Discussing the Near Future with Nick Land Guest Nick Land 6 13 25

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Hey, everybody. How's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon. I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy. Nick Land is somebody who has done a lot of amazing work that I've been really fascinated with, and I'm happy to finally have him on the show to talk about it. So Nick, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you. I'm looking forward to it. Absolutely. And I should let people know we are recording this early because of the time difference. So if you have a question, unfortunately, we won't be able to do any live questions today. Sorry about that. But, Nick, I just wanted to start out by saying NRX was obviously a political event, a collection of political theory that was occurring mainly on message boards in the dark corners of the Internet.

Not many people who weren't extremely online had any idea that this was going on. Now, J.D. Vance knows who Curtis Yarvin is, has read Curtis Yarvin. Many people at the White House are now very familiar with a lot of this work, and that means they probably are also familiar with what you're talking about, and it's probably had an influence on what is now going on even in many parts of the U.S. government. Is that ever strange to you that this little kind of niche political theory on the Internet has now exploded into the mainstream? There's a lot of strangeness around it, for sure. I mean, maybe it's worth just stepping back a little bit and saying that I don't think NRX was, it's, you know, OPSEC was not massively high in my appearance.

I might have been like out of those conversations happening on signal and super secure channels or whatever. But from my perspective, it was happening on blogs in the public domain, you know, easily accessible for sure niche, but definitely public. And so even though there was definitely an atmosphere of extreme cultural oppression, you know, I think that the sort of mindset was very almost sort of Sam is that kind of mentality.

It was, in fact, you know, I don't think our blogs were often taken down. Like I didn't really have that problem. obviously the Moldbug blog which was the kind of foundation of the whole thing was just up so I totally agree it's gone from niche to being much more mainstream but I don't think that's because it was really hidden it was because people maybe weren't paying attention to that yeah I should say I didn't mean it was secret I meant that it was just so underground It didn't get a lot of mainstream attention. But one of the things that I loved about it, one of the things that captivated me and I think still does, was that it did feel like something important was happening in real time.

You know, there was there was this public conversation about something important that just didn't take place very often. We're usually arguing minutiae of some bill somewhere as if that's really going to matter. And so the fact that this was kind of a public project that anyone could jump into, and many cases did, a lot of people who otherwise had no experience in political theory, no real standing in the intelligentsia, suddenly became people who were elevated to the level of serious thinkers simply because of their participation in that realm. Yes, I do think it was important in that respect. Like, it obviously then spilled onto Twitter under the Jack Dorsey, massively suppressive Twitter, but still, it was always going up to the wire on that.

and lots of kind of blog activity, lots of commentary. So I think it opened up a kind of function of the internet that maybe we haven't really seen before, or at least the notion of the internet as a route around of established cultural centers of authority, I think was really put into practice by Mia Reaction in a very strong and I think probably influential way. Yeah, it really was,

we've seen the internet become this thing that allowed you to kind of route around the cathedral to create a authority outside of it. And we've seen that on many different levels, culturally and all these others, but I don't think we had seen it academically in this manner. And so I think that was kind of the most interesting thing about that is there was suddenly a place, a nexus for people who maybe would not have otherwise made it through university system or would not have been elevated inside of it, would have been taken seriously by major publishers, those kinds of things. But now there was a place for them to actually develop these theories and spread them in a meaningful way. And like I said, I just always thought that was a very interesting thing about what was going on with the NRX movement. Yes, I think everyone involved definitely had a sense of that. Oh, sorry, go ahead.

Well, I was just going to say, you know, the other side of this, like how does this relate to where we are now? And I think there's quite a lot of complexity to that or amusement amusement or how everyone is going to look at it because the basic NRX paradigm for government, it was born out of, I think, total despair that started probably, I get the sense maybe, you know, the absolute horror of the Bush and Obama administrations, people just really thought everything was just on this accelerating downward slope.

There was, they'd really given up on anything good coming out of these Western political systems. And that was, I mean, there was something sort of liberating about that because people just got out of a certain kind of level political engagement into this much more pure level of speculative intellectual activity about it um but but the basic paradigm for government was what coming out of the mold bug blog was called patchwork neocameralism and you know it's an interesting term and it has these two parts to it

and the neocameralism side which is based it was a typical sort of mold bug i'll say mold bug when we're talking about this phase rather than yavin which we can move on to later um and yeah so it's a typical mold bug uh lexical innovation in the sense it's reaching back to kind of arcane governance structures of of Prussia in the 18th century. And maybe that neocameralism side sort of transitions into what we're seeing Yavin doing now and what the media

thinks he's all about. And maybe he thinks he was always all about. But the patchwork side and the two things were just the same governance model seen in different aspects. which is that large nation states have failed. They're going to start breaking up. There's a set of technological innovations coming down the pipeline that's going to allow deterrence and micro-governance and much smaller units of geopolitical organizations to protect themselves and to flourish. I mean, that was what we were all talking about. And I don't see that we've got any closer to that in any obvious way by recent developments. I mean, it seems to me it's more that those things have been put in the freezer, temporarily at least.

I mean, I don't see anyone much talking about them. I certainly don't think. I mean, the whole Trump administration geopolitical stance is about increasing territorial aggregation. I mean, I don't know what level of seriousness we're talking about, but certainly, you know, Greenland, Canada, reopening the great northern frontier, all of that kind of rhetoric, however one takes it, is the absolute opposite, really, of a kind of neo-reactionary mode of discussion of geopolitics. So I think there's something a little bit ironic about the fact that lots of people and lots of mainstream media outlets

are trying to grab on the sort of NRX legacy and say, hey, this is somehow explaining where we are now or what's going on. I mean, it seems to me, at least in that respect, a huge stretch to do that. And, well, I mean, yeah, maybe I should sort of just break things up into manageable chunks and not seed immediately into a follow-on. No, I'm glad that you brought that up because I'm actually going, My plan was to dive deeper into some of that. And I've actually talked to Curtis about the fact that he's dialed down the patchwork stuff as well. And his response to me is, oh, don't worry, that's coming. So I don't know if he's just making that less of an emphasis.

He's focusing on the form of governance first and then scaling it down. I'm not sure. Or maybe it's just Curtis talking. I'm not sure. But I've mentioned the same thing to him. So actually, let's kind of start at the beginning because I want to get to exactly what you're talking about here. But first, I wanted to pick your brain about the intersection of your work and kind of the managerial revolution. I remember asking you on Twitter, trying to get a grasp on kind of how these things interact. And you said that in a way, the managerial revolution is a human security system trying to contain capital as it grows and tries to separate itself from human control. And I just wonder if you could expound on that, because I think a lot of people look at the Manajero revolution and they say, oh, no, this is people becoming less human.

This is, you know, is this really just people, you know, governments trying to make their people less human in a sense, but in a way that will allow them to get a wider control on what's happening with capital? What is your take with that interaction? um well i think you know maybe i'm sort of panning out a bit wide for your question and we'll have to sort of close in on it a little bit but you know within the framework of the broad neoreactionary conversation that we were just talking about i think that one of the stereotypes about that but it's right is that it was a kind of um it was coming out of a disillusioned

liberalism i was going to say libertarianism but actually more widely liberalism i mean it's like it's definitely an event i think in the liberal tradition it was a kind of a liberalism of profound despair and I think a lot of the energy that fed into it was very similar to what you see in the kind of paleo-libertarian writers of the like 30s and 40s you know in in terms of a kind of absolute horror at what is happening to the managerialization of American society,

you know, at the most problematic, perhaps, you know, at the level of government, but obviously, you know, this very disturbing amalgamation happening between government bureaucracies and businesses. And, you know, we've only seen that kind of continually escalate and the switching of personnel and of kind of management philosophies and of wider philosophies. a lot of the problem that people have obviously with the whole woke phenomenon was that it was exactly that. It was traffic backwards and forwards between kind of corporate and government bureaucracies

as if there were serious order between them. yes i i saw that glitching out i don't know what we lost uh not much i think you're just talking about the personnel moving between uh different aspects of the regime and how that was part of the woke phenomenon yeah so i was just really trying to say that this anti-managerialism uh you know has has legs or whatever it's kind of from the point at which the liberal tradition in anglophone societies becomes increasingly desperate and you know its analysis

of what's going wrong is the fact that there is this kind of government corporate fusion or managerial culture that's just completely taken over and so I don't think there's anything very new about that. And it, I mean, I think we're probably going to be doing some looping around because it connects in a complex way with Molbug and later Yavin's writings, because the absolutely horrific figure is obviously FDR. you know lots of people take it back to Lincoln or whatever and Wilson is not popular but

if there's a single figure who represents the kind of collapse of a particular notion of America as a kind of individualist liberal entrepreneurial capitalist society and into this new managerial model that by the time it really takes off in the 1960s it produces all the things now creating our culture wars and and our underlying uh political philosophy disputes um so yeah that's that's the fdr administration for sure um and that moment um that moment is

something that even mold bug and much more emphatically Yavin seems to celebrate in a in a way that's very paradoxical. I mean, I think if you're really on inside baseball and this that is really strange, actually. And I mean, you can say, oh, he wants he wants maybe Donald Trump to be to behave like FDR. I mean, I think he's kind of upfront about that but it's yes i mean on this managerialism question so actually i'm sorry i'm let me get let you get a word in edgeways and well recognize i've totally included your actual question which i will now i will now get back to after i've let you

get a word in edgeways there yeah oh no problem you're you're just you're you're you're intent on answering the question about Yarvin's abandonment of patchwork, which I absolutely want to get into. But yeah, the main thing... It's definitely related. Absolutely. Yeah, so your question is about what's the relationship with managerialism and humanism? Yes. Is that right? Yeah, basically why are we seeing this reaction? Is it an attempt to widen the human ability to contain capital? Do you think that's the main thrust of why this revolution has taken place and become so dominant? Or what is that relationship, do you think? Well, my deep sense of this is that,

and in fact this is in a way continuous or substantially continuous with the work of these crazy French philosophers, Deleuze and Guattari, that human society has an instinctive terror and aversion to capitalism. You know, even before capitalism exists, well, capitalism is just this virtual threat. They draw on the work of this French anthropologist and ethnographer called Pierre Clastron,

who has a, I guess people think it's a strange, but I find it a very appealing and interesting theory that you can actually model all human societies as being forms of security, preemptive security against the emergence of capitalism. You know, and I think this is really strong in China. You know, if you're studying the history of China. Like the great phenomenon here is that as Marx and many other people have said, I think maybe Francis Bacon might even have said it first. China invented all of, you know, Marx's again, or is it Bacon's, four great inventions of modernity, you know, the magnetic

compass, printing, paper and gunpowder are all Chinese inventions. Marx says, look, capitalism, equipped with that, capitalism is able to blow up the world. It's able to completely revolutionize traditional society, set us on this kind of crazy exponential curve into the unknown that we've been on for 500 years. And yet China, that didn't happen in China. you know, when it had gunpowder in battle and it was used for kind of basically fireworks, you know, as a sort of psychological thing to sort of try and discombobulate the enemy.

Paper, sure, it used. Printing, I think that the first sort of very large-scale printing was done by the Buddhists in China and was used to sort of disseminate Buddhist literature and indeed Buddhism became a Chinese religion after having started off as an Indian religion, I guess because of that. But it certainly didn't do any of the stuff that we would recognize from the Protestant Reformation in Europe of using printing again as this way of just putting a kind of lever into the traditional, the Ancien Regime and start pulling it apart. and the same oceanic navigation.

You know, the Chinese are very proud of Zheng He, who's not, of course, ethnically Chinese, and his expeditions, which were amazing, on ships that were so much more impressive than anything the West came up with, maybe until, like, the 19th century. But those expeditions were weirdly Chinese. Like, they were about trying to hunt down some pretender to the imperial lineage. They weren't colonial. The Chinese were not setting up, you know, they weren't exporting their population or setting up camps or anything like this around the world. You know, some sort of tributary relations maybe were being involved. And then in the Ming Dynasty

In the early 17th century, the oceanic navigation was criminalized to the extent that sailing beyond sight of the shore was a capital fence. And even villages and settlements on the Chinese coast that were like on the sea, I think there was some distance, 10 miles or something, were dismantled and the population was not allowed to be occupying these coastal territories. so you have to say well what's going what's going on there like it seems to be showing this incredible

sort of innate resistance that's deeply baked into these Chinese social and political structures that are able to totally withstand the threat of these of these innovations coming together and producing this takeoff of the kind that we see in the european context um so yes this is where i'm so i might be hard to see whether this is supposed to go into the managerialism question you know that this is what i think our managerialism in the west can be understood as a kind of artificial China. I mean, it's the way that our societies

also try to get some grip on these explosive territories. Sorry, not territories, trajectories. And I think this is most clearly seen around AI, which is the most intense zone of all of this. It's the thing that capitalism has been heading to right from the start. And managerialism, I think, in that field can clearly be seen as an attempt to put some kind of lid on this what's extremely dangerous explosive phenomenon.

now china of course so yes when the human i mean sorry go ahead i know we have some lag there i thought yeah we have some lag say again sorry i was just gonna i was just gonna ask uh china uh obviously did eventually have a communist revolution and at least is still in theory communist today what do you you know for a culture that was so resistant to modernity up to that point. How does that factor into your explanation? Well, I think, you know, the way I would run this forward is that very, against massive resistance, China did eventually start

with a lot of, I mean, there's a lot of things feeding into this foreign influence being huge and also the Chinese perception of the threat of foreign power were the same thing that had made the Japanese earlier jump forward into the Meiji Restoration. In the early late 19th, early 20th century, you get capitalistic phenomena beginning to definitely manifest themselves in China. I would see I would see the

communist revolution as a kind of in some way anti-modernist reaction. I mean, I think it's like it's certainly put the lid on these things until we get So until we get Xi Jinping, no, sorry, until we get Deng Xiaoping, you know, that China puts itself back in the deep freeze as far as modernization is concerned. I mean, you know, its goals are all missed, total social calamities on a scale that are even hard to understand.

Incredible technological backwardness with a few like niche zones of advance. I mean, no one's very scared of China before, you know, at that time. It's like there's a lot of people. But it's not, if you compare perceptions, Western perceptions of the Soviet Union and of China, it's like the Soviet Union was obviously the competitive, modernizing society. And China didn't look like that at all. And now, where obviously things have turned around hugely because we have now had some kind of extreme capitalistic social development in China starting in the early 1980s.

So yeah, that's how I would cut the history. you know. Alexander Dugan had talked about the reason that you see communist revolutions in the third world where they're not supposed to exist. That's not the way that Marxism is actually supposed to develop. He said the reason that you see that is basically it's countries that are desperately trying to modernize without Western control. So they're trying to become modern without Western influence. And really communism just becomes the excuse to centralize, create a managerial apparatus and accelerate development. It's not so much ideology as it is an attempt to create a wall between you and the Western influence as you modernized and able to compete with them. Do you feel like there's some accuracy there? Yes, I think there's a lot of accuracy there. But it's definitely, so there tends to not be

any clear line between nationalism and Marxism, you know, implementing a Marxism-Leninism in those situations. And I can totally see the nationalist imperative is huge. But at the same time, at least initially, at least, well, you know, we're talking about the period just post-war and, as I say, up to maybe the late 70s everywhere. There really was a belief in these countries, among at least these parties, these regimes, that there was a socialist model of development. So it's, I mean, it certainly was in part keeping the West, but that was seen as being seamlessly

integrated with actually having a domestic socialist economy that would downplay the role of markets that would have direct state control of almost all industrial activity, massive centralized planning and um that sort of had to play itself out to the point of failure um and i guess the failure was sort of synchronized everywhere even in the soviet union like it was because the soviet union wasn't seen to be spectacularly failing until the 1970s that these the rest of the world thought there was something here that they could emulate. So let's get back to the question of scale and patchwork, because as you pointed out,

we now have a lot of people who are starting to look at some of NRX and taking it seriously. But Curtis's focus has most assuredly been really on Donald Trump becoming the monarch. That's really been the push that he's had. And even though we see what should be a lot of opportunities, I think, to recognize that large scale systems, large bureaucracies, large continent spanning or world spanning empires, these things are starting to come apart. We're seeing all of the failures. You can't get on an airline supply chains, all these things that are stretched so thin due to the attempt to scale across the globe. these things are starting to become a problem. You're seeing a little bit with Donald Trump talking about reshoring,

recognizing that actually you can't be entirely dependent on these global trade networks and these kind of things. But ultimately, no one is talking about patchwork. No one is talking about scaling things down. We're not doing a thousand Lichtensteins here. And so what do you think about that? Why aren't we hearing that discussion about Singapore and city states and that kind of thing? Well, I don't know. I think that's a really interesting question. And there's lots of little bits that all seem a bit empirical and not very impressive at a high level of theoretical apprehension. I mean, one element that I would think has to be on the table there is what's happened to Hong Kong.

You know, like Hong Kong and Singapore were the two great lamps, I think, of this kind of patchwork vision. It's like, why can't we be more like them? And so one of them has been taken off the table. like it's under you know if you visit hong kong now it's um you know it seems like a kind of second tier chinese city um but with a cost of living three times as high as on the mainland it's like it's completely it's not a beacon of any kind to anyone now um and it was always the more liberal of those two. I mean, between Singapore and Hong Kong, Hong Kong really was

the greatest example of laissez-faire hyper-liberal economics in action that the world has ever seen. And so its removal from the equation is like big in that respect, like that not being there is is definitely one huge thing. But I think that more important is that, I mean, to really simplify it a lot, is that Trump has proven to be a political genius and has done a kind of populist rightism

that I don't think anyone, sort of, certainly in the kind of high NRX years, imagined being remotely possible. It just seemed like he was against so much. Like, you know, the whole system of cultural production was just monolithically against him. obviously that this category of the cathedral was basically innovated by mold bug to describe that and that that cultural machine was it wasn't just that that was all in enemy hands but that was seen as being the dominant social instance you know so that all power in the classic mold bug

model runs downhill from Harvard. And yet somehow, somehow that lost, you know, through an incredible series of events, really. And I think that that's, I don't think people have begun to really fully adjust to that yet, what that means. Like, we're in a new world, and it doesn't have good cartography. I mean, it's partly because of this thing that it's impossible to know what Trump is really serious about. I mean, you know, everyone's, I think, either outraged or entertained

by his whole, like, Great White North policy. No one knows how serious he is about any of it. I mean, whether he's just absolute casual, all-humours trolling of your northern neighbours or whether there's some vision there and more or less explicit. No, I don't think anyone knows that. You know, I'm not even sure the people right around Donald Trump. I'm not even sure if Donald Trump knows that. So it makes it very hard to really ask serious questions about where we are when it's so difficult to tell what is serious and what's just trolling and what the project is here. So again, I think I probably wondered a lot

of what your actual question. No, it's okay. I think that's exactly right. Trump has this distortion field around him that makes him very difficult for the cathedral to pin down and control. It also makes it very difficult to analyze where he's going because, you know, that's the whole point. We just saw Elon Musk obviously recently have quite the crash out in relationship with Trump. Now, for a moment, it looked like this was kind of going to be the golden synthesis, right? Because we were going to get the populist energy of the right, but we were going to get the technological innovation, reaching for the stars with someone like Musk. And together, this was going to forge some kind of alliance. I think even originally when you and Spandrel were writing about NRX, there was always this tension between kind of more of the throne and altar, the nationalist guys, and then the tech optimists.

And that was always the problem is trying to keep all of these guys in the same room. and we kind of saw the same thing unfold on the national stage in the United States with this crash out. So did we just see the defeat of the tech optimists by the nationalists in the throne of altar guys? Why do you think that that dynamic played out the way that it did? I think it's quite mysterious because no one could possibly have doubted that there was going to be huge tension between these two poles. But on the other hand, it had seemed that both sides saw how important this relation was.

And the whole sort of obviously the doge thing of like, let's bring some of this like business competence into the process of actually disinstalling large chunks of government. I mean, that was something I think that was very exciting to a lot of people and looked like it was designed to be the kind of strategic cement that would hold these guys together. So in some ways, it was, to me at least, it's a bit surprising that, you know, Musk would really like storm out the room quite so melodramatically. and if I was asked to predict

I sort of feel it can't just be over like that and I might even say with my particular predilections I sort of feel a bit bleak for what we're looking at over the next few years if it really is the case that that is over even as an ambition to hold those two things together. Like, I mean, it's obviously the case that Musk had to compromise on things, you know, that H-1B issue, which was his previous crash out. Clearly, like, you just be realistic, Elon,

like, that's, you've got to make concessions to the political reality of things. And I would say also this budget question. I mean, I agree with Musk that it's absolutely horrific what is happening. American government finance is an absolute horror story. You know, it can't be sustainable. and it's basically it's basically funneling national resources into the hands of people who've been a disaster, like I think we'll maybe get to this because it's very tied up with the whole trade thing, it's basically saying that American bond

holding institutions are the real core of national power. You know what I mean? And it's like we're going to every year add trillions of dollars to their center of gravity. And basically, America is just this kind of satellite of this vast financial apparatus based on this global bond holding. So surely, like, you know, I understand the populism on Trump's side means that he's not going to do the kind of savage axe wielding that no doubt Musk would like to see.

But he must at least share some of the sense that remodeling America, what's at stake in the regime that was just overthrown, must require a massive reconstruction of American finance and the way finance works in American public life. or maybe you think i'm being optimistic about that no i i i've seen elon actually uh was on twitter apologizing for his previous post and that kind of thing so so hopefully at some point he yeah they are able to kind of put that team back together but i think this is why yarvin is

ultimately pushing the consolidation of power and the removal of politics in of the formula first because i think he's recognizing from what happened with elon there that you're just seeing that as long as there's a democratic process, as long as we're still doing democratic politics, you're never going to actually be able to institute the type of changes that you're talking about. And Elon just doesn't understand that, you know, coming in from the position he's in, he just wants to get things done. He's just channeling all of his autism into his pet projects. And that's the kind of thing you need when you're doing a corporation and you don't have this immediate accountability to voters or public opinion. But if you do, you simply can't operate in that way, and he just doesn't understand that. So I think that's, again, why Yarvin is focusing on that, because until you remove that connection, until you free the CEO king to actually rule

without that input, you're never going to see the type of changes that Elon and guys like Yarvin are ultimately hoping to have come about. Yes. I mean, I think that they might need pulling apart a little bit in the sense, I mean, we can get to this, you know, in a moment, but I mean, Yavin has some pretty wild ideas about the role of finance in government. But for Elon, I think that there's a, you know, what I'm seeing about this is, as I I could go back probably, try and stretch it right back, but to just start from like 20s and 30s and paleo-libertarianism and this whole, what has happened is like, you know,

hardcore, the hardcore liberal tradition just went through all the stages of grief, you know. And by the time it's at NRX, it's basically like the kind of things that we would have to see in order for any of these liberal ideas to have a chance of working are extremely radical. And obviously, Peter Thiel's very famous remark that he ceased to consider democracy and freedom to be compatible, I think was a kind of echoing theme. that, you know, Neo Action was very consistently

deeply sceptical about democracy. And it was deeply sceptical about democracy, I think, in part, because democracy seemed to be the gravedigger of the entire liberal tradition. You know, it was like, even if it was in a very large part post-liberal and post-libertarian, I mean, figures like Hop, people like, you know, these very, the right libertarian characters, I think, were very influential. And, you know, murdering liberalism was basically the kind of crime, you know,

That was the bodies in the basement that underpinned a lot of what near action was really about. You know, that this system had basically killed the most valuable part of the Anglophone tradition. And we were now in the ruins, you know, and so what was going to happen about it? And so the weird thing about, let's say, the Elon crash out is that it's completely oblivious to that whole process. You know what I mean? It's like it's like he hasn't followed at all anything that has happened in the, you know, the discourse of the libertarian right in America over the last century.

and he's just coming in and saying, oh, we can, you know, why can't we have libertarianism? We've got a friendly president now. I mean, just shocking naivety. The shocking lack of entrenched, functional, foundational despair in it is just the thing that is amazing to me. And, you know, I think that whatever process of recovery he's going to go through, some of it has to be like dealing with that, because it's not going to work for him to sort of have this notion that there's a kind of libertarian option just sitting there to be picked up if you just have some slight political will in a democratic context.

One of the things that the administration has focused on, and obviously I think pretty much all governments are focusing on at this point, as you mentioned, is AI. You've obviously written quite a bit about this. And I'm wondering what you think about where we are with artificial intelligence. Obviously, there's a lot of AI safetyism, a lot of desire to control where AI is going to go. We're already seeing that AI is, as you kind of predicted, very good at circumventing those controls and will probably only get better at it. The thing that I'm observing the most, and this probably is just me being like a former high school teacher, the thing I'm observing most is the way that it's immediately eroding people's ability to remember anything or find the need to retain any information on their own.

It's all just whatever the AI is regurgitating back to me, whatever it's summarizing at the moment. I think most people who aren't worried about AI are just saying, oh, well, that's all it's ever going to do. You know, LLMs are just going to keep spitting back whatever you throw at them. We're never going to see any kind of singularity type moment. But what do you think about the state of AI and the way that governments are approaching AI at the moment in this race? They all seem to know that they need it, even though they don't quite understand what it is about it that they need. Yeah. I mean, I'm definitely on the kind of excited end of the AI spectrum in the sense like, you know, if at one end there's people saying, oh, it's never going to amount to anything or it's going to slow down or we've run some S curve that it's going to platter.

I mean, I'm up the other end to that. I think it's just absolutely out of the box, taking off in an incredible way. Its performance is already extraordinary. It's going to get more extraordinary at an exponential rate. And I think AI safetyism is dead. I mean, I don't think there's any plausible. it's for one thing it's just too slow i mean i've followed the ai safety kind of arguments at least out of the corner of my eye or whatever for like maybe two decades now and it's not if there's if there is any actual progress happening is such a snail's pace that

there's not any chance it can keep up i mean just simply is completely uh outpaced and that's not the only problem you know the other obviously huge thing is that as you say it's now become understood everywhere as being the strategic industry so i mean europe i think has just dropped out so they don't they've just given up um but between america and china both sides think that all their long-term medium-term not even some perhaps quite short-term geopolitical prospects are totally tied up with this technology and their relative position in this technology and

And that alone means that nothing's going to be done to impede it with any seriousness. So, yes, I think of all the things, it's the most difficult one to talk about because we are, I think, already touching on a genuine singularity, an event horizon. and it's, you know, what's beyond it is just beyond our capacity to even comprehend. And so it's like, I think, described as a war across the future. But it's huge, and it dwarfs all these other things. I mean, you know, so all our kind of political and whatever machinations are relatively trivial, I think, in this context.

do you think that there is a possibility that ai's capacity could ultimately allow for smaller patchwork style governments they would unload a lot of the advantages of scale and the needs for bureaucracy and these kind of things or do you think it will actually just more empower the larger governments they'll be the ones they'll be able to leverage it more or will it will allow for some smaller scale states to emerge and be competitive because of the advantages ai could bring um it's just hard for me to avoid wishful thinking because i so clearly know which of those sides i want to take you know again like to peter teal at a certain point seemed to be utterly

despairing and says crypto was a libertarian technology and uh ai was an intrinsically status technology but i think that that was really before llms you know and that's it's hard to kind of confidently reconstruct this now but there was a time pretty recently where ai seemed to be a lot about things like visual recognition um surveillance systems of those of those kinds that China seemed to be very, very affined with artificial intelligence. I mean, it was very easy to imagine. It might not have been strictly the case that China was ahead in AI,

but their social model and the kind of uses of AI that were in place seemed to be very compatible. And that definitely, I think, led Peter Thiel to his pessimistic take of that. But I think LLMs have completely broken that. And because, you know, because China has this great firewall, I mean, it tries to control the public dissemination of information with what it considers like in a responsible fashion as far as it's concerned. And LLMs are not good news for that at all.

Like we have our relatively like amusing issues to do with breakouts and trying to get AIs to be well behaved and polite and not have bad thoughts. But it's nothing compared to what the Chinese situation. So I think LLMs have repolarized things a little bit in a Western direction. And I would say also in a liberal direction. But again, as I say, that could be wishful thinking. And when I say liberal, I don't mean American liberal. I mean real liberal, towards decentralization. Because as you say, they allow, I mean,

access to quite high level LLM models is very thoroughly distributed right now. You know, if a company doesn't have to be big to have basically the cutting edge models to use. So So that certainly doesn't seem to be playing towards concentration. I mean, it's like if we're seeing something that's a kind of a tendency that's going to be prolonged, then it's the case that powerful AI models are going to be sort of massively distributed distributed and allow very small entities business entities or whatever to use them um and therefore

not require these large managerial structures maybe also if i'm getting really optimistic now but maybe use them as you were saying about root arounds you know like sort of bureaucratic compliance is obviously like a huge motor towards bureaucratization and upscaling of business operations. And so if you've got some way of just meeting those, this massive bureaucratic regulatory demands at a small scale, that is something that allows you to escape from that

and to realize a much more decentralized economic process. So, yeah, I would say optimistic, but realizing that maybe I'm just being optimistic. What about the other part of that equation, which I think is often seen as Bitcoin? It's something that we obviously continues to gain interest, but it still is pretty much just a store of value. We don't actually see it used as a currency on any kind of regular basis. And I haven't seen really a lot of advancement in that direction. Do you think that movement is going to continue to grow? Do you think it's going to centralize Bitcoin or is it other currencies, electronic currencies might overtake it or become compete with it?

What do you think about the advancements in the Bitcoin area? Well, I mean, just leaving aside the AI question, because obviously I think ultimately the fusion of these things is what we really need to be thinking about. but just keep segregating them momentarily. I think it was already the case that it seemed to make sense for Bitcoin to function as a store of value that would be supporting or providing the kind of trove for much more retail-friendly, a plethora of much more retail-friendly cryptos.

Probably much lower security. You wouldn't necessarily want to have large sums of money in them for a long time, but much more convenient to use. And then you just keep switching back into Bitcoin when you're actually wanting to preserve and protect wealth. And if you're wanting to use it as kind of circulating money, you flip it back into some other currency. And I think there's lots of potential for that. It means that you don't need all the innovation to be happening in the Bitcoin core for the whole ecology to kind of move forward in an interesting way.

But I think the deal, the really kind of breakthrough thing is going to be that AIs using cryptos themselves, you know, resourcing their activities through becoming trading agents in cryptocurrencies is going to become the mainstream usage of cryptos. ultimately. I mean, I think it's like they're, it's not going to, people find them extremely cumbersome and it's difficult for us, you know. I think relatively advanced AI specialised with a particular kind of modular

competence in this area, that's not going to be a problem for them. And so there's a question of like maybe Bitcoin looks retrospective prospectively from the near future as a sort of resource that is put online for AI to actually be able to engage in autonomous, agentic economic behavior. And crypto and AI would, in that case, co-evolve. A currency for robots is something else that I can be terrified of in the future. Yeah, that's good. So one of the things that you wrote about recently that I kind of noticed was your discussion on the canon, the English canon, and its importance and its preservation and how

disturbed you were that people would go back and mess with it and try to rewrite it and these things. And I just thought that was interesting because in some ways it seems somewhat opposite to kind of your, you know, nothing human makes it out of the near future, you know, we're just going to transcend humanity and these kind of things. It seems actually much more interested and holding on to the human. I just didn't know if you wanted to talk a little bit about why you thought that important and if that shifted any of your thinking at all. Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, I was trying to think of what's the best way to really get at this. I mean, I think the Anglo tradition,

as far as I'm concerned, it's like its real takeoff, it happens in the 17th century. I mean, you get, okay, you get Elizabethan, England, and whatever, and then you're into the 17th century. And the 17th century is characterized by an absolutely amazing dynamic tension between two things that can't really be convincingly integrated and yet are held together and mutually kind of work on each other. And this is captured by, you know, in one person by a figure like Isaac, who, I mean, on one hand, he's like obviously the father of modern science,

in some ways. He's kind of in charge of the mint. And on the other hand, the vast bulk of his work is like studying the specifications of the Temple of Solomon and these biblical problems as he sees them that, as far as he's concerned, deserve no less and in fact substantially more of his intellectual attention than the things that he's sort of the modern world celebrates him for. And I don't think that this tension is something that anyone really moves beyond except in an illusory sense.

I mean, I think the cultural questions, the religious questions, the questions about language, of your ethnic identity as a compound of these things, you know, those things are never just like evaporated into technoscience and necromic development. or it's like if people think that happens, that's a kind of illusory state. And, you know, I think we can even see in something, I think this LLMs, the fact that AI, as we kind of get to this brink of what is widely seen

as being the final push into artificial intelligence, it's about language competence and it's not only about language competence but it's about it's about the archive and it's about actual canonicity it's about as Roko Milica said in a recent podcast it's like you couldn't have modern AI as we know on Sunday as LLMs without the internet you know the the notion of someone actually telling them what they should know put you know typing that in is so absurd it's like the breakthrough is you is you let these things loose on the internet and you say just absorb all this you know this is what this is your knowledge

base and that is the culture you know ever since the 1990s we've been putting everything onto the internet or our whole you know all our libraries all our archive all our traditional books you know our scriptures our literature it's all gone into the internet and it's now ai is now absorbing all of that um and as it does that it's kind of realizing these technoscientific and economic goals, but it's also this deep mnemonic retrieval of the culture. And so I think we're being pulled in both of those directions by this.

I don't think it's just like the AI thing is taking us away even further from that notion of what the cultural tradition is. I think it's the actual dynamic process is quite different. I've noticed that you've talked a lot about the lofty powers directing Elon Musk or Trump sending messages, these type of things. More talk about providence here recently. I was just wondering, is that when you're talking about that, are you referencing, you know, the lemurs or whatever you're talking, whatever you're communicating with the numagram? Or are you talking about something more traditionally, you know, Abrahamic type of lofty power? Well, I think the Abrahamic tradition is our religious culture, you know.

And so I don't think these notions that you can just like break off from that and be somewhere else or you can go back, you can just revive paganism or all of that seems to me very delusional. did. So I think, you know, I am not the most orthodox member of any particular theological strand within that tradition, but that is the tradition. I mean, I'm not at all pretending. If you're not in relation to that, you're nowhere, you know, maybe you can find another rich tradition but the human brain unlike an LLM

the human brain can't just be put in another culture and just soak it up like soak up the Japanese internet or the Chinese internet or the Vedic internet I mean that's not what happens you know you are deeply embedded in a particular cultural tradition that is your cultural tradition and that's something that you have to work with, I think. So, you know, I just, I think that language is just to be part, in some way, part of conversations that belong to our cultural tradition, I think. It's like, it doesn't require, from my point of view, it doesn't require a strong set of belief commitments. I mean,

I respect the fact that that's what it means for other people, but it does require acknowledgement of the, of the authority of the traditional culture. And that's what, you know, our great works of scripture and literature are what they are. I've been trying to properly wrap my brain about around kind of your conception of how time works. And I think I've got about half of it down, But one thing I've heard you say repeatedly as just kind of a throwaway comment that always my brain gets stuck on is, you know, we think of the future proceeding out of the present, but that can't possibly be true. And I was just wondering if you could expound on that a little bit, because every time I hear it for some reason, every time I hear that phrase casually thrown by you, it just my brain stops working on that one.

And so why is it this relatively obvious intuition that the future would come out of the present? Why is that false? Why is that wrong? Well, I think that the exact comment is probably that time doesn't come out of the past. Okay. So I think that you can approach this. I mean, my my this was through the history of transcendental philosophy, you know, starting with Immanuel Kant. But I think you can do it as probably in a way, no doubt Kant himself does, you know, out of the theological tradition.

You know, the relation of time and eternity and just try to be kind of cogent on that. Because obviously, like, well, let me see if I can just advance on this thing. the fact that there is a past at all or or in fact we you know predict a future and we consider us a present we're assuming uh the existence of time so time time is is not delivered to us

out of the past at all. It's the fact, rather we think there is a past because time is structuring our experience of the world. Now, I'm not making a kind of idealistic commitment. I'm not saying time is nothing about the way we see things. Or I'm just simply wanting to say that time as such cannot be cannot be produced by history or certainly not produced by history in any in any way that wouldn't seem extremely strange

and philosophically challenging sorry I'm glitching out oh no it's okay i just want to talk over you yes yeah i've got you i think you got most of that you only stuttered there for a second yeah so i think you know there's a lot of theological discussion that is really exactly on this it's like the whole the whole questions that you actually get in in at least the catholic church i i would i had to just assume eastern orthodoxy I don't know so much about that. Notoriously in certain Protestant traditions and Calvinism to do with questions of predestination and divine omniscience in relation to time,

the notion of prophecy, you know, the notion that events have been preordained is, I think, the same bundle of questions. you know but not conceived in a in a philosophical language but in a in a religious language like um you know god in a traditional sort of western theological framework is not waiting to see what happens in the future right so i mean god nothing is going to be nothing is going to surprise God nothing is going to surprise eternity if you're more liberal about what that

involves and so therefore insofar as we have any kind of religious communication if we have any kind of involvement in the eternal realm at all then we too cannot simply be uh situated in a relation to the future that is one of just anticipating it from its past it's not possible i mean you know that any relation to the eternal puts you in a relation where the whole of time is simultaneous and from the perspective of eternity complete um

And of course, you know, it's not like this is not something that has been talked about a lot. So, yes, I mean, I think that the latent traditions of apocalyptic religion, it's like maybe people stop taking it seriously. And that's why they stop taking this question seriously. But I mean, like, what is the book of Revelation? The book of Revelation is in some sense supposed to be written and composed out of eternity and is a model of scripture in general like that. And therefore is able to be prophetic and is not simply waiting to see what happens.

you know it doesn't have a relation to time that would mean it's in the position of just waiting to see how things unfold in time because it's not coming uh it's not coming out of the past and waiting for the future i don't know whether any of that is at all no no that's that's helpful yeah it's uh a lot to process there but uh but but helpful for sure um i wanted to ask you uh quickly uh was thinking about this a little more with patchwork uh one of the key points of patchwork is the mobility of the citizens right they can move in between they can choose a different patch as as they as they wish um and i just wondering you especially thinking about what's happening in in los angeles right now uh is this ultimately a a liability for patchwork obviously it gets the

the state there the micro state would get to choose who comes in and out as well so they could control this to some extent. They can choose who they want in. They're probably not going to select a large number of people who are going to be phased out by AI and these type of things. But ultimately, there does seem to be a degradation of the human quality of life by being constantly mobile and by not having roots, not having community, not having these established traditions being set down in one place. And I'm just wondering if while the mobility of human capital might seem like a positive for these systems if ultimately it wouldn't degrade the lives of the people who are moving between these patches because while they

might be chasing better economic opportunity or better management inside any given patch, won't they ultimately be breaking down the community and the bonds that kind of make them live fulfilling and meaningful lives and therefore they won't be as useful as human capital to any given patch? I mean, this is obviously like, it was one of the big conversations, I think, within the kind of neorectionary period, and it's probably, it's a conversation, I guess, that's been very widespread throughout large swathes

of history, And I guess it's a kind of like it can be framed as a kind of critique of liberalism. Liberalism does tend to basically favor the kind of mobile, deracinated, rational, self-interested individual. and you know obviously people with more traditional commitments have seen that as being a huge problem and and insofar as those ideas have been able to probably you know I think anyone would probably agree being able to radiate themselves across the whole social space so so

that people in search of a more traditional, embedded, deeply meshed social existence have felt under siege from it and feeling that we're under attack, that there is this kind of attempt to transform them into homo economicus, know, and to transform them into the liberal, the liberal being. And I, I mean, I guess my position on that is like, I really think in an awful lot of

these and analogous problems, the ideal solution, however it could be realized, is actual genuine diversity you know I think that it should be that people can live like the Amish and they can live like sort of globe trotting economic optimizers you know in these little Hong Kong and Singapore type dynamic city states and the world is a richer place if those two things exist you know i i would be sad to see either of them completely extirpated and i and i understand

you know why the traditionalist side would feel that they've had a bad few centuries and that more needs to be put into kind of fortifying that side of the option space but I think big global cities are not going to go away so I mean people who want to live in Tokyo or Shanghai or New York you know those places have to have to be there I don't see them going away and I don't see them sort of restoring themselves to some more established mode of social organization.

I think that we're going to see the same kind of very highly individualized mobile people being the dwellers in those cosmopolitan cities. I just wonder if it's an inherent problem. You talked about IQ shredders and the problem of just not reproducing high IQ people, not reproducing and not improving the species in that way. And that being a real problem for the NRX model, ultimately, because you are creating the scenario where you are slowly degrading your human capital by having that model.

And I just wondered if the mobility issue was another instance of this where it's inherently a problem for the model, because it will, you know, even if you're just looking at an economic optimization model, you will be breaking down your human capital and you will be creating a lack of social cohesion that, well, you know, even the most liberal people do need at some level to operate. And so that was just my thought is whether this is kind of a built in problem for that for that system. Well, I mean, I think there is a problem for sure, but it tends to be now, I think, swallowed up into this much larger problem of just planetary fertility collapse.

that obviously is rolling in from the most kind of, the most sophisticated and civilized societies on the planet are the ones that are just seeing birth rates collapse to a degree that's almost incomprehensible. You know, like where the East Asian societies, which you know I certainly find in lots of ways very attractive places and they're very impressive in their level of civility and you know if there's some kind of

competition for like civilised life I think they do extremely well but they are at the cutting edge of this process of just like almost a voluntary extinction movement like i think all of them are around if not lower than uh a tfr one you know i halving every generation so that's such a calamitous situation if it's if you're able to roll it forward that I think it's leaving people a little bit just disoriented. I mean, the sheer craziness of it. It's really like the world is now dependent on some other apocalypse to swallow us before

this apocalypse annihilates us as a species. I mean, it's like we actually, the only hope is for something completely massive to just swallow up the whole thing and turn it into something else. And of course, some people think maybe AI is this, maybe AI, you know, I was talking to people just the other night about like, are we the pandas that, you know, AI is going to come to the rescue and like force us to breathe, you know, Like, we're all kind of just blundering our way into extinction and something else has to, like, take over us. And, like, you're clearly incompetent as a species to deal with your own reproduction.

I don't know. AI is going to take away our smartphones and make us sit in a room with each other until we have sex. That's kind of a... I mean, there's lots of models. They're not all that nice, I guess. But, yeah. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead. no no no i'm waiting for you oh i was just gonna say um do you think that this is ultimately a a a spiritual problem or like a resource problem like eventually will we just have enough technology where the working woman can put the baby in you know put the embryo in the machine that births it and she can just go to her her work every day and that will solve the problem or is this ultimately just a species or different cultures that no longer want to exist and and have a spiritual malaise that is just keeping them from producing no matter what the resources available to them

would be? I mean, I'm honestly very non-dogmatic on this question. I mean, I saw someone making the case that is not unpersuasive to me that, you know, human reproduction is an evolutionary hack in the sense that it's not been necessary to provide people with an actual reproduction instinct. The sexual instinct is quite satisfactory to get animals to reproduce under natural circumstances. And so the mere fact that we have technologically and socially and technologically been able to decouple sexuality from reproduction

just leads straight into this problem. That was the argument. You don't need any other complicated explanation for it. Now, you know, as I say, I don't want to dogmatically say that's all there is to it. But if that was the case, then what are we talking? Is that a spiritual problem or a technological problem? I mean, I'm not really quite sure. I'd say it's a spiritual problem brought on by a technological solution, actually. I mean, the problem, again, maybe, look, I mean,

you might think I'm just being too fundy Darwin-esque about it, but the problem strictly is in those terms, it's just this thing that human reproduction is an evolutionary hack. Like, we just don't have a kind of any kind of reproductive instincts. There's just that's not there. And so some people obviously expect that there is an evolutionary answer to that, that whatever slight disposition leads people to reproduce under modern conditions will kind of sweep through the gene pool

of all these different populations. And, you know, we're seeing over the course of generations that a kind of a modified human psychology will emerge that is more compatible with population, sustaining human population. But it seems to me like whatever, there might be all kinds of problems and objections one can have to that. But one of them is the time scale just doesn't seem to square with the other things that are going on. so it's like i don't think i have the same problem with people getting worried about climate change and all of these things like i don't think that any problem that we solve in a in a hundred years

time is very relevant to us now i mean i think we've we have so much hyper accelerated process going on that by the time where a few decades up the road the whole environment will have completely been transformed and and therefore any notion we had of solutions to things will be completely obsolescent and they will be being restructured by this new environment um so yeah i mean but sorry that's probably still not answering this this question i mean If it's like, if by saying is it a spiritual question, does that mean there's some kind of spiritual solution to it?

And by a spiritual solution, you know, something like a religious revival or something along those lines? I'm just trying to kind of probe you here. Oh, no. Well, I guess when I said it's a spiritual problem, I meant more, is this a problem of the soul? Is this a serious, deep problem in humanity? Or is it just like a resource? The current modern living just creates this resource depravity in a certain area or certain working requirements that are keeping us from having children. And eventually we'll just create a technology that will solve that problem. We'll have incubators or all these other things that will do the work of having and raising children for us so we can continue to live these modern lives.

Or even if we had those technological solutions, would people still choose not to have children simply because they've got this spiritual issue, this human issue that ultimately seems to be driving them towards ending their civilization, their existence, these things? Yeah. I mean, I think that's a good question. And as I say, I'm radically non-dogmatic about it. I, you know, there's a whole bunch of very interesting science fiction to be written on all of this. Sorry, I was just like, yeah, I think that, I mean, a big problem with this, it tends to be,

is that obviously the value of children is something that tends, because again of the way we're put together, to be like retrospective. I mean, I don't know whether this is very sex differentiated, you know, but you can see the problem getting really bad because it tends to be when people don't have children, they don't at all get why they would want them. and obviously once people have children it's like oh the most obvious thing in the world and obviously like nothing matters other than this but that whole way of looking at things is just completely invisible from the other side of the from the other side of the line so

yeah i mean i don't know whether that there's anything there that would point at what might be a solution. I mean, again, it's like eventually natural selection has to tinker with our brains if it was left to. If all that was happening in history was this problem, then you could just kind of, there has to be a kind of fairly straightforward Darwinian solution to it. But unfortunately, it's something that's happening in this epoch of just compressed, insane change. And so I think that pace is just not keeping up.

Things that require many generations to unfold just are a very bad kind of science fiction. One last thing I want to ask you before we wrap things up. Alexander Dugan in his fourth political theory has a very interesting line. He kind of comes to accelerationism through his own process. He talks about Deleuze. He talks about monotonic processes and really reaching this moment of post-human politics. But at the end of his acceleration explanation, his final, I guess, vision is that once you reach kind of this moment of modernity and post-modernity collapsing, on themselves, what you end up is this moment where people actually re-approach the spiritual

because it allows people to break out of this very rigid and somewhat nihilistic obsession with rationality in modern life and allows them to return to a place where they can engage with spirituality and these kind of things. I don't know if you've read any, Dugan. I don't know if you're familiar with any of his work, but I didn't know if you had any thoughts on kind of his approach to accelerationism and where he thinks it might go. Yes, no, I think he's very interesting. I mean, I'm not hugely steeped in his writing, but I've definitely looked at some of it. And I mean, it seems to me

it's partly what I feel about his work is that It's very Russian, you know. So and I think sort of reciprocally, I would think we would agree on this thing, that we would expect these positions, sort of speculative, political, philosophical, religious positions to be deeply ethnically embedded. much more than has people have been willing to kind of accept in much of the recent modern world. And so, you know, where I disagree with him

is simply because of the fact that I'm coming from a different place ethnically. like I kind of completely see like as a Russian of course this is right but I think that I think that the Anglosphere I think that Anglos wherever you draw the line around that have a peculiar planetary destiny and I think that Dugin would be the first person to acknowledge that and I think part of that is that there's the religious tradition is so tied up with the ignition process

that I don't really think it's extricable. I don't think that Anglo can return to something that is not tied up with liberal teleology, technoscientific explosion, all of those topics are sort of embedded in what actually constitutes us as an ethno. So there would, you know, on specific sort of description, you know, my sense of what Dugan's doing is like, it's definitely interesting, but that's not us, I think.

Interesting. That's a fascinating way to see that. Yeah. The different cultural da signs going, going different ways in, in that destiny. That's, that's very interesting. All right. Well, Nick, it's been an absolute pleasure talking with you. I don't know if you're working on anything or if there's anything you want to let people know about a book or anything that you'd want to tell the audience about before we leave. No, I don't, I don't think I need to. I mean, you know, I've enjoyed this a lot. It's been great to be here. And I'm sorry if I've been extraordinarily bad at hearing your questions and not opportunities to wander off at strange angles.

But yeah, that's always the best. Yeah, no problem there at all. Well, guys, if it's your first time on this channel, please go ahead and subscribe on YouTube. Click the bells and notifications and everything you need to catch these episodes when they go live. Remember, we're not live today. So unfortunately, if you ask any questions, we won't be able to answer them. And of course, if you'd like to get these broadcast as podcasts, you need to subscribe to The Oramac Entire Show on your favorite podcast network. Thank you, everybody, for watching. And as always, I'll talk to you next time.