Transcript
Speaker: Hey everybody, welcome to the Exit Podcast.
Speaker: This is Dr. Ben and I'm joined here by Dr. Nima Chiraghi, a failed academic, disgraced former academic.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: A friend of ours in the group.
Speaker: And I want to talk to him about his experiences with academia, with what he's seeing in the study of history, and some of the projects that he's working on to move the conversation.
Speaker: So welcome to the show, Nima.
Speaker: It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker: I've dreamt of this moment for many years.
Speaker: So let's start with where it all started, which is technique.
Speaker: Can you tell us about technique?
Speaker: So technique is an idea proposed by the French sociologist Jacques Ellul,
Speaker: Although technique theory sort of is found in other people as well.
Speaker: Like Heidegger talks about this as well, kind of, in his, of course, he calls it in the German, Technique.
Speaker: He calls it Technique Kritik.
Speaker: But Elul posed this idea that very basically...
Speaker: as technology has sort of progressed, that we've lost any semblance of, I guess you could say, a free will.
Speaker: And by technique, we don't necessarily mean just technology, machines and computers and things like that and factories.
Speaker: But we mean more of a societal nos, a societal mind.
Speaker: It's the way that we perceive things.
Speaker: And Heidegger sort of talks about it in the same way, that it's a mode of eclairung, a way of clearing things, to see things.
Speaker: And this societal noose drives us towards one destination, which is the ultimate efficiency of all things.
Speaker: You know, the way to find the single most efficient way to do something.
Speaker: And so what technique theory essentially does is that it says that any sort of, uh, distinctions we can make among things, especially, you know, he uses this example of, of capitalism and communism, that there are two very, there are two different ways to go about technique.
Speaker: You know, on one side, you, you have this idea that, uh,
Speaker: a free market will make the most efficient means and the other you think that centralized control will find the most efficient means.
Speaker: But the very explicitly stated purpose of both of these ideologies is that it finds the most efficient economic means.
Speaker: And you can abstract that idea towards almost everything.
Speaker: And I wrote this one piece on religious technique where people who profess to be part of a religion, but yet they act in ways that are very contrary to the doctrines of that religion.
Speaker: It's not necessarily because most of these people are midwits and they can't
Speaker: they're unable to actually parse any sort of total ideology.
Speaker: But it's just because they have this technical mindset where if you're fully...
Speaker: dedicated to your religion, it becomes sort of impossible to live in or embrace a secular society, right?
Speaker: So for example, like I wrote that.
Speaker: It gets in the way.
Speaker: It's inconvenient.
Speaker: Right, exactly.
Speaker: So like an academic, for example, at a religious university, if he wants to be honest about his doctrine,
Speaker: well, then, you know, he's going to have a very hard time in the global academic apparatus.
Speaker: So he has to employ these methods of like, well, actually, our doctrine teaches, you know, it's not actually this.
Speaker: It's actually this, which just so happens to be a confirmation of the modern, I get progressive view.
Speaker: Well, you know, the Bible actually confirms social justice or whatever.
Speaker: We just figured it out.
Speaker: So that way he becomes once again a candidate for scholarships and teaching positions and stuff like that, which is his ultimate end.
Speaker: So he finds the way, the method of efficiency to at the same time profess his supposed religious values while also pursuing these technical career ends.
Speaker: And
Speaker: So essentially, the point of technique is that everything is sort of fake and exists only in a perceptive mode.
Speaker: But ultimately, everything that you perceive under it is a means of pursuing the most efficient method to do something.
Speaker: What's interesting about the capitalism and communism conversation is...
Speaker: So basically, the reason that central planning seems to have failed in the 20th century was really mainly a question of communications technology and computational power.
Speaker: They just didn't have the ability to see all of the variables needed to control and plan that market.
Speaker: And there's an article by Scott Alexander,
Speaker: you know, some of you may know Slate Star Codex.
Speaker: He does this write up on, basically some folks think that we've reached the level of computational complexity and power where it's actually not obvious that central planning isn't more efficient.
Speaker: But the way those two paths converge,
Speaker: is that instead of the state imposing central planning,
Speaker: what's happening is because central planning is starting to become really, really efficient, you're having mega corporations grow so that they can access those economies of scale and essentially like, I mean, I mean, BlackRock, basically the, the, the number of the level of controlling interest they have in how many different sectors of the economy.
Speaker: I mean, they're bigger than the Soviet union was.
Speaker: And, and, and,
Speaker: And so sort of by this evolutionary process, central planning, by virtue of the fact that it works now and is efficient, is eating things and agglomerating and agglomerating and agglomerating, which is kind of the Marxist thesis of what was supposed to happen.
Speaker: So it's, I don't know, it's interesting.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And Elul writes that.
Speaker: So the thing that makes technique important is that it's a modern phenomenon.
Speaker: It's a way of understanding the period that we live in.
Speaker: Elul would say that although technique has sort of always existed, its current form only came about around...
Speaker: 400 years ago or so.
Speaker: Before that, and the reason is that technique adapts to the state of the society which it operates in.
Speaker: So technique couldn't have been global in the times of
Speaker: the Romans, for example, because each different part of the world had adapted a, they were in different points of civilization.
Speaker: Some were a little bit more civilized, some were less.
Speaker: So, you know, each piece of technology, for example, can only work in that, in the setting that it is.
Speaker: It exists in like cell phones, for example.
Speaker: If you take a cell phone back to, you know, a thousand years ago, it would more or less be useless here, right?
Speaker: There wouldn't be cell networks.
Speaker: You wouldn't be able to charge it.
Speaker: After the power died, it would kind of be over.
Speaker: You wouldn't be able to do anything with it.
Speaker: But as sort of everything has become universal, you know, there really isn't a whole lot of difference fundamentally between peoples and countries anymore, right?
Speaker: Like everyone eats the same crap.
Speaker: Everyone watches the same TV shows.
Speaker: All the economies sort of function the same.
Speaker: So it's interesting to think of a person also, sorry to interrupt.
Speaker: It's interesting to think of a person also going back a thousand years.
Speaker: And being similarly useless because everything that I, all of my social capital, everything that I've built up, the skills that I know are all intended to plug me into this.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, you know, it's funny you say that because Elul writes that, uh,
Speaker: At one point, man was to fill the holes in the tools that he had, right?
Speaker: So if you were a blacksmith, you know, and you have a hammer, like you're the one that strikes the hammer, right?
Speaker: You have to grab the hammer and hit the metal with it.
Speaker: But now...
Speaker: Man becomes sort of just, you know, the guy in the factory worker that pulls the levers and stuff.
Speaker: He can be replaced by any other meat bag, right?
Speaker: He's only purely there.
Speaker: And, you know, the same thing for like white collar jobs as well.
Speaker: Like,
Speaker: There are the countless coding academies online or whatever, and you don't have to be particularly skillful to learn any programming language or to be an accountant or to be a lawyer, as long as you have sort of a moderate IQ and a willingness to learn something for a year or two.
Speaker: Most people can do almost anything.
Speaker: But to be a skilled Black student,
Speaker: you know, a craftsman.
Speaker: Like it actually, you actually did have to spend actually quite a few years as an apprentice to be able to do that.
Speaker: Because your learning was embodied.
Speaker: It was, it was something that couldn't, couldn't be received out of a book.
Speaker: You had to, the muscle memory and the.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: That's another way that technique differs from back then to now.
Speaker: All the jobs throughout the world are sort of the same as well.
Speaker: People may still buy rugs from Persia, but that's sort of just a historical formality because honestly, you could produce the same thing almost anywhere else and not...
Speaker: be able to notice the difference.
Speaker: And that's why technique has become sort of, and that's why central planning also has become more viable now because the world is sort of the same now.
Speaker: So almost any piece of technology or technique that you can find anywhere, it works anywhere else.
Speaker: Yeah, everything's plug and play.
Speaker: Is there a distinction between technique as you're describing it and like enlightenment rationalism?
Speaker: Or are they kind of the same thing?
Speaker: So if you want to think of the enlightenment rationalism sort of more or less the same as liberalism, Elul does write that
Speaker: liberalism created the environment which allowed technique to overcome it.
Speaker: So when liberalism prevailed and these enlightenment ideas of freedom and individual liberty and things like that came about, it created the environment for which technique could overcome it.
Speaker: So for example, like the free market, now you allow people to do more or less whatever they want economically.
Speaker: Well, obviously, what they're going to do is use the machines, which are most effective, use the manufacturing processes, which are most effective, use the accounting processes, which are most effective, and use the economies that are most effective.
Speaker: But there comes a point where technique and liberalism start conflating, right?
Speaker: So, you know, you can know it's no longer permissible, as we see nowadays, to have someone who's not...
Speaker: loyal to the modern ideology.
Speaker: And that's because ultimately, if you have too many people who sort of value their own freedom, who don't just want to be meatbags doing line work, then the entire thing sort of slowly starts to fall apart.
Speaker: Because actually technique is a very sensitive thing because it's all encompassing.
Speaker: So, you know, one or two nodes within the network, if they collapse, just like the cell phone, for example, if the cell phone tower collapses, then the cell phone sort of becomes useless.
Speaker: So if one or two nodes of that network collapse, then everything else sort of starts to not work as effectively as well.
Speaker: So you have to replace those liberal ideas of like individual freedom and whatnot.
Speaker: with principles that facilitate technique.
Speaker: So, you know, it's sort of a, it's an unfortunate circumstance of liberalism where that the ideology which made individual liberty
Speaker: I, you know, if you want to think a little, I don't necessarily think this is true, but if you want to think of it in this way, the ideology that made individual liberty possible was, uh, sort of taken over by the consequences of, of individual liberty.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It, it's, it's self-consuming.
Speaker: So one of the questions that I have about this is, I mean, people, uh,
Speaker: it's sort of taken for granted that we will optimize, right?
Speaker: We'll choose the maximally efficient path.
Speaker: And so how would you describe the pre-technique world?
Speaker: Is it people still trying to optimize but doing so kind of unconsciously or inefficiently?
Speaker: Or is it a completely different process?
Speaker: Well, the way Ellul thinks about it, and he gives this one example of Archimedes, where once Archimedes makes a machine that proves his numerical theories, he destroys that machine.
Speaker: And Elul thinks that pre-globalized technique, particularly the Greeks, which he has a reverence for, they were by nature very philosophical.
Speaker: So they didn't necessarily see the point of optimizing all things.
Speaker: They had this idea of a good life, which is philosophizing, eating grapes, drinking wine, having gay sex, things like that.
Speaker: And anything that and, you know, the idea is like, why would if you if you have that nice life and it's happy and it's and you can pursue intellectual endeavors, then why would you want to change it?
Speaker: You know, there's no reason to employ new methods of production because the production is already fine enough.
Speaker: What can abundance get you?
Speaker: So, he would desire, Elul would desire that...
Speaker: Although this isn't really possible anymore because we've gone so far into the world of technique.
Speaker: But he would have desired that when we find a new means of efficiency, that we reflect on whether there's actually any sort of, yeah, I don't like this term necessarily, but ethical purpose to use it.
Speaker: You know, and for example, like, so science in the conception of the Greeks was very different than our conception.
Speaker: So, you know, the example is that Aristotle is a scientist, as people would have thought of him back then.
Speaker: And what he's doing is he's just sort of going around cutting fish open, examining their bodies, diagramming them and whatnot.
Speaker: But science nowadays is about use, right?
Speaker: Everything is done for a purpose of doing something.
Speaker: If you discover a new material, well, it's not enough that you discovered a new material.
Speaker: The next step logically is find a way to use it.
Speaker: This is why plastic became so popular, right?
Speaker: and leached into the water and it's poisoning us slowly.
Speaker: And this is so, or a vaccine, for example, if you, if you discover some sort of vaccine it's not enough that you just potentially discovered the technology behind it.
Speaker: It's that now you have to immediately use it as, as, as quick as possible.
Speaker: Well, there's a competitive dynamic at work, right?
Speaker: Which is it's, um,
Speaker: The fear... Well, and this is sort of the argument between the guys who want to go escape to their trad remote work farm, their email job farm, where they...
Speaker: Like that's sort of your post-scarcity abundant life, right?
Speaker: Like you get to have this agrarian ideal subsidized by an email job that you work two hours a day, right?
Speaker: And the problem that I think a lot of our side of the internet has with that approach is that basically...
Speaker: the beast is coming for you.
Speaker: And like you, you can't afford to not use the weapons at your disposal to resist.
Speaker: And so like there's, there's almost, that's, I think the source of the pressure is it's not this like, it's not this like instinctive drive to optimize.
Speaker: It's more like if we don't optimize, we'll get out competed and eaten.
Speaker: Like it's, it's, it's the difference between, um,
Speaker: It's the difference between a sort of hyper-competitive Malthusian environment versus the frontier where there's just all this unclaimed land that you could go live on and yeah, why would you optimize?
Speaker: Well, that's the societal nos, right?
Speaker: It's collective.
Speaker: It is the hive mind.
Speaker: That's the ideology of the hive mind.
Speaker: And Alul admits this.
Speaker: He says that...
Speaker: you can no longer go and live in the woods and be left alone or whatever.
Speaker: You know, as a Roman, for example, if you lived a few dozen kilometers away from the city, you could have more or less gone your entire life with like no contact with the state.
Speaker: Like the tax man wouldn't have come that far to collect taxes.
Speaker: You know, there was no police, really.
Speaker: And if you're in the empire, you know, there's no reason for the soldiers to come through.
Speaker: But that's not possible anymore.
Speaker: Wherever you go nowadays, you're followed by technique.
Speaker: Whether...
Speaker: Even if you find the most remote area in the world, you're still going to have airplanes flying over you at the very least.
Speaker: Unless you go to a country with a failed state, then the tax man is always going to come no matter where you live in that country.
Speaker: And Alula Metz, I use my telephone a lot.
Speaker: I use the typewriter.
Speaker: I use all these things.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Uh, so he's, he's very blackpilled, I guess you could say about, uh, moving on from technique.
Speaker: Although he, you know, he makes this argument that actually the only way, uh, you can sort of live a post technique life is through Christianity.
Speaker: And he makes that argument very explicitly, which, um, you know, a lot of the, the scholars, you know, so, so-called scholars studying him seem to ignore, uh, conveniently.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: But the idea being that your Christian doctrines are pre-technique and the goal that you're aiming for in Christianity is post-technique.
Speaker: So that's the only way in which you can live a life that's not totally dominated by technique.
Speaker: I've been writing this post about my high school graduating class.
Speaker: And basically the fertility of the women.
Speaker: I mean, that's not me being sexist.
Speaker: TFR is always measured according to the women because that's who's the limiting factor.
Speaker: And it's much easier to study because a man can have more than multiple partners, et cetera.
Speaker: So anyway, looking at the ladies in my high school graduating class and their fertility so far and trying to...
Speaker: I'm not doing a regression model.
Speaker: I'm not tagging the data.
Speaker: But I'm just looking at who had kids and who didn't and trying to vibe it out.
Speaker: What's the difference?
Speaker: And one of the differences that I've identified is there is this susceptibility to hyperstimulus.
Speaker: Like...
Speaker: It's the, you've heard the story of those Beatles that found the knobbly beer bottles and they would have sex with the knobbly beer bottles instead of the other Beatles.
Speaker: Because the beer bottle looks like a really attractive female.
Speaker: And I guess what, the way that I relate this to the technique conversation is the Christians,
Speaker: it's not necessarily that like, well, I guess what I would say is they have a set of rules that prevent them from just pursuing the maximally efficient access to hyperstimulus.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: Like they have another set of governing principles that,
Speaker: that makes sure that they are not seeking out the most attractive beetle-like object to sort of fruitlessly mate with.
Speaker: These rules require them to actually go find a real beetle.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: And it's the fact that it's pre... I think you're right, that there's something about it that's pre-technique, it's pre...
Speaker: uh, it's sort of like, um, it's sort of like booting back to an earlier version of the software that doesn't have this problem.
Speaker: And, uh, and what's interesting about that is that that's going to be who survives because the people, I mean, in, in my case, the people that are, uh, in, in terms of the, the, the population that I'm looking at, um,
Speaker: the people who had some rules that prevented them from responding to hyperstimulus are the only people who are going to be represented in the next generation.
Speaker: And that's going to iterate even more strongly in the second generation.
Speaker: And so it's sort of the, I think you're right that it's pre-technique, post-technique.
Speaker: It's a way of jumping over that gap and sort of surviving the cataclysm that it's creating.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And, but also like very basically, um, religion, uh, you know, a little use as Christianity, but you could probably, uh, use most religions as well.
Speaker: Like it's, it's anti-technic sort of, right.
Speaker: Uh, it's, it's, it can be very inconvenient at times.
Speaker: Uh, although, so, so, right.
Speaker: I mean, like think of the way, like we're, we're talking about this, like, uh,
Speaker: We're talking about it instrumentally.
Speaker: We're talking about it as a way of achieving a goal.
Speaker: Right, exactly.
Speaker: Like it's inconvenient, right, to...
Speaker: as if everything is supposed to be convenient.
Speaker: But that sort of getting used to inconvenience, that something isn't completely about pursuing some sort of technical end.
Speaker: Well, I just listened to a podcast about... It's like the transhumanist pronatalists.
Speaker: It's the guys who are like, we have to have babies because the GDP is going to crash.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, the Elon Musk types.
Speaker: And home prices are going to collapse and generational wealth is going to evaporate.
Speaker: They've got all these reasons.
Speaker: And to be fair to them, there's also an element of like...
Speaker: hey, we believe life is good and life is beautiful and we shouldn't be saying that life is horrible and why would we bring kids in this world?
Speaker: So, you know, fair play to them.
Speaker: But there is this mentality of, because they're all secular, there's this mentality of like, we have to find a way to access the tools of religion.
Speaker: And use it as an instrument to achieve this goal that we have, which is maintaining... You know, that's a good goal, maintaining human prosperity and making sure that we all don't die and that we're not miserable and we don't live in a Somali-Detroit dystopia.
Speaker: But I guess... And I've had this conversation with tons of them.
Speaker: Because, you know, they'll look at...
Speaker: you know, some of, some of the value that we have in our communities.
Speaker: And they'll be like, man, I really wish that I, I really wish that I had that.
Speaker: I just can't buy all your wacky doctrines.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know the type.
Speaker: And, and I, you know, I'm not like, I'm not trying to like own them or anything, but I'm like, it, it doesn't work that way.
Speaker: Like you can't, you can't do it instrumentally because the whole point is that it,
Speaker: It's not worth it from a calculus perspective.
Speaker: The math does not add up.
Speaker: It's more work than you think it is.
Speaker: It's worth it, but you really have to believe that
Speaker: when you die, you're going to be with your family and went like, and Jesus will come back.
Speaker: And like, that's what makes it make sense to do individually.
Speaker: Now it totally makes sense to like,
Speaker: live in a society where everyone else believes that.
Speaker: Like that's super useful.
Speaker: It's like, that's really good technology, really good technique to have a system where it makes everybody follow the rules because they think God will spank them.
Speaker: And so it's very high trust and I can operate safely.
Speaker: But to agree to be bound yourself by those rules doesn't fit within that technical mindset.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, that's exactly right.
Speaker: Like, uh, very bit, like you can't fake, uh, religion.
Speaker: Although a lot of people, uh,
Speaker: Try and, you know, you know, to some extent, a little would say that technique does sort of try to fill, you know, the God shaped hole within within people.
Speaker: But, you know, those people are always miserable and sort of decrepit.
Speaker: It's obviously, you know, not working for them.
Speaker: But yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Well, I wanted to also cover this project that you're working on, which is a translation project.
Speaker: You're translating a book by a Fry Corps soldier.
Speaker: Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: So this is a book, or I guess you could call it a memoir, by one of the captains of the Freikorps, which participated in the Baltic campaign after the first war.
Speaker: And at that time, Germany had invaded the Baltics for a brief period,
Speaker: And now the Bolsheviks were trying to push through and they had captured a good chunk of the Baltics.
Speaker: So the Entente and...
Speaker: And Germany and the government of Latvia sort of agreed to allow German Freikorps forces because the government itself was weak and incapable of defending anything at that point.
Speaker: And a Freikorps is like an independent filibuster army?
Speaker: Right, an independent volunteer union unit, as they call it.
Speaker: So, you know, the Fry Corps was supposed to protect the Baltics from Bolshevik invasion, and they did to some extent until they were forced to leave.
Speaker: I mean, they pushed out the Bolsheviks quite well, actually, which was sort of the problem for them.
Speaker: They had become too successful and had scared the Entente.
Speaker: I mean, they overthrew the provisional government of Latvia and replaced it with their own sort of puppet state.
Speaker: But yes, so I'm translating this memoir and should come out sometime within the first half of next year.
Speaker: You know, translation work is really, I think, something that sort of people have started to notice the importance of, I think, and making old books available to people.
Speaker: Yeah, particularly one of the things that I've learned from like listening to
Speaker: BAPS podcast and various interviews that Moldbug has done is how many books are just like Google Translate's not going to touch them and they're not going to do the screen grabs.
Speaker: They're just not going to make it accessible to you.
Speaker: It's that freedom of speech versus freedom of reach thing.
Speaker: But when like all of your...
Speaker: the dream of the internet, right, was all of the world's information accessible to everyone, right?
Speaker: And we've sort of integrated ourselves with this research tool.
Speaker: And so if Google doesn't want you to see it,
Speaker: you know, it's going to be really hard for you to see it.
Speaker: And so, uh, you know, stories like this, I mean, I, I think I had heard the word Freikor, uh, but I had no real sense of what that was.
Speaker: Uh, you know, I, I, because it was a German word, I was like, yeah, you know, it's probably some kind of Nazi thing.
Speaker: I, you know, it was a mid-century German thing.
Speaker: That's what I knew.
Speaker: And, uh,
Speaker: And so, so can you tell me a little bit more about that, about what those guys were like?
Speaker: I mean, who funded these like expeditions?
Speaker: So within the Baltic region, what had happened is that under the agreement signed between Germany, which was crafted by the Plenipetsk entry to the Baltics, August Winning, and the Umanis governments, the provisional government of Latvia,
Speaker: So the agreement was that after four weeks of service, I believe, the Fry Corps soldiers would be given plots of land in the Baltics in Latvia, and they would also be given Latvian citizenship.
Speaker: And because there was a lot of discontent amongst the men who had fought in the war about new Germany, because it had just recently fallen under a Soviet Democratic rule, which was totally inept and incapable of running a country.
Speaker: And, you know, we ultimately saw the consequences of that in the collapse of the Weimar Republic.
Speaker: But so these soldiers were more than willing to get back into the fight because for a lot of these guys, first of all, who had entered the war when they were 16, 17 or whatever, the war was the only thing they had known in their adult life.
Speaker: So coming back, it was just like, well, what do we do now?
Speaker: Where do we go?
Speaker: So this new opportunity for them was, it took on an existential form, really.
Speaker: And a lot of the books, a really good one is...
Speaker: The Outlaws by Ernst von Salaman.
Speaker: And that's a very easily accessible book.
Speaker: It's sold in a few places.
Speaker: But, you know, they talk about the Baltics sort of in a very romantic sense, about the trees, about the sky, about the mist and fog.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: So the soldiers, for citizenship and land, they had agreed to go and fight in the Baltics.
Speaker: But, you know, the Baltics did have a history of German-ness.
Speaker: The Germans entered the Baltics in around the 12th century or so.
Speaker: And that was through and, you know, facilitated the immigration to the Baltics was the Hanseatic League and the, and the, the,
Speaker: the crusades so a lot of a lot of the crusaders uh they became the the nobles of the region um the so-called baltic barons and uh they had you know from from the 12th century all the way to the 19th century they had lived there and their kids were up there and whatever you know there was constant lineage through there and the hanseatic league the merchants of the hanseatic league and the craftsmen they became the burgers of riga
Speaker: And the Germans had dominated decision making in that region for, you know, what is 600, 700 years or so.
Speaker: And what had started to happen in the late 1800s and the early 1900s was that ethnic tensions sort of started to become insurpassable because the Baltic Germans, the noble, had actually received significant privileges from all the empires that ruled, whether it be the Danish empire, the Swedish empire, or the Russian.
Speaker: They were spared from all Dainification, Sudification, Russification policies, while the Latvians weren't.
Speaker: But, you know, the nature of these Baltic Barians, I mean, think of who they were, right?
Speaker: They were...
Speaker: aristocratic, highly educated people who spoke several languages.
Speaker: They had studied all over Europe.
Speaker: What type of ideology does that make you a pre-discussed or easily influenced by?
Speaker: It's liberalism, right?
Speaker: That's the archetype of a person who's influenced by the Enlightenment ideas and liberalism.
Speaker: Cosmopolitan.
Speaker: Right, exactly.
Speaker: And they thought of themselves in this way, too.
Speaker: Like, there's one passage by where a Baltic baron, you know, the Soviets or Bolshevich ideology had started to spread this idea of like, you know, the early ideas of deconstruction and identity and whatever.
Speaker: So they were forced to sort of figure out what their identity is.
Speaker: You know, I thought that before then, like no one had ever thought about like my identity.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: So, and like, and the way he answered the question is something like,
Speaker: Well, first, I'm a Westerner.
Speaker: Second, I'm a noble.
Speaker: Third, I'm an academic.
Speaker: Fourth, I'm a German.
Speaker: Fifth, I'm a Baltic.
Speaker: Sixth, I'm a Russian.
Speaker: So German-ness wasn't super salient to them at the beginning.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: And actually, they were sort of very willing to cooperate with the Latvians and had implemented land reforms and feudalism reforms on their own accord without having the Russian Empire forcing them to do so.
Speaker: The Enlightenment ideas became very popular with them.
Speaker: But, you know, in the 1905 failed first Bolshevik revolution, they had become the victims of Bolsheviks, right?
Speaker: Latvian Bolsheviks.
Speaker: And they had, you know, they would burn their houses, they would beat them.
Speaker: A lot of manors were destroyed, a lot of property was destroyed.
Speaker: And that changed the situation for the Baltic Barons.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Sort of like the farm murder situation in South Africa, where it's just sort of escalating violence that's committed kind of with impunity.
Speaker: Right, exactly.
Speaker: And so one of the Baltic Barians, Karl von Manteuffel Katzstangen, he writes that, despite my best efforts and the efforts of the modern Latvians and the modern Germans,
Speaker: we had become victims of the circumstances.
Speaker: The situation just developed to the point where efforts from both sides could no longer overcome the circumstances.
Speaker: So in order to ensure their own survival and the survival of their status as nobility, the barons adopted this idea that the Baltics should become somehow a part of Germany.
Speaker: And this was an idea that was sort of unthinkable just 20 years before that, before 1905, because why would the Baltic barons want to become part of Germany?
Speaker: They had very privileged positions in the Russian government.
Speaker: Most of them spoke Russian relatively fluently.
Speaker: And in fact, the Germans themselves, like the Reich Germans, which they're called, the Germans who lived in the
Speaker: in the main official German territory.
Speaker: They didn't really know much about the Baltic barons either.
Speaker: And in fact, Herbert von Hoene was arrested in Germany when he was, you know, this was a Baltic German, this was an ethnic German who spoke German as his first language.
Speaker: He was studying art in Italy and on his way back to the Baltics, he was arrested because they thought he was a Russian spy.
Speaker: So the relationship between foreign Germans and Germans who lived in the Reich wasn't necessarily one of brotherly love.
Speaker: The Baltic Germans felt like as if they were seen as foreigners just as much as anyone else was by the Reich.
Speaker: But after the First World War, when they were discovered by the German Empire, then the ideas of becoming part of Germany became more reasonable and actually the only way that they thought that they could pursue their survival.
Speaker: So they also made great contributions in terms of land and money in order to incentivize these soldiers to come to fight in the Baltics.
Speaker: They had offered up plots of their own property to Fricor soldiers in return for their service, with the idea being that the Baltics would become part of Germany in some manner, whether it was officially or an independent state that was sort of a satellite state of Germany.
Speaker: Well, it's fascinating to see some of the parallels with... Yeah.
Speaker: When you're... If you grow up not really thinking of yourself as a particular kind of... Like BAP actually has a whole rant about how the whole concept of identity is kind of gay and modern and fake.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And if you don't think of yourself as part of a team, but then all of a sudden you are being attacked on the basis of this...
Speaker: this division that like it was no it wasn't salient to you before, but now it's like, well, you know, if they hate all the guys who are 510, then I guess I'd better be a 510 nationalist and go sit at the prison table with all the 510 guys and mob up like, I guess that's what we have to do.
Speaker: You know?
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: And yeah, 510 gang.
Speaker: That's me.
Speaker: But yeah, yeah, it's, it's man, it's so interesting.
Speaker: And I also think about how different, well, maybe, maybe it provides a little bit of a, of a model.
Speaker: You know, I'm always thinking about the frontier because I think the frontier is, is where that freedom exists.
Speaker: to the extent that it can be found.
Speaker: And you mentioned like going and living in Somalia as like the only place to escape the tax man.
Speaker: And I do sort of think that frontiers emerge in chaos.
Speaker: They emerge in disorder and there's
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I guess I'm an opportunity guy.
Speaker: I see opportunity.
Speaker: As things break down, there becomes freedom of action, freedom to move, freedom to control your own space.
Speaker: I mean, let's be real.
Speaker: Even the Western frontier, the archetypal frontier of the American West,
Speaker: that's a post-apocalyptic wasteland from the perspective of the natives.
Speaker: I mean, it got wiped clean.
Speaker: And I think similar things are happening with respect to fertility, with respect to like the...
Speaker: the increasing incoherence of the sort of nation state framework of how states are organized and like it's this particular people within this particular geography.
Speaker: You know, I just see
Speaker: a lot of danger and a lot of opportunity.
Speaker: So, I mean, it's, you know, and like it didn't work out great for the, for the Fry Corps, like on any dimension.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But I mean, it provides, it provides a vision of, a vision of the frontier as being something that you kind of have to go out and make rather than something that just exists for you to occupy.
Speaker: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker: So in this memoir, the captain of the Fry Corps, who had recently come back from the war and his unit was demobilized, and that caused some existential terror within him, I guess you could say.
Speaker: especially since, you know, he was worried about how the country would treat people who had fought in the war because the new Soviet ideology or the new socialist ideology, they rejected all forms of hierarchy, more or less.
Speaker: And, you know, thoughts would go in his head like, you know, You're talking about the official Weimar ideology?
Speaker: Yeah, well, the ideology of, although, you know, this is, I guess, the difference between the SPD and the USPD, the USPD being the more sort of far left group and, you know, the Spartacists, as you may have heard.
Speaker: And a lot of the young reserve reservists, you know, young guys who hadn't actually fought in the war, but they were just reserve soldiers.
Speaker: They saw the Soviet or the socialist revolution in November as like their revolution.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And it was supposed to embolden them and break down the hierarchy so that there were no more orders they had to take from the captains and whatever.
Speaker: And so a lot of like generals would just be attacked on the streets, for example.
Speaker: And in the mind of the author, he was worried about like, would my father who, he comes from a noble family, an aristocratic family, like
Speaker: would my father be attacked one day by these people?
Speaker: So he has a lot of sort of anxiety about New Germany.
Speaker: So he decides to take a trip up into the mountains and do some skiing to clear his mind or whatever.
Speaker: And this is where, up in that mountain...
Speaker: that he comes up with the idea to go fight in Riga because he comes across... So, you know, in the mountains where he was, he had met some other soldiers who were there with their wives and sisters and whatever.
Speaker: And the ladies of that group had decided, like...
Speaker: you got you men are thinking way too much about you know the state of the country and the war and whatever like you guys need a break uh no more talking about politics or or reading newspapers uh while you guys are up here so like okay whatever but after some days uh he he's sitting by a fire and he comes and he grabs himself a newspaper and in the newspaper he's reading about what's happening in riga what the bolsheviks are doing um
Speaker: And truly, it was a reign of terror, although the Fry Corps, they reigned a good amount of terror as well afterwards in clearing the Soviets, the Bolsheviks out of the region.
Speaker: But yeah, so there was a good amount of legit terror happening against just the normal people by the Bolsheviks, like mass starvation in the Baltics, really.
Speaker: Um, and actually they had passed laws where you weren't allowed to trade like your possessions for food anymore.
Speaker: Um, so you just, everyone's starving and you're not even allowed to procure food.
Speaker: Uh, so, uh, he's reading about what's happening in Riga and he decides, you know, he, he hadn't really known what a fry for was at that point.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: So he decides, like, I have to do something about this.
Speaker: You know, like there are, and he thinks in nationalistic terms, of course.
Speaker: He thinks, like, there are Germans there who are being abused by these Bolsheviks.
Speaker: I can't just let them be abused.
Speaker: I have to do something.
Speaker: So, you know, he creates a Freikorps, and then he gets the permission to go and make that frontier, to make the Baltics a frontier.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So yeah, like frontiers very much do come through chaos and you sort of have to you have to make it a frontier.
Speaker: You have to seek it out.
Speaker: It doesn't just it doesn't just come to you to whatever extent that a modern frontier could exist.
Speaker: It's it's interesting also when you talk about the revolution in Germany, I had never
Speaker: You know, you grow up hearing about Weimar as basically like 1990s Denmark or something.
Speaker: Like they were just trying to be, they were just trying to be a liberal Western democracy.
Speaker: And like, yeah, it, yeah, it was, you know, it was socialist and it was, it was, there was the, the abuses and, and the,
Speaker: the sort of depredations of that regime were pretty extreme.
Speaker: There's a great book.
Speaker: Um, Oh shoot.
Speaker: What's it called?
Speaker: Oh yeah.
Speaker: Necessary war by, by Buchanan.
Speaker: He does his sort of, uh, his sort of history of, of, of world war one and world war two.
Speaker: And, um, you know, he's, he's definitely got an ax to grind for sure about, about, uh, he really hates Churchill for, for one thing.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: But it's fascinating as an illustration of like, you know, people didn't just go insane all at once for no reason.
Speaker: Like there was starvation and there was like these insane...
Speaker: laws and really terrible things happening.
Speaker: And like, it's, I guess what I view all of that as is like, there's a cautionary tale there, I think, about letting a justified rage dictate your actions.
Speaker: And, you know, letting it be misplaced and letting it, one of the things that Zero HP Lovecraft has said is like,
Speaker: Whatever your ideology is, you need to be prepared to have it in the hands of morons.
Speaker: Like, because that's who's going to be the actual like functionaries and police and prosecutors and HR people.
Speaker: All of the foot soldiers of, you know, your glorious revolution are going to be morons.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so like you have to think about how your ideology will be executed in the hands of people like that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, one of the theories of international relations is
Speaker: I hate these academic terms, but it's called neoclassical realism.
Speaker: And what that basically says is that there's an objective international structure, but obviously humans perceive things, like everything is done by humans.
Speaker: And often humans can misperceive the reality of the international structure.
Speaker: And so the point is that like leaders matter actually, contrary to some of the other realist perspectives on international relations.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like it's all just impersonal forces and, you know, if it wasn't this guy, it would have been some other guy.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And the only thing, like the only way to think about war is just through material capabilities and, right.
Speaker: How many guns did that country have?
Speaker: How many guns did that country have?
Speaker: You can figure out the structure of the world that way.
Speaker: Hitler was a buffoon.
Speaker: His perception of the international order was fundamentally buffoonish.
Speaker: He wasn't able to perceive things accurately.
Speaker: And
Speaker: And even his generals would tell him that what you're doing is stupid.
Speaker: This is not how Europe is structured right now.
Speaker: But he wouldn't listen to them, obviously, and...
Speaker: And I think there's also this... They had a similarly modernist instrumental approach to culture and religion.
Speaker: And they were like, well, we'll do Christianity, but it'll be the kind of Christianity that's maximally useful to the German state.
Speaker: And we're going to throw in some occult elements because this symbol looks cool.
Speaker: And it was very...
Speaker: silly in hindsight and then it's like even even down to like you know i don't know if i'm making too much of this or not but like
Speaker: the fact that, you know, toward the middle of the war, he's like all stimmed out.
Speaker: Cause it's like, ah, this, you know, it's, it's, it's better living through chemistry.
Speaker: It's let's, let's get on, let's get on Adderall and modafinil and, and the surely there'll be no consequences to my personality or behavior.
Speaker: And that goes back to like this, you know, well, I mean, like it's, it's maybe a, it's maybe a,
Speaker: a challenge to the, the Nietzschean like will to power the, the, the like limitlessness, the like, you know, whatever it takes kind of mentality.
Speaker: It's, it's like it, it, it, uh, what if you're not the over man who's worthy to, to write new laws on new tablets?
Speaker: What if your new laws are retarded?
Speaker: Cause you're kind of retarded.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: Like, like, whatever you just, whatever you just make bad decisions.
Speaker: And yeah.
Speaker: Anyway, I want to talk also about just in general, this, this view of history and why, why history sucks so bad.
Speaker: Why, why are academics?
Speaker: I mean, you could, you could almost make it a conversation about like, why are academics bad at everything?
Speaker: Like why, why are they just so bad at, at perceiving reality right now?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I mean, where do you begin criticizing academics, right?
Speaker: Oh, you can start anywhere.
Speaker: So I think one of the best writings about...
Speaker: It's the study of history is by Nietzsche and it's called the use and abuse of history for life, I think.
Speaker: And he he he comes up for he starts with saying that man, to some extent, envies the animal who he sees just like eating his food and being happy and not worrying about anything.
Speaker: and it's because this animal lives ahistorically, right?
Speaker: He doesn't remember things.
Speaker: He doesn't remember what he did yesterday or what happened 100 years ago.
Speaker: He has no idea who his parents are or whatever.
Speaker: But man is constantly remembering things.
Speaker: He lives historically.
Speaker: He knows what happened yesterday.
Speaker: He knows what happened 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 300 years ago, and so on.
Speaker: And so he can only perceive things in the context of the things that he knows about history.
Speaker: So then, but Nietzsche doesn't say that, you know, because Nietzsche believes that ultimately everything that I guess you
Speaker: everything should drive you to action, right?
Speaker: It's supposed to get you to do great things.
Speaker: So Nietzsche doesn't say that you should just forget all the time, forget everything you know and just act.
Speaker: He says that there are three methods of studying history and these can be both used and they can be abused and you have to find just the right way and the right circumstance to use each one.
Speaker: And if I remember right, the three methods are the monumental use of history, the antiquarian use of history, and the critical use of history.
Speaker: And I guess you could say maybe the most important one, although anytime you talk about Nietzsche,
Speaker: Everything you say about him is like a very base level generalization with like 100 caveats.
Speaker: But the most important one, I guess you could say, is the monumental vision of history or study of history, which is...
Speaker: You study the great men of the past to know what's possible, right?
Speaker: To know what you can do, to know what they did so that you can maybe use what they did, imitate what they did so that you yourself can become a great man.
Speaker: And the second mode is the antiquarian history.
Speaker: And this is sort of more or less what we conceive history of.
Speaker: But although we abuse it instead of using it, I think you would say.
Speaker: And that's sort of knowing the history, you know, like...
Speaker: Who put the walls up in the city?
Speaker: Who built that bridge?
Speaker: When was that bridge built?
Speaker: Names and dates.
Speaker: Well, yes, but also as a method of rooting yourself in your society.
Speaker: The history of the city, he says, becomes the history of the man.
Speaker: who lives in it, right?
Speaker: He knows like, oh, my great ancestors built this city or whatever.
Speaker: And so I'm rooted in this through that.
Speaker: And maybe the which is maybe the Latter-day Saint, like view of genealogy.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Like, yeah, it's to it's to tell you who you are.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Although he would say that, like, that's that's being abused now because it
Speaker: It turned history into figures and facts.
Speaker: And the way that we perceive war is through like dates and whatever and newspaper articles and videos online.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You know, the way that most people see the war in Ukraine, for example, is by videos on the Internet and things like that.
Speaker: What it's supposed to do is create some reverence in you for the world, like some respect that you have for what has come before.
Speaker: That's the use of it.
Speaker: And then you have the critical use of history, which is sort of exactly what it says it is.
Speaker: If you live in a time that's not conducive to creating great men, it's the method by which you look at the past so that you are able to criticize the time that you live in.
Speaker: But he says that the man who critiques for no reason becomes suffocated.
Speaker: And this is what we see, right?
Speaker: Very common today that people use history as a means of criticism and they use ideas like justice and injustice, which Nietzsche would say that
Speaker: Like most people have no basis to judge justice and injustice fundamentally because, you know, in that critical view of history, you know, everything is, you know, the place that we exist right now has come from injustice.
Speaker: So using it as a basis to criticize history is meaningless.
Speaker: Yeah, digging up that Confederate general bones and breaking down his statue.
Speaker: That's not about history.
Speaker: That's about a war being prosecuted now.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, you know, what are our historians doing?
Speaker: Well, you know, they're chiefly criticizing, I mean, obviously.
Speaker: And I guess the neutral perspective of history is just to sort of create encyclopedic knowledge.
Speaker: That's what our academics think, like, is their job, sort of.
Speaker: But Nietzsche would say that history is supposed to serve an end.
Speaker: It's supposed to help create you into a great man, to get you to act in a great fashion.
Speaker: So you're not necessarily, you know, you're not supposed to forget, but you can't live...
Speaker: in the shadow of history.
Speaker: Because if you're constantly thinking about, you know, the critical perspective, the injustice or justice of the past, if you're constantly thinking about the data points of history, then you're just going to be suffocated and unable to act, which we see this in a lot of people.
Speaker: They're totally... Yeah, I think BAP...
Speaker: I think he said, I'm just going to keep quoting BAP because I don't read books.
Speaker: I just listen to the BAP podcast.
Speaker: I'm complete sued.
Speaker: But he talks about biography as being the most honest form of history and even in particular autobiography.
Speaker: And like, you know, obviously by the academic model of history, that's like the least valuable, right?
Speaker: Because it's totally biased.
Speaker: It's one person's perspective.
Speaker: It's an N of one, right?
Speaker: You can't make a statistical model on an autobiography.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But if your goal is to become a particular type of person,
Speaker: then what you really want is a view of that type of person.
Speaker: And like the best view you could get would be the view from the inside.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And, and how did they perceive the choices that were ahead of them?
Speaker: And how did they decide this is the path?
Speaker: And, you know, and like, there's definitely a role for the critical there, which is, you know,
Speaker: Maybe they didn't see 100% accurately.
Speaker: Maybe what they thought was prudence was actually luck.
Speaker: Maybe they undersell the value of their acumen.
Speaker: You do have to interrogate their decision-making process a little bit.
Speaker: It's not blind hero worship, but it should be like, how do I become the kind of person that could do the great things that that person did?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And, you know, our academics aren't interested in doing that, in creating, you know, there's no high culture right now in the pursuit of creating great men.
Speaker: It's just sort of either encyclopedic or critical and critical without reason.
Speaker: It's almost, well, I don't think it's almost, I think it is ideologically opposed to that kind of analysis.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: It's like, don't tell me about the great men.
Speaker: I want to hear about the roots that they dug up and like what did their shit piles look like?
Speaker: What was in their shit piles?
Speaker: Like, and you know, what kind of roots and berries did the common people eat and what were their folk dances like?
Speaker: And like, yeah, that's right.
Speaker: It's very like hoi polloi.
Speaker: And like that, that's interesting as, as, as trivia, but it doesn't lead anywhere.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Nietzsche isn't saying that you should forget these things necessarily.
Speaker: He actually says that forgetting and remembering aren't something that happened to you.
Speaker: They're active things.
Speaker: They're active actions that you take.
Speaker: So in terms of history, for example, like the ability to forget history, I guess you could say, isn't that you forget these factoids and trivia and maybe the injustices that you perceive of the past, but it's the ability to go beyond them, you know,
Speaker: Go beyond good and evil, I guess you could say.
Speaker: And, you know, Kierkegaard sort of writes about forgetting in the same manner.
Speaker: Because for Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, they sort of had...
Speaker: They don't have teleological views on history, but they do have teleological views on man.
Speaker: Man is supposed to get somewhere.
Speaker: So for Nietzsche, he's supposed to become like the overman.
Speaker: And for Kierkegaard, he's supposed to become the knight of faith.
Speaker: And Kierkegaard says that man should not forget because to forget would be an act of a lesser creature.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So like the cat of the butterfly forgets who the caterpillar was.
Speaker: But and for Nietzsche, it's not that you should become an animal, right?
Speaker: That you just forget everything you've done before.
Speaker: He makes I think he makes this joke about.
Speaker: So the man asks the animal, like, why won't you talk to me?
Speaker: And the animal says, well, I would, but I immediately forget
Speaker: The animal would say I would, but I immediately forget what I was going to say.
Speaker: But before he can say that, he immediately forgets, right?
Speaker: So the ability to forget is something we've sort of lost because everything is encyclopedic.
Speaker: The academic is expected to just have all these factoids about history in which he builds his entire context of the world on.
Speaker: Well, but again, it's because your memory is so intensely mediated and outsourced.
Speaker: It's not that we've lost the ability to forget.
Speaker: It's that we've lost the agency over what is forgotten.
Speaker: It's Google that decides what is remembered and what is forgotten.
Speaker: Unless we make this very deliberate, very labor intensive effort to go find texts from the interwar period in Eastern Europe and translate them from German to English and then hawk them on a podcast.
Speaker: I mean, that's...
Speaker: That's the level of effort that it takes.
Speaker: And so I think we got to get ready for the Europe call, but I wanted to close with what is the value of your course of study?
Speaker: You're studying of technique, you're studying of philosophy.
Speaker: What do you see as the, well, and maybe you haven't figured out exactly how it cashes out yet.
Speaker: That's, you know, that's fine.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But what is the hope that drives this line of study?
Speaker: What are you trying to find?
Speaker: There are times where you're supposed to act, but all things should lead to some sort of action, I think.
Speaker: But there's also a value in analyzing, and this is where I deviate from Nietzsche a little bit, I think.
Speaker: I do think it's valuable to understand what exactly you're dealing with.
Speaker: And technique theory, in my view, is the best method of...
Speaker: of so to say is to clear up um what's happening and i think it because it transcends ideology because you'll have like all the people who are who are totally subversive to to civilization right now they'll all profess different types of ideology right but ultimately you sort of act in the same way and you know what's so what's underlying that and i think that that's technique so and the way that uh you you escape this is
Speaker: to some extent, like knowing what people in the past did in similar situations.
Speaker: Although, you know, we do live in peculiar times, and I think all times are peculiar because they're
Speaker: the construct of what led up to them.
Speaker: And so you want the ability to abstract from the past and to be able to apply it to the present.
Speaker: And that's the part where it leads you to action.
Speaker: So unfortunately, we don't have a class of, really a class of people in the academies or really anywhere who are studying the past in terms of
Speaker: creating something better, creating a high culture.
Speaker: But the next best thing we have is us.
Speaker: And to whatever ability that we can, it's valuable to take the study of the world and the past, which I think originates in thinking that's much more similar to us in the first place, which has been abused and beaten to death.
Speaker: But
Speaker: we can take it and repurpose it in a classical tradition and use that to, you know, because the only way that you're going to create men is through a high culture.
Speaker: So like, well, maybe the us right now won't necessarily be great men because we grew up in a, in a decrepit culture, but we can set the foundation for a high culture, which will eventually produce a great men.
Speaker: And, you know, the ultimate exit, I guess, is a society in which, you know, there's, you know, everyone is sort of exited out of the creptiness that haunted the previous decades or so.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: When I tweet about when we win.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's always my sons on top of the throne of skulls.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's not me.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I think
Speaker: Well, and you mentioned the value of analysis.
Speaker: I think, I think the value in analysis, it's, it's kind of an act of faith.
Speaker: It's an act of saying, I don't know exactly how this leads to the answer, but I need to know the truth.
Speaker: Like it's sort of the truth will make you free.
Speaker: Like, like there's a, there's a, there's a path through this.
Speaker: Even if I can't see how, what I'm learning right now instrumentally leads to, uh,
Speaker: to the end I want to the action I need to take.
Speaker: Um, it's, there is, there is intrinsic value in understanding your situation and it will lead to, uh, the, the action.
Speaker: And, and a lot of times if you are, if you are studying just for, you know, tell me what to do.
Speaker: Um, you often don't have the sort of intellectual stamina to reach the depth where the answer really is.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Well, this has been a lot of fun, man.
Speaker: I appreciate you coming on.
Speaker: It was my pleasure.
Speaker: Yeah, thank you.
Speaker: And my ambition as far as high culture, I want to get the guys who want to make a pile of money.
Speaker: I want to get them a pile of money so they can subscribe to the NIMS stack.
Speaker: And because there's a...
Speaker: there's a lot of really smart guys on our side of things, uh, who currently, you know, are, are independent enough to do a lot of interesting thinking, but I also want to get those guys set up to where they can support families and have the real, the real patronage that, uh, that maybe you saw in, in cultures that, that,
Speaker: that did have this kind of intellectual ferment.
Speaker: Uh, so that's, that's my dream is to sort of wed these worlds of, of, of intellect and culture with the, the, the guys who are just great at making money.
Speaker: Cause those guys value this stuff.
Speaker: They just don't, they just don't live in that world.
Speaker: And if you can get those worlds talking and, and, and communicating with each other, they can both be,
Speaker: made a lot better off and Nim will tutor your sons, your princelings.
Speaker: That's right, I'll give them a class qualification.
Speaker: That's right, that's right.
Speaker: Thanks everybody for being here.
Speaker: It's nimachiragi.substack.com if you wanna learn more about him.
Speaker: If you wanna get involved in the group as a whole, it's exitgroup.us.
Speaker: You can also learn more about kind of the projects that we're doing at exitgroup.substack.com.
Speaker: Thanks everybody for being here.
