The Daily Stoic - Journalist James Pogue on Political Principles and Cultivating Virtue | We All Must Go Into The Wilderness

Episode Date: June 22, 2022

Ryan reads today’s daily meditation and talks to journalist James Pogue about his recent piece on the new right in Vanity Fair, how the modern political climate is void of solid principles, why cultivating virtue is so important, and more.I came across his recent piece in Vanity Fair on the New Right, where he dives inside the new strain of reactionary, retro-patriarchal conservative politics embodied by those like Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance. It touched on a lot of things I have been thinking about lately, so I wanted to have him on to discuss this particular topic because it feels timely and important.James Pogue is a journalist and essayist who has written for Harper’s, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, the New Republic, and Vice, among many others. He is a recipient of support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and was once called a “brilliant young Southern writer” by the Oxford American. He lives in LA, where I help run a native plant nursery. My first book is called Chosen Country: A Rebellion in the West, a first-person account of conflict over public lands in the American west. NED Products will help you perform better, sharpen your mind and get consistent, quality sleep. Go to helloned.com/STOIC or enter code STOIC at checkout to get 15% off.LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk to, faster. Every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/STOIC. Terms and conditions apply.Go to shopify.com/stoic, all lowercase, for a FREE fourteen-day trial and get full access to Shopify’s entire suite of features. Grow your business with Shopify today - go to shopify.com/stoic right now.Framebridge makes it easier and more affordable than ever to frame your favorite things - without ever leaving the house. Get started today - frame your photos or send someone the perfect gift. Go to Framebridge.com and use promo code STOIC to save an additional 15% off your first order.KiwiCo is a subscription service that delivers everything your kids will need to make, create and play. Get 50% off your first month plus FREE shipping on ANY crate line with code STOIC at kiwico.com.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a Meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives.

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Go to helloned.com slash stoic or intercode stoic. Check out that's helloned.com slash stoic, 15% off. Thank you to Ned for sponsoring the show and offering our listeners a natural remedy for some of life's most common health issues. We must all go in to the wilderness. Sanica was exiled once in 8041, and then again for Nero's service, the end of his career. Epic Titus was exiled to Greece by the Emperor Domitian. Publius Rutilius Rufus, the Roman tax official who was convicted on false charges, was exiled to Asia.

Stoicism and exile seems to go hand in hand. Winston Churchill, who himself spent about 10 years in political exile after World War I, once wrote that every prophet has to come from civilization, but every prophet has to go into the wilderness. He must have made a strong impression of a complex society and all that it has to give. And then he must serve periods of isolation and meditation. This is the process by which psychic dynamite is made. The period of difficulty and loneliness and loss that Seneca and Epicetus went through. This was not simply some bad period in their life.

No, it was a formative soul strengthening priority clarifying experience that made them who they are. Publius, Rutilius, Rufus was not only not bitter about the slanderous accusations and the trumped up political attack he was a victim of. He chose Asia as his exile, where he could go back to be with the citizens who actually appreciated his honesty and hard work. It was an awful experience to be sure, but he accepted it with cheerful stoicism. Psychic dynamite is not just handed to us, we aren't born resilience or with confidence, we have to earn it, we have to make it. And that is only possible in difficult circumstances, it can only be found in the wilderness, where we are alone,

where we are forced to adapt and adjust to circumstances outside of our control. It won't be fun, but it is essential. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wanderer's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. I came across this piece, maybe a month or so ago, In Vanity Fair on the new right. And it was a fascinating, horrifying, challenging piece that I thought connected to stoicism in the sense that I often hear from people that see stoicism as this

kind of strident philosophy, this exclusively individualistic philosophy. In fact, there was this guy in the UK, I think, a couple years ago, that was fired for basically being a jerk at work. And he said, oh, you're persecuting me because of my religion. Actually, filed this case about it. And he said, my religion is that I'm a stoic. And he was, I think actually more thinking of cynic philosophy, which the stoic, which stoicism has its roots in, and that that was excusing the way he talked to his colleagues, the way he dressed, what he did, is what he felt his obligations to other people work.

And there's a strain of that in modern stoicism as well. And I know because I hear from these people and they've gotten quite upset with decisions or choices that I've made my business and what I talk about, et cetera. And I just overall, I found the piece very alarming because although I actually happen to know many of the people who are profile that it, like masters being one, I was running for Senate in Arizona, JD Vance, who I met before, was running for Senate in Ohio, these are people who are quite smart, kind of the best schools in the world, work on cool companies, generally would agree with them on a lot of things.

But if taken some interesting political stances that I think are quite alarming and dark, and ultimately at odds with Stoicism. So I was really fascinated with this piece. And he, basically, it's written by this guy James Poke, and he dives into this new strain of kind of reactionary, retro-patriarchical conservative politics. This's the only word I could really put for it. And because it touched on a lot of things I was thinking about, I reached out to him and I said, hey, look, I just finished your piece on teal and vans and masters.

And attention to a lot of things I've been thinking about. And I've written a book about Peter Teal, who was in the piece. I met some of these people. And then I too, I said, I too have moved from California, New York for a different kind of life in rural Texas. I dropped out of these people and that I too, I said I too have moved from California, New York for a different kind of life in rural Texas. I dropped out of college.

I think much of the mainstream media is flawed and broken. So I've read many of the thinkers in your piece. Yet for whatever reason, I said, I'm not only not been red-pilled, but I'm appalled that the changes that I've seen in some of these people that we're talking about. And I said that I think that they're dressing up intellectually what is at its core, some of these people that we're talking about. And I said that I think that they're dressing up intellectually.

What is at its core, a kind of recentement and nihilism? Ironically, what Peter said, he was trying to destroy in his campaign against Docker. So I wanted to reach out and talk to him about it. And I shot him an email, which I always recommend doing when you read stuff you like and makes you think, even if you don't have a podcast, you never know what's going to come of that. And so that's where today's guest comes from.

James Poke is a journalist and essayist who's written for Harper's in the New Yorker in the New York Times magazine, the New Republic Invite and many others. He's been called a brilliant young Southern writer, although he now lives in a rural part of California, kind of actually up where I'm from. And his first book is called Chosen Country of Rebellion in the West, first person account of the conflict over public lands in the American West. You can go to his website at jameshensonpogue.com. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram at jhensonpogue.

And I will link to this new right piece here in today's show notes. Enjoy this conversation. And if you get churred by this, just go ahead and keep it to yourself. I don't need to hear from you about it. You live in Northern California, right? Yeah, I mean, I'm going back to LA for the summer, but for now, I'm in Siskiw County,

which is like, I don't know, do you know Mount Shast area? I grew up in Sacramento. Oh, okay, yeah, there you go. Okay. I was just wondering because I saw you lived in sort of rural California and I wondered how the internet was out there.

Like where I am in Texas, the one thing I don't like is my wireless broadband. It's so terrible that I basically can't do anything over Zoom unless I go to my office. Where in Texas are you? I live about 45 minutes from Austin in what's called Bastrop County. That was more rural when I moved here and then now the Tesla factory is between us and Austin. So is that heading south towards San Antonio?

It's heading east towards Houston. Gotcha. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I weirdly, like I train hopped, like I dropped out of college and train hopped for a while and I was in Texas. I mean, as you can imagine, just hard to get rid of Texas.

It's just a little bit. It's so big. Yeah. And so you're just like, all the way, you're like, wow, we're still in Texas. Just on a freight train, but I saw a lot of it that way.

It was really interesting. No, it's funny. I wanted to ask you about where you live because I saw you did, you were responding to something on Twitter where someone was saying, you know, like, this generation is nihilist. They all want to move to a farm somewhere. It's funny. I agree with both. It's like, I agree.

There is a nihilistic streak in this generation that's quite alarming. And I want to talk about that. Put the deciding to move to a farm and have a family or a somewhat more normal life. To me is like one of the few bright spots in the generation that's not evidence of the nihilism. Oh, so that's what I was saying. I know. I agree.

Yeah. Okay. I thought, yeah, I didn't know if you caught that I was being sarnonic there. Yeah. So like, I mean, what's interesting about up here is that like you're seeing actually something that really terrifies me, like the fact that people really can't afford a rural life anymore.

Like this is the broader West. And this is new. You're probably experiencing this in Texas. I'm more like the Inter-Mountain West in California. The average home price in this county is $450,000. It's one of the poorest counties in the West. So everybody who even, let's forget the kids who want to like grow up and, you know, have a farm fantasy. Like literally the guy who like used to work as a small engine repair guy, the small rancher, all of that is gone. And that's happening for reasons that maybe are out of our control, but that are the result

of processes that we unleashed and that a lot of people make apologies for. And like, that to me is inexcusable. Like the rural, the collapse of the American family farm, the fact that you could feed the world on family farms and we tell ourselves that you can't and that it was inevitable, those would go away and that kids shouldn't dream about that. Like, I'm ranting, but that's like a kind of animating passion of mine. It's just not true and it's insane that we've come to just accept it. Yeah, there was a New York Times piece a couple months ago that was like the next affordable

place is already too expensive and it's true People think well I could always move out to the country and I could afford to live there and like the farm that I bought in 2015 having left New York City Thinking I was getting a steal all this land. It was let's say less than half a million It's tripled in value since I bought it, right? And in five, you know, in seven years. And so yeah, like, I can't afford it.

But like, if I had inherited it from my dad, I couldn't afford it because especially, and I think people often blame one side or the other, but like in Texas. Is this thing all? Check one, two, one, two. There y'all. I'm Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur,

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but it's actually like the taxes are remarkably regressive in that way. So it's even less affordable, but it's a weird phenomenon because you can see where the people are getting sort of bitter and angry because they're getting forced out of the place that was always their sort of respite or solace from the crazy expensive city.

Well, so and this even goes to like, this goes to a lot of new right stuff in a certain way kind of roundabout, and maybe we'll get there. But like, so what you did was not you, but we did. Like, up here, it's forestry. So there's this kind of long story that environs people on the left, which I'm implicating myself in. You know, you know, there were clear cuts. There was really, really bad forestry decisions made up here over many, many years for a lot

of different reasons. Some of it was fire suppression. some of it was approving clear cuts that shouldn't have been cut. You know, it was just take, take, take, right? But then what you did was you basically said all loggers are bad, not these guys doing the clear cuts because a lot of the union, particularly union logging jobs were pretty sustainable, comparatively.

And basically through a number of weird regulatory decisions that were not voted on by anyone in America, you shut down public land logging all across Northern California, most of the Pacific Northwest, outside of like state stuff. And you decimated the regional economy and made it into a place based on tourism,

based on servicing the needs and interests of fundamentally elite people in San Francisco and Seattle and places like that. You made it into a tourist playground. And then basically those industries, of course, don't go away. Like we don't get rid of, we get rid of family farms,

but we keep agriculture. We get rid of small loggers, but we keep timber. So nobody sees it. You don't see the like, the small time guy with the union. That's gone. But there's Syracuric Pacific is the largest landowner in all of the United States and

owns basically this whole nexus of counties here. So they just ruthlessly drive down wages. They cut privately on private land with very little government oversight. The economy collapses, and then the house prices soar because people can come in by them cheap compared to the bay. You basically make a subservient economy. You make two classes of people, the outsiders with money and the kind of locals who increasingly, and there's a lot of jokes and stuff and it sucks, but like, I was at the bar last night and they're like half this county is tweakers. That's not true, but we're lower income people, like that's just where they end up. And so there's just which homeless camps.

It feels like a true dystopia. I know I'm talking a lot about this, but just being up here, like you start to see the alienation that is feeding into our national politics in a way that I think is really, really a big deal. Well, it goes in both direction, right? I was walking my sons this morning, and we go on this walk around the rarosa we live on, and it's like someone had dumped a cooler, just filled with dead animals, just like gutted deer, you know, just like, and it's like, so there's this huge dumping problem, right?

So like I, as a person who has like a vested interest in all this, I find it disgusting and repulsive and awful, and then someone who's living on the fringes, right, living in horrible conditions out in the same, you know, like I have my farm, and next to it is a trailer, right? Like you can see the stratification and then it creates this sort of animosity between the people, right? And it's like one, one, because only some of the people are vested in and feel an affinity

for the place or the culture at this point. And then you're at awe. It's a spiral is what it becomes. Oh yeah. I mean, so a good example of that is, so many places have gone to Airbnb's here. Yeah. And to second homes basically. Second homes actually drives it more than the Airbnb's in where I am.

Yeah. And okay, so you get all these people coming up. Well, they can't get breakfast in this town because the kids, the young people who would staff the breakfast restaurant, they can't afford to live here. So they've had to move away or they're on drugs, right? And you know, like I was at the bar last night and there was a property manager.

His mom had died of an overdose and he kind of at 22 or something got clean off of meth and coke and stuff because of, at 22 or something, got clean off of meth and coke and stuff, because he was like, oh, wow, this is really real. So they found his mom's body in a swamp, and like the police didn't investigate it because the police in the county where he is, there's hardly any of them anymore, because the, like, the tax base has been destroyed. And so, I mean, I'm laughing, but it was just so typical and terrible in a certain way, because that was what scared him

into quote unquote, getting straight. So then he goes and becomes a property manager for out of state investors. And he's throwing people out. That's his job now is to evict people. And then those people are going to have the same issue. But of course, now he's like set, he actually bought a house. He's in between. He's transitioning towards between the two. And what's really interesting is he's fully conscious of that. He is fully

conscious of like, you know what, I lucked out, I actually get the profit from this our way capital. Most people don't. And it was interesting. It was like talking to somebody who was flirting with the enemy and knew it, you know, and just to have that feeling in the United States of America, it's a very, it's not new, but it's much more present and it freaks me out. It is weird. So I, one of the things, we'll talk sort of new right now.

I'm going to talk to you about a bunch of things, but one of the things that, I don't wanna say it keeps me up in night, but I think about it often. How old are you? 35. All right, so we're the same age. So we both sort of came up on the internet, but kind of before social media, right?

I remember early blogs, early websites, all that stuff. I got a Facebook account when I was waiting. I got my Facebook account after I could show that my college email had been approved, right? So I think about all the time that I spent on the internet from probably on, I don't know, fifth grade to high school. And the world that I was immersed in, so I, you know, that gets sucked into heavy metal, like it sucked into, like, sort of, but it was largely, there's a lot of humor, a lot, it was sort of the subculture of what the internet was then. And when I think about who I was then

and where I ended up, I now think about if I was that kid today on today's internet, what culture would I get sucked into? And it makes me think, like if you're rebellious, if you like pissing people off, you like the attention of it, et cetera, I could actually very much empathize with being sucked into a sort of an alt-right or new right world, if only because that's where the energy is.

Yeah, I mean, I'm not gonna name the group, but I'm a part of a certain number of private group chats on Twitter that are like, sometimes I just get added to and like there's one, I don't even wanna say the topic because it is private, but there's one that has nothing to do with politics on the topic because it is private, but there's one that has nothing to do with politics on the face of it, and I popped in, and somebody added me,

and it turned out to be basically kids. I thought it was, there were people I knew from Twitter who I thought were older, and they started talking about who's this guy's birthday, and he was young, and I was like, oh, okay, these are kids. And the first question somebody popped up and was like, hey journalist, are you racist?

Cause that was them vetting. And like what they were doing was not, as far as I can tell, not saying, hey, we're all racist. But they were like, are you scared to be in a space where we will joke about us being racist? And that was really interesting to me because it was, it was a test. Like, are you a square? Are you a suit square? Are you going to freak out that we asked you this?

You know, and like, I'm not going to say what I responded, but like, that's a vibe. Like that's a vibe that goes beyond, I was talking to somebody else in kind of, in New York, like not like these people. These are rural people who are chatting with. And she was saying like, she got canceled in college. And at first she was like freaking out and then she was like, wow, it's so freeing, I'm racist. And she was like, again, not saying I'm actually racist, but once they've called you racist and once you've just not cared about that,

then you get to be in these online spaces that feel very rebellious and very like, for lack of a better term, free, right? And so it's dangerous water because like, to be in a different way, right? You're special in different, and therefore better than masses. I mean, base, right?

Like people, and like it makes me uncomfortable, because people like now, like, you know, I went through this long period of like great obscurity, writing for print magazines, like doing my weird adventure stuff. I'm pretty broke and stuff like that. But then like the vanity fair piece hit, and all these people were like, yeah, James Pug, he's like really bass.

Like he's the most, like somebody was like, he's the most heterosexual journalist out there. Again, like you're kind of serious, like, okay, this makes me a journalist out there. Again, you're kind of serious. You're like, okay, this makes me a little uncomfortable. Like, I wasn't trying to be based. I was just trying to live my life. You know, I wasn't trying to be cool in this way, right? But it plays in that direction.

And then you end up talking to people. And it's like, there's another step where it's like, oh, you collect memorabilia from Rhodesia. Like, oh, you've gotten a partiteer as South African flag, like shit like that. Sorry, am I allowed to curse on you? Yeah, whatever you want. Oh, and stuff like that where you, you're like,

oh, this tip's really fast from like, what feels to me generally like, transgression for transgression sake, to, oh, I identify with reactionaries, I identify with the reactionary tradition, I identify, and then some people to stay with that. Some people like the reactionary tradition to them is like, you know, they're really in depression generals and, you know, the French language and the Catholic church and things like that.

But then there's a quick step from there to like, oh, this guy was your actionary, but really smart, but really racist. Maybe he was right about everything. And that line is not a difficult one to draw. I'm not criticizing necessarily anybody, in particular when I say that, but you see it happening, and you see it happening really fast with some people. Spring is in the air.

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post your job for free, turns and conditions apply. Yeah, it's a, I've sort of watched this now, especially during COVID, it's a it's I've sort of watched this now especially during COVID it was most pronounced But you sort of watch someone get radicalized very quickly Like there's this marks to really school that I think a lot about because he said it during the pandemic He said there's two types of play. He said it during his pandemic. Well, it was the Antonine play He said there's two types of plagues

There's the one that destroys your life, that would be the actual illness, and then one that infects your character, right? And it's been interesting to watch, you sort of watch someone, like they'll send you a link from this website, and then they'll send you a link from this insert, I don't even wanna say the name,

this sort of COVID skeptic, and then all of a sudden they're, you're like watching it incubate and then explode inside the person and they become full blown ex-wires. Yeah, I mean, the term for this is being read pill, but it's very fascinating to watch it happen to people who you'd like to think you're very different than, but actually who you'd like to think you're very different than, but actually at a different time or place in your life or a different series of events happening to you could very easily be you, I think.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, you have a lot to say to that. Kind of a side note, but like going back to your earlier question about getting radicalized online or getting just what the online groups that you can fall into, like early internet for me was all about Northern Ireland. And I'm not even 100% Irish-American, but I found it actually very a kind of a space like Irish politics where you're trying to, you're living up to this national idea of like a socialist United Republic and like regalessizing Ireland after, you know, darn near 800 years

of, you know, Anglo influence and stuff like that. I found that to be a really refreshing and exciting rebellion against the quote unquote global order, the kind of constant, homogenizing force that is around us all the time, right? And I went deep, like I don't mean like I listened to songs. I mean like I went to fundraisers for groups that were a part of keeping the arms struggle alive. Like I graduated from high school the year that the IRA decommissioned its weapons and I like vociferously opposed that. Like, and I went to Northern Ireland and probably at 27, like I knew the codes,

I knew the people, I knew the names, like deep, deep, deep stuff, all from having been online. Not from any family connection, just from being quote unquote, I guess, radicalized online. And I was able to go to South Armada and places like that and meet people who are involved

in tears, I mean, tear, tear, yeah, and one thing running and things like that. And luckily, I'm a reporter. So for me, I have a vehicle to interact with stuff like that and describe the allure, describe the feeling of being pulled towards it, but also like, oh, I'm not actually going to help this guy like move this gun.

Like I just, luckily it's my job not to do that. So, like there's a natural stop, but I still want to see that guy move that gun, you know, whether it's an Ireland or somewhere else, I want to see everything. But that was the only thing probably to stop me. If I wasn't a reporter, I would've gotten involved in stuff that would've been really dark, and that still is really dark. And I say that just,

because the thing you talked about cancer of the soul or does that play with the soul. And you talked about principle. And the thing that I noticed a lot in my reporting is that we have developed a politics and a way of interacting politically and through our media and stuff like this, where principle seems to not really apply that much anymore.

So like, if the other team is doing something, you can justify basically any action. You can justify shutting down their speech, whatever it is. As long as we're the bad team, you don't have to act with principle. You have to act with principle towards your own team. And I think in a deeper level in our politics, we have all internalized that our politicians are not acting on the basis principle. They're acting because of lobbying influence, because of political interest.

And I think we are much more deeply corrupted than we really understand or like generally talk about in daily life and that it's very natural for people to look for literally any system other than that that might re-inject some kind of honesty and principle back in. I don't think that's strange and I've felt that a lot myself.

Yeah, no, I think almost all recruiting propaganda, et cetera, works because there is some kernel of truth in it, right? You are triggering, you're not making something up from whole cloth for the most part. And so the fact that they're, you know,, the half truth obliterates the truth, right? And that's what makes it hard, particularly if you're young, or you want something to be true because it's in your self-interest, or it would allow you to hate someone or be

energized or get attention or whatever, it makes you extra susceptible. Yeah, sorry, that cut out there for a second. Oh, sorry. Oh, no, that's okay. It does make you extra susceptible. And I tend to think like, okay, so I mean, this is my own gloss and nobody has to buy it, but I tend to think that what's happening right now

is there is actually a kind of core of liberalism that is people looking for that. The people looking to the kind of blue wave types, looking to Obama and Biden as these kind of saviors of the Republic, these people who are like are really standing against the bulwark of chaos and that therefore it justifies basically any political action. And I think that's why you have like such intense loyalty to the Democratic Party now amongst you know, kind of daily show watching, you know, like Boomer liberals. Like, it's almost its own kind of like, red pill

shirt, fantasy, you know. And I just, I think that we're all probably casting about right now, looking for that thing. And even liberals are kind of like, they're seeing it in what used to be the ideal American liberalism, even though everybody kind of knows that that's been a little corrupted. And I don't have a great answer for what comes next. And so I think what's really scary right now is that you have a lot of people who are really, really looking at like

Kennedy-esque liberalism, the thing that we have done and that kind of, some people would say worked in the mid-century as the only option. And anything else is like a kind of demon lurking at the gates. And now that demon is kind of here. I think that fight is coming and it's going to be really, really scary.

It's been a weird experience for me because sort of like you, I get kind of invited to these groups or people make assumptions about me both directions that are not based on anything real. But I wrote this book about Peter Teal, so I get sort of, I have sort of entree into the groups that way, then I write about Stoicism, which is this sort of Greek Roman-esque thing, so there's some fellow travelers there, and then I live in Texas, and I hunt and like to be outside. So there's that. And then on the other hand, I actually have my actual politically, so I'm on this other

side. But I've had this weird experience of watching, like I know Blake Masters. Blake Masters has stayed in my house before. I've had dinner with him many times. I knew JD Vance when he was just an author writing a book, you know. And so you sort of meet these people and then you kind of, it's a weird experience of like watching a friend on a reality show, do anything and everything to win when you know that a reality show makes you into a caricature of a human being and splits all the word.

So it's been this weird kind of disorienting experience to watch people that I know that I thought were sort of on the same wavelength in a kind of centrist, normal spectrum of you know beliefs and also like sort of like things you would say versus not say, like not even ideologically, just like how one would act in public, you know what I mean? And then you're just like, holy shit, did you see them on the bachelor last night? Like I can't believe they did that, right?

And it must be strange for you. That's what I like about your vanity fair pieces. You sort of went, you spent time as people, and you intellectually understand and give some credence to what they're talking about, or you can at least understand where they're going. And then at the same time, you're also like, what the fuck? Yeah, I mean, for me, like, for me, though, what the fuck moment, or like the kind of thing that brought me in and that allowed me to report

this. I tried to describe this to Brian Stelter from CNN today and I couldn't do it. So I'm going to try to do it again. Like he asked me why they trusted me. And the reason they trust me is because I share their critique of liberalism, which is not to say I share their prescriptions, but I share their critique of what's, which is not to share their prescriptions, but I share their critique of what's going wrong. Right. And so, like, what was weird for me is I didn't know that there was a whole wing of the American right that like kind of saw like, hey, America's government is not working.

Hey, America is kind of, and like, like a, what do you call it when cell division happens? Like, we're going through an organic division that is very scary, that a lot of people kind of pretend is not happening. And also that these narratives of constant progress and technology making our lives better are not representative of how most people actually feel, right? And I felt very alone in that.

I think a lot of people who are on the kind of left spectrum feel very alone, particularly when they critique tech, particularly when they critique kind of liberal narratives of progress, things like that. And when they critique kind of like what's going wrong with the soul of America, like that's a conversation people on the left have a lot of difficulty having. And so I'm down with them for that, you know, And like in private, as I guess you know, like JD and Blake are really, really articulate and interesting interlocutors. They are people who are worth talking to.

They are very interesting. And yet then especially with JD, you know, like I don't think it's totally, totally wrong. People critique him, you know, they say buffoon. They's totally, totally wrong. People critique him, you know, they say buffoon, they throw around buffoon all the time. That word to it. And he's up there and he's trying to troll people on Twitter and he's doing anything he can to get Trump. And it does, it does feel like, man, this is so disappointing because whatever you are, even if you're, you know, the next Mussolini danger to the Republic, everything that people claim, if you are that guy, get out there and be that guy and describe it.

Instead of being like, I'm kind of magaheem, but in private, I have these really interesting ideas. That stuff drives me crazy because it's the same going back to my bug bear about principle. It's unprincipled from another side because now you're just playing the magazine and hiding that you actually have this whole intellectual ecosystem that I think people deserve to be exposed to. I think it is interesting and people deserve to understand it. And I think that's kind of why the peace work is I just operated from that premise. I was like, I'm going to take this seriously and people deserve to hear it in its full

extent as much as I can describe it. And then if you decide these people are the next Mussolini, we have to fight them tooth and nail, you can do that. If you decide, wow, that sounds really good, go ahead, I mean, I guess whatever, do that. But just people deserve to hear it instead of having this come from left field

and then all of a sudden it's having a coup, you know? Yeah, there's a weirdness to it too, where it sounds smart in soundbites. And then when you actually give it a fuller platform, I thought you did this well with Curtis Yarvan. You, when you actually let it extend out, it's just like a really long blog post that doesn't go anywhere. Do you know what I mean? blog post that doesn't go anywhere. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's kind of a theory and it kind of makes sense. But there's also an element of, like, hollowness to it. I don't know if that makes sense. So I think the idea of, like, suppressing it, not engaging with it, it's kind of a mistake because if you actually, if it actually was to fight

in a battle of ideas as opposed to shit posting on Twitter, I think it would not work very well. Well, maybe. I mean, Curtis is a tough one because Curtis is like, he's like a magician. He's like, he's like summoning forces and kind of imagining futures

that like I don't necessarily think he believes will happen. So like, I mean, I've said this many times, so sorry to repeat it, but like people should listen to Curtis. His latest episode on Good Old Boys, like it's not a joke, like it's like a blueprint for like how we get an American dictator. And they're, it's like a blueprint for like how we get an American dictator. And they're it's like a pretty detailed plan and description. But you listen to it and you're also like, well, this is like you've plotted this all out.

Like this is not how like you read one history book. Like you just like like the Japanese are like, okay, we're going to see his China and then we're going to get the oil and Indochina and bubble. And you're like, there's so many steps in that chain where something can go wrong. This is not going to work. And he talks about like, oh, well, they'll be peaceably. We're going to peaceably retire all these bureaucrats. We're going to have marshals at the fed and stuff. And you're like, any one of those things could erupt into a shooting war. Like any one of those things could erupt into massive chaos. Like, and when you hear Curtis tell it, it's very, I don't want to say seductive, but

it's like, it all seems very step by step plausible. Oh, this is how Rhonda Santas can become an American dictator. There's a plan here. And then you're like, Curtis, you're such a good student of history. How do you not know that these things usually don't happen this way? And it's a kind of weird thing. But as far as they're a lure, like, as a broad ecosystem, I would tend to think it is weren't winning the war of ideas. Like sub-Rasa, I think the stuff that is coming from, like, these thinkers, like James Burnham, Christopher Lash, the critique against the kind of managerial elite society, I tend to think that at least in the internet that I'm seeing, that's winning converts day

by day, you know? Yeah, I listened to Patrick Beenan on Ezra Client's podcast the other day, and it was interesting that Ezra decides, like, I'm just going to intellectually engage with this person and like, actually see what he thinks, not what he's mad about, but like, what he thinks the solutions to the things he was mad about, but what he thinks the solutions to the things he was mad about would be, like how it would work. And it was, there's almost, it's almost like what these,

magician is a great way to think about it, because there's an element of slight of hand going, where it's like, they're sort of very eloquently describing a problem, and then very vociferously explaining part of a solution, and then they get cut off, they know they're going to get cut off before they have to extrapolate it all the way out. So it doesn't have to be a complete thought or a workable solution anyway.

And so Ezra is sort of every time giving him the runway to actually sketch this out. And it's just, he just like, he can't go there. Like, he can't actually, it's like, he's like anticipating being cut off. Like, it not actually having the platform, he sort of goes like, okay, let's say you have the president, the judiciary and 60 senators, like, what are you doing? And he's describing like, effectively Bernie Sanders platform. And you're just like, okay, so you actually, what you're really enjoying is the ship posting and the flame war element of it,

the sort of straw man argument of it, but it's actually, I'm not sure how serious it is as an actual platform, which is what alarms me the most because this is where I go back to the reality show thing. It's people saying and doing very serious things as if this is performing, like they all, when I was in Peter Tills World, they've really liked the world of professional wrestling. And I think they feel like what they are doing politically and culturally is a form of professional wrestling, but it's not, it's real.

Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, right. So that's the, I don't even know how you say it, K-Fabe. Yes, K-Fabe. Yeah, so, you know, everybody talks about K-Fabe, which is for people who don't even know how you say it, K-Fabe. Yes, K-Fabe. Yeah, so, you know, that everybody talks about K-Fabe, which is for people who don't know, it's kind of like the performative, fakery aspect of, yeah. And, you know, that's a big Peter Teal concept. And I say that because I think, you know, I joke, my girlfriend's reporter too, and she

went to Ukraine and I was like, I really want to go to a war. We always joke that the info war right now in America is the real war. It's kind of like it's a joke, but it's kind of true. I think that a lot of people right now are fighting an info war, a media war, a kind of ghost engagement in the midst of the American elite to try to like figure out who's who's vision of history like treat the globe super deep like who's vision of history is going to win out and whether it's going to be the Davos kind of globalized people these guys hate or, or this kind of, you know, rag-tag band of insurgents.

The trouble is that like, with all of it, as you said, I don't know, this stuff that kind of gets me weirded out is that there is a plan, this is kind of the nature of it coming from the right that makes it a little tricky. Like, there's a plan not necessarily to radically reshape America. There's a plan to get America back to something that it kind of once was. And the way that you kind of do that, oddly, like you said, is like, you know, mass social programs and like attacking corporate power and things like that. But attacking corporate power in the name of getting back to a place before corporations

actually figured out how to seize power in this country. And so what you're kind of doing is you're trying to not make enemies of very, very powerful people, even at the same time as you need to take power from them. And that's the gap to me. So like, like Mark Andreessen, I know this is a long answer, but Mark Andreessen was tweeting recently that elite power in America resides more so in media than it does with money. And that is something that I find very, very scary because if you actually wanted to reshape America in a way that was fair or calmer, you know, more, you know, had more family cultural community value, you actually have to go after people with money. You have to take

power from them. That is capitalism. This isn't a Marxist take, but capitalism and the constant churn that it engenders is what is revoking the fabric of this country. And if you're going to let those people off the hook because they're convenient because they like your philosophy, then you have a major gap between, we're going to do this, we're going to get our 60 senators, and we're going to do this, these are our policies. And that's where I see the kind of disconnect that you're describing. It's like, you're going gonna have to go after those people and they don't really want to do it.

Those are their friends, you know, and that they want to take over the Republican party and those are the people who control it. It's spring here in Texas and one of the great things about spring is doing outdoor projects with my kids. One of the best Kiwi co-kits that I've done with my kids, they built this stomp rocket and we just spent hours out in the yard shooting it up in the air, tracking

it down, shooting it up in the air, tracking it down. They just had an amazing time. If you're looking to have some outside, non-screen time play, hands on, science-based, work with your hands projects, Kiwi Co is it. Step into spring and celebrate the season of discovery with Kiwi Co subscription, get 30% off your first month, plus free shipping on any crate line with code Stoic at KiwiCo.com. That's 30% off your first month. KiwiCo.com promo code Stoic. Yeah, I mean, something you said in the piece that I thought was really interesting. w-i-c-o dot com promo code is stowing. Yeah, I mean, something you said in the piece that I thought was really interesting. You were talking about, let me pull it up actually,

you're talking about how, you know, these different, you're sort of describing the situation. You said, uh, professional advancement, stable romantic relationships, residential independent, uh, into, independent, seemed like the birth park of young Americans. And now all of that is increasingly out of reach. What's also interesting to me is that the people who are most talking about these things at the forefront of this idea revolution, they have all those things, right? They have those things.

And they got them ironically at the expense of the people that they're supposedly serving now. So I wonder, is the rage sincere or is the rage not unlike the interest you see in an entrepreneur who identifies an underserved, under-mobilized market and makes something for them. Right. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I said this to JD.

It kind of, I mean, we're kind of shit talking and we're off the records, so I won't say what he said back. But, you know, I said this to him. I was like, okay, you guys hate the incentives of this elite, you hate the corrupting influence that it supposedly has, but you've responded to all of those incentives. And like here, I drive a 20 year old truck and like I'm looking outside, I live in a trailer park at the moment. And like I said,

like, and you guys have all got these condos in DC, you all went to wait Yale. I got in to Yale at the grad school didn't go. I traveled the country and lived out of pickup truck. And so, you know, like, and I'm not trying to sound cool. Like some of that was just my own, like weird choices. But I, like, there are people who are just refused to accept the incentives of that elite or who play into it a little less than they do. And they have been elevated by those incentives. And they have been elevated to those incentives. And they have been

elevated to these places where they're responsive. And to some degree, like they owe their careers and lives to billionaires. And like, so you get to this point with them, like, I don't know, I mean, I get worked up about this because you get to a point where essentially, I think it's hard to look at this if you want to take their concept of the regime, right? This kind of elite aristocracy in America, of educated people that like, sure, I'm a part of on some level. Like they are a faction within that regime who is trying to engender a palace coup, right? So if you take their vision of what we have, like a sort of decentralized Soviet party

that you don't get a card, but you know who's in it. You can see, you can see, you can tell, you can go to a party, you ask what school they went to, and then you're like, oh, bam, you're in the regime, right? And essentially what we're seeing right now is an attempt to dislodge the regime from within in the manner of many elite palace coups that have happened throughout history. And I just, I'm enough of an Americanist. I'm enough of a kind of believer in the ideals of the founding and stuff like that. I know it sounds corny, but like to me, that just, that's a really dark way of looking

at how American politics should work. And like, I understand that we've had a lot of those internal palace cues ourselves and we don't call them that. But to me, like, okay, fine, maybe we've had those before, maybe we've always been governed by an elite, but the goal is to get rid of that, not to render it and cement it by doing it again. Yes, I had an academic on a while ago who was an expert on the Catalan conspiracy, which is effectively a guy loses an election, he loses to Cicero and tries to use the mob

to overturn that election. He's as elite as they can be, he actually loses to a new man, but he somehow manages to make it seem like the new man is not only not democratic, it was the elites pushing him out. Right? There's this irony of the elites losing power with the other elites and that the threat in Rome was always that you could turn the masses who have been abused or mistreated,

you could use them as a weapon against the other elites. But it was always this, it's a very dangerous thing to do because it's a process that once you start, it's very difficult to stop. And I think when I look at the new right, what alarms me about it, why I try to use my platform to talk about some of the stuff is like, once you bring out into the open, certain tendencies, traits, ways of speaking,

the open acceptance of certain repulsive ideas, it's very difficult to wind that down once you have achieved your ends. Absolutely. I mean, I'm actually, I need to brush up on my Roman history because so much of this stuff, I get in conversations with people and I'm like, wow, I thought I knew a lot about this and then I'm like, wow, I don't. So that's something, the kind of line conspiracy, something that comes up a ton in your right circles.

Yes. So, you know, as you know, but just so everybody knows. So, but like thinking of the American Republic and like the founding of that, like, we kind of have this, not all of us now, but we kind of have this rosy notion of like how that revolution worked. And there was like, you know, okay, all of a sudden, there was these policy differences, and then there was a war. But it was a social revolution, a revolution of like, you talk about, I wrote a piece about this recently,

but cancel culture and like, tauring and feathering and social ostracization, and really, really brutal thought policing. Like that's the characteristic thing of the American Revolution. It's you had a change in patterns of thinking, and then the people who didn't come along were extorted or economically or coerced with violence

to come along and change their way of thinking. And what we are living through right now is the exposure of a way of thinking that is enough of an alternate paradigm and Enough of a challenge to the system that I think you could see suddenly a rapid shift and coercive methods coming in once you get a body of people in there and so like it like because To think about the American Revolution like at a time when media moved so slowly,

you had wholesale changes in how regions thought about themselves and their political future in the space of months. And so like with the new writer, whatever you want to call it, like, you know, you went from Tucker Carlson not using the word regime at all on his television channel. And then all of a sudden he's using it, ingrams using it, and then Tucker is quoting people from the Fed post, like literally like showing tweets as banners from like really obscure podcasts.

Now to tens of millions of people. And that is happening so fast that I don't even think people are aware of how quickly it could produce a wholesale sea change in the right. No, Andrew Roberts wrote this interesting biography recently of King George. And so it's fascinating to watch a British person write about the American revolution from the perspective of this king. I found the book to be really interesting.

And anyway, one of the sections, he talks about the Declaration of Independence, which the Declaration of Independence itself is a fantastic document. I vaguely understood that there's a sort of list of causes underneath the Declaration of Independence, but we don't really spend any time talking about them, right? And he sort of goes through them one by one. I think there's like 38 of them or something. But he's like, all but two of them are demonstrably untrue. Like not like remotely true, just like complete fabrications. And so that, you know, again, it's always interesting that I would believe in America. I support the ideals, even though we weren't close to getting them. But it is an interesting reframing of the American experience, which is that, yes, the colonies should have been able to break through, but it'd be like finding out that Gandhi gets British independence by just making up a series of lies about the injustices of colonialism.

And then forces through the means that you just said bullying, tarring, and feathering, repeating the untruth over and over and over again to the degree that it gets widely accepted and then the cause seems moral and just, but it is in fact based on a fundamentally untrue premise. Yeah, I mean, like, and I think this is where, I mean, this is how politics works in a way that like, again, until I started studying the American Revolution, I didn't really know this.

Like, I think it may be one of the first, actually no, sorry, the rebellions against the stewards were kind of the first example that I can think of in the Anglo-American world of this, where you have though, like, people, you know, to go actually to talk about the rebellions against the stewards, because a lot of people in this kind of sphere want to restore the steward kings. Like, you had Puritans who basically made demons out of the

airsockersian out of, you know, King Charles. And they didn't have any real basis for any of this. I mean, Charles was a kind of bumbling inept person, not the person to be leading England at that time. But you created a structure and a narrative that said basically he was a heretic and evil and all this stuff. And anyone who descended from that, once you were an opponent of him, you embodied the ideology completely, right? And you stamp back here, you embodied that ideology completely. And if you were like, well,

maybe like, I'm not sure, like maybe we should just follow this. You were cast out not just of your own little business or whatever out of society. And that happened so quick. And it happened because the elite was kind of unable to manage the chaos of the time. And so you had an alternate vision that didn't really need to be accurate. It didn't really need to describe perfectly what was going on. It didn't really need to have a perfect political vision as we did not, as they did not when they deposed Charles. You just needed an alternate answer that then you could figure out. That's enough to get to the revolution. And I tend to think we're probably pretty close to that, like in a way that we don't always

see because like the first step is just that the elites can't manage the chaos. Then the answers don't have to be that good. They don't have to even be accurate as you just said. You just have to undermine the foundations enough that things could shake you. Yeah, yeah. And like, at the full, sorry, because you asked, but the number one thing, like, and you can call it anything you want,

you can call it, Adam Curtis in his movies calls it hyper-normalization. You can call it explaining water to a fish. But once people start opening their eyes to the ideological constructs that shaped their society and saying, hey, maybe that ideological construct isn't that good. Hey, maybe we don't like the King as much as we always said we did.

Like, then all of a sudden, stuff starts to go really crazy really quickly. And so like that happened in this Soviet Union where people, they didn't have a good answer for what was going to come, but they knew the system itself was kind of fake. And then you can have revolutions in ways that you don't even really necessarily anticipate, like in the Soviet Union. Yeah, you know, that is really interesting. It's sort of like how science the paradigm begins to fray, And revolutions aren't this overwhelming transform

to the thing, what happens is the paradigm begins to fray. And then one starts to look for a new paradigm that retroactively explains everything better than not better, but more conclusively or more seductively, good or bad, then the old paradigm did. And then the new paradigm is absorbed. What's fascinating to me is I was in the Teal World, this would have been like 2016, 2017,

as I was writing my book, Conspiracy, which I think ends up being a word that explains a lot of what's happening, this sort of element to a conspiracy. There's this, you know, the Nietzsche quote, like beware those who fight monsters, right? I thought it was so interesting that Peter and this group of people spend all this time complaining about fighting against what they thought Gokka represented, which is this sort of intellectual nihilism,

tearing things down, attacking indiscriminately, you know, being captured by an algorithm or like a page view sort of virus thing. To watch that wave wash over this world in its own, like they have actually become their own social media version of that thing. Would you disagree with that categorization? Maybe. I mean, and I say this not to endorse the new right. But as a matter of fact, I say it to

again, kind of critique. Oh, my dog just woke himself up by bumping into a cabinet. Welcome to Recording from Home. So like I say it almost like to critique the main run of our society and the left that I come from. I come from a very, very left wing tradition in my family and stuff like that. And hey, like we have been remiss. I say this is a leftist, like, in not talking about a lot of what you just brought up, in not talking about how social media is reshaping our brains, in not talking about how bad

media has become and why that is. And like, accepting all of this is inevitable, you know, I work in publishing, right? Like publishing just kind of went along with the degradation of its own business and didn't make a peep and people who criticized it. And, you know, like, you know, I'm associated with Harper's. Like, I remember this rash of pieces about how evil Harper's was and how Harper's like not wanting to be super online

was actually like technically patriarchy somehow and stuff like that. Like that was an N plus one piece. That was an N plus one piece from 2012 that I was like, what is going on? And there was something about the left and is something about the left that finds it very uncomfortable

and quote unquote, reactionary to criticize a lot of these forces. And so I don't disagree with you. I don't disagree with you that they have, to some degree, recreated that space. But they're also producing these long, like I am 1776 just came out with a literary journal, like a perfect-bound literary journal.

And compact is producing these long, thoughtful pieces. Maybe you hate compact, but like they're doing something that the broader media ecosystem is not. They're trying to do the ideological and political engagement. And I don't know. I see it.

What I think is interesting is like when I watched a generation of people that I knew that were sort of left ish get utterly captured and consumed by the ethos and the incentives of, say, Twitter, right? All the journalists we know are captured by the way Twitter think, but over the last several years, you could also argue that's what happens to JD Vance, that's what happens to Blake Masters,

that's what's happening to Elon Musk, right? The exact same process of being consumed by competing on trying to get the most attention, changing your ideology and your worldview to what will get you the most attention on that platform is also what's consumed that side of the spectrum. And there is this element to me of their performing for internet points

even as they're sawing away at the basic foundations, not even of the democracy, but of like how humans should treat each other when they, you know, like the terrible quote in your piece about like the debatification of the government or the firing all bureaucrats. I mean, you are floating now out into the public sphere, like a kind of like cleansing, you know?

Yeah. So it's weird to watch the people that were supposedly so concerned about the effects of that thing. That's why I like the Nietzsche quote, ironically become the epitome of that thing. Yeah, I see better what you meant now. Yeah, I 100% agree with that. And I would, I mean, I don't have too much to add to it

except little cherry on top. To me is that, you know, like okay, there's a CNN anchor. Like, oddly in liberal media, you're so constrained in what you can get away with saying that it's very hard to look cool. You can get on there and you can tweet about whatever the thing that everybody's tweeting about that day is and you can try to pile on, you can try to go viral. But it's very difficult to do what you probably know, like in the new right, like people talk

about posting spicy stuff, right? You post just the right kind of spicy thing. And it's like not too racist or whatever, but it's just like it reads a little like, wait, you're allowed to say that and not get banned. And like, they're hitting that line. And therefore, they're cool, right? Because they actually have the space to like do spicy stuff. And so their incentives are, I would almost argue, like sort of, they're taking the liberal kind of journalist, media brain Twitter parasite that infects every book. Without the governor of a radical correctness.

But also, to some degree, to some degree, this is a hard thing to actually describe, but I do think it's true. Like, your whole like being to some degree becomes about like being spicy. Like that, like people, it's really difficult to like separate the person from the online engagement at a certain point because you create these personas and these personas are so different. Like they're so differentiated, much more so than like,

a guy from CNN versus a guy at New York Times. Those guys like almost you can you like change the name and you wouldn't be able to tell who's tweeting. But in the new right, you can create a whole person. You can create a whole new thing that is radically different from everything that everybody else is saying. And then I tend to think I don't know, but I tend to think that if you do that, you go around in your daily life being that person. You're still checking your phone all the time. You're responding to DMs constantly. Like Twitter is totally mediatizing your brain.

And that's... It might be another Nietzsche quote, but he talks about the mask that eats at the face. I think that's what it is. Yeah, I mean, and like, now, there's this guy that is kind of popular on the new right, who talks about profilicity,

do you know this, Jordan Friedrich, shoot George Friedrich Heidel or something. But, so I listened to him on Good Old Boys and I thought it was really interesting, like, and I don't know what his deal is and you might be like a fascist. I'm so I'm not endorsing this guy. But he has this concept of profilicity that he describes

where everyone now essentially has lost their internal character to some degree because they have this public presentation that they're always maintaining through all of these different forms. Like, and you know, this isn't totally new. We've all had CVs, but it's really different to have a CV and then a LinkedIn that just somebody like meets you at a gas station and they're like, oh, it's that guy. And so that we've essentially become, as you just said, like, our masks are inseparable from us now.

Like, we cannot figure out the difference. And I feel that a lot. Like I hadn't been on Twitter as much, like I got on Twitter late and I never really used it that much. I'm not that good at it. And then reporting this piece where I spent a lot of time on it and then having this media blow up where all of a sudden I was just monitoring my mentions and all that stuff. It changed my relationship with my girlfriend. Like it changed who I was to her and she noticed it. And she also changes your relationship with yourself, I think. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, that, that, what I just described

is downstream, it changing my relationship to myself. Cause like, she's not on Twitter. And so to have that happen, this is the space of like six weeks, but like for a little bit there, and I haven't tweeted I think in all of May, but like for a little bit there, like I felt myself change like really, really quickly. And I think that's the power of this nebulous force.

It can bring you in and change your brain so much faster than you often give a credit for. Obviously, the Stokes say time is zipping by its passing by. We can't hold on to it once it's gone, it's gone forever. But there is something I think to be said about the preservation of memories. This is why the Stokes had buss and portraits and different forms of art.

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You should read it. Upton Sinclair, after the jungle wrote an exposé of me in like 1930. Oh, I really want to read that. I'm a big California history guy anyway. It's incredible. This is my copy. It's an incredible book. You should absolutely read it. It's an exposé of what was then a sort of

capitalistic industrial scope right of Media which you could just swap out a couple words. It brings you exactly back to where we are now But anyways, he's he's sort of talking about how it's, he calls it the fool that feeds the monster, right? And I think that's, that's to me what's happening. Is these people are sort of feeding this monster because they want something or it's fun or they're bored or there's some hole in them.

And you know, this is, this is Trump, this is Vance, this is Elon Musk. Even though these are powerful rich people that have everything you want, that you think they want, there's something deeply exhilarating and addicting about performing for this real-time international audience, where if you say the right thing at the right time, you're not just performing for the internet, but now CNN is calling, and Fox News is calling, and they're commenting on you, it's it's profoundly addictive and distorted and if you can get and this is where I

was in my 20s you can if you can get good at tweaking it you can feel it's really fun and exciting as long as you don't think about the consequences of what you're doing. Yeah and I mean, so I don't know. This is my thing though, is that like, if you want to fight that tendency, like, I think we have to have a conversation. It would like, these people can't be the only people who are critiquing liberalism, right? And so like, the thing that I think is happening with JD is like, okay, so with JD and with Tucker, there's often a conversation in the media.

Like, are they creating their audience? Or is their audience kind of, are they finding their audience? Right. And yeah, I agree. And I think that like, I basically think that conversation is pretty dumb, like because it's both. Yeah. But like, I would tend to argue that they are,

the reason that it's impossible to differentiate is because there's like this vast mass of people who do have that hole that you're describing. And it doesn't take a lot to fill it. Like it's an amorphous hole that a lot of people feel and like that you can even, you can have Joseph Arbide and fill it for you. Like some people do.

Like I, I, a lot of my parents' friends, like he fills it. Like he's our Roosevelt and he, if he just had 60 votes, he would save us, you know? And like in a certain sense, like the Daily Show is creating its audience as well, like by doing that. It's just, it's formulating an enemy and it, like, the thing that I get, like, really kind of worried about with JD and stuff is that, like,

okay, fine, if you want to fill that hole, like, you really need to describe it. Like, I would love, like, I'll reveal this. Like, Tucker texted me after the piece came out and he congratulated me and thanked me for writing and he thought it was good. And if I was going to say something to him, I, like, he should have JD on for an hour, like not on the screaming channel, not on, not on Fox Nation, but on the TV and really talk about where this is going, really talk about why all of a sudden they're using the word regime, like why all of a sudden, like this info war matter so much, why, you know, like, why

there is this crossfire between him and the New York Times and CNN. Like what is that actually about? Like because you allude to it all the time, you talk about it all the time, but you're not really explaining to that audience that you're helping to engender or helping find themselves or whatever it is. You're not giving them the goods. And I would be really interested, it would almost, I guess this goes to where

you're kind of raising concerns. I would be really interested to see what happens there. I would also be a little scared because I think there's a pretty high likelihood that if Tucker did that, the vast majority of his audience would be like, cool, where do we sign up? Like let's get that dictate. audience would be like, cool, where do we sign up? Let's get that dictated. You know, the nihilism combines with a certain spiritual emptiness and anger and rage that

can be turned against any group that it so chooses. Yeah. Or that it's directed to be turned against. And like, I mean, this is kind of the thing. This is kind of the thing, like, is that anger and rage gonna be turned at elites, which is already kind of happening on all sides? Or like, when does the kind of like,

ethnic nationalism stuff come in? And like, how much, like, this the kind of like ethnic nationalism stuff come in and like how much like like like this is kind of again like the difficulty in our shadow media war is that like people often don't people are so hesitant to talk about so much that it's kind of hard to find the racist like and it's it's very interesting because you listen as'm sure you have, you listen to some of these new right inflected podcasts and they're like, they're very careful. I don't know, like, or like maybe they are not personally like ethno-nationalists of any kind.

But they know that a lot of their listeners are and you just don't see those people. You just, because they're, you know, they do get, they get banned from Twitter, they're off. And so that whole wing of that audience, and that whole wing of support that's coming into this new right, like you're not even seeing the racists,

but they are there. That is a part of this. It's a dark, it's a dark undercurrent. I mean, it's a really dark undercurrent that is there. That to me is what alarms me about all of it. It's like sort of people who should know better are messing with some very powerful forces

that if you have any sense of history, once again, once unleashed does not end. It ends with people dying. It ends with things being like, like, and of course the left does this too. This is when you saw after the death of George Floyd, people talking about riding as a legitimate form of protest. You are the whole purpose of the structure we've developed.

Even if you disagree with it, even if you'd rather it be more socialist less, so whatever. The whole purpose of government is to get us out of the state of nature where we kill each other over shit. Do you know what I mean? That's the whole purpose of government is to get us out of the state of nature where we kill each other over shit. Do you know what I mean? That's the whole fucking point. And then you see people fucking with it

to get internet points or to get elected to an office that they probably don't even want or to get extra ratings that they don't really need. You realize that there is either, there's either some nihilism in it or some ignorance in it, or it's something like they are motivated by some profound grievance personally that in the way that a cataline was, that trumps all of the other stuff.

And really they just want to stick it to a certain type of people or person. Yeah, I mean, or to even go deeper than that, which I agree with, but like, you know, I think a lot of people on the right actually nowadays don't really buy that kind of Hobbsian vision of what government's supposed to do. I think, you know, like a lot of people, and I'm not going to speak necessarily for JD or Blake, but certainly some of the more online people think the status to promote virtue, the status to promote good men and good families and things like that, that liberalism, there was a critique by Matthew Crawford, the guy who wrote Chopcraft.

Yes, I cited on the podcast. Okay, so he just published a piece and unheard that was a critique of liberal Crawford, the guy who wrote, I said it on the podcast. Okay, so he just published a piece and unheard that was a critique of liberalism. In the direction of saying basically that what we now understand as liberalism is basically like a death prevention device. Like basically like, so we like adopt like COVID protocols, gun regulations, whatever it is,

it's all about ensuring this kind of bear and kind of sad vision of human safety instead of like, well, I don't want to speak for Crawford, but instead of what a lot of people are saying, which is that take gun rights, for example, right? This guy, Indian Bronson, who I mentioned before on podcasts, and then he'd message me and talked about stuff. So I'll mention it again. But I heard him describing the Second Amendment

and he was like, I'm opposed to the Second Amendment on the basis that it's a liberal amendment. The individual use of a gun is not what I want. I want like malicious. I want a society where every guy, this is a quote. I mean, I'm in a certain fact. I want a society where every guy can do 10 pull-ups and every guy can shoot, you know, like with peep sites at a hundred yards, whatever.

And like, he's talking about stuff that is not the vision of government that we grew up with. And whether that's good or bad, like they are talking about something that is way far beyond. And they, I say this, like going back to your point, like, I don't think a lot of these people care about unleashing the dogs of war. Yeah. They think that actually, like, we, like, it's, you know, men need violence in their

life. Like, you know, people talk about this a lot, like, like, men like to fight women, like fighters, you know, and we've basically excised that kind of thing, that kind of conversation, even that kind of discourse from polite America, that's just like basically gone. And they are talking about bringing stuff back that goes to the core kind of animalistic almost impulses of humanity. And I'm sympathetic to a lot of that. I'm a big nature guy. I do jujitsu. I have guns.

I'm not. I share their critique of liberalism as a kind of managerial safe, somewhat like degraded life in a certain way. But I also like going back to the Ireland thing, like I've seen, I get tempered because I've seen, you know, I saw the boy Finnecom die. I didn't see him personally die, but I was with him very soon before the FBI shot him

at the Malier National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. I've seen so many families in Northern Ireland where like these guys very virtuous on some lesson. Is that the guy that got shot in the Bundy thing? Yeah. Yeah. The guy who ironically made his entire living adopt in kids and then being paid by the state

to take care of them. Yeah, I mean, it wasn't his entire living, but yeah, I've been to that house actually. And so I've seen his wife and daughters like living with the wreckage of what happened there. And Northern Ireland is the one that really sticks with me because you had people who were like, very, in their own mode of doing things,

a lot of them were very virtuous. Like a lot of them were people who upheld the tradition that goes back hundreds of years of resistance and all this stuff and if not talking and all this stuff. But you get to 40 and they're broken and the community is so messed up. And none of that stuff really suffuses their lives. And I just, I don't know.

I get so wishy-washy about this stuff because I think about that a lot. I'm in the middle of writing a series on the Cardinal Virtue. So I think about this the same way. Just the irony that the state can teach virtue. As if the whole point isn't virtue is something you develop internally,

strikes me as preposterous. And I think ironically, when you look at the development of fascist states, it almost always starts with the exact premise that you just elucidated, which is that the state has made us weak and hollow and not aggressive enough. And there needs to be an insurgency to capture those commanding heights and then we'll have real men. And those real men always end up murdering a lot of other people and it's a fucking terrifying

thing when I think about that. Right. Well, so I mean, the apologists for fascism, the apologists for fascism often bring up that the thing that kind of animated Hitler in much of his rise was this kind of loathing of Anglo-American capitalism and belief that this was going to, as people talk about today, which is where I'm going with this, like it was going to homogenize the world and it was like reducing the quality, like the literal quality of European culture and stuff like this, right? And like the apologists, the apologists for fascism are right, but the downstream of them, I don't mean fascism is good, I mean, they are right about that point, but the corollary to that point, therefore, is that if you're saying all that stuff to, then the comparisons to fascism have to be brought

into this conversation. You can't, and so you have these kind of like wishy washy like, well, like this wasn't that bad. Actually, people don't really understand what fascism was really about, and it's like, all right, yeah, but if that's true, then this new right is more close to that fascism than a lot of people are willing to actually talk about and admit.

And I brought that up a lot with people generally in private, you know, and there are some interesting, I wish that I could quote some of this, but there are some interesting responses and I will be honest, some of them are very disturbing. Some of them are not, they're not like, oh, no, no, no, we're not that. Some of them are like, well, maybe.

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keep using it if it didn't work. So go to Shopify.com slash Stoic. There's this famous scene at the outbreak of the US Civil War, Sherman is teaching at what is now Louisiana State University. And he's at this, you may be know the story, but he's at this dinner and all the southern sort of military future leaders and these kids are all, yes, this is so great they're talking about.

And he's like, first off, I don't think you understand that the North will fight and that the North has all the industrial might, all the power. You know, they might be softer. They might be more urban than you, but you're underestimating them. But he says, I don't think you understand what a civil war will bring. He says, this nation will be bathed in blood, and it will be horrended. I think about that often when I watch these speeches.

Again, from people I know that I've spent time socially with, that I probably agree with on a lot of things, I see them talking about and flirting with forces and ideas that if taken to their, the conclusion that the natural logical conclusion that they themselves say they want to do, they don't, they seem to be either ignorant enough or indifferent to what that will actually mean, and it will be horrendously awful. And the shame of this country, you know, I mean, it will be, it will be, I'm reading a book about Imperial Japan right now.

You look at these things that serious people took very seriously at the time, and you wonder how it could have happened. And it's like, this is how that happens. Wait, what Imperial Japan book here? I'm reading, I'm Sea of Thunder by Evan Thomas about the Japanese naval commanders versus the US naval commanders. And it's actually fascinating. We don't think of the Japanese as a racist imperial force, but the Japanese not only thought

they were superior to the Chinese and the Koreans and all the other countries they made, but they thought the white race was the inferior weak race. And then we would fight. Yeah, we were scared to fight at night. was the inferior weak race. And then we would fight. Yeah, we were scared to fight at night. I was the reason I asked is because I just before I got on this call, I turned off my audio book of The Rising Sun by John Tallinn.

Yeah, so I'm going through the exact same history. And there's some similarities there that I did not enjoy. Yeah, and the thing that really struck me, was that going back to something we talked about earlier, they kind of made an empire by accident and made a war by accident and like invaded Guadalajan by accident.

Like, it just, all of this stuff happened because there was a one little faction that was like, let's do this. I mean, I didn't know, for example, that the Manchurian invasion, like the invasion coming from Manchuria into China was just a random commander's like, we're going to do this and nobody can stop us, you know? And I think that we're probably headed towards a point of that kind of like chaos, but also like desire to rebuild the nation

through extreme acts and things like that. And so like going back to, you know, where I am right now, the militia is in charge of Shasta County. So I'm just over the lines, you county, but the militia basically ran proxy candidates in a recall election. And like they won't say this,

because like they say like, well, these guys were just independent candidates But like when you talk to people in the militia like at the bar like at the rodeo, which I do I'm in and among them like They're like yeah, we're in charge now like they describe it that way and there's one woman who said to me at the rodeo Just now she was like I was so happy when we won that election because if we hadn't like We would have had to fight them. And I was just like, like it was just a casual violence.

It was just so casual. And there's this guy, Carlos Sepada, who people should Google, I have a big bit of taking notice of his videos down, but he's kind of the big dog in this area for a lot of different reasons. And he went up to the county board and he said, I will fight, I was in Fallujah, which seems to be true.

He was like, I was in Fallujah and I do not want to fight against my fellow citizens because I've seen it, but I will lead that fight if I need to. And everybody's just with him. Like, he is a hero. Can most people you talk to in this county? Not everybody, but a pretty sizable portion. And that's how he talks like all the time.

That isn't just one sound bite. That's a baseline for Carlos. He talks about there's going to be blood in the streets. That's, he just is like that. And those are your neighbors. He owns the bar down in Red Bluff. Like, he's just the guy you see. So this isn't, I often said this like about Trump.

Like, you can't write off half a country as a lunatic French. You can. And you can't, and you, I think you can't just wish away to growing the extremism and the fascism and the willingness to seize a wildlife center or use weapons or use physical intimidation at a pro-tat. You can't, you can't write that off because this is, I mean, this is how those movements take over.

This is, this is even, yeah, this is how that works. But as we wrap up, I wanted to talk about one more, let's tie this back into what I try to talk about, which is, ironically, I think you and I would both agree with the people we're talking about that virtue is essential and that virtue is in an alarming amount of decline. I think what we're talking about is how does one cultivate virtue and make virtue the primary

sort of metric by which society and people in that society are judged. The interesting, like, the idea, it's a seductive idea, but the idea that you get virtue by being unvirtuous, right? That this is why Christian supported Trump, even though they knew he wasn't actually Christian or cared about any of the stuff. This is why it, that has never worked well.

I would defy someone to find an example of it working well. And I think what's so strange about it is the people they are most angry at or against the so-called elites are in many ways putting aside their implicit guilt in things like outsourcing and income inequality, etc. Like, everyone I know is married, everyone I know has kids, everyone I know, like actually adheres to many of those things that we describe as part of the virtuous life. What they don't do is valorize them in how they talk and act, but sort of ironically live quiet lives of virtue. Do you know what, even that's the weird part about it?

Yeah, I think that's true. I think the bigger question is like, and this is kind of, actually, I think that points to a criticism that I have of the left, which is like, if you have people who are living virtuous lives and are able to, according to the dictate of the culture and the society that we live in, like, they're acting out what seems like a good life, and yet society is not getting better, yet our collective is getting worse. Then like, at what point is that actually a public virtue that you're enacting, or is it just

a kind of like private performance of a life that is convenient, right? And that's not a right-wing take. It's a take that I think we all need to kind of think about, because what is weird to me is I'm personally not married, I'm a weirdo and travel a lot and do all kinds of like unvertuous things in a certain sense. Like I'm a very like, like, I was a family man in a lot of ways. But like, the thing that often stymies me about looking around at my married friends and the people who donate to the right candidates and do all that stuff is like, they're caught in a trap of like, I'm pushing the button, but nothing's happening.

Right. Why is this not getting better? We're doing all this stuff. Everybody around me is doing all this stuff. And yet the chaos at the fringe is just gets closer. And again, I'm talking about all this stuff without a good answer to it, you know? No, that's a haunting image that I think we should think about. And maybe it comes down to a fundamental distinction of what virtue is.

And maybe it's ironic that a lot of these guys are suddenly converting to Catholicism, which we didn't get into. But I find it to be interesting as someone who grew up Catholic and it's not Catholic. I think the Stoics, the ancients, would define virtue as a private pursuit. That was what virtue is. It was about self-discipline. And we seem to be pervert, but they seem to have this regressive perverted notion of virtue in the populace, which is something that is enforced upon you, or you are made to follow, that that's somehow superior. And it is a fundamental misreading of what America

is right. America is not a theocracy. The idea was you had a governmental state that depended on virtue, but there was no forcing mechanism of that virtue. It was a voluntary thing and they seem to be despairing that they don't have the not the votes. They don't have the guns to make people be the way they want them to be despairing that they don't have the votes, they don't have the guns to make people be the way they want them to be, which is their religious vision. Right, I mean, you know, and this is, we didn't really go into this either, but like, this

is a very diverse movement, you know, and like, very much like the post liberals, you know, like Patrick Deneen, those guys, like seem to be doing exactly what you're describing. On the kind of younger cultural end of it, I think the virtue question is really interesting because a lot of people have decided, hey, virtue is in withdrawing from this society. A good life is in withdrawing from political participation. Withdrawing even to the degree that you don't use your real name on Twitter, which people don't think about, but it is a withdraw. It's a withdraw from all of that. And you're finding essentially like an avenue to achieve something that feels like a good and ordered life by looking in the past. And frankly,

I don't find anything wrong with that. I'm the last person to accuse someone of converting to a religion of being a larper. I actually don't think that's the people I know who are doing that are not larpers. They believe in it and they're looking for something. The question is, if you're coming from a more progressive background, like, okay, why are these answers not as seductive as Catholicism? Why are these answers not pulling people towards public life instead of away from it? Right? And I wish I had a better one. I thought Bernie was a good answer. And yeah, we see how that turned out. No, I think ultimately this is where, to me, philosophy is a

solution to that, right? Philosophy, what they would call the good life, and the idea of sort of having this discussion of what is a good life, what is a good person, that that is the purpose of education in school. It's not to force you to do a certain way, but to ask these questions, and it does feel like we stopped doing it, and I do find when there's certainly my conversion to philosophy and a lot of people I hear from,

they're like, just nobody else is talking about this anywhere else. And I think because no one else is talking about it, it makes people very ripe to be recruited in in the way that people get sucked into gangs in the inner city because it's the only game in town, you buy into it. Yeah, I mean, and like, the truth is, I'm way more likely to follow

somebody who's right-wing these days on Twitter just because it's generally more interesting. Yes. Like, it's generally, like, there's just stuff going on that's just more interesting to follow. And so I notice, like, I'm like, uh, follow that person back. Yeah, no, like, you notice that it tends to be them because I'm like, oh, this guy is having a conversation about whether the sexual revolution was interesting and good. Like, what is he saying?

I didn't know that we were allowed to talk about this. And then you get by that networking effect, you're in that headspace. And I was like, I need to not be in Twitter because I want that. No, I myself. I'm sorry. Maybe like five years ago, I spoke at this conference in San Diego and Jordan Peterson was not yet Jordan Peterson, but he was speaking there and we had lunch afterwards in the private room after.

And he was just vibing with an energy that I had not gotten from anyone in a long time, putting aside what he says, what he thinks. All I was struck by was the energy, right? Like he was buzzing at a level. And so I think it's not just that the people you're talking about are talking about interesting things. There is an intensity and a flurvel to it that doesn't exist on the other side. And so it just feels like that's where stuff's happening. Even if as we said, there's a certain emptiness or contradiction or horror is a subtext,

but it's just, it's a more compelling show. Yeah, and I mean, I think about this a lot because like, it wasn't that long ago, like it feels like eons ago, but it wasn't that long ago that people were looking at DSA and kind of thinking the same thing. They were looking at Bernie, they were looking at the rise of the new socialists. And I think the whole- And I think the whole-

And I think the whole- And I think the whole- And I think the whole- And I think the whole- And I think the whole- And I think the whole- And I think the whole- And I think the whole- And I think the whole-

And I think the whole- And I think the whole- And I think the whole- And I think the whole- And I think the whole- And I think the whole- And I think the whole- And I think the whole- And I think the whole- And I think the whole- And I think the whole- And I think the whole- And I think the whole- And I think the whole- And I think the whole- And I think the whole- Bernie wasn't that far away from the presidency of the United States. He was probably farther than he looked, but it wasn't wholly implausible to get within our lifetime, like someone like that into a position of world-wide power.

And it just dissipated so fast. And I don't know, is that because the answers turned out not to fit the problems? I think it's because they're not actually that sincere about it. Like they actually just, you know what I mean? And I wonder if that's what will happen to the new right movement, which is that it's more a means to an end. I identify a market or a grift that once, I'm not saying the fervor's not sincere in a lot of them, but I wonder if it dissipates as one is rewarded or touches power. All of a sudden, you're making

a lot of money, having your podcast or whatever. You soften a bit. Yeah, I tend to think though, if you want to think of it as a palace coup, like, you're accruing the more you stress the system, the closer you are getting to accruing greater power to the incentives, the incentives are actually to keep stressing the system and actually keep engaging in the same politics that you're engaging in before. Like, then you get corrupted after you actually get the power. I think we might be at a point where you can't, you don't just feed somebody a Senate seat and put them over there and say you're done.

I think now the wave is cresting, or not cresting, the wave is building. If you look at these kind of oligarchical collapses, generally, generally, the anti-oligarchy keeps pushing the envelope until they get the power. I think that further will remain, I guess. No one knows that, and that's what I alarm me and why I like your stuff and why I think it's you're doing an important service by talking about it is that these forces once unleashed are very hard to stop.

And we need to understand them and talk about them openly. Yeah, I agree. It's not that life is short, Seneca says. It's that we waste a lot of it. The practice of Momentumori, the meditation on death, is one of the most powerful and eye-opening things that there is. You built this Momentumoriory calendar for Diosdok to illustrate that exact idea that your life in the best case scenario is 4,000 weeks.

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