Transcript
Speaker: Hey, everybody.
Speaker: Welcome to the Exit Podcast.
Speaker: This is Dr. Bennett, joined here by Pascal Emmanuel Gobri.
Speaker: He's a Twitter account guy that I've been following for many, many years.
Speaker: I think we've been mutuals for many years.
Speaker: He's a Frenchman, and he's got a sub stack, which I think is pegobri.substack.com.
Speaker: It's called the accelerationist, but I don't actually know the URL.
Speaker: I prepared for this.
Speaker: No, it's accelerationist.substack.com.
Speaker: Accelerationist.substack.com.
Speaker: Okay, cool.
Speaker: Bringing him on here because one of the exit guys encountered your post on the French aristocracy selective breeding program.
Speaker: You, like many of us in the scene, read...
Speaker: Kostin Alomariou's dissertation, Selective Reading and the Birth of Philosophy.
Speaker: I don't know why people were interested in this obscure dissertation all of a sudden.
Speaker: Yeah, some academic, some Romanian academic who went to school with P.J.
Speaker: Novak.
Speaker: So you were addressing...
Speaker: partly this concern about like, you know, should we all sort of abandon politics?
Speaker: Should we abandon elite institutions?
Speaker: How do you maintain or how do you build actually a counter elite?
Speaker: And I wonder if you could just real quick kind of recapitulate a little bit of what you talked about in that essay.
Speaker: Sure, yeah, so the post was inspired
Speaker: part by reading that book, Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, which I found fascinating because I studied philosophy in college.
Speaker: Of course I did.
Speaker: But also because I had an interesting angle on it, given my own history and background, which is that there is this sort of secret is not the right word, but it's certainly like, you know, sotto voce, as we would say, institution in the sort of world of the French aristocracy sort of broadly understood, which
Speaker: Because there's obviously lots of debate about who counts as a bona fide aristocrat, but there's sort of that social milieu.
Speaker: And that institution has a strange name, which is called, it's called Le Rally, so like a rally race, and nobody really knows how it got its name.
Speaker: And they're basically organizations run by women whose job is to essentially select...
Speaker: children really is, I mean, nobody puts it so crudely, but it really is what they are.
Speaker: Their job is to select children of the French elite and breed them together.
Speaker: I mean, to get them married together.
Speaker: For the purposes of marriage and the natural end of marriage, which is reproduction.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: And so it's the sort of centerpiece of it is something that's also exists in the sort of Anglo-American world, which is the debutante.
Speaker: It's also a French word, right?
Speaker: Debutante is a term from this sort of social world.
Speaker: You know, a debutante is a young woman who's, you know, who's at the end of her teenage years and so is ready to sort of mingle and be courted.
Speaker: But it's much broader than that because children are selected or families, I guess, are selected or invited or co-opted when the children, I mean, it depends because you have different rallies.
Speaker: It's not like one central organization.
Speaker: There are many and like many have like different vibes and all of that.
Speaker: But usually children are co-opted when they're
Speaker: 11, 12, 13, 14.
Speaker: And there's, you know, they, as children, they sort of do activities together.
Speaker: There are like museum tours with like parents acting as chaperones and the kids hang out together.
Speaker: There are, you know, classes on things like dancing, because again, like it progresses up to these, you know,
Speaker: where dancing is a big part of it.
Speaker: So there are dancing lessons, history lessons, etiquette lessons.
Speaker: It's a whole thing.
Speaker: And the sort of, you know, obviously the goal of that is to sort of select children for future breeding potential.
Speaker: And then when you're 14, 15, 16, you sort of have these social events happening
Speaker: with other kids that are chaperoned by adults.
Speaker: And then when you're essentially in college, you get into more formal soirees where it's like black tie or you're well-dressed and you dance with your partners and so on and so forth and you socialize.
Speaker: The expectation is that by the time you're 20, 21, 22, you found the person you're going to marry.
Speaker: You're ideally engaged, but if not engaged, you know, in a, in a, in the kind of committed relationship where everybody knows you're going to get married eventually.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: and you're definitely married by 25.
Speaker: Obviously not everybody sort of follows that entire trajectory.
Speaker: And as with everything else, things get more degenerated as time goes on.
Speaker: Some of the rallies today are basically like glorified party groups and they rent out, it's just rich kids renting out nightclubs in Paris and all of the other stuff.
Speaker: uh has sort of been forgotten but the the general idea the general concept is that is it as granular as like i'm bringing this boy and this girl because i think they would in particular be a match or is it just like i want to loop in this sort of cluster of kids and you know let the magic happen uh it's it's more the latter
Speaker: But again, like the parents are involved at every stage.
Speaker: And so it's, you know, there's also a very informal component.
Speaker: It's like, oh, you know, oh, that boy, you know, he looks nice.
Speaker: I like his parents, you know.
Speaker: But yeah, no, you're not...
Speaker: At least theoretically, you're not arranging the specific marriages of individuals.
Speaker: You're taking groups of people who have been selected and letting the magic happen on its own.
Speaker: But this is the sort of European tradition of marriage.
Speaker: If you read books about 18th century aristocratic families,
Speaker: They had things like this.
Speaker: It wasn't, you know, oh, the two parents meet and, you know, Bob and Stacy, you're going to get married whether you like it or not.
Speaker: It's this much more informal and complex process where there's a bit of that.
Speaker: But also, you know, if Stacy meets Bob at a ball and really likes him, then the parents will meet.
Speaker: And if it's a fit between the families, then Stacy and Bob are going to get married.
Speaker: So it, you know,
Speaker: That's that's one of the things we're finding out with this sort of moment of cultural destruction that we're in is how subtle and complex.
Speaker: How much more subtle and complex those institutions were than we imagined to that that we imagined them to be right.
Speaker: It was it was a sort of balance between this sort of, you know, young, you know, sort of young romance and picking your own partner and the sort of familial
Speaker: patriarchal aspect.
Speaker: It was an either or.
Speaker: If you, I know it's a complicated, the breakdown is complicated too, but how would you explain or how do you think about why those institutions have degenerated as far as like, if the rally just becomes a party with rich kids at a nightclub, like what's behind the decline?
Speaker: So to be clear, it's not all of them.
Speaker: And again, like they're, they're, especially in Paris, there are many rallies and by the way, they're all over the country.
Speaker: Like usually in small cities, there's like one and it's, it's much less formal.
Speaker: It's basically just, you know, parents sort of, you know, hosting house parties for their kids and sort of chaperoning them.
Speaker: Uh, and the more formal ones are in, you know, Paris and the other big cities.
Speaker: Uh, and, and so some rallies, uh, yeah, have become party clubs.
Speaker: Some rallies, uh, are very, are very explicitly religious and it's really, you know, it, the religious component is very strong.
Speaker: Uh, some are, you know, very money oriented.
Speaker: It's re it's really about whether your parents are rich.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Some are very sort of lineage oriented and it's sort of much more artistic way.
Speaker: Like you have to come from like a particular aristocratic lineage.
Speaker: And if you're sort of, you know, you know, there are, and it's always in these sort of like self-contained worlds, you have like the narcissism of small differences.
Speaker: And obviously because these organizations are kind of secret, like none of them have websites, you have to be invited, you have to know someone like there's a lot of like moms, you know, I mean, uh, you know, when you have a preteen child, like all of the moms are like exchanging information of like what, unlike which rallies are the good ones, which ones have the good values, blah, blah, all that stuff.
Speaker: Uh, like, you know, like
Speaker: parents do when they're trying to like find a school for their kid oh you know saint mary's is it like oh it says catholic on the website but do do they actually teach that or is that just bs is it you know a sort of more you know really academically focused school or is it more like it's the same kind of thing where you know you have these different institutions that are sort of competing that have
Speaker: that share these stuff and these characteristics in common, but also are differentiated and, you know, they each have their own vibe and sort of culture, but it's sort of hard to like write down on a list, you know, oh, so, and, you know, first of all, all institutions decline, right?
Speaker: That's the even absent sort of post sixties or,
Speaker: post-French Revolution craziness.
Speaker: It's just a law of nature that all institutions eventually decline.
Speaker: And so the rallies, the history of rallies that they got started after World War II when arranged marriages became, well, I don't want to say illegal.
Speaker: It's not like there was a particular law change, but there was just this sort of vibe change.
Speaker: And it was seen as a way to sort of like preserve the goods
Speaker: of arranged marriages in a more quote unquote liberal in the broad sense setting.
Speaker: So some of these have been around for 80 years.
Speaker: So, you know, sometimes institutions just decay because they've been around for a long time.
Speaker: It's the third generation of leadership or whatever, and they just suck now.
Speaker: Yeah, I wonder if, I mean, what do you make of, so Bap, it's not really, you know, his thesis, it's kind of Nietzsche's thesis.
Speaker: Who, Bap?
Speaker: Who's that?
Speaker: Oh, sorry, Costanella Maru.
Speaker: Oh, oh, yeah, the Romanian guy, okay, go on.
Speaker: His thesis that it's the tension of like real,
Speaker: survival pressure, real like martial pressure that, that forces, forces things into this channel of like, we all know what competence is.
Speaker: We all know what excellence is because if, if you're not excellent, you lose and die.
Speaker: And, and, and now we're in this situation where, and you're talking about how all these rallies are different and they're based on values or money or lineage or whatever.
Speaker: And it's like the, and I mean, he doesn't even necessarily characterize this as a bad thing, but it's like,
Speaker: the the release of that tension the absence of the uh the sort of discipline of of of existential uh threat allows people to kind of explode off in all these different creative directions and a lot of them suck but some of them are good and and maybe that's sort of
Speaker: It is the process of decline, but it also generates this variety of approaches.
Speaker: What's interesting about that to me is like, so I'm, you know, like all Americans, maybe from the French perspective, a total like parvenu, like I would have no...
Speaker: no roots no like no background that i could point to that says like you know i deserve to be part of this i i deserve to belong to this or or uh you lack privilege that's uh that that means that you're you're entitled to my money yeah yeah um and my status that's even more important
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: And so for me and maybe some of the people even who are on the inside of this, like if the elite institutions have collapsed or decayed or non-existent or you're not part of them and you want to build a new one, do you have thoughts on how that can be done?
Speaker: I mean, that's the... I mean, I wrote the selective breeding thing also because, I mean, it's just funny, but it's part of this broader thing that I've noticed.
Speaker: And, you know, we know noticing is criminal, but, you know, I believe in elite theory and all this stuff about elites is now very popular on the American right.
Speaker: On the European right, it's sort of taken for granted.
Speaker: But one thing that I've noticed, I've been in sort of like conservative spheres in the US, in France, in the UK, in a few other countries.
Speaker: The main difference that stands out to me in France versus every other country that
Speaker: that I can think of, including places like Poland and Hungary that are supposed to be like mega based, is that France has successfully maintained a conservative elite.
Speaker: Not meaning that the French elite is conservative, obviously it's not.
Speaker: But within the French elite,
Speaker: there are sort of pockets of conservative excellence.
Speaker: So for example, if you were to take the list of the top 10 prep schools in the U S the top 10 most ranked, most prestigious, purely status, most likely to send your kids to Harvard, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: How many of them would be considered conservative?
Speaker: None.
Speaker: None.
Speaker: If you were to do the same thing for France,
Speaker: Out of the top 10 schools, probably five would be considered conservative.
Speaker: What does that mean?
Speaker: So, for example, recently there was a sort of like two minutes hate in France because the new minister of education,
Speaker: who's married to the CEO of the second biggest bank in the country, was found to be sending her kids, her four kids, to Collège Stanislas, which is an extremely prestigious prep school, which I attended,
Speaker: And which is known for being conservative and Catholic and having classes where they teach you that abortion is wrong, that masturbation is a sin, that premarital sex is a sin, that blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: And they really do teach that.
Speaker: And they also, you know, are considered extremely prestigious, extremely hard to get into, extremely academically selective.
Speaker: This aspect, and it's not an outlier, like there are other schools, like I can name them.
Speaker: And again, like if you were to ask any educated French person to name like the five top prep schools in the country, they would have a list of them.
Speaker: And at least two or three of them would be schools that are known to be sort of conservative, Catholic schools.
Speaker: religious and seriously so, like not just on the website.
Speaker: And, you know, there are many other examples like this.
Speaker: You know, you have, I mean, I've been in this world my entire life.
Speaker: Like if you speak to like senior people and so on, like I would guesstimate that about 10 to 15 people
Speaker: percent of any sort of elite, you know, CEOs, senior civil servants, whatever, would basically be completely at home in like a right wing group chat.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's not that such people don't exist in the U.S. Obviously, they do.
Speaker: And like we see, you know, with doxes that the people who get doxed turn out to be, you know, surprisingly impressive or surprisingly from the perspective of like the resentful left-wing journalists.
Speaker: But the numbers aren't the same.
Speaker: And there's an institutional aspect in France that's lacking.
Speaker: There's no, uh, there's no like professorship at a conservative university where we just had one of our guys, uh, get doxxed.
Speaker: He's an Irvine professor.
Speaker: And, uh, you know, in, in France, maybe there's somewhere he could land that, uh, that, that, uh, would, would be friendly.
Speaker: And here there's, there's nothing basically, uh, you know, and you know, uh,
Speaker: he got doxxed for being like a kind of a new media guy.
Speaker: And that's sort of where if you want to live the life of the mind, the life of ideas, and you're a you're a right winger, you kind of have to, you know, carry your own backpack, build your own thing on the Internet.
Speaker: And that's.
Speaker: various attempts at giving that elite polish.
Speaker: And it's like, not to knock any of it, but it's like, it's a struggle to, and I think Yarvin, I don't know what you make of Yarvin's take, but I basically agree with the idea that propaganda is sort of a,
Speaker: a withdrawal on an elite account.
Speaker: You get the privilege of producing propaganda by being extremely reliable, extremely accurate, extremely valuable all of the time.
Speaker: And once you've built up that credibility, then you can burn some by being a propagandist, but you can't start being a propagandist.
Speaker: I compare it to...
Speaker: like one of my guys was talking about kind of being a being a right-wing children's author.
Speaker: There's tons of right-wing children's books in France.
Speaker: That's another example.
Speaker: Like there's a store I know I can go to and there's like a giant wing which is full of like children's books and it's literally all right-wing propaganda.
Speaker: Like I even found a comic book on Mussolini.
Speaker: I'm not joking.
Speaker: Sorry to interrupt, but those are sort of specific, concrete examples.
Speaker: I could go into my children's room right now and bring you back examples of comics glorifying saints, glorifying military heroes from ages past, that sort of stuff.
Speaker: And part of the... And high-quality stuff, by the way.
Speaker: Not sort of cringe.
Speaker: That's the thing.
Speaker: which is the other problem.
Speaker: Part of the crutch that I think people lean on with media is they really do go like, ads for kids, you know?
Speaker: It doesn't have to be that good because kids will eat up whatever, which is to some extent true.
Speaker: But in order for it to like...
Speaker: bury itself in your psyche and be something that you come back to as an adult and something that like, like, you know, the, the most influential.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What's that?
Speaker: It would be true if it wasn't competing with other things.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: The really influential children's media is the stuff that you still think about when you're a grown up, where you retain those values and you don't look back with embarrassment on it.
Speaker: And that's something that is sort of a junk food thing where you don't...
Speaker: you don't receive the consequences of dumping junk food on your kids until significantly later on.
Speaker: And it's the same thing with media.
Speaker: It has to be high quality.
Speaker: And what I was saying about the Daily Wire is they can afford to sell crappy chocolate because they have this audience for other reasons.
Speaker: But that doesn't mean that you can just go out there and sell crappy right-wing chocolate and get away with it.
Speaker: Probably not.
Speaker: Yes, that's true.
Speaker: And by the way, it's popular in this sphere to sort of like dump on the daily wire, but you know,
Speaker: You build a website that's got, you know, 100 million visitors and however many millions of paying subscribers.
Speaker: Like, I mean, honestly, like if you'd asked me, you know, 10 years ago whether something like this was possible, I would have said no.
Speaker: That's my point, actually, is they got there by having value, by delivering something.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And like, honestly, I mean, you can always like find things to pick on, but it's not that bad.
Speaker: I mean, yeah.
Speaker: Like the trans, you know, the trans like sports team movie was, it was like a solid B plus comedy.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: I didn't see it.
Speaker: You know, I mean, as like a first effort at like a genuinely, you know, good movie.
Speaker: I mean, honestly.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Like filmmaking is a craft you learn by doing.
Speaker: Like if you look at, I'm also a film nerd because I have every disease.
Speaker: you know, if you look at the industries, you know, when countries or like groups started to build film industries, you know, all of the first 10 or 20 years of movies were shit, right?
Speaker: Because filmmaking is a craft and the difference between a craft and an academic discipline is that a craft you have to learn by doing.
Speaker: An academic discipline is something you can learn from a book and then you can do it, right?
Speaker: Math, you learn it from a book, you can do it.
Speaker: Woodworking, you have to produce bad woodwork before you can produce good woodwork.
Speaker: And so filmmaking is a craft.
Speaker: And so whoever, whether it's The Daily Wire or Peter Thiel five years from now or whoever is the right-wing billionaire that decides to actually like, oh, I'm going to do conservative Hollywood for real.
Speaker: Even if they do everything right, the first movies are going to be shit.
Speaker: Even if it has all the right money, all the right people, all the right everything, because it's the nature of like doing something complex.
Speaker: Just like, you know, the first SpaceX rockets crashed.
Speaker: Because yeah, like he's building a freaking rocket.
Speaker: I don't know what the cursing situation is on this on this podcast.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: So, sorry.
Speaker: Just sidebar rant here.
Speaker: I just get tired of this sort of, like, right-wing circular firing squad.
Speaker: But I think... I guess the point that I would make about the filmmaking situation, the story situation, the media in general, is, like...
Speaker: I think that stories, if they start from like, I am going to tell a right-wing story.
Speaker: I am going to paint a right-wing picture.
Speaker: I am going to sing a right-wing song.
Speaker: It's like you have to keep your eyes open and your mouth shut a little bit.
Speaker: You have to be observing reality, observing the world around you, and then articulating what you see.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And if you come with the message, it's really, it feels false because what people are looking for is like a perspective on the real world.
Speaker: And so like, what I hope to see from these artistic projects is like, give me a right-wing guy and have him just tell a story.
Speaker: Yeah, 100%.
Speaker: I mean, this is what Lomaz, since we're talking about him, and he's a wonderful guy, and I cannot say in public what I think should happen to the pond scum who doxxed him.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Same guy who got me, by the way.
Speaker: Oh, really?
Speaker: Yeah, same guy.
Speaker: Absolute, absolute, just the worst drugs of humanity.
Speaker: It's the worst filth.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, this is what Lómez understands, and this is why he's so successful.
Speaker: This is why he's ten times more successful than the pond scum going after him, and this is why he's going to be extremely successful, is because he understands that quality is like the prime directive, and the rest will follow.
Speaker: And, you know...
Speaker: I go back to this idea of craft and excellence in craft.
Speaker: make a good story and like polish it a hundred thousand times and then decide you're going to write a good story.
Speaker: So another example I think about is, so in the Renaissance, the Catholic church commissioned all sorts of Catholic art.
Speaker: Leonardo da Vinci was not a Catholic.
Speaker: He was a sort of Platonist, deist kind of guy.
Speaker: Michelangelo was a very devout Catholic.
Speaker: Can you tell from just looking at like their respective religious paintings?
Speaker: Oh, this man is like a true believer.
Speaker: Like he believes that when he paints the Virgin Mary, that's the mother of God versus, you know, I'm just doing this for a paycheck.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No, because they're both just excellent.
Speaker: And so if you tell them, you know, I will give you, you know, I will give you
Speaker: money and status for expressing these ideas, they will do it really well.
Speaker: Obviously you prefer the person to be a believer, but what matters is the underlying excellence of the artist.
Speaker: And so... And probably Da Vinci was at least immersed enough in the religious milieu that he was depicting that he could
Speaker: he could catch what was being expressed.
Speaker: He could catch like, this is what it means to these people.
Speaker: This is also part of the artistic excellence.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: It's like, oh, when they asked me to paint the Virgin Mary, I understand that that doesn't just mean like painting a woman, but I understand that this is what this means to the people who will be first paying for the painting and then looking at it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You're at minimum telling the truth about them.
Speaker: you know, even if you don't agree with them.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And yeah, I think that's incredibly important.
Speaker: And I think that the biggest, the biggest obstacle that we face in, in what, what culture is this sort of luxury phenomenon.
Speaker: It doesn't, it doesn't have like this obvious ROI.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And when you're trying to bootstrap these kinds of projects, either by getting investors or by getting customers, buyers, guys on our side of things face this pressure of, you know, like, what's, you know, how's this going to make, like, what percentage is this going to make me, you know, versus what I could get from an index fund or something.
Speaker: And it's like,
Speaker: I'm interested in your take on like, how do you, is there a way to get guys with money to catch that vision or is it something where like,
Speaker: I sort of am torn like, do I just need to go make money so that I can try to be that guy?
Speaker: Do I, do I, you know, try to pitch these guys on like, here, here are some really excellent people who you should support and here's why.
Speaker: And maybe you're closer to kind of those kinds of people in that world in that background to say, you know, what, what, what drives them?
Speaker: you know one of the things i really like about uh bap's podcast is he always says like i don't give like personal advice because it's it's so specific to so you know like standard disclaimer but also like sincere disclaimer like nobody should watch this and like draw conclusions from oh should i become an artist or an investment banker well peg said
Speaker: Please don't do that.
Speaker: You know, your mother will hate me.
Speaker: So that's, that's, I mean, it really depends on like your own personal circumstances.
Speaker: Like, honestly, you know, are you good as an artist?
Speaker: It should be like the number one.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: In terms of the funding and the sort of funding environment and donors and all of that stuff, I mean, I know this is like a perennial topic of conversation in group chats and everybody's sort of trying to pass off intel and it's like, oh, you know, I saw Peter Thiel walking through, you know, he was...
Speaker: here at a party and like my friend talked to him and blah blah blah it's like okay whatever uh i mean it's very difficult um and it's it's very difficult in part for bad reasons and in part for good reasons um the sort of
Speaker: The bad reason is that, you know, I'm trying to say something that will neither get me in trouble nor reveal too much.
Speaker: Let's just say that, yes, there is a vision deficit on the part of conservatives who have a lot of money and want to donate that money to right-wing causes.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: That being said, so that's, let's say that's the supply problem.
Speaker: The demand problem is that there is a IQ deficit, not really, it's a sort of U-curve, you know, we, you know,
Speaker: We have lots of really dumb people, God love them, our retards.
Speaker: And then we have this like tiny outlying core of like 150 plus IQ people.
Speaker: The real problem.
Speaker: And this is, this is, I mean, this is a problem in the world in general, but maybe it's worse in the right wing world for reasons.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: We, maybe we can sort of riff about that, but you know,
Speaker: Again, art is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.
Speaker: Like when, when I've talked to people about fundraising, they want to fundraise for this project.
Speaker: And it's like, oh, I have this amazing idea and I just, I just need Mr. Moneybags to give me, you know, three, 300 gajillion dollars and it's going to be amazing.
Speaker: And then when Mr. Moneybags says no, they're like, oh, you know,
Speaker: oh, I'm so black-billed, we're all doomed because they don't understand, they don't get it.
Speaker: And again, he built an actual business.
Speaker: He built a thing with his bare hands.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: He did the thing.
Speaker: He selected the authors for the prize.
Speaker: He put the book together.
Speaker: He found the designers.
Speaker: He found the printers.
Speaker: He found the
Speaker: And I'm sure there's like a million difficulties, you know, there's the million difficulties involved in starting and running a business.
Speaker: And then you add on that, the million difficulties of doing it as like a right-wing dissident.
Speaker: Like it's just hard and it requires, you know, the sort of like grind set entrepreneur
Speaker: kind of mindset, which our world is filled with intellectuals.
Speaker: And there's a classic quote from a classic French movie.
Speaker: It's a war movie where three guys are, they're stranded in the desert behind enemy lines and they think they're going to die.
Speaker: Two of them just sort of like philosophically prepared to sit down to die.
Speaker: And like the third one who's this like blockhead sort of starts, you know, says, you know, whatever.
Speaker: I'm just going to get up, start walking in direction.
Speaker: Maybe I'll find a noasis.
Speaker: Maybe I'll find a patrol.
Speaker: Maybe I'll find something.
Speaker: I'm not just going to die here.
Speaker: And the other two guys sort of mock him.
Speaker: And then he just starts storming off and walking in a random direction.
Speaker: And then the two guys sort of look at each other.
Speaker: And one of them says, two sitting intellectuals go less far than a single brute walking.
Speaker: And so we've got a lot of sitting intellectuals.
Speaker: And for people who brag about being bodybuilding retards, I, it, it's a perpetual sort of right-wing problem.
Speaker: And, you know, with all respect to sort of like HBD nerds, it's not true that IQ directly.
Speaker: I mean, it correlates in the sort of strict scientific sense, but it doesn't directly lead to like ability to get things done in the real world.
Speaker: Um, and yeah.
Speaker: Intellectuals are great, by the way, intellectuals are wonderful.
Speaker: You know, some of my best friends are intellectuals.
Speaker: I love my intellectuals.
Speaker: Doers do more than people who don't do.
Speaker: And if you put yourself in the mind, sorry, just finishing this.
Speaker: If you, if you put yourself in the mind of somebody who's made a lot of money in business, maybe he's a Christian.
Speaker: or he's some sort of right winger and he goes, all right, I've been very successful, very fortunate.
Speaker: I'm going to devote X of my net worth to like funding good things to sort of retake America.
Speaker: For every dollar that you're allocating, you've got like 10 guys sort of like holding out their hands saying, mister, please.
Speaker: And, you know,
Speaker: Frankly, a lot of these people are just not very impressive.
Speaker: Like, you know, a part of being right wing is being in this world is being able to say sort of like unpleasant truths.
Speaker: As much as a lot of our people are very impressive in certain ways, you know, this sort of phenomenon of like the intellectual who sort of like can't, you know, can't put together a camping trip.
Speaker: And this is not to say that the donors are sort of like perfect or whatever, but
Speaker: It's also like a legitimate perspective.
Speaker: Yeah, I was in a conversation with, well, I was witnessing a conversation between Lomez and a funder.
Speaker: And I got to hear him make the pitch and describe what he had accomplished.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And getting a yes was just smooth as butter.
Speaker: It was easy to hear a yes because he had done the work and he had already built something that was real.
Speaker: And so I think that there's an element of acting as if the billionaire isn't coming.
Speaker: that makes it so that if the billionaire does materialize, you're in position.
Speaker: Absolutely, 100%.
Speaker: There was a point that Peter Thiel made in an interview, and he sort of... I'm saying he made it in an interview because I don't want to be like, oh, I'm privy to Peter Thiel's thoughts, which I'm not.
Speaker: I'm just using it as an example.
Speaker: He sort of phrased it very politely, but he was asked this question about, oh, why aren't there...
Speaker: Hollywood movies, you know, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: And he was like, there's two theories.
Speaker: You know, the first one is, oh, right wingers are discriminated against by the evil Hollywood, blah, blah, blah, which is true.
Speaker: But there's another theory, which is that, you know, we just sort of suck.
Speaker: He didn't put it that way, but he was clearly thinking it.
Speaker: And he said the control for that is if it's the gatekeeper, look at the industry without gatekeeping.
Speaker: And that would be online publishing.
Speaker: You know, if you look at online publishing is, you know,
Speaker: Is there some really cool stuff like what Loomis is publishing, like, you know, other stuff?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Is it like this sort of avalanche of like, you know, new Conrad's and new, you know, with all due respect to
Speaker: Zero HP and all those, like, I'm not saying they're bad.
Speaker: I'm just asking like, where are the like 20 other guys like them?
Speaker: Like, it's still a very small percentage of like the book publishing worldwide and, and the, the, the sort of lack of critical and publishing success is not entirely attributable to sort of like, you know, media and publishing industry gatekeeping, because guess what?
Speaker: Like 50 shades of gray, you know, was not a psyop.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: Like it's possible to have a hit.
Speaker: Yeah, content curation is incredibly valuable.
Speaker: The curation of social opportunities, the curation of content.
Speaker: Basically, I have a theory that we're coming into a world in which the sort of floodwaters of slop are just going to, you're going to be up to your neck in slop in terms of your search engine results, in terms of like the content that's out there.
Speaker: what there is to read, what there is to watch, what there is to listen to.
Speaker: It's all going to be algorithmic artificial intelligence slop.
Speaker: And so there's going to be this immense value in human vetting and curation.
Speaker: And I view sort of my project as maybe the first tier of curation, of curating social and professional opportunities.
Speaker: and bringing together people who are on side enough to start having those conversations.
Speaker: And I think what Lomas is doing similarly, you know, the fact that he was like the service that he performed was reading the avalanche of dog shit.
Speaker: He read, I mean, I know he didn't, he never complained about the quality of what he received.
Speaker: He was very gracious about what he received.
Speaker: I just know from having seen on the outside, there's so much of it that was awful.
Speaker: And he had to, yeah.
Speaker: I mean, the man had a poetry contest for crying out loud.
Speaker: Yeah, imagine.
Speaker: Just imagine.
Speaker: And so, yeah, it's basically somebody with a lot of taste coupled with a lot of patience has to make those calls.
Speaker: And yeah, going back to the selective breeding thing, it is what you described in the rally, it's almost...
Speaker: it's almost silly how simple it is where it because basically what you're describing is just like, what if adults took an interest in the social opportunities of their children?
Speaker: What if adults like did something to curate, you know, who they would be around and like, what could you accomplish if you, if you number one just made the attempt, but number two, and maybe, maybe this is a little bit harder.
Speaker: creating an adult culture that adolescents aspire to grow up into.
Speaker: Rather than either creating something that they don't really want and that they think is cringe, or attempting to pander, attempting to sort of reach them where they are, so to speak, and failing to actually
Speaker: inculcate a culture i mean again like the the rally is not perfect so full disclosure speaking of like doing things that your kid i was invited to a rally when i was like i don't know 12 or something uh and i declined because at the time as an idiot i thought it was cringe and my parents didn't particularly feel like i mean they sort of like tried to talk into me but they also weren't gonna fight me on it
Speaker: So, and now I regret, I mean, I'm happily married with kids, but, and so I don't regret in that sense, but if I had known then what I know now, I would have chosen differently.
Speaker: So, yeah, I mean, so the way that sort of traditional, I mean, not traditional, the way that our existing elites, meaning liberal, liberal in the broad sense, like the, just like, you know, rich people in Manhattan,
Speaker: get the benefits of the rally is just by sending their kids to $50,000 prep schools.
Speaker: Like schools and universities are sort of like, you know, a big benefit of them being the place you find your spouse is not a new thing or a secret thing.
Speaker: Certainly, you know, elites are completely hypocritical about all of this stuff.
Speaker: Like, you know, when it comes to like, which schools their kids go to and, and who they're,
Speaker: daughter brings home, like they understand very well what IQ is and how it's transmitted.
Speaker: So in that sense, you know, I mean, this is why the rally is so politically incorrect, right?
Speaker: It's because it was like, oh no, we want, we want to select for something more than just like, you know, having a high IQ and sort of upper middle-class parents.
Speaker: Yeah, having a gate that is, I mean, and you see this with housing too.
Speaker: There's always sort of this slow burn of discourse about housing and segregation and the NIMBY YIMBY thing.
Speaker: I said a couple of weeks ago, no one is seriously discussing should segregation exist or not?
Speaker: We're just saying, should there be segregation on another basis than money?
Speaker: Like that is the basis of segregation in the United States.
Speaker: It's completely legal.
Speaker: Everybody does it.
Speaker: The question is, should poor people have access to control of their neighborhoods at all?
Speaker: And it's like, well, I think we frame it that way.
Speaker: Same thing with vouchers, by the way.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Should poor people get to do what rich people get to do?
Speaker: It's not school choice, yes or no.
Speaker: It's just school choice.
Speaker: Should school choice be reserved to rich people or not?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You mentioned on the essay about sort of plumber discourse, you talked about Ashkenazi Jews being rejected from Harvard and Yale.
Speaker: They didn't become plumbers.
Speaker: They went to City College and excelled anyway.
Speaker: And I think there's two things that I would tease out from that.
Speaker: Because like when you get...
Speaker: an elite education, you're getting hopefully two things, one of which is an actual elite education where you're learning some things that other people don't know and to do things other people can't do.
Speaker: And then you're getting a credential that affords you status and puts you in a particular position.
Speaker: The other thing that I would tease out
Speaker: is you, by virtue of an elite education, you are hopefully gaining the ability to generate real value in addition to the ability to seek rents.
Speaker: And I'm not actually like categorically opposed to rent seeking.
Speaker: I think that to some extent having elites who have some rents to sit on so they can do interesting things is cool and kind of good for everybody.
Speaker: But if you are frozen out of the institutions of the sort of status credential and the rent seeking,
Speaker: It's interesting to think about how could our guys, and again, I know we're not talking about particular individuals and what individuals do, but how could our guys
Speaker: get the most in terms of like learning how to generate value and, and, and the, the, the elite education itself, if they are not welcome in the elite education circles and are not welcome to receive the sort of rents and the sinecures.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean the plumber discourse.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean like endless, endless.
Speaker: It's so gay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: This is, like, I'm going to be, like, extremely elitist and, like, extremely sort of French aristocrat.
Speaker: But, like, the, you know, people mocked Curtis because he talked about elves and hobbits and maybe the words weren't chosen.
Speaker: But, like, he's absolutely right.
Speaker: Like, you know, people are either elves or hobbits.
Speaker: And, like, hobbits, you know, God bless them.
Speaker: You know, I love my hobbits.
Speaker: But seriously, like, I don't mean that in a condescending way.
Speaker: because unlike meritocratic elites, I don't have status anxiety vis-a-vis other groups of people.
Speaker: But, you know, this is the most frustrating hobbit-like trait of sort of right-wing people.
Speaker: It's, you know, when an institution sort of becomes hostile, you retreat.
Speaker: It's like, you know, similar to the plumber discourse is, oh, you know, don't go into the military because it's woke now.
Speaker: And it's like, all right, well, you know, maybe you can give up on college.
Speaker: Maybe you can give up on the military.
Speaker: But like, if you give up on both, like, that's it, you're dead, you're over.
Speaker: And like, you know, first of all, you know, Zog's not gonna send you to die
Speaker: in Ukraine, like, I'm sorry.
Speaker: And, you know, like 99, literally 99% of military occupational specialties are non-combat.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Nobody since, you know, since, since 1945, no American has been in combat without having wanting, without having at some point, like even the guys who were drafted into Vietnam,
Speaker: 90% of troops sent to Vietnam were non-combat.
Speaker: That's the glorious thing about the American military, which us Europeans, we find hilarious, which is that they have to have like 20 guys to build a Walmart to have like one guy holding a rifle shooting it.
Speaker: That's very inefficient, but from the point of view of like your own career goals, like, you know, if you don't want to get shot at by some Bedouin in the desert, it
Speaker: it's not going to happen to you.
Speaker: Or we're in a very different world where none of this matters anyway.
Speaker: And so the best response to the plumber discourse was, I believe it's team age mindset.
Speaker: I sometimes get my Anon's confused where he sort of like did the like white boy career plan.
Speaker: And it was basically like, go to the military, go to a highly technical specialty, get the free college, get VA disability if you want.
Speaker: Obviously, I'm not like a specialist on like, you know, VA disabilities and like which kind of student grants you get for what kind of service, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: But I like I hang out with a bunch of Americans and I know a bunch of Americans.
Speaker: I know enough.
Speaker: about America to know that that, you know, if you're like a middle class white kid, that is that is totally the best thing to do.
Speaker: And you want to know a great example of who did that.
Speaker: And, you know, I know a lot of Anons don't like him, whatever.
Speaker: It's J.D.
Speaker: Vance.
Speaker: Like J.D.
Speaker: Vance is sociologically, he's one of our guys.
Speaker: What did he do?
Speaker: He went
Speaker: He went to the Marines for his four years out of high school.
Speaker: He served in Iraq in a non-combat role, even as a Marine.
Speaker: Did two years at Ohio State for free because you get basically two years of free state school.
Speaker: Worked his ass off, ASDLSATs, I presume, got into Yale Law School, and then the entire...
Speaker: elite world opened up to him.
Speaker: And so, you know, whatever you think of J.D.
Speaker: Vance's career path or ideologically, his career path is certainly very inspiring.
Speaker: And obviously, you know, writing a million dollar bestseller or befriending Peter Thielen in law school are, you know, optional.
Speaker: But you know what I mean?
Speaker: Like, it's a totally legit career path.
Speaker: And, you know, our guys should be doing that.
Speaker: Probably Yale is not going to let any more, you know,
Speaker: Marine from Ohio in at all.
Speaker: But there's still Harvard and Stanford.
Speaker: There's a total unwillingness to accept that we are talking about multiple different types of guy, which is so ironic.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: For, for you sort of hierarchical, inegalitarian right wing to be like, no, no, no.
Speaker: Everyone should go work at Fang or everyone should go be a plumber or everyone.
Speaker: It's like, no, right.
Speaker: There's all, it takes all kinds.
Speaker: There's lots of us and we have different destinies and different capacities.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think there's, there's a deeper point to be made here about just acceptance.
Speaker: And this is, this is the, the, the Hobbit and dark elf thing.
Speaker: This is even like the role, the sort of gender wars between men and women.
Speaker: It's like,
Speaker: if you cannot accept comedy and harmony between superior and inferior, and being straightforward about it, and sort of like someone, and the easiest example that I can offer,
Speaker: where a relationship of superiority and inferiority is still mainstream and accepted and understood is between a parent and child.
Speaker: And it's like, who is the master and who is the servant in a parent and child relationship?
Speaker: It's like not obvious, right?
Speaker: Like, you know, you as the superior in that relationship
Speaker: are putting in an awful lot of work and you are bearing with some weaknesses and you are, and at the same time, can you abuse power?
Speaker: Yes, you absolutely can.
Speaker: Do even good parents sometimes abuse power?
Speaker: They do.
Speaker: And I think you can extrapolate that to this whole question of hierarchy in general.
Speaker: It's like, we're so sick
Speaker: as a society in part, and I think this is actually true of the right as well, because you go from no admission of hierarchy whatsoever, like pretending it doesn't exist,
Speaker: to like, oh, I've noticed that some people are better at things and worse at things.
Speaker: And therefore, I'm going to engage in class conflict from the top.
Speaker: I'm going to have contempt for my inferiors.
Speaker: And it's like that is in its own way as destructive as the resentment from below.
Speaker: And so you have to get to a point where that enmity and that tension is resolved.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, like, I agree 100% with everything that you say.
Speaker: I have so much, you know, I could respond to that.
Speaker: The first is that this is, like, this is the sort of the power and the truth to me of the sort of Catholic slash medieval slash European slash aristocratic sort of
Speaker: which is that it views society as this organic pyramid where all of the parts work together.
Speaker: And, you know, it's, I mean, you know, Paul...
Speaker: St.
Speaker: Paul, you know, the church is a body and every part has a role.
Speaker: It's that kind of mindset.
Speaker: And so every, you know, every part of the whole has respect for the part, no pun intended, that the other parts play.
Speaker: And so that's, and that's, to me, is like the fundamental, this is like a debate that's so boring, I don't want to get into it, but I'll just say it.
Speaker: This is like the fundamental worldview difference between the sort of like Christian version versus the sort of Bap Nietzsche atheist version of this, which is, which is, yeah, like, oh, I'm better than you.
Speaker: I'm superior to you.
Speaker: Therefore, fuck you.
Speaker: You know, lick my feet.
Speaker: Ha ha ha.
Speaker: Which is self-destructive, ultimately, because, you know, it's also in the enlightened self-interest of the elite to sort of, and like the Italian school of political science that Bernheim talks about, like,
Speaker: you write this, like, it's in the interest of the elite to sort of, like, work for the interest of the good of the society as a whole, as opposed to their own interest.
Speaker: And they become degenerate, where they sort of become, like, these taking elites that don't have respect for the rest of society.
Speaker: And so this sort of, you know, this sort of,
Speaker: oh, you know, I'm a Bronze Age warrior.
Speaker: I've, you know, I've taken your women, I've taken your country, go slave in the coal mines to, and, you know, feed me grapes as I recline and write poetry.
Speaker: The one good thing about that worldview is that it's sort of stark about reality because the problem is that ultimately, you know,
Speaker: Elites also rely on their status in also hold their status in at least in part based on their ability to physically overpower the rest of society.
Speaker: And if they lose that, then they lose the mandate of heaven and they need to be aware that, oh, you know, sometimes.
Speaker: the lower orders are like hobbits happily living their lives and everybody is working together.
Speaker: But sometimes the lower orders are a mob and the mob needs to be put down.
Speaker: And if you spend too much time in Versailles and you've become a fag, then you can't put down the mob.
Speaker: And so the mob will cut off your head.
Speaker: And so in that sense, the sort of Nietzschean perspective is sort of clarifying and it sort of like prevents you from like getting high on your own supply.
Speaker: But it's still fundamentally, in my view anyway, untrue.
Speaker: Well, and he even talks about that in, I mean, he talks a lot about Critias and sort of the 30 tyrants in Athens.
Speaker: He's like, once upon a time, there were people who were forthright about their intentions as overmen, amoral tyrants.
Speaker: And guess what happened?
Speaker: They pissed everybody off and they got killed.
Speaker: And the subtler point that he makes about that sometimes is like,
Speaker: you know, the elite who views himself as sort of ruling by the consent of the governed is to some extent sort of slave of popular opinion, even if he's not formally, you know, democratically appointed.
Speaker: And so, yeah, like you're saying, it does sort of rest on force.
Speaker: But at the same time, like a lot of people, and you see this especially with gender discourse
Speaker: a lot of guys come out with this very like, you know, men should be in charge because we're sort of physically bigger and stronger and can overpower and, and, you know, you know, through, through coercion and violence be in charge.
Speaker: And it's like, but, but you're on here on Twitter, like trying to make that case.
Speaker: Like you're trying to like, you're trying to make it like it's a persuasive case.
Speaker: And it's like, no one's persuaded by that.
Speaker: Like,
Speaker: You know, if you want to if you want to rule that way, then you're going to have to actually prove it and like do it.
Speaker: You're not going to get like a woman on board with that rhetorically.
Speaker: Like that's ridiculous.
Speaker: And so, you know, and that sort of rhymes with the whole with the whole conversation.
Speaker: Like, are you playing democratic politics or not?
Speaker: Well, anyway, this has been a really good conversation, man.
Speaker: I appreciate you coming on.
Speaker: If we were to send somebody somewhere, it would probably be the Substack, right?
Speaker: Yeah, or my Twitter.
Speaker: My Twitter is better, actually.
Speaker: Just follow me on Twitter.
Speaker: P-E-G-O-B-R-Y.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: Thanks, man.
