't have like a particularly woke perspective on colonialism writ large, but I do think it's fair to say that
Speaker: Like, you know, we get pretty conspiratorial as Americans just when it's Americans we don't like making the big decisions.
Speaker: So if you extend that a row further and be like, it's actually people from a totally different society making the decisions and the record they're giving you of what decisions they're going to make and why are like
Speaker: incredibly unreliable, then yeah, I think the people of the Middle East have a very valid basis to say, we've done some like real empiricism.
Speaker: We have like a sheet of shit you told us and then what happened.
Speaker: And those don't, you know, those don't match.
Speaker: So that's like an imperial... We looked at the data.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: I think the numbers support their conspiratorial worldview.
Speaker: No, absolutely.
Speaker: We can see, and to be clear, I don't know what happened, but it's like, I lived in Lebanon for a while, I have Lebanese friends.
Speaker: This stuff exploded at the port.
Speaker: A couple hundred people died.
Speaker: And now what it seems like is happening is there's gunfights in the streets because the judge or whoever was selected
Speaker: kind of wants to blame Hezbollah for it.
Speaker: And Hezbollah says, if you're going to have a kangaroo court that blames us for everything that happens, we're going to start gunfights in neighborhoods.
Speaker: And it's like, that is not a situation where you can expect like a quote citizen, unquote, to like parse what's happening.
Speaker: Like the most reasonable conclusion for a Lebanese citizen in that situation is to be like, there's a lot of
Speaker: powerful people with guns making decisions above my pay grade.
Speaker: And I am like a little Adam being bounced about by the physical laws of the universe.
Speaker: And honestly, like, I think you were sort of getting at this.
Speaker: It's like we could learn from that.
Speaker: There's this weird, there's this weird thing in democratic societies where it's like, all we talk about all the time is what we want.
Speaker: and how the expression of our desires will be meted out in the political process.
Speaker: And it's like, yeah, that happens once a century.
Speaker: It's much more accurate to totally separate you and your family's desires for the society you live in from the reality of the society you live in.
Speaker: I think Americans are particularly brainbroken in that regard, where it's just like,
Speaker: well, a lot of us don't want this thing to happen, so surely it won't happen.
Speaker: That's not really how anything, it's like, you know, people stopped liking the wars in like 2008.
Speaker: Yeah, no kidding.
Speaker: And I was, you know, 24, and it was 2011, so first Obama administration, and I was literally, like, this is embarrassing to say, but I was baffled.
Speaker: because all the people that I met were like Fed post level on board with Osama bin Laden.
Speaker: And like, don't say a bad word about Osama bin Laden.
Speaker: But they loved Americans.
Speaker: They loved all Americans.
Speaker: Like they were so amped to have an American friend.
Speaker: And like they wanted us to go to their wedding and they wanted to like, you know, come to this party.
Speaker: And like,
Speaker: Just very warm, sweet people.
Speaker: And I could not understand that at all.
Speaker: And I asked somebody about it finally.
Speaker: And they were like, well, I mean, you're not in charge of what Obama's doing.
Speaker: Like, you don't like, you don't have any to do with like Bush.
Speaker: Like, why would, why would I be mad at you?
Speaker: Like, you know, and, and, and like in my American mind, I was sort of like, well, yeah, I do.
Speaker: Cause I vote.
Speaker: And which is just like the most absurd, like the, the arrogance of that, like that you matter to any of this and like that it matters whether or not you approve, you know?
Speaker: I mean, I was a kid, so whatever, but I think that's a common sentiment.
Speaker: No, for sure.
Speaker: And I know that I almost had a parallel experience where when I studied abroad in Egypt undergrad, and when I was in Egypt, some poll came out that was like some crazy percentage of Egyptians support Al-Qaeda.
Speaker: And, you know, I just did a real quick poll with my Egyptian friends, and I was like getting confused and disturbed.
Speaker: And then one of them was like, oh, by the way, I think the context you're missing here is that none of us think Al-Qaeda attacked the world trade.
Speaker: So, you know, in my mind, I was like, oh, they're justifying this terrible attack.
Speaker: But that wasn't how they thought about it at all.
Speaker: Oh, that's a classic.
Speaker: Ha ha ha ha!
Speaker: Yeah, though what is interesting is like I've never been a 9-11 truth guy.
Speaker: And one of the reasons you can – and there's even like an Onion skit about this.
Speaker: But one of the reasons I've always believed Al-Qaeda did it is that you can find certain people in the middle of school who are like, yeah, we did it.
Speaker: Don't try to take that shit away from us.
Speaker: Like that was amazing.
Speaker: But that's a minority – that I encountered much more –
Speaker: when I was looking at like social media stuff from like Syria and Iraq sort of, you know, terrorist groups that they would, that it seemed clear that like the rank and file of jihadist militias, they believed, but you know, there, yeah, there could be a flip side of that, which is like, well, yeah, just accepting it at a certain point becomes like a good recruiting thing.
Speaker: tactic.
Speaker: But yeah, there was, I think like middle Eastern normies, at least back in 2008, 2009, there was a lot of skepticism that Al Qaeda had anything to do with that.
Speaker: And yeah.
Speaker: And there's a difference.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's definitely a difference between, um, the hard edge and like the, the, the bros that you met on your internship for sure.
Speaker: Um, and, and I mean, you know, um, you, you find a similar phenomenon, uh,
Speaker: on the right, which is, it didn't happen, but it should have kind of mentality.
Speaker: And I suspect that, I suspect that that is also, there's, there's a level of people who are like, we definitely did it.
Speaker: There's a level of people who are like, we didn't do it, but it would have been cool.
Speaker: And there's a level of people who are like, we didn't do it at all.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Well, this is also, I think, sort of what we're, or I in my clumsy way, I'm trying to talk about is that like, staking out a position that is your position all the time is not actually how human beings work.
Speaker: You know, like if I imagine my Arab friends, they might like, maybe a news story comes on Al Jazeera and is about like Abu Ghraib or something terrible we did droning a wedding.
Speaker: It's like for the next 48 hours, that person is like,
Speaker: you know what, maybe, maybe Al Qaeda did 9-11 and I hope they did.
Speaker: And then maybe their media diet changes a little, they're feeling different.
Speaker: They interact with a Westerner and they're like, oh, I don't know, maybe that media, like we all have conspiratorial versions of ourselves.
Speaker: And when we're presented with evidence that encourages that subpersonality to come forward, we can indulge that.
Speaker: But like it actually and that's sort of where this like social media stuff gets all messed up is because like the Internet encourages you to let that voice take the wheel.
Speaker: But that but that doesn't necessarily tell us.
Speaker: Who you are.
Speaker: Is that your perspective as you go about your life?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, you know, for some people it clearly is and for some people it definitely isn't.
Speaker: But I don't know, you know, in a couple of years of looking at people's crazy utterances, I have not found a way to just from the text, you know, decode what kind of what kind of person they are.
Speaker: IRL.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So tell me a little bit about.
Speaker: It can't have looked the way that it looks now when you started.
Speaker: the political changes and the things that people are looking at have changed so dramatically in the last five years, even in the last year.
Speaker: Can you describe your view of that from sort of inside the belly of the beast?
Speaker: Yeah, sure.
Speaker: So probably the biggest thing was, I think like the biggest argument at the beginning of this, and I'm on one side of it, is like,
Speaker: Digital recruitment is a big thing for these terrorist jihadi groups.
Speaker: So we need to get them off the internet.
Speaker: And then there was another perspective that I'm more sensitive to that was saying like, whatever they're saying on here, they can say on other platforms, they can make their own platforms.
Speaker: So have them do it where we can watch.
Speaker: I very much agreed with that sentiment.
Speaker: And then I think that with the 2016 election, there became this fear that, um,
Speaker: like in the mind of the people who talked about this, you know, quote, very sophisticated communications operations from Russia primarily, but also places like China was having a huge impact on our, uh, our domestic political discourse.
Speaker: Um, and from the very beginning, I always thought, you know, in 2016, I was, I was pulling for, for Hillary Clinton.
Speaker: I had, I had not, um,
Speaker: face down the implications of a lot of my own political conclusions.
Speaker: I think I was just sort of going with the flow.
Speaker: Didn't think Trump could win.
Speaker: Hadn't given him a lot of thought.
Speaker: And, you know, still now I'm closer to just never voting again than supporting some some figure I'm familiar with.
Speaker: But at that time, even as a person who was
Speaker: like a DC normie in so many ways, I did know like, okay, everything they're saying the Russians and Chinese are doing are actual disputes that exist here.
Speaker: And like, because so much of the problem was like an inability of,
Speaker: sort of beltway people to conjure a perspective, a let's say I'm going to use the word legitimate, not in the sense of like an intellectual defense of Trump, but that like you could summon a coherent critique of American society where voting for Trump made sense for me.
Speaker: Weirdly, like having liberal education being taught about, you know, moral relativism and, you know, maybe all these crazy people around the world, we just don't understand them.
Speaker: with that tool set, it was very easy for me to be like, yeah, this is totally sincere.
Speaker: Like there's reasons people could believe this, but there is a huge emotional need to say, no, our countrymen couldn't be doing this.
Speaker: There must be like a
Speaker: you know, there must be a warehouse somewhere in Siberia where everybody's like posting racist comments, uh, under like a, a brilliant Obama tweet.
Speaker: And it's just, you know, like Maga, Maga man, 69, 420 is actually, uh,
Speaker: Igor Tchaikovsky or whatever.
Speaker: But like, I think if you're just like a little bit of a socially heterodox person where, you know, maybe you have family members in different places politically, maybe you have family members, it's much easier to just be like, oh, well,
Speaker: maybe bots are retweeting this, but like it wouldn't totally matter because this is a sentiment that Americans are totally into.
Speaker: So I think like I was starting from a totally different premise than a lot of the people I was working with because their premise was like, I'm trying to think of a specific example.
Speaker: Oh, here's maybe an example.
Speaker: Like, do you remember Razeeb Khan is a gold star family guy?
Speaker: He got in like a little bit of a tiff with Trump.
Speaker: And Trump said like some some mean things about it.
Speaker: And look, I'm I'm like enough of a still like enough of a bug man and like a typical patriot to be like, yeah, I don't really want people insulting a gold star family.
Speaker: But I also don't really want gold star families at political conventions.
Speaker: But let's leave that aside for the moment and just say that there are a lot of people around me being like, you know, when the when the regime con criticism
Speaker: didn't seem to, there weren't that many people on the right outside of say like Lincoln project or like McCain people.
Speaker: I mean, Lincoln project didn't exist then, but that type of guy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There weren't that many people like seemingly in Trump's base, there was not a huge disgust with him saying those comments.
Speaker: And like, to me, that was just like, yeah, well like the politics of the street is not like the politics of television.
Speaker: Like people, you know, and again, maybe this is time in the middle East.
Speaker: I don't know, but it's like,
Speaker: people's ability to sort of excuse someone that they think is their champion and not excuse someone they think doesn't.
Speaker: Not only does that not confuse me, I think it's legitimate.
Speaker: But like there were other people being like, this is so out of bounds for what America is that like surely there must be hidden hands, you know, saying that they're okay with this when in fact like Americans would never do that.
Speaker: And you know, that's just a very like,
Speaker: velvet-handed, gilded view of what politics is, of what democracy is like.
Speaker: I don't know what other word you use, but it's instantized.
Speaker: Everybody that I've talked to about this who has had that critique, like how could you possibly justify X, Y, and Z?
Speaker: My answer is always basically we disagree about the stakes of the situation.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: We disagree about what we're up against and...
Speaker: If it was a guy with a gun holding off a mob outside your house, and then someone said, well, but he actually is mean to his dog.
Speaker: You know, I hate people who are mean to their dogs.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: But like where we're at, who gives a shit?
Speaker: Like that's like this, the situation that's not in the, that's not in this situation right now.
Speaker: And, and that's, I mean, you know, there was that article, the flight 93 election, which, you know, a lot of us read.
Speaker: And I think that, yeah, that's what they don't get is that they don't get
Speaker: they think of themselves as being the ones who like take this seriously and that, and that Trump is like a joke and we're sort of fought, we're sort of supporting him as a, as this really like mean spirited troll to tear down this really good thing.
Speaker: And that's just, that's just the complete wrong read.
Speaker: of the situation.
Speaker: There's an Adam Serwer book that I think describes this perspective and he, the author, has that perspective.
Speaker: It's called The Cruelty is the Point.
Speaker: And I think if you think the cruelty is the point, you are really ass backwards on this.
Speaker: Like it's not...
Speaker: It's not the point.
Speaker: I think to a lot of people, it doesn't even appear as cruel.
Speaker: Like one thing I've always felt, I mean, I totally agree with your comment about stakes.
Speaker: Like I certainly don't view people as rational.
Speaker: Like I have a more, a more like, like I, I sort of think,
Speaker: I don't know, like religiosity or spirituality or something is so present in all things humans do that I'm not going to say people are rational, but I do think that when people do something that I consider out of what I would expect them to do, I immediately try to reassess my understanding of the situation.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Update your model.
Speaker: Yeah, not move those people.
Speaker: Well, like, they were formerly rational, but now they're irrational.
Speaker: Like, I don't think... And again, this is another area where I'm saying, like, I am the hashtag real liberal.
Speaker: Because, like, I thought that's, you know, in my hippie college-geared high school I went to, that was certainly how they taught us to think about people outside the United States.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But then the minute that you...
Speaker: When it becomes incoherent is when you try to apply it to the past.
Speaker: Because when you try to say that Americans in the 1600s did things that made moral sense to them, or Germans in the 1930s did things that made moral sense to them, and they didn't spontaneously go insane,
Speaker: Like that is a way harder conversation to have.
Speaker: And that doesn't mean that you like justify what they did, but it's a totally different.
Speaker: It's not what you're taught in school.
Speaker: What you're taught in school is that they went nuts.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I think that like people way overestimate like how many figures in history are leaning into playing the heel.
Speaker: Like I think it's virtually none.
Speaker: But when you see sort of like Western renderings of a lot of historical conflicts, there's always these figures like not that Django is supposed to be like a serious treatment of
Speaker: But the Leonardo DiCaprio slave owner character in that, it's like the perspective they project onto him is that like he knows slave owning is bad and he loves it.
Speaker: Like he's in league with the devil.
Speaker: He likes that it's bad.
Speaker: And it's like, yeah, I don't think...
Speaker: there is a much more complex, maybe equally objectionable, like sort of patrimonial perspective.
Speaker: It's like you don't have to read a lot of, you know, primary sources to know that that's that's a little bit different than the attitude that existed.
Speaker: But I think it's.
Speaker: Well, we're doing the same thing.
Speaker: We're doing the exact same thing with, you know,
Speaker: mom putting her kid in a dress for, for social media clout.
Speaker: We're like, she knows she's the devil.
Speaker: She knows that she's monstrous and she's psychologically destroying her son for attention.
Speaker: And she, and she's gonna, you know, she's going to pull the cheap heat, you know, on that because it's fun for her.
Speaker: And that, nope.
Speaker: That's not the case.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I would say like, I think one, one area in which I have some trouble, uh, operating in this space or vibing with people is like, uh, I know a lot of people who believe things that I think are really destructive, who I really love and who I'm not ready to cast out as people that we can't make a country with.
Speaker: And like,
Speaker: I'm not saying that I'm in the right that I know that my more, um, you know, dovish attitude is, but in other words, like I know people, not the decision you just laid out exactly with the dress, but it's like, I know people where I think they're making the exact wrong decision, but I'm also confident they think they're doing the best thing for their child.
Speaker: They are not in fact being cynical or being, uh,
Speaker: you know, saying like, I don't care about this kid.
Speaker: I have this other, and like, that's much more, you know, this is, this is probably cringe, but it's like the, the soldier needs and thing is like, you can think about the world as good and bad people, or you can think that good and evil cross every human heart.
Speaker: And I think all scripture, Islamic, Mormon, Catholic, because the religions of the world are in some sense wise, they all go with the, across the human heart model because, you know,
Speaker: The identifying the bad people model is the model of, you know, infinite conflict and genocide.
Speaker: And the crossing the human heart model is sort of the model of personal growth and accountability.
Speaker: And that is at any point in history is the least popular model for how to consider morality.
Speaker: Yeah, no, absolutely.
Speaker: And I mean, one of the things, you know, they talked about like, there's that quote that like, travel is the death to prejudice or something.
Speaker: Something like, you know, if you just traveled, you wouldn't be, you'd be liberal, you'd be progressive.
Speaker: And what travel did for me was that it showed me that none of my positions and none of, nobody I know's positions
Speaker: we're particularly extreme.
Speaker: Um, like, you know, if, if you're, if you're, uh, you got a good old boy uncle from, from Alabama and he's got some thoughts about race, um, they are just totally normal in China.
Speaker: totally normal in the Middle East.
Speaker: Like he would be totally at home.
Speaker: And, and that doesn't mean he's right.
Speaker: It just means like, let's, let's keep this in perspective.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And there's, there's a total cope that says that racism is not a sort of endemic and timeless quality of human beings, but is in fact an article of colonialism.
Speaker: And it's just so a historical story.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: We made it to prop up this system.
Speaker: Which, like what?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so, yeah, I also wanted to say about that good old boy in Alabama, I think another thing with Trump is like, I didn't realize how important manners are to people because, you know, describing this sort of heterodox social environment, I've always found myself in where I have people I love on all sides and at various extremes.
Speaker: One thing I had always noticed in life is like where I grew up, this lily white, nice town,
Speaker: no one in that town would ever say something that was clearly racially prejudiced, but there absolutely were racists in that town.
Speaker: And then I know other people who just like, they are characteristically incapable of talking about race in a respectful way, but they have, they have nothing but love in their heart.
Speaker: And I think like part of the whole Trump thing is like,
Speaker: I think the upper classes really conflate manners and morality.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They're like, if you're going to use certain language, if you're going to talk about people in a certain way, like that actually means like the content of your heart is worse.
Speaker: And I've just never found that to be true in my own life.
Speaker: And probably that was made even more extreme traveling because like, and you were sort of talking about this too.
Speaker: It's like you meet people who have the most wild and seemingly destructive ideologies who are like,
Speaker: more hospitable and family oriented and more disciplined about their religious practice than like any American you've ever met.
Speaker: And you're like, okay, maybe like, maybe the take on, you know, factory farming is not actually the big moral question we think it is.
Speaker: Maybe it's more like human beings are nuts.
Speaker: We're all working with limited information.
Speaker: But if you're like,
Speaker: If you're good to your parents, good to your kids, people in your community respect and trust you, like you're probably good.
Speaker: And maybe the ideological part is less important than we've been led to believe.
Speaker: Yeah, you have to bring it into a tighter sphere of things that you actually influence and have something to say about.
Speaker: Again, I think it's narcissism.
Speaker: I think it's narcissism to say that like, and people get in fights about it.
Speaker: Like I had a family that's dear friends of mine
Speaker: they were just torn apart over like stuff about immigration, stuff about the vaccine.
Speaker: And it's like, none of us are going to move the ball on any of this.
Speaker: Like the, the winner of this argument doesn't get to decide anything.
Speaker: And, and yeah.
Speaker: And like, yeah, I don't know if this is helpful for people and like, I don't want to bring my, uh,
Speaker: family into things necessarily, but it's like my mom raised me by herself.
Speaker: I don't think we have a political overlap on anything, but there are, there are so many ways in which she's just the most generous person, uh, that I've ever known.
Speaker: Like what she did for me and my brother.
Speaker: It's just like,
Speaker: heroic, you know, in my view, she's she's sort of a saint.
Speaker: And like, I'm just not gonna I view part of victory as like not letting the insane people on TV, like change my perspective on my mother, because my mother has like succumbed to like COVID hysteria in some small degree.
Speaker: Like, I just think ultimately, I definitely agree with her, but I disagree with her.
Speaker: But like,
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: She's still like in every way, a more morally impressive person than me.
Speaker: So like, I have to just be like, what is the consequence of her?
Speaker: And you know, if she was running for some political position, maybe it'd be more complicated, but as it is, she's just a person and I'm just a person.
Speaker: So, you know, it's, I do think there's like a, there's a right wing version of like, talk to your racist uncle this Thanksgiving.
Speaker: I just kind of don't,
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I, I'm sure people's family situations are different.
Speaker: I can't, I can't make a rule that'll work for everyone, but I know what I try to do, man, to keep it interesting.
Speaker: Like, cause I don't want, I, I want to share, you know, I want to have a real talk with my family and I want to, I don't want to like, just keep it to like, you know, how about them cowboys or whatever, you know, because, uh, because that's boring and insipid.
Speaker: Um, but,
Speaker: the way that I do it is I want to talk about like UFOs and Bigfoot.
Speaker: And like, I want to, I want to like go lean real hard into the schizo posting with my family, because then we're just like talking about like weird stuff.
Speaker: Like it's, it's orthogonal to sort of the things that we would fight about.
Speaker: And it, it raises fun ideas and you still get to talk and you still get to kind of,
Speaker: approach the questions of worldview, questions of epistemology, questions of culture.
Speaker: But you get to do it in a stealthy way that doesn't provoke conflict.
Speaker: No, and everyone has a schizo poster inside them.
Speaker: They do.
Speaker: If you just sort of go through...
Speaker: Like if you spend enough time with people, you will find the totally socially unacceptable thing they believe.
Speaker: And it's very valuable to find it because then you can, it's often a way to give each other some generosity.
Speaker: Because like if you're, if you discover that thing and they're a person who's sort of judgmental of you or your beliefs, you can be like, okay, but there's that thing that you're holding in, not telling your coworkers, like that's just my whole life, baby.
Speaker: Like, you know.
Speaker: Oh man.
Speaker: So, so going back to this question of, of narcissism, there's a, there's a belief on right-wing Twitter that our shit posts are very important to the regime, that we are sort of public enemy number one in their eyes.
Speaker: From your perspective, how much time do you think they actually spend thinking about like me personally, but also, you know, the wider orbit?
Speaker: Hmm.
Speaker: Well,
Speaker: I think that generally there is, um, there is like a disturbance in the force of, of global homo to the extent that they are, they are watching tools for narrative enforcement fail in real time.
Speaker: And that at a macro level is very disturbing to them.
Speaker: But I think that, uh,
Speaker: again, like, you know, schizo posting, right-wing schizo posting is art.
Speaker: And I, far be it from me to, I'm a lover of art.
Speaker: So I think it's very important sort of on its own aesthetic merits.
Speaker: But I would also say that,
Speaker: like this is going to make me sound like totally normie con or whatever, but it's like people posting frogs matter much less than like moms who thought McAuliffe was bullshit and went out and voted for Youngkin.
Speaker: And like, I'm not even saying Youngkin is like an important figure.
Speaker: I'm just saying like the communications failures that are betters need to be really worried about are happening at a massive scale so that like,
Speaker: I think those of us who have like a non-accounts and post crazy shit, they think of us as like lost to them.
Speaker: And if they worry about us at all, it's because they would tie us to some violent potential.
Speaker: And certainly as a person who's at the nexus of those two things, I think they don't need to worry about that.
Speaker: They need to worry about the much more normal people who either don't have accounts or on Facebook, who just sort of like every day have a little less confidence in the things they're hearing.
Speaker: And this is why like...
Speaker: I get very confused.
Speaker: This is why I could never be a Marxist, right?
Speaker: Because I think if you're a straightforward materialist, it's pretty easy to be like, okay, well, as a rich, fancy person, you want to undermine the chuds.
Speaker: But you can't do a full-out, multi-pronged assault on everything they like simultaneously because it's just bad for business.
Speaker: But that's what they're doing.
Speaker: So I can only...
Speaker: I can only explain it by being like, yeah, they really don't like this and they're really attacking the people they don't like out of sort of cultural animosity.
Speaker: There's no strategy here.
Speaker: And again, I would say people in government who are smart, I'm sure they're aware that like...
Speaker: in any political coalition building, there's always going to be antagonism.
Speaker: But like a lot of mainstream institutions are leaning into antagonism and even seeing mass public unhappiness as sort of like evidence of their righteousness or whatever.
Speaker: And like, that's the real problem.
Speaker: You know, like I can't go into that as evidence of their righteousness.
Speaker: What do you mean by that?
Speaker: Well, I think like the New York Times, for example, it's like I see writers at the New York Times sort of like proudly retweeting people talking about the Times being bullshit because they sort of see it as like
Speaker: Yes, like we're making people unhappy, right?
Speaker: Because that's the whole like 60s ethos thing, right?
Speaker: Like uncomfortable conversations.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But like the thing is like that's not politics.
Speaker: Like that's some nonsense process that you think people should go through but no one else does.
Speaker: Like politics is just a dipstick of where people are at.
Speaker: So like –
Speaker: Yeah, like making people angry is not a positive indicator.
Speaker: And so like, I just think what they're not acknowledging is like, like, I've even seen people post and I wish I could remember a name, but they've been like, you know, if readership drops from 3 million to 1 million, but...
Speaker: like we lose the racist, then like, so be it.
Speaker: But it's like, okay, the other way to say that is you used to be a narrative setter for lots and lots of people.
Speaker: And now you're a narrative setter for far fewer people.
Speaker: And I think ultimately like that is...
Speaker: That is the real concern.
Speaker: And I think they would like to link sort of liars on Twitter and on... It's the same thing with the Russia thing, right?
Speaker: It's like they want someone to blame...
Speaker: for mass unhappiness besides their own failed worldview and policies.
Speaker: And so if that's Russian bots that are fooling the people, that's a good answer.
Speaker: Or if it's Pepe posters spreading disinformation, that's a good answer too.
Speaker: It's like anything to distract from just all their ideas being pretty unpopular.
Speaker: So like...
Speaker: but so I don't have a clear view, like, but then if someone asked me like, but does it help, you know, uh, like for instance, you know, at the beginning of COVID there were a bunch of, um, right wing accounts that were just sort of like ahead of the curve in terms of what this was going to look like, how big a deal it was going to be.
Speaker: And that definitely made its way into the media, uh,
Speaker: And like that would be an instance where like clearly not only did crazy accounts have an influence, but they sort of were ultimately vindicated.
Speaker: But I would just say like, again, as a, you know, as a lover of art and a believer in God, like do it for the love of the game.
Speaker: Like don't think that, because like part of what's, you know, people talk about the nudge now and it's like, I think part of what is so, uh,
Speaker: grotesque and inhuman about our contemporary culture is like the amount of communication that has been rendered wholly strategic.
Speaker: Like the things that are written and the things that are said are always done with in mind some sort of semi-coercive persuasion.
Speaker: And I would really encourage people to like not even entertain questions of what kind of influence they have, but just to be like,
Speaker: There's value in placing what I think is true on the internet.
Speaker: And, you know, whatever happens with that, like, that's cool.
Speaker: But if it's true, like, that'll be my guidepost and I'll be happy with the things I said.
Speaker: But that's also... You hear it here first.
Speaker: Dr. Bennett, public enemy number one.
Speaker: They do fear me.
Speaker: They are aware of me.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I mean, if you're asking, like, is there, you know, somewhere in Reston, is there a, you know, is there a cork board with a bunch of pictures and your Twitter avi is like, you know, there's a circle of yarn around it and it, you know, connects to a picture of Soleimani's corpse or something.
Speaker: I can't, I can't confirm that there aren't people that stupid in government, but I have not seen the cork board.
Speaker: Also cannot deny.
Speaker: He didn't, yeah, I just want to make that clear.
Speaker: Um...
Speaker: Oh, man.
Speaker: Sorry, I just want to add.
Speaker: I think if anyone has gotten under their skin, it's probably BAP.
Speaker: Oh, no kidding.
Speaker: No kidding.
Speaker: It's got to be BAP.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That's just like a guess.
Speaker: But in a way, I think they – this is a weird side note.
Speaker: But I think they're much more disturbed by the defection of people that they might have once invited to a party.
Speaker: Like, I think, I think the thing that people in DC lose the most sleep over is Claremont.
Speaker: And, you know, like probably from our perspective, Claremont's like still towing a lot of pretty respectable lines, you know, in terms of like fealty to the constitution and not bailing on liberalism or, you know, all of these things like, so that, so from my perspective, they're like pretty unradical.
Speaker: And I'd say that in a good way, I like them, but I think like,
Speaker: people really hate that an institution they might've once called respectable is sort of, uh, amplifying people like BAP or, you know, talking to Yarvin or whatever.
Speaker: And I think that's a funny story because I actually was just published in Claremont.
Speaker: Oh, nice.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I wrote a thing for a response to James Paulus's human forever book.
Speaker: Go check it out.
Speaker: I'll put a link in the, in the podcast description.
Speaker: Yeah, he is.
Speaker: I mean, I like all those guys, but,
Speaker: Poulos is definitely my favorite.
Speaker: And I think his, his sort of analysis of how technology is central in all of these issues is, is pretty on, but, but yeah, like I said, I do think like the sort of more like right-wing Marxist guys, like I don't, I don't ultimately share the worldview, but I do think in all of this stuff, it is pretty useful to try to think of it as class conflict.
Speaker: Whereas like,
Speaker: They never are mad that the unwashed masses disagree with them because they have always thought of those people as trash and they want to manage them, but those people disagreeing with them is par for the course.
Speaker: What really makes them mad is someone that they went to school with being like, maybe the Chuds have a point.
Speaker: Because that's like, you know, that's like Omerta.
Speaker: It's like you keep your problems with the mob inside the mob.
Speaker: You don't go to the cops.
Speaker: You don't take sides against the family ever.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: So what do you think that the Chinese and the Russians are actually doing online?
Speaker: Like from what you can see, do you think that they actually have some kind of disinformation or sort of a social disruption agenda that they're pursuing?
Speaker: Well,
Speaker: It would not be correct for me to say that none of that stuff ever happens.
Speaker: But if I had to guess, I would say that they're experimenting with it to no particular end.
Speaker: Because one of the assumptions that's buried in this process that I just don't agree with from the start is that the Russians or Chinese have a clear perspective on who it would be better for them to have as president.
Speaker: There was this whole thing.
Speaker: The Russian thing was really interesting because...
Speaker: like Trump pretty quickly, he like sent some stuff that the Obama administration wasn't giving to Ukrainian nationalists and then like bombed some mercenaries in Syria that later turned out to be Russian.
Speaker: And it's like, so if this guy is...
Speaker: you know, if him and Putin are in league, they made like some really sophisticated choices about what kind of policies to implement to hide the ball.
Speaker: And so like, because I think if I was Russia, for instance, it would be a pretty complicated question to be like, okay, Hillary Clinton is sort of like bellicose.
Speaker: But you know, she's, she's a known quantity.
Speaker: And we have files on her and what she thinks will do.
Speaker: But like Trump,
Speaker: is a total question mark.
Speaker: I would think in that situation that there would be a sizable block within like Russian state officials or whatever who would think that Trump was the more dangerous option in that instance.
Speaker: And so like, I just don't buy into the fact that for China or Russia, it's always a clear question who they would prefer as president.
Speaker: I actually think that's like an incredibly complex question.
Speaker: And I suspect it has factions on both sides in both those
Speaker: But maybe there's a broader task of just sort of... Well, because the cultural cachet of the American media and Hollywood and the intelligence community overseas and their ability to sort of project influence, soft power type influence...
Speaker: is a real problem for those people.
Speaker: And if there's massive discontent at home and massive distrust of all those institutions, they become harder to deploy.
Speaker: Well, that's interesting.
Speaker: And I think a much more... Yeah, the better plausible argument for why they might be doing this is to just say, to the extent that there is social discord in the United States, that's good for us.
Speaker: It keeps the sort of American Leviathan with its eyes on its own people and not messing with us.
Speaker: But I think even there...
Speaker: there are questions of like, what exactly would they want to accomplish?
Speaker: And I don't know if I think it actually makes it harder to deploy our soft power.
Speaker: I think one of the things that's so weird is like American soft power, like there's a, there's a bunch of ways in which it's insulated from sort of like cultural disturbances within the United States.
Speaker: And I do think that like,
Speaker: China would probably like, clearly would like to have less American and Western influence on their youth, whether it's video games or clothes or LGBT stuff.
Speaker: But I think that it's harder to say that they think that would be an easier...
Speaker: job if the United States was like a more socially chaotic place.
Speaker: Like, I'm not sure that those two things are exactly linked.
Speaker: And the things that people don't talk about enough is that I think the United States and China have sort of made the same decision.
Speaker: I don't know if it's fair to call it an error, but like one of the reasons I'm sort of like a non non hysterical about US China conflict, but I'm also not particularly impressed by the things she has done to try and protect Chinese culture is that like both these governments made a deal with the devil about global production and commerce.
Speaker: and like the technological changes that that brings about and requires.
Speaker: So like, it's all well and good for, for she to yell about, uh, LGBT brainwashing and like make a law, but like China is not the same kind of authoritarian country as, uh, Syria.
Speaker: You know, there's over a billion people, their ability to, uh,
Speaker: impact the daily decisions of, you know, millions of youths who have basically you get a VPN and you you have a non firewall internet, though, apparently, they're getting better at that.
Speaker: But it's like,
Speaker: I get sort of frustrated sometimes when I see right wing or sort of like American dissidents being like, look, they're doing all the stuff that were too brave not to do.
Speaker: And it's like, what do you really mean?
Speaker: It's like, yes, they disappear some billionaires and then they still have tech and real estate oligarchs who are screwing over their people.
Speaker: It's like, look, I don't begrudge them their effort to rein some of these things in.
Speaker: But I would say that
Speaker: our governance and their governance represent two models that is sort of failing to stem the influence of technology and global culture.
Speaker: And like,
Speaker: Maybe there is something to say for a government that's willing to be more directly coercive and confrontational with those forces.
Speaker: But I wouldn't say that she is succeeding.
Speaker: And all of that is just to get back around to saying, I'm not sure how messed up she would want to make America because I think we still are in some sense their golden goose.
Speaker: So like, yeah, I think I think like a little bit of chaos around the edges is probably always
Speaker: something they like just to know like, okay, if we press a button, something happens.
Speaker: But I really don't think they would want to, for instance, like they don't have the ability to sort of and I think they know that.
Speaker: So maybe it's irrelevant.
Speaker: But like if China had technological tools,
Speaker: to foment civil conflict in the United States.
Speaker: I don't think they'd use them.
Speaker: No, I think they, they need us to buy things.
Speaker: They need us, uh, you know, they, they need us to, uh, send crazy gain of function research their way when we, when we won't do it in our, like, like when I get, you look at, you look at how crazy and, and,
Speaker: misguided their overt propaganda attempts are.
Speaker: I don't know if you follow Chen Weihua.
Speaker: He's like a People's Daily Bureau chief and he tweets in English.
Speaker: His attempts to own the US are so clumsy.
Speaker: As far as I know, he's the best they got.
Speaker: He's their top guy.
Speaker: And I look at sort of the quality of like what they're doing above board.
Speaker: And I'm like, unless they're running like some kind of like deep cover op, I don't believe that like the dudes in the basements, you know, who are creating the misinformation are like way more informed than have their fingers on the pulse of like American popular culture in a way that they can like imperceptibly, you know, screw it up.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think just on some of these things you have to go, I mean, maybe my inclination is always to be suspicious of our government first, but it's like someone actually needs to explain to me in an intelligent way, like,
Speaker: 30% of American boomers to be vaccine skeptic instead of 20%.
Speaker: Like what's, what's in that for them?
Speaker: I mean, again, like maybe they're pushing around the edges to see what kind of effect they can have.
Speaker: But again, talking about those whole conceptions of good and evil, I think Democrats have really adopted this view that like,
Speaker: Russia in particular would just fuck shit up in America because like they're in league with the devil and they like watching the world burn.
Speaker: And that's just not my impression of how Russia makes decisions or it's in.
Speaker: So like, you know, so I'm just much more open to the idea that like, if there was weird stories spreading, let's say about stuff happening in, you know, there's so much weird stuff that went on with Crimea and like the news around that.
Speaker: And I would be,
Speaker: But the complicated factor there is that I think our own news covering that conflict is also fake.
Speaker: But if someone wanted to say to me, like, Russian influence in Western ideas about what's happening in Ukraine were actually like fairly effectively manipulated, I'd be like, OK, I get the interest.
Speaker: They actually have like the ability to capture narratives on the ground and disseminate them in sophisticated ways.
Speaker: Like maybe that happened.
Speaker: And it's a small enough narrative ecosystem that they could potentially budget.
Speaker: And like you're saying, they're so much more in control of the facts on the ground there.
Speaker: So yeah, you can see why they would and why they'd want to.
Speaker: But yeah, this sort of like great game type, it's very silly.
Speaker: And I wanted to go back to...
Speaker: to BAP and the vaccine stuff.
Speaker: And frankly, people who would go to parties with DC people.
Speaker: I can still remember a conversation that I had.
Speaker: I can't remember when my business school locked down.
Speaker: but it was fairly late into the process and I was sitting with my friends.
Speaker: And so we were like a couple of weeks in to COVID being a domestic thing.
Speaker: And I was telling him like what I was hearing from, what I was hearing from right-wing bodybuilder Twitter.
Speaker: And I was like, look, I'm,
Speaker: I'm pretty sure it's from the, it's pretty sure it's from gain of function research.
Speaker: I'm pretty sure that it's, that it's man-made because the bats don't come, they're not native to that region.
Speaker: And the wet market was like a block away from the Wuhan Institute.
Speaker: And, you know, I'm, I'm pretty sure that this is all man-made and, and, and like, yeah,
Speaker: talking about like the vindication and the power that creates, like there was, there was five guys in there who are, you know, respectable people.
Speaker: And I know that every one of them remembers that conversation.
Speaker: Um, and, and, and so like, you know, they want so much for it not to be an own goal.
Speaker: They want so much to believe that like someone is poisoning the American people against the, against their righteous, like truth.
Speaker: And it's like, no, you're just bullshitting all the time.
Speaker: And people are noticing.
Speaker: And like, you know, there's no conspiracy.
Speaker: It's just noticing.
Speaker: And man, it's reaching higher and higher up the chain.
Speaker: I do think that like, you know, I don't want to have a naive perspective on the past.
Speaker: But I do think like, to the extent that...
Speaker: the United States had some novel things to say, or like when the United States was most compliant with its own stated vision of governance, I think what was genius about it was it was like, well, don't coerce people, actually reflect what they want and don't fight with reality, like reflect reality.
Speaker: And that's actually making your job as governance incredibly easier because then you can just, you can start with like a,
Speaker: manageable scenario.
Speaker: But like we are very clearly down a road where, yeah, they want to fight with reality all the time.
Speaker: And that's that's really weird for me because studying political science and stuff like the whole thing they said is like a primary factor of instability in these regimes is like they continue to insist on propagating implausible claims.
Speaker: And I think I I think there was a time in the United States where at least within my lifetime where like
Speaker: Yes, there were always liars.
Speaker: Yes, there was always propaganda.
Speaker: But there were more people calling balls and strikes.
Speaker: And there were more media people willing to back off when the balls and strikes got called against them.
Speaker: I think what they're doing now that's very bad from their perspective is just like refusing to... You know, there's like...
Speaker: people that I thought were smart, that I thought had like analytical firepower, who will just sort of, you know, who work at big institutions, who will just be sort of like, yeah, just going to say it again.
Speaker: Like Russia collusion was never a hoax.
Speaker: If you actually read the Miller report, like it's all real.
Speaker: And I don't know why you've all moved on.
Speaker: It's like, I feel like that block,
Speaker: in the past, like would have been silenced or something.
Speaker: Or maybe it's just none of us had Twitter accounts, but it's like there are so many people who just persist antagonistically in their unreality.
Speaker: It's like and that's a losing hand for them.
Speaker: I mean, I'll be real with you.
Speaker: I think it's because we have Twitter accounts.
Speaker: I think it's I think it's because I think it's because they have no.
Speaker: They have no psychic vocabulary for getting called out in a public way that they can't suppress.
Speaker: Because, I mean, it used to be that if someone had something to say that they didn't like, they just didn't give them a mic.
Speaker: Simple.
Speaker: No, yeah, and I guess they are in the unenviable position of like, I do try to...
Speaker: manage my own social media as like, there's things I know a little bit about that I'm going to weigh in on.
Speaker: But a lot of these people are, you know, quote, generalists, unquote.
Speaker: So like, they aren't allowed to bow out.
Speaker: And definitely like in my own life, if I had to react in real time to everything instead of sleeping on it and being like, yeah, I was having a stupid reaction to that, you know, I'd get so much dumber.
Speaker: And then being like emotionally compelled to defend it.
Speaker: Yeah, so it's like, because I think this is another weird, like, part of the American ideology that nobody talks about is there's just an underlying assumption that technological progress is good, and that if it's messing with us,
Speaker: that's like our failure to work out how... But if you just said like, there might be things we come up with that are just bad and can't be managed.
Speaker: Like they're just bad for us.
Speaker: This is like a thought that Americans like can't hear.
Speaker: Like I kind of feel this way about the pornography conversation.
Speaker: It's like if you talk to most people on earth and say like pornography is bad, they'll just be like, yeah, obviously.
Speaker: But Americans are so...
Speaker: Americans really feel like, I think what we were taught is that our lack of resistance to the future is part of what made us great.
Speaker: And so we don't want to be limited in the way we think other societies are limited, like closed off afraid, but it's like, there's just going to be bad things.
Speaker: Like you don't, you don't have to, um,
Speaker: You don't have to always find a way that it can be okay.
Speaker: That was actually the topic of the Claremont piece was it was about cybernetic institutions and how these things that historically were tools that we use to conquer nature have become sort of a component of nature.
Speaker: And because we're so used to
Speaker: having nature under wraps.
Speaker: I use the analogy of like a tiger in the jungle when you're like naked and you have like a sharp stick.
Speaker: Because like we're so used to thinking of like tigers in the jungle and floods and plagues and all that as things that maybe not plagues anymore, but as things that we have more or less under control.
Speaker: And so like, yeah, it's a problem, but it's not like an existential problem, a terrifying problem.
Speaker: And, and cybernetics, I think, is the return of nature as a scary, like quasi religious terror, something that we can't control and can't understand and can just can just squash you, you know, without, without even noticing or caring.
Speaker: And I think that that's what we're up against with pornography.
Speaker: Frankly, I think it's everything, every consumer product that can be made addictive is being made addictive.
Speaker: Yeah, and again, to go back to scripture, I think if you read scripture, it's very clear that our scripture indicates to me that it will be harder to remain human over time.
Speaker: That it's almost like a conception of religious history is almost the reverse of Whig history, where it's like, you know, I feel like from the Bible's perspective in the year 500, it was maybe a little bit easy to be an okay human being who emphasized the right things, but that...
Speaker: Lots of passages suggest that as time goes on, human beings are going to have to fight harder and harder to retain what is important about being human.
Speaker: And I think Americans often have the opposite instinct, like that this stuff is almost always a good.
Speaker: And this is probably like really stupid, but I always think like one example I like to use with people just because it's totally unobjectionable is like when GPS came out and I was in college, I'd drive around my hometown and literally as the GPS...
Speaker: told me where to go.
Speaker: I was like, there was a map of my hometown in my head that was being erased because it had been like reinforced and like, it's a stupid example, but like knowledge of the layout of my hometown is something that was like somehow spiritually important to me that like being able to like draw that or conjure it in my mind made me feel more connected to the place, whatever.
Speaker: And so I would always ask people, especially people who worked on technology, like,
Speaker: is there a version of GPS that could actually make me closer to my geography?
Speaker: Like it uses mnemonics or something else to like reinforce my human understanding of the layout as opposed to diminishing it.
Speaker: And like everybody's always just like, oh, people wouldn't buy it.
Speaker: And so it's like, maybe, maybe that's as simple as it.
Speaker: Cause you do always like encounter these people who are, you know, there's people who don't watch nonsense politics on YouTube.
Speaker: They watch like jujitsu videos and like practice like that.
Speaker: There are individuals who are using technology to increase their human capacity rather than diminish it.
Speaker: But definitely like without,
Speaker: just the average human and like the American marketplace without, you know, instruction from a family member or some other institution, like they're not going to know to do that because that's not the, you know, I don't know if this is some version of like Cthulhu always swims left, but it's like the Cthulhu that is technology always swims towards diminishing human capacity.
Speaker: Well, I mean, if you think about it, if you think about, if you think about, uh, tools as, um,
Speaker: machine extensions of the body.
Speaker: And as your tools become able to reach farther and farther outside your natural human reach, like the system that is you using the machine becomes more and more machine and less and less you.
Speaker: And so now you're this tiny human, um,
Speaker: neuron in the middle of this vast organism that's drawing, that's drawing resources and information from literally all over the planet and into the, and into space, you know, you're connected to all these things, this system, and you are increasingly, you know, if it was easier to be a human being in 500 AD, it's because you were,
Speaker: you were so big relative to your environment.
Speaker: You were so like your hands were reaching out and touching everything that you went and got or people you knew were doing it.
Speaker: And like, there just wasn't this enormous system.
Speaker: And now it's, you're literally, you know, it's like the sci-fi story where the cyborg has like a little tiny piece of brain tissue still in it and everything else is robots.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think we can often detect on like a very primordial level that God's creations have God in them and our creations often don't.
Speaker: So it's like if you're interacting with something that he made, it's like it just stands to reason that, you know, interacting with the earth would like at some subconscious level,
Speaker: contain affirming truths about, like, it makes so much sense to me that like technology sort of allows for and reinforces atheism, because it's like, yes, in the little in the steel, like loveless, cold world that you build, there is no God, but like, that's not, that's not actually the world you were born into, you have to sort of exit that environment and reengage with like, I was at a
Speaker: just a catechism class the other day.
Speaker: And we were talking about like death or something.
Speaker: And a guy asked, he's like, I feel like in modern life, death isn't present.
Speaker: And as a Catholic, you're supposed to think about death and how to die.
Speaker: And he's like, how do I keep that at the front of mind?
Speaker: And I was like, just go into nature.
Speaker: It's everywhere.
Speaker: Like you deal with animals.
Speaker: It's like sickness.
Speaker: And because that's how I think about it, right?
Speaker: It's like God gave us
Speaker: what we need to think about the world in a way that will be ultimately acceptable and affirming to us.
Speaker: But when we spend all of our time in our own creations, it's like, oh, like watching eight seasons of Friends this weekend didn't prepare me to like confront my own mortality.
Speaker: It's like, yeah, why would it?
Speaker: Well, honestly, I think it might.
Speaker: Yeah, it might make you happy to shuffle off the mortal coil, but...
Speaker: Well, I mean, you know, I think that there is the one thing, the one thing that I think the cybernetic world can teach you is just what we're saying.
Speaker: Like it can, it can give you that sense of surfeit and that sense of disgust.
Speaker: And I wonder if, I wonder if part of the reason why so many people are being drawn into like,
Speaker: online orthodoxy or online Catholicism, and you're not seeing as many like online evangelicals, like extremely online.
Speaker: Like I, you know, I don't even know what like Roger Williams or whatever they would get like real excited about.
Speaker: You know, apologies to my Protestant friends.
Speaker: It's not, it's nothing personal.
Speaker: I'm talking about ideas here, but, but I think that there is,
Speaker: a sense in which the world that we are in reflects a very Protestant view of man's creation, which is sort of that it's, um, sort of that it's, it's, it's dominion and it's like, it's good to exercise dominion and it's good to conquer the, the, the creation.
Speaker: And, um, and so these, these tools, um,
Speaker: And here's the truth, which is that they're not actually separate from the creation.
Speaker: They're just things that we've done with the creation.
Speaker: Like nothing is really artificial, but yeah, this idea of infinite progress in Whig history, I think is fundamentally a Protestant idea.
Speaker: And maybe part of the reason why you're not seeing
Speaker: extremely online Protestantism as a reaction to all this is because it's kind of a reaction to Protestantism.
Speaker: Sure, that definitely could be.
Speaker: I mean, I think I want to separate what I'm about to say from Protestantism, but I think maybe what's happened is that
Speaker: You have a certain Protestant idea about dominion, as you said, but that's actually constrained at some level just by the contents of the religion.
Speaker: But if you get sort of people who are existing in that milieu but give up on the concept of God, I think it's not that long a skip and a jump.
Speaker: to be like, well, then the project is just infinitely enhancing like humans resemblance to something like a God or, you know, I think that's exactly right.
Speaker: I think it's I think it's not Protestantism, but it is a Protestant heresy.
Speaker: Yeah, it's like what what secular people do with what's in the air.
Speaker: And like, I guess one way in which I've always felt
Speaker: a little un-American or like a little just out of place with with certain attitudes that are that are very prevalent with both secular and religious people is like, I am always comforted by being like, you know, if this if this the universe is a movie like I'm not Al Pacino, God is Al Pacino.
Speaker: I'm like a guy who gets shot in the first frame or whatever.
Speaker: Like, you know, I'm I'm a bit player.
Speaker: So like, it's not actually
Speaker: it's not like I build a big tower that's like almost as glorious as God.
Speaker: And that's how I love God.
Speaker: Like, no, I, I'm more, I more am constantly reminded of like my finitude and weakness in contrast with God.
Speaker: And like, that's okay.
Speaker: As long as you're trying to do right and, you know, avoid sin and temptation and everything.
Speaker: And so it's not, um, I've always had a hard time understanding, like,
Speaker: the sort of, and again, I would, I would say like, I think scripture supports my view, but obviously that's, that's something people have debated, but like, I don't read the Bible and think like, yes, God wants us to take these beliefs and build a glorious civilization that like excels in technology and wealth.
Speaker: Like, that's not what I see at all.
Speaker: I, I much more see like an idea that's sort of like,
Speaker: There are contexts in which those human pursuits are okay, but confusing them with the transcendent is an ever-present risk and one humans are particularly prone to.
Speaker: And I think the sort of hysteria I detect
Speaker: in secular people is often they're like, you know, they'll get obsessed with the singularity or something.
Speaker: Yeah, they'll be like, what has to be really it has to be that we can cure all diseases and radical life extension, because then what else has this all been for?
Speaker: And it's like, to me, that's so clearly like this pale shadow of God that they're building post hoc because they just refuse to engage with
Speaker: you know, and to be fair, like there are some atheists like John Gray in England would be one of them who I think like confront the actual implications of their worldview in a real way without defaulting to these sort of nonsense technological stand-ins for the divine.
Speaker: But I feel like I encounter that a lot where like people who are like very militantly anti-God have some other thing that they think is going to create a utopian.
Speaker: This is why I always say like,
Speaker: The sort of new atheist perspective of like God as infantile childish belief is like exactly backward because it's like, okay, maybe on some level believing in God is implausible, but you know what's more implausible?
Speaker: That we're going to like solve mortality ourselves.
Speaker: Like that's more childish.
Speaker: So it's like of all the fantasies, I feel like I have the most adult fantasy.
Speaker: Because I don't think like the UN is going to solve world hunger.
Speaker: You know, I think that's significantly dumber than believing in God.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So and the challenge.
Speaker: So the challenge with dialing it back.
Speaker: And this is a little bit of a troll question I recognize.
Speaker: But the challenge with returning with a V. Is always returning to what?
Speaker: And like, you know, a lot of guys' response to that troll is to lean into it and agree and amplify with it and say like, well, eco-fash, we're going to go back to like eating raw meat in caves.
Speaker: And so I'm interested to know what kind of what your take on that is.
Speaker: Like how much cybernetics, how much machine is too much?
Speaker: Yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker: Yeah, because I always do find myself like,
Speaker: There's people in my family, again, like I have a aunt who I really love who raised her kids without TV and was like really anti-screen.
Speaker: And she was sort of like a crunchy con person.
Speaker: She's not even possible to really...
Speaker: to really plot on a American political spectrum.
Speaker: But the point is she was really committed to protecting her children from a certain technological innovations that in retrospect, I totally understand why she was afraid of.
Speaker: And it's sort of interesting because I think ultimately her children are like very interesting people and benefited from the type of life she built
Speaker: adopted normative technological practices.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So in other words, it's like she went to this great effort and then even having done that, having sort of executed this very difficult task, it sort of dropped back to the American mean as soon as she took her foot off the pedal or just the kids moved out or whatever.
Speaker: So I still am sort of like struggling with how I feel about that.
Speaker: The other thing that's weird here is that like I almost think
Speaker: you know, maybe this isn't true anymore, but the very liberal high school that I went to still was at that time really engaged in giving people the tools for critical thinking.
Speaker: So like, I'm sure a lot of my favorite teachers would be horrified at the political conclusions I've come to, but like, it's their fault.
Speaker: Kind of, you know, they told me to read Homer or whatever.
Speaker: So like,
Speaker: What did they think was going to happen?
Speaker: You know, it's like, what I mean to say is like, I have a harder time being like, oh, I need to homeschool because I know that I was in this incredibly liberal environment.
Speaker: And in some ways that's, at least with my story, that's directly tied to the aspects of it I've ended up rejecting.
Speaker: But of course, I'm also not saying that that's a reliable path.
Speaker: You know, all this stuff is contingent and weird.
Speaker: And I certainly don't begrudge anybody who
Speaker: wants to homeschool or something like that.
Speaker: I do think it's, what's clear is one of the difficulties about living in a modern society is just that the amount you have to compromise just to participate just goes up and up.
Speaker: I think that's mostly driven by technology, but maybe reinforced by technology.
Speaker: you know, certain attitudes that are prevailing in the upper echelons of society.
Speaker: And I think that the question of like, how important is it to be interacting with and participating with the main community in our society versus taking control over the values that are expressed in my day-to-day life?
Speaker: I mean, that is the question.
Speaker: And I don't have the answer to that.
Speaker: I will say with the whole like,
Speaker: return with a V thing.
Speaker: I will just say that like, I am such a product of modernity in my habits and behaviors that for me, like, it's very obvious to me that like, you know, to any of my great grandfathers, like I am and will remain probably like, you know, way too buggish, unmasculine, don't know how to fix shit in my house.
Speaker: But it's like,
Speaker: my goal is not to become something they would recognize as a man.
Speaker: It's just to reach greater balance.
Speaker: And so like, you know, I think...
Speaker: And in some ways it's like, because of our weird political moment, I think in some ways, like just trying to be responsible can be characterized as reactionary, but like, yeah, the things I'm trying to do, whether it's about like physical strength or taking up responsibility, I think it is possible to justify them on entirely non-reactionary grounds.
Speaker: if one wants to, like, you know, I don't know if, I think it is part of the cultural conflict is why people like saying, yes, I'm lifting blocks of wood because people did that in 1200.
Speaker: And I think they were right about everything and we're wrong about everything.
Speaker: And again, like I support that as a, as I think, yeah, as a fun mode of communication that has several secondary effects that I enjoy.
Speaker: But I think if I'm just being honest about my own approach, it's like,
Speaker: You know, there are other modern people who have just always done the things I'm now trying to do.
Speaker: And they don't think of themselves as like trying to return to the caves.
Speaker: Frankly, they were just more responsible, better put together people than me.
Speaker: And for me, it's helpful to engage with these corners of the internet in pursuing a more balanced and healthy life.
Speaker: But like...
Speaker: Even if you don't have a coherent ideal in mind or like a utopian, like, you know, 1380, that was when people had it really figured out.
Speaker: That was the sweet spot.
Speaker: I think even if you don't have that...
Speaker: just as a matter of orientation to say, like, I'm not going to participate in everything that society is doing.
Speaker: I'm going to look backwards and I'm going to try to identify things that are better.
Speaker: I'm going to be in communion with history is hugely valuable.
Speaker: And yeah, definitely gets you branded as reactionary because, I mean, you know, it is, I mean, literally reactionary.
Speaker: You're sort of...
Speaker: you're looking to the past, to a golden age, or at least the case you're making is that this world is not monotonically better on every domain, on every axis.
Speaker: than historical arrangements.
Speaker: No, and I think even within a liberal Whig history framework, it is only in the past 20 years that people would not in these words, but implicitly make the argument that the past has nothing to teach us.
Speaker: No historical liberal or progressive ever thought that.
Speaker: And I think the idea that you can sort of say like,
Speaker: The idea that there are people walking around who it's not odd to say, okay, for all of human history, after a certain point of development, it was very typical for people to comfortably adopt a monotheistic faith.
Speaker: And now suddenly that feels extremely uncomfortable to me.
Speaker: And rather than think that that suggests there might be something wrong with my environment, I'm going to conclude that we are the first smart people to have ever existed.
Speaker: Like that's nonsense.
Speaker: Then like no one smart from history would have respected it as an attitude or so.
Speaker: Like, I don't know exactly why we've ended up there, but it's like, yeah, I think there's a judicious way to say this, which is like, I am going to weigh the opinions and practices of people in the past as maybe like slightly diminished due to lack of knowledge.
Speaker: when compared with contemporary people.
Speaker: But there's also more of the past.
Speaker: So, you know, in some sense, it might even out.
Speaker: But the idea that it's like only a people alive now know anything about anything.
Speaker: I don't get that at all.
Speaker: Well, and I think what you're seeing right now is pre-modern people lived in a...
Speaker: very crude map that had sea monsters and dragons in the margins and, and goblins in the woods and fairies.
Speaker: And, um, you can argue that that's because they knew less than we know.
Speaker: Um, but I think that what's happening now is we are realizing that all of the, um,
Speaker: again, the cybernetic infrastructure that we were using to draw conclusions about what's in the woods and what's on the edge of the map, turn out not to be as flawlessly reliable as we thought they were.
Speaker: And, and
Speaker: And I think progressives are viewing that as a crisis because they're saying people don't trust science.
Speaker: They don't trust, they're out of touch with reality.
Speaker: They're starting to believe in spooks and conspiracy theories and they're going off the rails.
Speaker: But I mean, my take on that basically is that no, the, the, the,
Speaker: mon monolithic vision of of of reality that we all agreed on was an illusion it was fake and it was because there was a couple people in charge of the megaphones and now we're realizing that we've always lived in kind of the dark forest and there's always been the sea monsters on the edge of the map and that's like it's better to know that than not to know that right and again i i think there's sort of like a
Speaker: a class element here where it's like for most people in most periods of history, the metaphor is going to be more useful.
Speaker: And I would say here useful as a synonym for true than the stark material description.
Speaker: And I think one of the things that's been
Speaker: discredited is there sort of this idea of like if we start looking at people in real terms and not as like say spooky enemy barbarians stand in for monsters in the forest like violence will go away you know I think after World War II people thought like oh these massive conflagrations were sort of reliant upon the ghosts created by nationalism and religion but now we've dispensed with all that and like we'll only fight over like real things it's like well no I mean you know
Speaker: like, terrorism is both real and a specter that haunts your dreams is both and it may motivate you to blow up a wedding.
Speaker: And like, you will have to talk to God about that and account for it.
Speaker: When you go meet him.
Speaker: And like, if you think
Speaker: That, you know, getting a bunch of intelligence reports that tell you like statistical likelihoods of of who's in that car you're about to blow up, that that's totally different from some like Viking who's thinking his enemies are like subhuman.
Speaker: I think those are very similar experiences.
Speaker: I know people don't want.
Speaker: They don't like the idea that history is sort of like consistent in that way.
Speaker: But again, to me, it's it's comforting because you just sort of you contextualize your own weakness and fallibility in in the context of all these these great and brave people who came before who also made errors.
Speaker: But I'd also say with with the other return thing that the discourse that I get very frustrated with is, you know, some guy will be
Speaker: posting about how he wants to change his life with reference to the past.
Speaker: And someone will be like, oh, you know, like if, if you got in a time machine, like those people would think you're a bitch.
Speaker: And like, to me, that's a much less interesting question than like, okay, but like, did his BMI go down?
Speaker: It's, it's, you know, it's like, it's like inspiration is inspiration.
Speaker: I don't think you actually have to,
Speaker: indulge in the idea of like, I'm going to live a life where if I had to meet Genghis Khan, he would agree like we're equals on the field of bat.
Speaker: Like, I don't actually, I don't actually think, I don't actually think any of these raw egg posters believe that.
Speaker: I think they, they have found practical reasons to use this as a source of inspiration.
Speaker: And also like it pisses off some of the right people.
Speaker: So like, whatever, get into it.
Speaker: But yeah, I think my measure of the behaviors would be like, you know,
Speaker: Is it improving your health?
Speaker: Is it improving your relationships?
Speaker: And, you know, draw inspiration from wherever you want is only in such a stupid and defensive political moment that we would object to people finding inspiration, you know, from wherever.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I wrote that article about addiction and how everything is becoming addictive.
Speaker: And my mother-in-law lives with us and she threw out all the junk food in the house.
Speaker: And I was like, yeah, it's a lot easier to lose weight when you're picturing like a grappler.
Speaker: You're picturing like an enemy who's trying to poison you rather than just sort of I make bad decisions and the enemy is me.
Speaker: And I know you were talking about sort of the line that goes through every human heart.
Speaker: And I think that it is useful sometimes for there to be an enemy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it depends on how you deploy that mentality.
Speaker: But, but, you know, I think that's, that's totally right.
Speaker: And I don't know how to account for the incoherence in my own strategy, but like, I'm very pro, like, you know, when, when Bernie talks about like millionaires and billionaires, like, I don't think it's a real thing, but I think it is potentially a,
Speaker: like an okay category for the public to indulge in hating.
Speaker: Now, like, obviously, I don't, I don't want, I don't want a Bolshevik revolution in the United States, to be clear.
Speaker: But I think there is maybe some gray area where you can be like, yeah, like vilify a group that doesn't even really exist, or that people move in and out of for the purpose of like some broad economic solidarity.
Speaker: And like, maybe this is a slightly different example.
Speaker: But it's like,
Speaker: if all the people all over the world who are trying to get their kids to eat vegetables are like, there's someone at Monsanto who wants my son to be like fat and have an endocrine disorder.
Speaker: And like, I will defeat him.
Speaker: Like as long as you don't go to Monsanto, you know, as long as that conflict stays within your house and the grocery aisle, I think you're good to go.
Speaker: Oh, well, listen, man, I got to prep for our meeting tonight.
Speaker: This was a great call.
Speaker: I really appreciate you taking the time.
Speaker: So Degree Studies is an exit member.
Speaker: You can get to have more fascinating conversations like this one by joining Exit Group, exitgroup.us.
Speaker: You can also follow him on Twitter at Degree Studies.
Speaker: Thanks a lot for coming out.
Speaker: This w as a great time.
Speaker: Yeah, thanks, Dr. Bennett.
Speaker: I appreciate it.
