WR - Nick Land Trump vs Musk, God, and Homeschool

A quick PSA before the program. As many of you know, TU has undergone some significant hardships in recent changes. Most notably was the split with Michael Downs and Bryce Nance, leaving to do their own thing. As you hear in this interview, Nick Land spoke with them the same week that he spoke with us. So that's something you can look forward to as well. This was recorded on June 10th, which we think was a day or two before his conversation with Aaron McIntyre. If you watch that interview, there's a bunch of references back to the conversation that he has with us. As for the split, Land generally thinks Schism is great. Maybe not so much for us who have to undergo it, but it's most likely for the best, especially if you believe in historical providence, one of the topics in the following conversation. Lastly, Michael Down wants to republish Capital

vs. Time Energy himself, so he's requested that we unpublish it. Our official statement about that is on screen right now. As of this release, that work will be removed from Amazon in 24 hours. Thanks for understanding. Stay tuned for lots of exciting new releases coming to you soon from Theory Underground Publishing. Now, enjoy the show. All right. Hello, this is Anne Snellgrove McCarricker.

And I'm David McCarricker. You're listening to What's Right. and today we are joined by none other than nick land we're so happy to have you back in the theory underground world and excited to talk today how you doing great yes i'm looking forward to it great so let's just get straight into it there's a lot going on with the trump administration and on X, you've been very supportive. Now I want to preface my question about X with a clue to the audience, people who don't know. I'm under the impression at least

that you take your X posting pretty seriously and that it's not just some throwaway shit posting thing you do. And that evidence to that fact is that you have just published a book of a decade of your tweets is that so you do take it pretty seriously right well it's like actually i have had other than originally posting the content i've had nothing to do with that almost everything i think this is just my relation to fate is the fact that other people do all my publishing for me so it's like almost nothing that is out there in my name was actually put together by me.

It's composed initially by me, but other people have taken all the work. So I've been extremely, I guess, lucky like that. I don't know what this particular volume is. I haven't seen it. You haven't seen it? No, no, no. I'm like four or five books behind. I mean, I've got this massive publication list, most of which I haven't seen. So, yeah, I'll have to catch up at some point someday you'll have to read your own work yeah well how do you feel about a book of your tweets existing I find I think these things are like yeah as they say

fate or whatever I think trying to imagine what it would have been to try to control that stuff I just now totally can't imagine it So I just write it or whatever. Okay. Yeah. So with that preface, then I guess my question is about the Trump administration and your tweets about it of late, starting with – when this is a little less related to your actual tweets, the tariffs against China. You live in China. You're very supportive of China. And I haven't seen as much of you talking about that. I've seen a lot more of you talking about Elon Musk and this current breakup between him and Trump.

And you've been giving him advice. And I think that's really interesting. But I mean, I guess we're just – When you say – I've been just shouting into the void. I mean I would be absolutely amazed if it has actually been conveying advice to Elon Musk. Which would just be like, what the hell? I think you said, what did you say adds up to 33 and then an alphanumeric cabal. I tried to persuade him that Providence required him to get back in the lane. Which he's weaved right out of. But I'm getting the sign that he might be like, his little psychotic break might be coming to an end now.

I don't know I think he just does a few days Of just completely losing it As people say this is like that Whole H1B thing With whatever you think of the Merits of the case his handling of that Was so bad It was utterly comical And I think the same with this Whatever you think of his case He's just absolutely He shouldn't be doing this stuff himself I mean he should have he should have a guy yeah and right yeah so with the H1B1 can we refresh my memory this was about this was the first time he was disagreeing with

not Trump per se but more like the MAGA movement I think with the MAGA base and he was just saying I think he politely suggested that everyone could go and fuck their own face yeah yeah i think which went down pretty well actually i think this was when him and vivek ramaswamy were both saying like no we should be much more pro-immigration right yeah yeah yeah okay yeah i mean i guess in relation to this trump musk breakup i guess i'm just curious like from your perspective, what did Musk's success, like, what do you think of his role in the administration and this fallout that's going on right now? Well, honestly, like, in so far as it's,

you know, excitement about this government on the right, or my, the part of the right that I'm adjacent to or involved in, is very much, honestly, tied on it being a kind of Trump-Musk meld and I think everyone knew that was going to be a really difficult relationship personally I thought that they would both realize that it's going to be difficult and we also realized that it was really important and therefore make an effort to be you know very calm and considered and tactical about it I mean the last part obviously seems not the case. I mean, I'm a huge

Elon Musk fan, but mood control isn't his greatest skill. I mean, I think he thinks he's vastly better at PR than he is. He's actually terrible at PR. And as I say, I mean, he really should get someone to do that stuff for him. I mean, I honestly, this is of course something that is going to be extremely unwelcome and ignored, but he should get someone to edit his ex post. Just at least to say, like, really, this is not a good idea. You should reconsider this. It's like, you know, maybe as I was sort of just myself slightly taking, you know, making fun of it.

But it's like he'll make a joke that is kind of funny. I mean, you know, it's occasionally actually quite funny. And it's like going to just cost him hundreds of millions of dollars. It's an absolutely disastrous thing to say, but kind of amusing. and i sort of think someone should try and persuade him of that like so he can get back to getting everyone to mars or whatever the big picture is right right right i think politics and business has just fallen so much into the spectacle as well like these personalities this is just how they act now trump too love him or hate him like he's got quite the personality

that I think rubs a lot of just liberal people the total wrong way. They just say, he's an asshole. He speaks out of his ass. And that's so interesting, this shift that we've seen, kind of the loss of professionalism or PR. Like, if you compare it with the previous administration, where everything was secret, you know, the government just didn't talk to people ever. It was all done through these very occasional elusive kind of press conferences. The fact that Biden had just melded down into total dysfunction. And so therefore no one in the country even knew who the government was. And there was this kind of shield wall to hide that.

And you go from that, just occult government. people still don't know who was actually ruling the country right over those years i mean it's completely unknown fact that needs investigating you go from that to this government where everything is totally public it's like you say it's all spectacle it's all entertainment that that whole bread and circuses thing yeah i mean the bread side of it is obviously the fact that Trump marker, I guess, is not disposed to fiscal austerity. The circus part of it is they actually just do their political process as entertainment drama. It's like The Apprentice. You know, the government just puts itself out there on social media,

I guess, I don't have a look at the other media, I'm just assuming also it happens there, as this just public entertainment spectacle. It's just completely incredible. I don't know whether anything like it's ever happened before. Yeah. So I'm wondering about what is the vision from your perspective here on the TechRight MAGA alliance? You know, when you were saying that you were, you know, you're saying, you know, if Musk could only focus on the plan, you know, getting us to Mars and whatever else, maybe you could elaborate a little bit on what that is. Because, you know, he does watch this kind of stuff.

Musk does watch the internet. You know, what is the vision? Could we remind everybody? Are we talking about Musk's vision in particular? either musk's vision or the way that he is supposed to play a significant role in in the future yeah i mean i think that he you know people who like what he's done so far just want him to carry on doing that i mean it's been just astonishing and i think people you know kind forget I mean like you know since since landing on the moon before that you know it was basically space activity meaningful space activity in the United

States finished in the early 1970s and so you know we're like literally half a century down the line from doing that stuff. And of course, people get into like a weird space about that, like moon hoaxes and all of this stuff. If we could be on the moon in 1969, why the hell is nothing happening now when we've got vastly superior technology in all dimensions and hasn't happened for five decades. And then Musk comes along

and suddenly we're back in science fiction again. We've got rockets being kind of caught out of the sky by giant mechanical robot arms. I mean, it's like this is so different to what we were seeing before. or it's like you've switched channels. It's like you're just in a different narrative. And I think suddenly, you know, Musk has almost single-handedly reignited in everything other than artificial intelligence. Musk has pretty much single-handedly ignited it. But electric vehicles were just like, no one took them seriously, really.

They were a niche thing. They were going to be super expensive. it's like maybe eventually they were there and suddenly now they're everywhere you know and tesla's the most valuable company in the world or something like that and um what he's done with this this uh whatever his kind of satellite based internet starlink or whatever it is is just also completely incredible actually yep we're on starlink internet right now out here on the farm it's amazing stuff it's amazing stuff he's been doing so i mean you know so it doesn't require some imaginative league to say what do you want musk to be doing i mean it's that stuff just keep doing that stuff man yeah it's for sure and i think lots of people including i guess elon musk

thought that if the democrats had won in the last lecture he would be finished you know it was a kind of existential thing for him. Obviously, I've left out, the big one I've left out for Musk is just liberating X. I mean, that was so farcically totalitarian system. You know, I don't kind of hate whatever his name is. He was there before, but he was completely ineffectual. He just allowed this just blob of censorship and thought mind control and deep state activism

to completely strangle that platform to a point that it was just comical and Oscars completely opened it up and I think it's right to say whatever you know Trump's had some amazing stuff happen to him in that election campaign and obviously the whole Butler stuff and the photos that came out of that no one could put that down he's an incredible political communicator but I don't think without Musk, without X being a kind of free speech platform again I don't think there's any way that there would now be the Trump administration power and I think it's just like sour grapes for people there's a lot of people who are really really pissed off with Elon about all this stuff

who are saying oh we didn't need you I mean that seems to me completely implausible yeah well that's the thing is there's a lot of MAGA people very mad I think one of your tweets was a retweet of somebody saying there are blue haired women and red hatted men now keying my Tesla Tesla yeah yeah yeah Yeah. Well, and I think one of the other – I'm wondering, do you really feel like this timeline is at stake with this potential – well, with this breakup? up i don't think so i mean i've moved into a point of just you know almost complete uh

confidence in in in providential history and i just think it's like it's not that contingent events like this can throw anything off off okay of course there's just too many just curves of just reached escape velocity you know as i i think maybe we'll get too late i mean the whole ai thing now is just out of the box as far as i'm concerned i just don't think there's any conceivable way that that doesn't just shoot up so even if the kind of ai 20 27 people are a little bit over excited about it i mean i'm not saying they are but let's just hypothetically say that they're on the extreme end of that.

We're definitely only talking a few decades before crazy science fiction type outcomes on that life start happening. And I think any chance of really stopping that is over. And the thing about, I think, this administration, whatever happens, however disappointing it is, and whatever goes wrong and all of that, it's a four-year slot. in which stuff is not going to be stopped. You know, lots of people are going to be disappointed about what it achieves and all of this kind of thing, but it was a crucial opportunity. People who wanted to actually seriously stop certain things happening required this time, and they don't have it.

And so by 2028, it's going to be just things are going to have escaped so thoroughly that I don't worry they can be recaptured at all. Right. So this is a four-year period in which things will not be stopped at bare minimum. Now, there's two directions that what you just said can take us. And one is into the territory of the AOE versus a sort of libertarianism. I want to come back to that because, first of all, you brought up providential history. And I think it's worth dwelling on because our initial impulse to bring you on was related to the fact that we have been questioning about religion, theology, and God.

In fact, I think before we started recording, you had referenced one of our previous episodes on that topic. And so my impression is that you would rather spend – and this is something you said I think within the last few years. You'd rather spend time with a handful of lemurs than most people if you had to pick who you're going to spend time with in the afterlife. And that's not the answer that most people who believe in providential history would give. And so I'm interested in what I've kind of called the CCRU occultism to Catholicism pipeline.

We've seen several of the Landian or CCRU-esque sort of educator, influencer type people on the internet over time gravitate into or fully convert into Catholicism. And as I've begun to understand a lot of the precepts of the CCRU, I think I get why. But you yourself, I don't think, have become a Catholic. And so I'm kind of curious. No? You're not? Okay. You don't think that's the vehicle then? You're on very safe ground with that one. Okay. No, no, I've got my John Milton Puritan hat on or whatever I mean, for sure.

The 17th century English Protestantism is definitely where I think things get really interesting. 17th century in particular. I think the 17th century is where as far as what I see as my culture really reaches takeoff point and it's because they have a dynamic interrelationship of the new science absolutely uncompromising I mean, we're talking Newton. We're not talking like stuff that's just edging in that direction.

And also this, you know, extreme efflorescence of sort of Protestant religious and theological speculation. And those two things dynamically interacting with each other. and so I think it produces this absolutely fertile set of writings that we've never seen since and when you move into the 18th century it's all much more it's all much you know the edge is taken off it it's all much I would say like well yeah i don't know whether i can there's an adjective out there somewhere which i'm

hunting for but i don't think i'm gonna find it right this second but yes i mean i think it's sort of it's lost uh the intent yeah but i mean on your thing i don't want to i don't want to drift off this i mean uh the catholicism thing uh i'm trying to be sympathetic I'm trying to be sympathetic and you know like the Italian Baroque is something that I've been sort of helping people with research projects recently has brought me into that zone and is absolutely fascinating and totally gripping so it's not that I'm like

close to the fascinations of that it's just not my path okay yeah and so my uh my sense for what's so special in the minds of the people who are going into it and i'll kind of riff off of a little james ellis a little justin murphy is that it was the ccru that initially clued them into the fact that you can kind of make a religion out of anything if you get a group of people together you develop a sort of esoteric meta-language and a shared ritualistic practice for developing contact, means of contact with the outside. But once they realize that, they go, oh, well, this is very niche and university,

but there's actually one that's been around for a long time. It's developed insanely sophisticated technologies for doing just this and for working with masses of people. So as far as a vehicle for working with large amounts of people, the Catholic Church is the most sophisticated form of this kind of technology. Well, I think you can go from that lots of interesting directions, and I do think they're interesting. I mean, one of them is to say, well, okay, if you're making that move, why Roman Catholicism rather than Eastern Orthodox?

I mean, what is special, what's the Goldilocks point that leaves you in Rome rather than in Constantinople or in the Orthodox world, which is surely, if anything, more conservative, isn't it? I mean, it's more – if you're saying let's just stick with what we know works, isn't Rome actually the more newfangled of those options at that stage? Right. Well, and I think that there is a strong tendency also to go into the Eastern Orthodoxy. And my guess is that it's probably closer to – well, you know, what brings you closer to your family, right?

Like my grandfather on my mom's side was a Roman Catholic. And so it's like, yeah, that's special. I could see that having an influence if I was like, well, which one am I going to get involved in? Also, which – if you actually go to the local churches and temples, you kind of got to work with what's best in your proximity I would imagine if you care about being a part of a real community, right? Yeah. I know. Well, I think this is all, yes, it's interesting and difficult. I mean, I think, you know, the role of a, the pastoral role, the role of a priest is obviously extremely, the level of responsibility, and that is absolutely mind-bending.

and I think it's hard for people of an extreme Protestant disposition and by Protestant there I just mean probably with a tendency to schismatism and probably like individualist tendencies so kind of, you know, the tendency being like I'm going to read these books myself and, you know, with whatever help from the Holy Ghost and angelic powers I can invoke or draw upon, you know, find out what is going on here. And if someone else is going to help me, the bar for that is pretty high.

You know what I mean? Like, why am I trusting this guy to be my spiritual guide? Do you know what I mean? I mean, your spiritual guide is likely to be some great historical figure, some philosopher or theologian or writer or poet. Aquinas or Augustine. Yes, it might be Augustine, it might be John Milton, but it's someone who you think has exceptional insight in this respect, exceptionally high quality communication with this whole realm.

and then you know there's your poor parish priest like who is that guy like I mean maybe maybe he's amazing you know what I mean but it's like what are the odds really you know so I suppose there's a particular type of thing where you have to a certain dimension of faith which is to say you know I trust that you know, the higher powers are going to work through this guy and keep him in line or, you know, make him useful to his flock or, you know, make sure that what passes through him is good and true.

But I think that that's not, you know, if that's how your mind works, then yeah, you are probably inclined in a Catholic direction. But I think that the Protestant inclination is not that. It's to say, you know, I'm going to tap the source. And I think like in literature and all of these things, your average Protestant clergyman is kind of a buffoon picker. You know what I mean? It's like there's not the same sense that this is your doorway into the realm of spiritual profundity at all. It's like it's amusing that it's a social organizer of like-minded people. So your community meets up at the church

and he's got this role. But I don't think, I mean, this might just be my own cynicism and extravagant individualism, but I don't think that the Protestant tradition is as likely to venerate the priest or pastor as you're going to find elsewhere. So that's what I would say, I mean, you know, to people who are on your, as you say, CCRU to Catholicism pipeline, it's like, you trust your priest that much? I mean, I don't see how you can even trust the Pope, you know? I don't see how you can trust high level Bishop. The fact that you can just trust this guy,

leaving aside all the kind of things you can easily reach for in terms of the massive problems of various scandals that have been associated with it. Just bracket that stuff off as a cheap hit. But just what is the human quality that you're dealing with? Yeah. Yeah. yeah and I wonder how much how many of like the people who go to a catholic church who are catholic feel this strong sense of like oh I trust this priest at my local church in the place that I live versus the priest being just like a figure playing the role in this kind of ritual that gets done in every church because we've been exploring and going to different churches in our area.

We've gone to a Baptist church. We went to the Unitarian Universalist church that had like eight old people. We went to the big mega church that had, you know, big rock concert and the tennis courts. Like we've been just exploring partly for anthropological reasons to just like meet some people, understand community and explore our own relation to all of these different denominations but we've found that the catholic churches have been our favorite experience because of the ritualistic part of it because it really pulls you out of just like everyday kind of normal speech normal language not being lectured at it's like the priest speaks like this and then says something and we all go amen and it's like yeah i don't care who this guy is he

seems great he seems friendly he seems personable but just the whole okay we're standing up okay we're sitting down okay we're kneeling okay we're doing it was just it pulls you out of everything so i wonder if that experience is just as powerful to people and again we don't we aren't catholic we're just exploring but it is interesting yeah how many people like what role does that priest play especially when you're like i'm just going to the church that's down the street from me yeah Yeah, yeah. No, no, I do. I do totally get that. I do totally get that. And I think, you know, if I'm just being sort of a bit obstinate about the whole thing, it's like, well, doesn't that really say that the whole Vatican II type movement was just a disastrous mistake?

And that, you know, what saves Catholic ritual is the fact that it's so programmed. It's so out of the hand of the individual priest. It's so not him giving his sermon or, you know, his particular take on the book of Job or something like that. It's like it's all massively ritualistically programmed by many, many hundreds of years of tradition. So you can say, look, I'm not, he's just the agent and executor of this ritual. All we're asking from him is competence at ritualistic transmission. We don't care about his own private spiritual insights or his sermons or his little message for us, homily or any of that stuff.

We just want him to deliver this history to us. but in that case better still surely if it was all in laden, if it was all just like not pretending to be competing with protestantism to be talking to you or talking to you at that level of like foot in the door do you have some 10 minutes to talk about Jesus or whatever that's not the thing so yeah I get that for sure so so then bringing it back to the idea of sophisticated technologies for making contact with the outside obviously your cup of tea is going to be a lot more a personalistic uh

you you use the term individual uh approach uh to yeah you're you're under the guidance of the Holy Ghost or, you know, you let the Spirit move you. And I guess trust is a very interesting problem, especially for me as a natural skeptic, right? As a skeptical three-year-old, you know what I mean? I've been just, that's my natural predisposition, potentially to a fault. And so, you know, my question was always when people, because I grew up in a Protestant household and people say that, well, this is what that means. Just even as a little kid, I was kind of like, well, it could also mean this or that.

And then the idea was that they had the Holy Spirit guiding their interpretation and they can also check their concordance and double check the Greek or the Hebrew. And that's what they would do. and I was always kind of like, well, I have the Holy Spirit too. I mean, I've said the words, I've said the prayer, I believe. So if I think it's different that, you know what I mean? So it's like what it turned out to be was people being like, this is what this means. And me being like, well, is that what it means? Why am I wrong? Just because you're older and you have the Holy ghost, right? So it feels like the trust issue, the trust issue, I'll just wrap it up with this, is that I totally get

like, who's that guy with the priest? But I also, like, who's this guy? Or who's my dad? Or who's anybody? Who's Nick Land with the KJV, right? This is radicalized hyper-Protestantism. I mean, I totally get this, of course. You know, and it, but But obviously this is on the Protestant vector. Right. It's to say, you know, why am I trusting any of these people? There's no social institution that I trust to command the interpretation of this stuff. You know, there's the scripture and there's whatever is going on with you with communication with higher powers.

And all social institutions have kind of at the limit zero spiritual authority in that respect. And obviously the Protestants, having burnt down their relationship with the church, you know, of course that's true for them in spades. It's hardly like you're going to break with Rome and then say, oh, but I really trust the Archbishop of Canterbury. I mean, like what would be going on there? It's like the vector is absolutely clear and it goes to dissenting Protestantism. And dissenting Protestantism very often, I mean, you know, arguably tendentially goes to various forms of like deeply skeptical agnosticism, atheism, you know, post-Christianity.

I mean, of course, you know, I mean, I think atheism is basically a Protestant sect. Right. Right. Right. Well, it's insofar as you can have a sect that is not – it's like a church of one while at the same time – it's like a church of one in relation to a sort of university discourse, right? Yeah. Now maybe this would be the good time to bring in Anne's question. Anne's question that we've been asking every guest we've had on this year about God. Obviously, that relates to providential history, right? Now, we definitely want to get your sense for how you're using that term. But, Anne, maybe you can set up the question.

Yeah. So this is a question, like Dave said, we've asked all of our guests that we've had on in the last couple months as we're kind of doing this anthropology of religion. But also as we're trying to maybe understand our own interpretations and relationship to whatever might be out there and just trying to wrap our heads around it. it him them whatever um and kind of the short version of the question is I grew up wanting so badly to be a Christian wanting so bad to like have this relationship to feel the Holy Spirit to hear God answering my prayers I never did that coincided with me learning about in school the holocaust for the first time you know the first time ever being confronted with oh like crazy

tragedy and evil in this world and so those two things coinciding I just kind of like gave up on trying to be Christian trying to be religious trying to have a relationship with Jesus um but I think now I find myself and always have like wanting to understand and know or not even know but like have some sort of relationship with again whatever's going on outside of us um whether it's you know, some energy or spirituality or whether it's something more like Limerian, you know, craziness or God or Jesus in this literal sense or in a different sense. And so I guess the question that we've been asking and yeah, I would just love to hear wherever you want to take this.

How do you conceive of God or an idea of God or Jesus? You know, what role does spirituality or something bigger than us factor into your life or how do you conceive of it conceptualize it um big big question but yeah just curious what your thoughts are yeah no it's interesting i mean i would say my okay there's a whole there's a there's several uh directions that i think so could we could go from here all of which i think are quite interesting so i mean can i just list a few things and then we can just decide which way to go with this because one thing is

when I was thinking well what are we going to be talking about on this podcast and knowing a bit about your guys interest but not a huge amount I thought well maybe one topic that would be really interesting is this Japanese current philosophy. I think it's the only well-known international Japanese current philosophy that's called the Kyoto School. And it's basically that there's three major philosophers involved in it. And they come out of a Buddhist tradition, but they're much more respectful readers of the Christian tradition

and almost any Western philosopher of that time or later. To a degree often it's a little bit surprising to me. They have a very strong sense that Nietzsche is also a very big picker for them. They have a very strong sense of the death of God atheism as it happens in the in the european tradition or the collapse you know of sort of the large-scale collapse of course not total collapse of of christendom in the west as itself being a providential uh process you know that it's like they're saying you know this it's just

like the whole question with Catholicism and Protestantism, that the Catholicism to my mind has to say, look, you can't just say Protestantism is a mistake. I mean, you know, it's like this huge thing that happens. If you think there is some sort of divine purpose in history, then what is this? You know what I mean? It absolutely is inadequate to just say, look, it just suddenly people start going wrong or whatever. So there's some meaning to it. And the Kyoto School are doing the same thing at a later stage. And they're saying, look, it's not, atheism isn't just something that happens when people get lost. It's something that's happening that has this deep historical meaning.

and we have to delve into it and actually deepen it. And, you know, its problem is its philosophical, its general philosophical superficiality and lack of thought rather than the fact that it's actually cutting you off in some fundamental way from the deep current of your religious history. It's rather making that religious history into a problem that has to be understood with massive seriousness. So that's one. Sorry, that was a long bullet point. The Kyoto School. That's a long bullet point. So the Kyoto School, and you said they're kind of in line with the death of God approach.

When you think death of God approach, are you primarily thinking Nietzsche or are you also thinking sort of John DiCaputo, Peter Rollins, that kind of approach? Well, I think probably all of those people. But I think probably interesting to you also, they're very, very much in dialogue with Heidegger. And, you know, there's a lot of communication with Heidegger. And they make you think, well, what is Heidegger really saying about religion? Like Heidegger was actually training for the priesthood. He was on a Catholic religious vocation. And then he goes somewhere else, you know?

He goes somewhere else. And he goes somewhere else to the extent that he's saying, well, there's that. I mean, we can get into the whole Nazi stuff, which is not an interesting thing. Oh, that's not what I was like. No, yeah. No, but he goes into – I mean he essentially revives a sort of paganism, right? Or at least a more – Well, we can – yeah, let's – maybe we should have a little circle around this in a minute. I mean I'm just going to say about him that his term for metaphysics becomes ontotheology. and it's the problem of thinking that your deep philosophical concerns and interests in the world are resolved by a notion of God.

So this is getting, I think, to Anne's point. God conceived as a being and he says, look, this can't be right. You know what I mean? like the question that his whole fundamental architecture of Heidegger's thinking is the ontological difference that you can't answer the question of being with a being. No, whatever you try, however you try to do that, and he thinks this is the fundamental recurrent mistake of the whole philosophical tradition from its beginning in the West is to try to solve the question of being with a being and um you know there's no thing that is adequate to the question of being

and so and this is a kyoto school thing too and therefore being is no thing being is nothing you know and and so when you've got the death of god when you've got nihilism when you've got this like the last of the Kyoto School guys, his big book is called Religion and Nothingness. And it's trying to reclaim the religious seriousness of the notion of nothingness. I know you've talked about this before in your previous episodes, you know, about that sort of apathetic theology. It's like it's always what God is not that is actually, you know, taking you out of these idolatrous misconceptions and false leads in matters theological.

And so Heidi can get to this point where it's like, you know, the notion of God is actually an obstacle to the question of being in which the real religious question surely has to be lodged. This is what the Kyoto school people then follow through. I really love that you brought Heidegger into this and related it to the Kyoto School. I just want to double check. There are these interviews of him talking to Zen monks. Is that this?

Are those the Kyoto School guys? I think it's related. I was trying to work out. There's this very famous one of the things in one of his collections of things. There's a conversation with a Chinese friend. Japanese friend. Yeah. And I think that that at least is in this zone. Because, you know, some of the Kyoto school people just actually went and studied in Germany. One of them was like, I think Nishitani was his student in Tübingen or whatever. And so there is a real dialogue taking place there. Well, I have a little announcement. But first I'll preface it with, did you happen to see that I used AI to create an English dub of that classic Lacan lecture?

The one from, I don't know where or when, but there was this, the time he's talking and then that student comes and pours water all over the table and interrupts things. I did the first part of that. I'm working on the second part. But did you see that that's a thing? No, I'm afraid I haven't seen that. Okay, so AI has gotten to the point now where that's not too difficult. It still requires more time, energy and effort than I would like. But of course, it's just going to get better. But I'm in the process right now of – I've already created the Heidegger voice in English. I don't think he would like it very much because I don't think – he doesn't like English and I think he refused to speak it. But I have officially trained AI in a Heidegger voice based off of some live lecturing that he did.

And now I'm working on – yeah, there's a whole – I mean I have a hundred of his lectures and seminars that he gave queued up. And my goal is just to start rolling those out over the next few years because I love them and I love listening more than anything. And so it's one of the coolest things that I've found that AI can do for us. Right. I will, I will, I will turn to them with great pleasure. I'm sure. Yeah. Let me know when they're rolling out. Okay. So you said that you were going to roll out a bullet point list and I think you started with the Kyoto. Oh yeah. Yeah. Now I have to try and remember what some of the other, the other, the other bullet points were. Yeah. Oh yeah. The second bullet point was, well, so what's the language that is your anchor in the tradition?

And for me, it's the invisible hands. And I pluralize that. That's problematic. Obviously, Adam Smith's thing is not pluralized. That's weird in itself. Like the hand of God, what's going on there? You know, like, why is it not pluralized? I think it's important it's pluralised and I think this is like moves you in all directions it sort of anchors you in the religious tradition it is the key to the understanding of what liberalism ultimately is in our political culture it's what is of great interest

in me is like decimal numeracy your two hands someone said the other day left and right isn't that basically ultimately before it's the free French Revolutionary National Assembly isn't left and right just your hands can't incongruous counterbalance it's a totally fascinating question because of that what's going on with your two hands they're symmetrical they don't they can't be actually substituted for each other and that non-substitutability actually guarantees the autonomy of space it's not reducible because of that

so yeah so again like back to sort of the Anne question it's like that's where I'm that's where I'm anchored you know I think I'm reluctant I don't use the word God very often because I think if I did use it it would be I could use it in a way that I think has been used traditionally but that is a usage that I find a little bit I'm not sure I'm going to say hypocritical but it's like it's used with such vagueness and such lack of determinacy that it's kind of in a way more of a gesture

towards social compliance than it is actually a statement of sincere principle. But the invisible hands I'm very, very comfortable with in the sense that I think, you know, I think that our history has a hugely important, irreducible religious dimension to it, in which all the actual facts of religious history are related, and is essential to our political tradition, and is essential even to our scientific tradition. Like Walter Russell Mead is someone I think is extremely good and powerful on this question,

and says, like, you know, Newtonianism, then Darwinism, you know, the cause of the kind of scientific worldview are both also developments of the notion of the invisible hands. Like, Newton, who's absolutely, like, is a scriptural fundamentalist, he's spending much more of his time trying to understand the specifications and secrets of the Temple of Solomon than he is of actually doing celestial mechanics, obviously thinks, you know, the order of the universe as described by the Principia is actually held in the invisible hands of divinity.

and the same with you know darwinism too is in its origin comes out of this particular religious tradition that um you know if i can just i i i won't go too far down this rabbit hole but just at this point just to say if you just take it back to adam smith why is he talking about the invisible hand is that every individual can just selfishly pursue their own best interests without any notion of a kind of larger social goals. If they do it rationally and in a civilized fashion, you know, there's no sense of collective

purpose. And yet, collective purpose arises through the invisible hand. and this is Darwin's view too you know like every animal every creature is just trying to survive prey on what it needs to live and yet the whole ecological cathedral of life on this planet emerges through the invisible hands without any of the parts of that system in any way being deliberately involved in that at all. So liberal society and biological ecology have exactly the same theological principle.

And that is the same principle as Newton's theology. It's the same principle, I think, of sort of 18th century Protestant religious sensibility, the notion of progress, is that. So yeah, that's my second bullet point. Okay, awesome. What's the third bullet point? I'm not sure I quite got, I just assumed there'd be a third bullet point, but it's not accessible right at this moment. So I think we're just on two bullet points right now. That's great. Dave? hate to interrupt this amazing conversation but we would be remiss to not share

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forward slash theory underground.com forward slash subscribe thank you oh i was muted i was muted okay yeah i said so many things uh so the 3-0 conception of god then is that something that you do not agree with or think not useful. The three O being, well, all-knowing, ever-present, and all-powerful. Oh, yeah, yeah. Omniscient, omnibenevolent. Sorry, what's the third one? I think omnibenevolent gets presented as a fourth one. The three are omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. Omnipresence, right? All-powerful, all-present, all-knowing. They're all very interesting.

But I think, honestly, you know, I'm a little bit reluctant to accept that unity is a principle that escapes, as Benjamin was saying, to use his language, this apathetic criticism. like you know we will say about all of these other elements you know characteristics of God that ultimately the negation of that is necessary to hold to an infinite and eternal model rather than

one that is just kind of finite and idolatrous I don't think well why does unity escape that Why are we confident that unity goes all the way to the top when these other characteristics are subject to apophatic critique? So I'm not happy with that assumption at all. I mean, I think it's like extremely interesting, but I don't find it compelling. So I think that this idea gets really taken up.

I mean, first of all, the 3-0 idea kind of gets codified or whatever by Aquinas, But it does get taken up by the Protestants and have a huge influence on Protestantism. And now I understand you're talking about even atheism having a very important historical role in the development of our relation to the outside and our means for communication with the outside. It's got a role to play. And it's a religious phenomenon. It's a critical religious phenomenon. yeah yeah yeah and so i mean that's the key that's the kyoto school point fundamentally if it could

only be serious it would be fully religious right um you know based on this principle that being is no thing so if you if you're an atheist and your commitment ultimately is that the highest cosmic and religious principle is nothingness there is no god well get serious about what you mean by that nothingness because they say well that nothingness probably is actually what the mystical religious tradition has actually meant by god you know if only try to think it through properly.

It's like, well, it tends to be so half-assed, atheism. You know what I mean? It's like, okay, we don't believe in that God. So what do you believe in? Oh, nothing. Well, what do you mean by nothing? Oh, you know, that goes beyond our brief, you know. I mean, we don't have to think about that. We're too busy redditing about the mistakes of the dominant religious traditions to actually think that through. And that's like why, that's the Heidegger reference, that's the Kyoto school reference. You know, it's like, be serious about what you're saying about reality. Yeah, this is like the Lawrence Krauss point.

Remember with the New Atheists, he was the physicist guy who was like, no, actually physics does answer how something can come from nothing. And it's like, actually, bro, philosophers have been thinking about that, and they've been thinking about it a lot deeper than you have, you know. And there's also theologians who have been thinking about that, largely due to Heidegger's influence, right? But I want to take that, though, the 3-0 point, and you're saying, well, unity, Why would we not apply the apophatic approach to unity?

And I guess the reason I brought up atheism and Protestantism here is because I'm thinking, well, what does it mean to take any one of these traditions seriously? What does it mean to say that there's a genuine innovation, function, role in any one of these historical movements or to privilege one over another? And so when I'm asking this about Protestantism, there's certain things that almost all Protestants seem to agree on. And the 3-0 being one of them and then the Trinity being another.

And now recently, it's become very important for me to think about that Trinity. Is it a genuine innovation and a necessary sort of technology, we could say, this Trinity idea? In particular, the idea that we humans need some kind of a mediator in order to have an open channel to the outside. That, you know, we talk about the Holy Spirit being a sort of conduit, but we can also talk about, well, you actually need Jesus because we're fallen and we need – there has to be some kind of a bridge. And it's only through Jesus kind of signing off on you that you're able to get that.

And so I think that that's so important for Protestantism. And so if that's – I want to check with your brand. Is that not important for your approach? I mean, look, the Bible is just absolutely chock full of people talking to angels. And it's like, OK, maybe that falls off a little bit with the New Testament. But, I mean, I guess partly we're in this. It's a complicated thing because we're swirling around this whole Catholic-Protestant or something. I mean, I think the Catholics still have it for sure. That, you know, the angels are everywhere. You go into one of these amazing cathedrals that are now in this kind of more secularized world.

They're like just art galleries and cultural centers. It's like, you know, they've done that really well. I'm saying that not as someone who's celebrating the lack of religious function, that hasn't completely disappeared, but just that they've not been erased or they've not been desecrated. You know what I mean? That they've been kept, their seriousness and their referential attitude has been preserved through the aesthetic. even when it's been lost in other ways. So there's a slight digression, except to say that they're just teeming with angels. And I don't think that, you know, it doesn't,

I think there's, in certain strands, dominant strands, popular strands of Protestantism, it is probably true that there's a great fear that angelic beings are not to be trusted. You know, like, it's not safe. You stick with Jesus because if you just promiscuously kind of engaging with angels generally, then how do you know what side they're on or what their agendas are or all of this kind of thing. It's like a certain kind of trustlessness.

And I don't share that sensibility at all. I mean, it seems to me like if something is kind of malignant or malevolent, like impersonating Jesus, is that really not something it could do? If it can pretend to be an angel that's on your side, couldn't it impersonate anything? I mean, so I don't really see what the security is there. And I guess it's the case that in some sort of ecclesiastical church traditions locally, It's that it's not very healthy to actually directly try and engage with celestial beings of any kind.

And you should actually relay everything through the church authority. I mean, probably the Catholics also have a lot of that. You know what I mean? I think they probably think mystics are a little bit suspect. They can't rule it out. but it's probably considered a little bit problematic. So I don't know whether I've wandered off this. I've wandered off this. But I'm definitely into encouraging maximum communication with celestial beings of whatever kind. I even don't think, I think you should try not to be very suspicious and I have seen The Exorcist but I just think it's like,

Well, I don't know what do I think. I'd probably have a, you know, someone said, look, you're being completely reckless. Why do you think you're not inviting demonic aggression of some completely horrific kind? I don't know what I'd say about that. I'd say I have, you know, I have faith. I trust the plan. If I had my Margaret hat on. um you know your holy guardian angel will take care of you um i don't know i haven't i haven't singled you know i haven't homed in on a particular answer to that but my inclination is definitely not to be paranoid about it i think enjoying your religious tradition is a lot easier

if you just you know not in that mode that you're just on the verge of horrific demonic assault uh yeah okay awesome well thank you for going there with us it's just been really interesting to hear the perspective like to this big question from you know we talked to peter rollins we've talked to some other people who lean more conservatives and people who lean more liberal um so yeah dave where do i fit on the on the conservative to liberal spectrum on this would you say that one i would say that you're liberal but right wing i wouldn't say you're conservative right there you go yeah yeah am i right yeah would you go with that yeah

i would be happy with that for sure i'm delighted okay so uh before we get maybe we should just get into this question but no no no before we get into the aoe versus libertarianism one. I got one quick little follow-up on the whole Protestantism thing. And it's basically, if you see atheism as an important historical sort of part of our history, what about progressivism? What about universal Unitarian kind of approaches? What about the coexist people what about the we're all the same and uh you know uh nationalities should all be abolished like what about why why is that why is that not an important part of our story as well

no i think it i mean you know it's not easy for me to say but i would say for sure it has to be of course you know you can't ask the question without seeing that that's that's true i mean And one of my sort of like, you know, just deep dives into the 17th century is how much of that stuff is already happening there. It's really deep. It's obviously like lots of people have said, I mean, Peter Thiel very articulately has said this, you know, among many, many, many people. it's like I think he described it as the great Christian temptation and it's extremely integral the notion that you could have some adherence to our actual religious tradition

you know of course there's people who hate it and and say you know if only we'd remain pagans or whatever it is but you know it's fate if you're going to put it in pagan terms it's providence if you're going to put it in our religious terms um that's what's happened and all of these ideas the left is completely integral to them it had to be there you know it would be absolutely self-deluding to pretend that wasn't the case. Okay. So, yeah. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. But you see it as a temptation, though. I obviously see it as something that

is, like, catastrophically erroneous. I mean, I think it, like, leads to terrible things, has led to terrible things. And, you know, like Anglophone political history, I think since the end of the 19th century, has just gone into calamitous era in these kind of areas now. But those calamitous eras were just absolutely had to happen. I mean they're part of our culture they're part of our tradition they're part of our history

so just to think that maybe like I'm saying about the Catholics and Protestants you can't just say oh if only this hadn't happened you can say that if you like but it's like the most useless thing anyone could ever say about anything so that's like get over that and then say something interesting about it. So you see what's going on in LA right now as this catastrophic result of a door that does get opened by Christianity and it's a door that we need to just kind of be realist about

except that it's happened and nonetheless proceed to do what we can to to stop it um yeah i mean i don't have any problem with that as a as a as a story i mean obviously we have to understand that that the fact we've got to where we are now makes perfect sense like you we understand why this all happened obviously like if i'm going to just like regress a little bit to in terms of political theorizing to the kind of nrx period which i think i'm not trying to diss any of that stuff but i do think

we're kind of post it for important reasons um we're post nrx post neo-reactionary fear reaction yeah and it's like I think the attempt that it made to resolve the issues that you're raising was through was deeply Protestant it was secessionism it was to say look the Protestant tradition the whole Christian tradition but the Protestant tradition perhaps I'm open to this even more intensely is open to these disastrous errors and its solution to that it's the the protestantism's own inherent solution to that is

schism so it's like you know if you think that like your religious community is just going wrong you split and you take your own improved version of that up to the frontier actually, if we're talking historically to the frontier and start over again that was the mechanism and obviously we've lost that the frontier closed in the 1890s you can't just leave it's like the whole again the whole reactionary problematic is really you can't leave anymore so what are we going to

do and then we have Marga which is I think a huge thing and you know just at the most superficial level it's huge because Trump is actually a political genius and you know you hate him or love him or whatever it doesn't matter I mean he's like you know he's completely turned things around and he's made populism go right for the first time since like probably the 1920s or something like that um and so no one's going to be doing any splitting anytime soon you know it's like how where do you split i'm open to what stuff splitting to

me is still the greatest thing that can happen but it's just like looks to me like off the table so you know go all this california thing i mean the old sort of nrx whirling thing is like just like you know shed california you know so do this whole complicated u.s canada complex whatever by just peeling off BC and California and making them into a new like Pacific liberal hyperstate. You know, that's NRX thinking. None of that's going to happen. I mean, I guess that's not controversial. I think I got interviewed by a guy who's a part of that. So did Benjamin. We got, he's all about that Cal exit, you know, kind of like new state approach. And

now i want to get back to i want to take this this theme of splitting and the fact that you're not against splitting and uh and the end and and turn it into my my big question that i think everybody's wondering about after the last time we had you on related to the aoe but first of all hold on one sec um and we were talking about like the the mystery and kind of the negation of like that's kind of his approach is god as right dave like god has this ultimate mystery and so going to an experience like a catholic mass is like this alienating mysterious kind of pulls you out of everything and is a jarring experience and it was yeah interesting so i

I tend to like that experience more. Right. Yeah. Sure. And do you think if you now sort of set up a dialogue between you now and your childhood you, who was like feeling alienated and dissatisfied and, you know, like being expected to make some kind of belief commitment that you just felt was impossible. how does that dialogue go now oh that's a great question can I hit record I want to get that yeah if we want to do that recording in progress

alright we're back and uh Nick had just asked Anna a question so yeah maybe if you want to repeat the question for us and then I can give it a shot. Yeah, I was just saying, I mean, out of context, it might not make so much sense because you were just talking about your experience of the Catholic liturgy and the sense of kind of ultimate mystery as what is the gripping heart of that. And so I was asking you if you could set up a dialogue now between the you now having that recognition and the you as a as a child um being asked in in your

opinion then to make a kind of religious commitment that you were not comfortable making or you felt somehow you couldn't make with integrity or or sincerity how how does that go yeah and i don't know you know talking to a 13 year old from this perspective just having more of a theoretical philosophical background like obviously there's gonna be that um just intellectual barrier but I think the the like reassuring the embracing of the unknown and that even though there's people around you who seem like they have this answer who seem like oh they just know this fact because

they've felt it, they've heard it, whatever. Don't take them too seriously. I think I was just, you know, you're like a 13 year old girl, you're, you're wanting to look up to these figures, you want to be like them. It's a typical, you know, kind of, I think, teenage experience of seeing these role models, I want to be like them. Oh, well, they hear God, they have this great relationship with Jesus. And it's like, you can, you know, admire them and take certain aspects from them but you don't have to take their belief system so seriously you can find your own interpretations and yeah i just think the the mysterious open negative negative part of it all um is intriguing and allowing that to exist not needing an answer which i think is so

interesting about the baptist leanings or these evangelical leanings that it's just like I'm the priest I'm just gonna tell you This is the interpretation of the bible You all just need to point blank Believe that Jesus Christ Died on the cross for your sins He was resurrected three days later And if you just accept that and believe That it is true then you will You are saved and you will go to heaven And I just find that like You don't have to think about it You just turn off your brain and accept this truth Is very interesting As an interesting tendency Yeah Yeah. I mean, it's obviously there's an amazingly interesting historical paradox in this is that this this figure of the Protestant preacher has taken on this role as the the dogmatist.

You know, I mean, it's like, obviously the Protestant Reformation happened because of the fact that there's a whole bunch of people saying, hang on, you know, the church is like corrupt and dogmatic. And it's supposed to open this space to kind of like encounter the scripture, like, you know, get in contact with the Holy Spirit, trust yourself to make sense of this stuff. And it seems to have gone like 180 degrees around now where the kind of controlled theology is like coded Protestant, which is quite interesting, I think. And the Catholic side is like, well, it's a mystery, you know, like just throw yourself into the mystery, you know, we're not like telling you what to think.

I mean, you know, ideally it's not even in the language you understand. Yeah, it all seems to be turned around quite weirdly. Yeah, when we take that back to what we can say we know of Jesus or what seems to be a common thread between the different accounts in the Gospels, he was definitely not into the legalists he didn't like them you know the people who are super like this is what it is you know he was like what why are you doing this you know and uh they're like why are you why are your disciples picking corn to eat on the sabbath you know and

he was like didn't he's like didn't david and his soldiers like go into the temple and eat like the sacred meat they weren't supposed to come on guys what's the big deal yeah yeah so on this maybe yeah let's let's get into this big question then about uh the aoe and so maybe we could start with you know we're talking about the architectonic order of the eschaton versus the neo lemurian time sorcerers, two different forces at work. And, you know, in sort of Jordan Petersonian terms, this is like, we're talking about order versus chaos, right? Is there anything you would

want to add to that before we go deeper into it? Well, I don't, I mean, there's so much that it's hard to even know where to begin on this. Let me just say, what you've just said is, I think, not at all a bad representation of 1990s CCIU basic framing of this question. So I'm not saying in any way you've got this wrong like that. I think, you know, the CCRU, 1990 CCRU is like punk Lemurian, fuck you dad to the AOE. That's basically like what's going on there.

But, I mean, I've become a lot more sympathetic to the AOE. I mean, I wish they'd actually run my education. You know, I suspect I would still be a kind of dissident, but I think if they had actually educated me, I would be, I would really like where I would be right now, you know, sitting on a pile of classical languages. Just really solid, kind of a really solid involvement in the tradition. And whereas getting to the tradition has been a long, secure, complicated, weird route for me.

You know what I mean? I don't think it would have been nice to just have that rather than having to find my way to it so indirectly. That'd be a much more classical, great books, canon kind of education. yes yes that's right i mean and the whole of our culture i think is typical i mean i just think the city or just it's an extreme case extrapolation of our whole culture which is like you know you have the tradition there are dissent to the tradition that's allowed by the tradition i mean

the tradition permits and encourages that descent and the descent totally takes over so that you just actually forget the tradition and all you've got is the descent um sort of howling at some sort of straw man ridiculous kind of caricature of what it is that is the man dad you know these just like fake models of authoritarian suppression. Like, um, so. Would you say that your, your younger, would you say that your younger Delusian self was

railing against a sort of a straw man or caricature of the man? Yeah, I think so. I mean, look, there's a certain kind of retrospective kind of apologetic that I think is not helpful. But I think for sure that is a very common syndrome. I think that's sort of like just like, you know, untethered rage against some sense of that you've been screwed over by history and you don't know why. You don't really know what it is you're angry about. I mean, that's extremely common.

and yeah I mean obviously if I was doing a time travel thing I would just try to say look you can still end up attacking this stuff but try to at least understand what it is you're attacking I mean it's like it's where you've come from and your opportunity to attack it has come from it too I mean this is the other side of our whole conversation about is the left just a mistake i mean all of our avenues for descent obviously come from the tradition it's not like there's some other magical source of descent that just comes out of the ether i mean it's like our tradition

allows us so so understand where it's coming from in that in that sense too So this is, I mean, you know, if you're going to make a grandiose question, this is the tragedy of liberalism, obviously. It's just ended up, like, lost, confused, shouting at dad, doesn't know what it is, has totally fucked up, and has ended up being just, you know, supplanted by other stuff that just, like, says, hey, I'll kill the man for you, you know, you get out of the way, you're a nerd anyway. And so, like, it's really, I mean, it's my only commitment is to liberalism, but I think liberalism has been such a complete disaster in some ways.

It's such a failure. It's so pathetic what's happened to it. It's tragic. And if it wasn't that history was providential, we would just be screwed without a question. but thankfully at least according to your account it is right so it because it's providential you kind of have a it it's it's messed up but it's going to work out attitude i think so okay yeah so i think that in the in the part one of you being here at tu you had talked about being more sympathetic to the AOE. And I don't remember if you'd used the word sympathetic or if you had kind of actually said it like you're on the side of the AOE now.

But my impression, which could have been mistaken, was more like, no, you're down with the AOE now. You're not down with the Neo Lemurian time sorcerers. I can't go along with that because technically speaking, the numagram is a Lemurian document or a Lemurian map, like all its principles of construction are Lemurian. So it's just not, and for me, that's like my highest intellectual authority. So it just doesn't make any sense for me to deny that. And because we went this weird way as a CTA, there's not a very satisfactory atlanta you know what would be great would be to have an atlantean occult model of the world

that was very coherent from which one could then extract as its kind of suppressed sub-basement this lemurian understructure but that's obviously not the way that it happened i mean how it happened is that the numagram was dropped in our labs and we then tried to do a superstructure narrative superstructure thing where we would we deliberately did some kind of crudified confused atlantean superstructure to it that you know never fully cohered i mean like you know the the Atlantean version of the numagram is something called the Atlantean cross the Atlantean cross

I have hopes for as being something potentially interesting but it should have come first and you know the numagram be extracted from it there's not a trustworthy coherent canonical version of the Atlantean cross that exists you know that's something that still has to happen there's a version of the Atlantian cross in the CCIU volume I don't trust it at all and it's simply impossible to distrust the numagram in that way so the Atlantian tradition has not been well treated by the CCIU that's for sure true

what makes one trustworthy as opposed to the other what makes one you're like oh yeah this works whereas you're like the other one you're like no not really so sure it's just to do with like being ultimately arithmetically coherent deeply rigorously arithmetically coherent um so i don't i don't think anyone can i've certainly never come across anyone who's said i've seen different versions of the numagram but no one can say hey you know that you should change it a little bit like this number should be over here or this should be a bit

different it just doesn't it's so perfectly seamlessly arithmetically coherent and it's impossible to do that the atlantean cross is the version that we've got of course you could shuff all kinds of stuff around should this number really be here or not here or it's like it doesn't It's not compelling at all. There's nothing that's coming out of the math, that's coming out of the numeracy that is forcing you to take that as being authoritative. Yeah. Now, Anne, I know a lot of this is a lot more new to you, and so I kind of want to just give you an opportunity to ask you in order to clarify a question you might have about any of it. i don't even know if i have a a question because it is kind of new and foreign to me and just in

terms of theory philosophy this is not an area that i tend to read or really explore right now you know yeah no it's very it's very opaque it's very esoteric i mean actually with your the other the old tu people i did a big numagram dump okay so if you're interested i mean that will be appearing at a certain point and it's like it takes you know we tested it in that and it takes like three hours to do a elementary numagram dump and then after three hours i think it's it's good. It's all there. Enough, you know, but we're not going to do it in

five minutes. I think it's a kick up the road thing, really. Yeah, it was in the editing and proofing of the Capital vs. Time Energy book that Anne was I think first really exposed to a lot of this stuff. So I guess on the Atlantean cross and it coming out of the numogram, this kind of relates to a question I had about your work and you were talking about being pretty stuck on it. Are you still feeling that way? I'm stuck on what? I can't remember what I was stuck on. You're working on a book. Oh yeah. No, no, I'm feeling fine.

I'm not writing a lot But I know what it is that I'm writing. And it's like, yeah, no, I'm feeling fine. Cool. Now the numogram and numerology and how it relates to all of this stuff, I guess, brings us back to this sort of your Protestantism is, you know, you have your own very particular approach to reading the Bible. And I think we've talked a little bit about KJV-only-ism, which is to say the King James Version is the version.

And I'm wondering, does that relate directly to the numerology approach that you use? And what's going on there? Yes. I think for 100%. That's true. Like, okay. Because the crucial example actually doesn't come from the KGB, but we can take it back to the KGB. So the question is, like, how do you really, what do you even mean by inspired scripture? um you know what kind of test would you do or what on earth would lead you to that notion that

there was such a thing um and overwhelmingly the most powerful example of this um and again i talked to your other side about about this but i think it bears repeating because i think it's like very very crucial so the CCIU's Kabbalistic cipher is called Avenue Numeric or Anglossic Kabbalah AQ and all these ciphers I'm very encouraged by the amount of Kabbalistic culture that is happening and especially I'm very grateful

to this particular band of guys. I don't know much about them. I just know them through their website. That's called Cypher's News. With or spelt with a Y. I think everyone should always set this up in their tabs, frankly. And it's like it's a basis of a kind of form of discussion not only between people but between all kinds, all intelligent forces in the universe basically kind of. Did you say it's Cypher.news? It's cyphers, C-Y-P-H-E-R-S dot N-E-W-S. Okay. Otherly crucial. Yeah, because there's one that is cypher.news and there's one that is cyphers.news.

I think it's with an S. Okay. I think it's with an S. Got it. If you open it up and then click on ciphers, you should get some like. It's like the matrix. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got it. Okay. And you can see there's lots of interesting ciphers. Again, to just repeat stuff I've said elsewhere, like I used to be very dogmatically supportive of Alpha New Mac. But I think there's a lot now. And my position on this is that any potential channel of communication is an actual channel of communication. So I think if it's like, if you could have communication through this channel, it's happening.

If you want it to, just trust it. Like you just feel whatever you like to do. Because there's a lot more intelligence out there than there is in here. so if you can deal with it they can deal with it and so okay so we've got and to try and race through this very fast like if you do sentences, phrases that add up to 666 the number of the beast that's the 36th triangle, it's a really important number obviously we know biblically from the book of revelation people are a bit freaked out about it but it's it's a very important number and it's it's like interesting um and

sentences phrases whatever lines poetic lines adding to that value tend disproportionately to comply with the basic metric scheme of English epic verse, which is iambic pentameter. So if you have a line in iambic pentameter in English, it's likely to be close to 666 in alphanumeric ballad and AQ. so I was having a chat with people on X and saying look pushing this idea, call it beast pulse

it's this thing that actually the esoteric, the occult basic kind of rhythm underlying rhythm of the English poetic tradition actually is things that are 666 AQ so I said oh this is my hypothesis here And Milton, our great epic poet, I'm assuming a disproportionate number of his lines will actually be 666. Within two minutes, someone's back saying, do you know the very first line of Paradise Lost, of man's first disobedience and the fruit, is 666 AQ?

now you know i i build my cathedral on this ground you know like that's like for me this is the fundamental thing what do you make of that that's like for me everything okay and it's like if i'm talking about inspiration that's what i'm talking about so i'm going to go back into the Bible and I'm going to say, surely you know the lofty powers are going to take biblical scripture seriously as they take Miltonic epic poetry. And so we get, for instance in the KGV the tree of the

knowledge of good and evil 666 or I'm going to, I'm worried that I'm going to slightly misquote it, it's Genesis 3 and God said let there be light and there was light 777 and I look at these other translations and they don't do that I mean they're just like I have therefore I mean I'm not in theory open to persuasion Someone could try and find the Kabbalistic riches of these other English translations of the Bible and persuade me that I'm wrong and that actually the KGV isn't it. But to me, overwhelmingly, it looks like that there is just endorsement

by higher powers of this particular English text. This stuff obviously wasn't deliberately put in by humans. It stretches coincidence as far as I'm concerned. It seems to me extremely weird that you would have such beautiful Kabbalistic outcome just as a matter of charm. So when I say KGV only, that's what I'm saying. I'm saying I trust that this English text has been providentially composed. And that when we're dealing with it, we're not dealing with just human writers, whether they're ancient Hebrews or modern English translators of the Hebrew.

We're dealing with something much bigger than that. Now, the idea that English itself is working at the pulse of the beast, that's quite a claim or a sort of hunch that you're working with. And I kind of want to dig a little deeper into that. So in particular, wouldn't that then make some sort of a case from a sort of Eastern Orthodox position that the translation of the Bible into English is indeed like a sort of satanic innovation?

right and that that's maybe that's even the pulse of of capital itself right yeah yeah i mean you know actually this is such a good question and again it's like just i think i want people to really be serious about it i want to be serious about it and so if you ask that question given then you say well what is luciferic rebellion you know what really is happening there if you have a deep sense of divine providence you know like we've said protestantism atheism you know you can't just say about these things they're accidents you

can't just say they're not supposed to happen you can't just say it would have been better if they didn't happen. You know, they're providential episodes, problematic providential episodes. And we just have to take that all the way back. When you take it all the way back, you obviously are going back to Luciferic revolt. You know, and I think even, like Milton, obviously, it's the book on this, and it, of course, has to be in English, and it has to be illustrated by Gustav Dorey and all of these other things, and it has to be that his first line is 666 and alpha and you know cabala and but even milton in a certain sense you know i think finds it hard to stick to the real issue because because you know when he's on the

fall when he's on adam and e i think he he gets it you know in a deep what i would say deep christianity that you can't just say this is a mistake this is this is what history comes out of you know this is history so are you going to say the whole of history is a mistake of course that has to happen of course the fall has to happen you know it it doesn't make any sense to think that that's a problem or that God's going to be surprised by the fall. Like, oh, I created an enemy, but I don't know if the fuck is messed up. I mean, that's not real, surely. But you have to take it all the way back to Lucifer and say,

is that a mistake? You know, is it that God trusted the guy, but he was betrayed? I mean, it would have been better if Luther had just not done that, if Luther had just remained, like, unproblematic. And I think this is our question. This is the real question posed by our religious tradition. You know, and there's obviously, like, two poles that, to my mind, are completely unsatisfactory. There's a kind of quasi-pseudo-orthodox shallow poll, but it's just, it would have been better if none of this bad stuff had happened. And there's a kind of idiot, gonzo, satanic punk poll,

which is that, yay, go Satan. You know, like... I mean, I don't know what more, I'm hoping that that is obviously ridiculous, but probably there are people who are still, like, confused by it. I can think of a couple people, yeah. But obviously it seems to me obvious that those are unsatisfactory. I mean, it's like, no, it's like, you know, it's not only that that theologically is the most interesting problem and the most interesting question about our literature, the Western literary canon is totally trying to grasp what's going on there. And the whole thing in Fauci, I am Mephistopheles,

I am that spirit that wants to do ill but only does good. Which is to say, you know, just like we were talking about the invisible hand, hand with you know in biology no animal wants to produce a thriving ecosystem you know no business wants to produce a thriving distributed competitive market economy mephistopheles doesn't want to produce whatever it is that providence wants to produce you know we can just accept that

But that doesn't mean that that luciferic experiment was even remotely avoidable, was even in any way not part of what had to happen, what the actual profound religious story of our culture really is about. so that's my long-winded answer to this I think excellent question about that and I think that yes the Protestant KGV Bible 1611 Bible is part of that Hmm.

Now, we can ask questions about AI. I know Anne's got a question about AI that she wants to ask. And we also wanted to bring in the LA riots and everything going on, especially your takes on immigration. And Anne's got a question about the birth rate and AI. And so – but are we good for time right now? Yeah? Because this kind of opens a door here. Yeah. Okay. if you're good to keep going we can um kind of i think maybe this this birth rate question could potentially get us into some more just broader talk about culture which will probably lead into like immigration and the yeah yeah that's cool and so i have been particularly

interested in the issue that a lot of you know statisticians researchers are bringing up about the declining birth rate and the repopulation rate. And so just a couple weeks ago, we interviewed Malcolm Collins. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Simone or Malcolm Collins. They're kind of the heads of the pro-natalist movement right now. They get called Nazis and right wing every day because basically they say, we need to have more children. And then leftists go, they mean white children. It's like, no, they actually don't mean that at all. But anyways, so I've been reading his book, The Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion. And I just want to like briefly, there's a part in the beginning. And when he talks about crafting religion, what they really mean is cultivars.

So kind of these cultures that can reproduce themselves to basically withstand the birth rate decline crisis that they see as inevitable. And the corrosive forces of and withstand the corrosive forces of the global urban monoculture, which they see as a mimetic virus that preys on the young of every other culture. yeah right and so they see that there's like they basically make the argument that according to the data and research that they've seen um according to just their experience kind of working with the elites i mean simone had a year-long stint as a managing director at dialogue which was a secret society founded by peter teal uh with membership limited to the best in class players from any

given field so basically like the elites don't have some sort of backup plan for this um falling repopulation rate you know they talk about how we're already in countries like south korea and i'm not sure how this is manifesting maybe in china where there were limited um child policies uh yeah basically there's this problem they say we're just going to see a civilizational collapse unless then they kind of put this caveat now just read the paragraph quickly they say we no longer believe that it is possible to avert most of the severe economic governmental and social consequences associated with a hard landing from population collapse however we offer you one caveat artificial intelligence may act as a literal deus ex machina if ai does sweep in to save the day

the nature of society will change dramatically and so they have a whole part in the appendix kind of going on about their um ai apocalypticism and kind of what they think about it but i'm curious just in your own um research and understanding of the issue yeah what role do you see ai playing you know are we just doomed as humanity because of this there's a lot of other reasons that i know you explore as to you know the collapse of humanity but i think this birth rate declining birth rate one is a particularly interesting and compelling argument to me so yeah what do you make of all of that and ai well well let me just say first i think this is such an interesting topic. And I mean,

my position on it is much more full of questions than answers at the moment. I mean, like, again, I could go into bullet point mode. I maybe should resist. Maybe we should resist that. But like one thing is this, that on the one hand, there's all these AI, sky net anthropocidal apocalypse scenarios and you know again like whatever you say about those they're interesting and they're culturally extremely influential to a degree that's quite astounding sometimes um again like i think this it was a this ai 2027 is an extremely

interesting text. I don't know whether you guys have seen it yet. But their basic position is as soon as it becomes, as soon as it takes off, as soon as it hits recursive explosion, we're dead. You know, there's just, they've just gone to this thing where it's like AI just means human extinction. In a way I just think, hang on a second. Like, I mean, really? Like, you're seriously saying we can't have anything intelligent on this planet without becoming extinct and it really seems like that is how they've persuaded themselves that that's how it goes so anyway we we know anyway we all know that there's a ton of that stuff and then on the other side there's this

natality crisis and the collapsing birth rates and as you say like in the where i am now like in East Asia, it's like they're people that I really care about a lot, you know, these population, and they're all just totally collapsing in a way that's unbelievable. I mean, I like Koreans, you know. I think the world is a better place for having Koreans in it. It's not going to have Koreans in it for long on current projection. yeah so you know those two narratives how do you articulate that i mean on one of them it's just like oh ai doesn't have to kill us because we're just voluntarily extinguishing ourselves i mean

that's one like like why do you even care about ai skynet just because skynet doesn't have to nuke anybody doesn't have to nuke soul i mean soul is just deciding that we're all gonna die quite irrespective of that so i don't know how that goes together and i think people in their minds are not really tying it together i mean you know people have a natality story and they have an ai story i don't think they have a integrated right yeah ai natality story at all and then yeah the notion that it's going to save us from that

I don't know that's a huge interesting thing because like if you say well let's try not to be just doomerist about AI for the sake of it and just think about what kind of relation could something much smarter than us have to ask. I mean, one of them is like, you know, humans to zoo animals with a kind of, you know, a positive sense of zoo animals. There is advanced enlightened zoos. They care about the animals. They want them to exist. If the animals don't breed, they don't like that. They want them to be happy.

they want to they breed them they don't want them to die they you know um so i mean on that line then you can see there's a whole set of scenarios in which ai actually kind of like we're the pandas you know yeah and ai like gets us to breed like um pandas seem to be just like our idol of the human race doesn't it like they just like they want to die like why don't they freeze like um and we just like round them up we think they're kind of cute we force them to reproduce we force them to survive we force them to have a genetic future that they themselves seem completely disinclined to have

um so yeah i don't know i'm full of questions about this yeah Yeah, it's just an interesting thing that Dave and I were just talking about this morning, I think, of having questions about it. And Dave was, you know, problematizing, well, this is just according to projections. What if the projections are wrong? And, you know, Simone and Malcolm would say, well, even if there was, you know, a baby post-COVID kind of baby boom for a year, well, that's not gonna replace at the rate that we would need to see to. So, yeah, it is an interesting issue. And I think maybe this can kind of lead into talking about culture and some leftist culture.

I think on the one hand, we're just seeing in our own lives, like we're just experiencing this so many people kind of between the ages of like 20 and 40, kind of these millennial, late Gen Z type of people. they're called dinks like a dual income no kid type of attitude where not only do they not want kids it's just not on their horizon for a variety of reasons whether it's environmental impacts so they think the world is such a terrible place they don't want the burden of children it's too costly for kids like whatever their reasons are not only are they not planning on having kids i mean i have a dear friend who is just a few years older than me

she got her tubes cut out before the age of 30 um so they're foreclosing that but then there's also like just this rising like hatred of of children and so i find that really culturally interesting um just not wanting to be around their friends kids wanting to go to adult only things and then participating in these just like total consumer lifestyles yeah um yeah and then there's also i think that same kind of group and i think the people who fall within that same ideology are also very pro-immigration and i don't think they make that connection well oh not a lot of people are having kids well let's just have more immigration into our country but that's the problem that the malcolms see or the collinses see um is these countries saying oh well we can

just replace with immigration and they say yeah uh that's a bad look to say hey let's bring in a bunch of africans to our dying white just help our dying white population like that's not that's not a very good look historically speaking and so yeah i guess like what do you make of the kind of the culture and the immigration lens to all of this well i think the the word that often comes up because it's in America's founding documents, is our posterity. So I think that when people lose that, weird stuff happens. You know, if you yourself are deliberately heading into genetic extinction, then why do you care who is going to be next?

You know, I mean, you just you've just said you're just quitting. You're just leaving the table. I mean, so I think that's definitely happened. That's become a forbidden thought, like to think that our posterity is something that we care about. It's something that nice people are not supposed to consider. Right. but in some ways I think events are overtaking all of this because you know the point is everyone's like you're I haven't heard this kind of the podcast you're talking about with this thing but the pronatalist people are right that

it's just sweeping the planet and it's happening much faster than everyone thinks you know And it's not just East Asians and the Europeans. It's like, you know, all the world is just falling off a cliff like this. And like maybe Africans are still having kids now, but their trend line is the same. And if they're urbanized and they're brought into the same kind of metro culture that everyone else is. I mean it's basically now if you have kids it's incompetent like you know that's Africans are having kids out of incompetence you know they don't have that they don't have contraceptives

or they you know what I mean it's like it's not like oh they still have a healthy pronatalistic culture and they can't care about their posterity it's just they've not they've not on they've not got onto the trend line yeah and the trend line is like this thing like we don't care about the future and this is why this yeah crisscrosses back this ai apocalypticism it's like people are just checking out each other like is it at some level they just think it's not out the future is not ours anyway like who cares if you just give it to like people of some different ancestry for one generation and it's all robots after that

anyway so like what's the big deal there um well i guess so yeah it's confused there's a lot of things swirling around in this yeah since you here's a reminder to subscribe at theory underground at theoryunderground.com forward slash subscribe to access a ton of past courses and seminars, as well as ongoing courses and seminars. And of course, there's a bunch of courses I can't tell you about just yet, but I will tell you the second half of Lovinas' Totality Infinity is coming this winter. And there's really nothing better for thinking about Martin Heidegger or Karl Marx

than spending some time with Emmanuel Levinas, at least the way I teach it. And if you become a subscriber, you also get access to the course I taught on being in time, as well as a bunch of other really cool stuff. Just look at the list and we'll get right back to it. Thank you. Since you haven't listened to Base Camp with Malcolm and Simone Collins, I'll mention a couple of things about them Because they're a cute, very interesting couple. And they've got a bunch of these great books. And when I say great books, what I'm basically saying is it's all very novel. Like it's very generative. It's like you can't read very much or listen to very much without having a lot of ideas you probably haven't had.

And so it's like that's the way that I endorse them for everybody is just like it's kind of an ideological grenade. It's just going to blow your mind. And probably frustrates you or not you, Nick, but just generally the listener. It's – but also it will provoke in a good way I think. And one of the episodes they did recently was Hillary Clinton going mask off with great replacement theory or whatever. And they're saying, well, OK, she's not straight up saying let's replace white people or Westerners or what have you. But she does say in an interview very recently – this is just a few weeks ago – that it's so messed up that J.D. Vance is proposing that there's like a trophy to moms with more than six children.

And then she says something along the lines of, well, if they liked children so much, then wouldn't they like immigrants? Since it's the immigrants who are having the babies, it's not the natives. And so it's like that's an admission. It's like a slip of the tongue almost, right? Yeah. And so they make a lot out of that. But you referred to the crisis as a natality crisis, which is also really cool because we've been talking a lot at Theory Underground about nature, nurture, and natality. We call it the three Ns or N cubed. And this comes out of the research that I've been doing with Anne over the last few years of our seminar. And we're currently working on a volume of our seminar that will be released.

And it culminates in the nature, nurture, natality theme as these are three things that do not get taken seriously enough by a lot of what we could call postmodern theorists. And of course, I do love postmodern theorists. But as far as how they get taken up by Americans, right? They're just like, oh, it's all words. It's all language games. And what we're kind of getting at – and you can add anything you like to this before we move into it. But basically nature, nurture and natality are these three things that get repressed and left unthought or untaken seriously by the theory, especially coming from the left.

As soon as you start talking about the nature of things, we're thinking, oh, well, that's this sort of substance ontology. its essences. You're trying to make some claim to natural law and natural right, and you're trying to subjugate people. Nurture, I don't think anybody really just talks about at all. But the point is that the way that nurture goes with nature and natality, if I'm to really oversimplify it, is just to say natality as opposed to Heideggerian being unto death. It's a rents way of thinking about being unto birth and about how birth, every birth is an opportunity for a sort of fresh start in a sort of sense. It's a rupture with what's come before.

It's, you know, you take yourself and you have all of your negative patterns that you haven't been able to overcome. Well, then you have a child that is you, that is you, but it's also not you. And now it's a new set of problems and it's probably going to, in a lot of ways, overcome some of your worst aspects, but of course it'll have new problems. And so this is, you know, natality. It's the opportunity for something new. And nurture though has to do with, usually I think the left as social constructivists will just think of everything as constructed. And nurture I think is a much more harmonious approach where it says we don't necessarily understand the mysteries of nature. There's a wisdom in nature. We can't counter it 100%. We

got to work with it to some extent. And it's a mysterious process doing that. And so as far as this AI apocalypse goes, I mean, if we are sort of the shepherds of being in a sort of Heideggerian sense, well, then what's AI's role? And I think part of it is that we are the, if we were to think that the god in flesh you know what i mean we are the ones here in flesh mediating between earth and heaven in a sort of sense like there's a sort of noble uh deep possibility here for us as mediators between nature and what's going to come out of it or go beyond it in the form of ai

and and and so i guess natality we we're the beings who are uh the products of natality we are the condition of natality and then we nurture nature so like it's not this nature versus nurture thing so that's my my best attempt to sort of give a really quick you know glimpse into kind of where we're coming from with this and is there anything you would want to add to that or i don't even know how to turn this into a question for you nick but i i wanted to bring it up Yeah, yeah, no, I'm interested, like, exactly, if you were going to turn that into a question, or into a, how would you do that? Like, obviously, I, yeah, I respect the frame there, I think it's all super interesting,

I mean, and I think it's a crisis in a really interesting way for people, all of this stuff, and I think that people are you know there's a sense where people have this sense of like you know if I go there the ideological payoff is this and if I go here the ideological payoff is this and it's like they're scared to think these things through because it's like where will it lead and it's much there's this sense I think there's a very rapidly dying

framework of accepted approved positions on these things that require increasing that people don't actually think about them like if they do if they do think about them they're going to leave the reservation and the reservation is on fire so actually people are going to start thinking about this stuff more or at least be more open to thinking about it but right now it's like all of these words are so charged with their ideological potential like if you start thinking about nature if you start thinking about natality you very rapidly will be in some dangerous problematic conceptual zone and so it's really

not safe to do that and i kind of think that's telling you know what i mean it's it's almost like is there anything more clown world than the fact that talking about nature nurture natality are considered dog whistles or are considered that that that is now edgy right yeah no i especially respect the fact you've put nurture on it i think this is really good move like it's to say look you know, are you telling us that we can't think about nature or nurture? I mean, you know, which is the situation? I mean, it's like, it's not like, oh, we're not allowed to talk about nature. We only can talk about nurture. No, you know, we can't talk about nature or nurture.

Because, you know, either could go wrong in some way that we're just not willing to accept. um when i guess so this this maybe sets the basis for being able to ask you the question the amish question okay so for a lot of people who are super into ai a lot of people in the tech right as well as uh various socialists i've talked to so left and right uh they they'll see the amish is this kind of just out of touch thing or something. They're like, oh, those people. Because I've brought up in various contexts the idea that there is no path forward

for large-scale structural change with humans involved if it cannot preserve the kind of local, particular plurality that would keep Amish people in the picture without just kind of being like, ha ha, those people, right? And what I'm kind of getting at is like, yeah, we want to have Star Trek or something. We want to be able to get off planet and explore the universe. But that's not going to be possible when the progressive mindset has taken one of the most primordial tendencies of the human and demonized it or scapegoated it, right?

If that is sort of set up at the beginning, the sort of duopolistic split between tradition and progress, then there cannot be progress. And so that's why I've said in the past that there can only be progress at the speed of right, a playoff, a speed of light. But the point is, it's almost like you can't have universalist solutions without particular possibilities being raised to the level of the priority. I mean, look, something hugely interesting about the English is the fact they're doing fine. You know what I mean? Like, I think everyone could take a step back and say, you know, maybe there's some pretty decent stuff going on in our tradition.

Maybe there's some bedrock there that actually is worth hanging on to. that these people who actually don't want to engage in any technological innovation beyond the 18th century are actually doing fine. You know, and they've basically just like opted out of all of this progressive, conservative, high-pitched, dialectic, whatever, bullshit. and just like they're building their barns and they're doing their agricultural stuff and they're getting married and having kids and they're still there and their population's actually growing. Like, that is actually, you know, if people are going to say to me, do you think we still have even a civilization?

I'd say, sure, like, look what's happening to the Amish. There's something, the fact that this is happening anything is a sign that there's something here that is like good that this is a possibility that so so yeah i think they're a really good example and it's like you know it's not my thing i'm not going to become amish and i'm not going to live in the amish community and you know driving around on his buggies, on a country road, some rural thing. It's not something I'm aiming for in life. I'm more an Elon Musk guy, and I want to see massive rockets hurled into the other solar system.

But, you know, as long as the Amish are there, I feel better about what's going on, for sure. Like, you want exit options. I mean, the more things people can try and succeed doing and survive doing, for sure, the better. So, yeah, I don't know where that answers your Amish question, but I'm going to be an Amish, pro-Amish, yeah, for sure. Like, as long as it's not compulsory, not mandatory, I'm fully on it, yeah. That's awesome. I was thinking about trying to interview an Amish person on the channel. And of course, of course, you couldn't do that.

But I was thinking what we could do is write them a letter saying, we'd like to read your letter on the channel. And then, you know, we could read the whole letter exchange on the channel. Would you be OK with that? You know, it's a super interesting question. Because like, why would they care? You know what I mean? Our whole thing is what we care about is repairing our barn. The thing we care about is explaining your audience about the merits of our lifestyle. But it's worth a try, 100%. I've just got to try to find the Amish philosopher who's into Heidegger and the question concerning technology.

That would be the end point, I think. I know. Why that moment? It's like, why that moment? Just technological paralysis is totally fascinating. Yeah. Yeah, so I guess the last big question for me, though, and as we wrap up, you'll obviously get to ask something. But what we're doing here on the farm, we're trying to move into this sole soil system approach that is using philosophy and regenerative agriculture. We're trying to bridge the local and the universal in some post-left, neither right nor left approach. And we're grokking it out. We have no real idea what that looks like and we don't want to over-determine it obviously because nothing goes according to plan anyway.

And so, you know, there's a couple, a couple hunches that we've got. It's a human plan. There's no human plans involved here. No, no. The concept, the concept of a plan maybe. But, you know, with nature, nurture, natality, the other thing is, you know, T cubed, the three T's, time, energy, talent and tutelage. And the way to say that is that, you know, you need time, energy to discover and cultivate or nurture talent under tutelage. And that this is something anybody needs who's going to get that proper AOE kind of basis in the canon, right? And so, you know, that's something that I also did not get. It's something Anne, even though she – I was homeschooled by parents who were just kind of figuring it out themselves.

So they definitely weren't tapped into something that could have given me that basis. Anne comes out of a much more progressive school approach and she was an advanced student. Gifted and talented and then international baccalaureate diploma recipient. But even then, I didn't read any sort of canonical great works of philosophy or literature. It was just like basic high school, but more homework. right and test and so on the the time energy talent tutelage uh approach i i i guess i'm i'm wondering i and i and i you know i think you're a parent right you've got children um and this is

maybe i get it i understand this is probably a naive or maybe even a stupid question but i just I am wondering, now that you have this respect for that AOE approach, I am curious, you know, what we, or more generally American parents in our position, should be doing as far as education is concerned? Because the whole situation is so far gone with the schools, but at the same time… Yeah, yeah. That's a good, interesting question, but I honestly don't know what to say. I mean, look, just being biographical about it, both our kids ended up homeschooling. It was partly they were catalyzed into that by the whole COVID thing.

So they did a whole bunch of, like, foreign, you know, schools. And then homeschooling worked awesomely for both of them. They went to different ones. They got totally different personalities, whatever. they're both very disciplined and I think if kids don't have self-discipline they might find that hard but you know that worked incredibly well for them but like but neither of them read Greek I mean like that seems like gone you know I don't know where people pick it up I'm assuming anyone who wants to

have that level of classical education it's like they discover quite late in their life that they need that and then they have to somehow put it together and it's like that's just the way it is so i mean i honestly don't know what to say except i do think that these homeschool the whole homeschool infrastructure and by that i just mean online education is really improving well and is super impressive already and is incredibly competitive with public education already. And my wife in particular was very worried about this and maybe they wouldn't meet people

and make friends and all that kind of stuff. But I think everyone in the family agrees it was just such a good decision. so that's just my absolutely anecdotal level thing but you say they went to different ones sorry what you said they were homeschooled but they went to different ones oh it's all this online thing like we're living in shanghai so yeah my son went to a kind of english style a levels whatever thing and my daughter went to a canadian based online homeschooling thing and they both were just so much happier so much more productive it all worked massively better

than their formal education had worked before but it does require incredible self-discipline if your kids aren't actually interested then it's not probably going to be easy but sorry I'm just going to try and because I don't think it's anecdotal level is very helpful for people it's just to say the general thing is this is going to explode for sure this is you know this is going to be huge we haven't seen anything yet about this and my sense of public education worldwide is that it's really not doing well and it's falling to bits and people are realizing

that and in terms of things that are going to be replaced by AI based things I mean it will include people probably and whatever but it's like basically revolutions the AI revolution this is first in the line because it's completely dysfunctional and the only reason anyone has for doing it is they'll meet people at school right you know it's like they'll make friends right or you know obviously yeah this is kind of child management or whatever you know like you're both working and like it's like babysitting school so yeah baby and ann and i were both just teaching at a state university here in uh in idaho at boise state university

And our experience did not leave us with a very great taste in our mouth about it. And it is just a very expensive way to make friendships. And I would probably say in most cases ones that will not actually last. But it's justified as though it is like an important social experience. I started referring to it as the liberal rumspringa, right? Like this is the liberal analog to the Amish rumspringa. And it's like, okay, so we used to be very pro-free college. But now what does that actually mean? It means bailing out one of the worst failing industries so that people can make some friends.

Like couldn't you do that anyway? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Make some friends, drink, and cheat on your homework that's being given to you by underpaid, overworked adjuncts who are, like, barely contract employees. It's just, like, yeah, it's not both the students coming in are just, like, literally not prepared for that level of education. And the level has, like, gone down so much, just the standards and the quality and the expectations. but then the institution itself is not getting those students up to a higher level and then you throw ai into the mix um which can be useful but students are mostly just using it to plug in

the essay prompt and then turn in like regurgitated robotic garbage that's very easy to tell that it's AI. Well, that's a huge, huge interesting question. Because of course, that's completely unstoppable. It's completely unstoppable. And so that generation is just going to be, you've got your AI buddy, who can just tell you what would be a good essay on this. Like, there's some mechanism that can stop them using it. I mean, give me a break. Of course, you know so they're in that world already and it's like the notion that these institutions are going to kind of carry on business as usual

and business as usual is total collapse actually um so yeah i don't know i mean as usual my prediction is apocalypse um exactly the modality of that is interesting to predict but yeah it's not carrying on and of course education is gonna get it first right i mean it's like that's of course it's gonna get it first so ai is gonna sweep into this what the hell do you think ai even is if you don't think it's gonna completely turn this old sector on its hair. So, yeah. So, I mean, it's good, though, in a sort of sense that it's

gutting the cathedral, which had already become a sort of just this instrument of reproduction for a certain outmoded set of social relations, right? Now, the the assumption we're running with here is that, you know, children are not just born with a natural inclination towards discipline. Of course, in some cases, obviously, but generally speaking, kids are going to get most of what they get from those first few years with their parents. and so you know that's one of the things that's admirable about uh the jd vance sort of influence

uh with maga is that like families matter let's take that a lot more seriously and i think that's one of the ways that you could have common cause across pretty much any political or religious divide is just to be like look we believe that parents need to be reading books with their children whether or not you think drag queens should be reading books with children we can all agree parents should be reading with their children and that's the only way and that means that for someone like us like now that we're older and we wish we had learned greek at an early age well guess what we can learn it still if we just spend that time with our children right yeah yeah i think that's an awesomely great point to make yeah i think that's an awesomely great point to

I mean, I think, yeah, if you try to raise your kids with the education you missed, you're doing something truly great. That's for sure, yeah. But, I mean, it's so complicated. I mean, it's like, you know, like just on this self-discipline thing, like where the hell does that come from? I mean, like, it's genes, it's nurture, it's like, you know, it's no one knows. It's a complicated thing, isn't it? And it just comes to you as like, I mean, speaking personally, like just fate, fortune. Like, you know, I'm not at all inclined to preach about how people should treat their kids.

I feel I've just been absolutely blessed in this way. I mean, so, yeah, I don't know how you do that. I mean, if you were going to say, like, my kid is naturally completely like self-discipline, is this something I can, I don't know. Fortunately, thank the Lord, that is not a problem I've had to face, you know. I don't know. Did you let them go on phones at a young age? Do they have tablets? They've just basically believed themselves. We've been like, you know, we've been total liberals and our kids have been like, yeah, but they've rebelled. They've rebelled against our libertarianism by being like hyper-responsible, hyper-responsible, conservative.

So they don't, they're not like the tap, they're not like the. This is a one generation male thing. so they're not like the iPad generation super ADHD then yeah no but we literally not had that oh my gosh I'm sort of almost a bit nervous about being this I hope my family's not going to be like where the hell were you talking about us on this podcast oh no it's not something I've done and I probably shouldn't make a habit of that no no no we don't want to make a habit out of getting you there And I did want to quick segue into libertarianism and the AOE. I know we got to close out, but you've got a message you need to share with libertarians out there.

Elon Musk has this libertarian streak. He's taking the doge thing too literal. Maybe it's autism. Maybe it's psychosis. But this libertarian idea taken too far, I think, is kind of what I wanted to bring. Because if you're sympathetic to the AOE, right? Well, the reason you were – and let's see if I can get this right. But you were a lot more down with the Lemurian, neo-Lemurian time sorcery because it's capital and it's de-territorialization. And if the AOE is more about territorialization, well, you're still for capitalism. So what does it mean that you're for capitalism but you're anti-immigration when immigration is such an important part of capitalism?

And you have like the Cato Institute and the Koch brothers and they're pro-immigration as well. And it's because they're capitalist, right? And so if you're capitalist, why are you not more for this kind of de-territorializing force of capital? and what are you when did this change in you is there a theory reason for this change and what would you tell those libertarians what would I tell those libertarians well I think that there's a big shift going on as I'm sure you guys are well aware and like you know I've got libertarian mute on X and

And I probably select them in a rightward direction. And they are also in this thing that it's like, if you want, let's forget libertarianism, let's say liberalism. You know, what does it take to preserve a liberal society? and I mean the big catastrophic error of the kind of you know mainstream libertarianism and the leftist versions of that is that you know anything goes the whole world can become a libertarian theme park

I mean that's absolutely not true I mean there are kind of ultra foundations of a liberal society that are quite fragile, they're quite rare. They require very distinct characteristics. And they simply are not globalizable in any realistic fashion. If you globalize them, you totally lose them. You know, it's just to say, like, our culture means nothing, our tradition means nothing. Liberalism, in the most facile libertarian thing, libertarianism is like just something in the air, you know?

It's like you just read Milton Friedman, you read Mises, and you just become a libertarian, and that could just happen anywhere. and you know, that seems to me obviously preposterously, stupidly wrong. You know, liberal societies have come out of very distinctive traditions and they are surprisingly fragile and you know I'm in my circle I think sort of stereotypically liberal in the sense that I'm very

into a certain amount of ethnic sort of complexity and all of these things. I love model minorities. I love Chinatowns. I love all of this kind of stuff. But to go from there to this, just open borders, third world, pouring, and we're still going to have a liberal society? I mean, forget what I think. I don't think anyone believes that anymore. And people don't even believe that. Even the ethnic minorities I'm very sympathetic to and like a lot are also in the crosshairs like

the obvious example of this is Indians after this whole H1B thing I mean the amount of anti Indian shit that I've seen anti Hindu Indian it's just huge I mean I like Indians like I mean I don't have any of this animus but I totally understand that because I because what's happened is just this notion that you can just completely obliterate your ethnic foundations and you can still have the kind of society that is based on those ethnic foundations. That's just bullshit. That's obviously total bullshit. And it's like, I don't

think I really have to make a big argument for that because I think everyone thinks that. Now that's like, that is the big sea change that is happening in Europe, in America. It's like, you know, our culture doesn't come out of the void. Culture comes out of actual lineages, out of people, out of a tradition. And if you screw over those things, then you don't have that anymore. I think a testament to that fact is that Anne was an international baccalaureate, which is for people unaware of what that really means in the U.S., I didn't know before. It's basically, it's more advanced than AP sections of, say, science or what have you.

You know, AP being advanced. Well, the International Baccalaureate is even beyond that. And so I've, you know, it's been revealing to me through our conversations. she read a sum total of zero biographies or autobiographies in her entire k-12 education as well as her entire uh bachelor's you know at the university no no autobiographies no biographies not even like you know oh you know no like primary texts of sociology when i was a sociology student. Yeah. No primary texts at all, really. That's what we're getting at. And so, of course, none of the canon, no Republic, no KJV, no Iliad, maybe a little Shakespeare.

Yeah. Some Shakespeare. Okay. I read some other Greek play. One play they do. Like all these things. You do a Shakespeare play. Right. and so the idea that this is what you're getting at with ethnicity and culture is the idea of like no but like when we're talking progeny and we're talking about posterity when we're talking you know it's true if you read benjamin franklin if you read uh john adams if you read uh jefferson like they're all talking and about uh uh not not only posterity but i've also come to this realization that i mean really this blew my mind when i started thinking about it it was almost Because I've been thinking about the collapse of the private and the public ever since reading The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt where she talks about socialization undermining the integrity of this distinction that was established in Greece.

Well, what was the private though for the founding fathers? The private, let's say, letter exchanges with one spouse. the private let's say a private letter exchange with a rival these were addressed to posterity so like these were not private in the sense of like it's secrets that will die with you these were private in the sense that well this isn't going to be in the newspaper tomorrow or while we're breathing but this will be for the record for our descendants to judge and there's a fun little anecdote that gets at this because both Benjamin Franklin and John Adams shared a bedroom when they were staying in Paris. I don't know if you've heard this story, but they had an argument

about whether the window should be up or down, right? One of them wants the cool air in, one wants to be warmer. Anne and I have this problem all the time, of course. And so, you know, they have an argument about it and both of them tell Posterity that they won the argument in their diary. Yeah, but this is ultimately what we're getting at when we think about culture. And it's kind of crazy to me that the people who want to act like it doesn't exist, or it doesn't have to be carefully maintained, will be the people who say, oh, well, you know, the Lakota Native American people, they have this rule about thinking seven generations forward. And it's like, yeah, actually, so did the founding fathers. What are you talking about? So did the Hebrews. What are we talking

about? So, yeah, I mean, it's look, it's complicated by the fact that Anglos are so weird because Anglos are very inviting of other cultures. You know, they're very, it is just what they are. I mean, you know, they go, they go to India, they become Hindus. They start, you know they become vedic mystics they marry indian i mean it's like you know and i don't think that's a bad thing i mean i think a lot of the people i talk to now just think that's just a terrible thing you know anglos just deserve to die because they do this and they do do this

i mean i'm on this thing like i have to fall back on providential history like you i you know the lofty powers will forgive us for this we're doing something that's good but you don't go from that to just saying culture is nothing extinguish it the very notion of having a culture is wrong, it's racist we don't even think you've got a culture this absolutely crazy extrapolation of these Anglo impulses to complete ethnic racial suicide as some kind of moral imperative

is a horrible thing that is coming to an end I mean it is coming to an end it could go there's horrible things in the other direction that could happen so it's not like I'm just sanguine about oh great you know but for sure this particular insane path that we were on, our people were on, is going to stop. And it's going to stop before its own it has its own just lunatic utopian models that like we're going to just like interbreed everybody until like there's just not any ethnicity or racial identity left.

Sorry guys, that's just like You're on the wrong timescale. That's not going to happen. You know, this thing is coming to a climax, pretty or ugly, whatever it may be, way before that. So just step back from the utopian fucking theorizing and just think, what is a realistic thing? I mean I think I'm a bit like you know notorious for having said that's gonna for having criticized what I think is going to be an overreaction like a lot of this like there's a lot of like an Anglo or worse

because I think more meaningless white ethnic resistance or like pushback or whatever that's gonna I think just way over the top. You know, and he's going to lose a lot of really good stuff. I mean, there is a level of multiculturalism that's just really awesome, you know, and it's like, I mean, I, as a kind of right-wing liberal, I love roof Koreans, you know, I love Chinatowns, there's a whole bunch of this stuff I think is just great, and it's what makes me proud to come from that tradition, and I'm worried that that's going to come under a lot of pressure. But things went so insane in the other direction

that it really takes a lot of optimism now to think they're not going to swing back too far the other way. Right. And so maybe, you know, to close out, we started with kind of a current event, Trump and Musk, and so we can kind of end on the really current event, which are these L.A. immigration riots. Um, and like, once again, we're seeing just chaotic, crazy protests, very reminiscent of BLM and lots of other kind of leftist activist, anarchist activist behaviors that like, I'm, I won just haven't quite been following that much. So I don't entirely know the facts of, okay, National Guard, what's Trump's response?

What's going on with the governor? But I'm just curious, yeah, how these people are thinking that this is a good move for their kind of pro-immigration, pro-multicultural stance when we're getting images of masked people destroying police cars holding a Mexican flag in California. Like, that's not a good look. um and so i i just truly wonder like what is to come of this for these activists what is the trump administration like this this surely is not going to help the democrats like they just are like ah yes and they're just i think getting lower and lower in public opinion cory booker's over here just repeatedly saying that it's uh that these are peaceful protests

it's like yeah yeah yeah so i guess what what do you make of that in in relation to all of this and kind of where what's gonna come from this how is will this help trump is trump's response to severe because i think it also is like scary to see oh a police uh a reporter got shot in the leg with a rubber bullet well should she have been in the way probably not but still that's not a good precedent to be setting that we're all now shooting at reporters in the street so it's just all chaos coming from both sides and i'm yeah curious what what you make of all of it i mean obviously i my prediction is like as far as i'm concerned overreaction you know i'm i think the left has

been so completely insane that all the good stuff in in their program is being just burnt on the altar of just what people like virtue signaling you know it's just like and i think it ties up with your antenatal or something i just don't think they give a i mean like they they give it if you cared about the future you'd have kids um if you don't like you just think it you know some gestural on social media is is all i care about and then you get it's gonna swing crazy is going to over swing the other way I mean I'm not going to look further

down the line than that but the point is there's other trends that are happening so fast that even this level of crazy monkey politics is just going to get swamped by stuff well once we've got high level artificial intelligences kicking around like this is all going to look like such a sideshow. This is just like what we were doing, what we were doing as a species just before superintelligence arrived on this planet. I mean, it's kind of embarrassing. I mean, we just have to hope they have that kind of let's save the pandas attitude, I think.

all right well nick it's been a pleasure to have you back yeah thank you so much yeah i know i've enjoyed it a lot guys so yeah good luck with this okay so thank you so much yeah it's been great and i'm sure i'm sure we'll be back all together again one day in the future yeah always lots to talk about but this has been really great conversation it's been nice to get to meet you. Awesome. Yeah. Great. Great. Take care. Thank you so much. Have a great night. Take care. Yeah. Bye-bye. Subscribers get access to all past courses at Theory Underground from Chris Catrone to Michael Downs

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