Nick Land at Theory Underground

All right everybody Welcome to Theory underground what you're about to listen to is an interview that we did with Nick land last week very exciting that he was able to join us considering how important he is for thinking the situation today Michael DS AKA Mikey of the Mikey seminar here at Tu taught intro to land almost a year ago and then taught intro to xiic about a month ago and we have Been pushing for the xiic versus land debate now for over a year and uh we also just wanted to have this conversation right because

at the end of the day we are just interested in seeing where he's at in his own development um if if you're at all familiar with his uh Twitter uh sort of personality that's a very separate thing from his actual uh theoretical work as is xii's Theory versus xii's articles that he writes for Say the guardian right there's this big difference with both of them between the sort of popular stuff they do this maybe trolling stuff they do and this much deeper and rigorous level and we are starting to think that in a sort of

sense uh there's this thing they do to weed out unserious uh people um at a certain level saying certain things um at the level of the public discourse uh can weed out the unserious and then you can Kind of just focus on doing your thing and you're not surrounding yourself with cowards or uh kind of naive utopians or what have you so it's a whole that's a whole thing that we think about and uh look this is a fantastic uh interview it might be the best uh land interview you'll ever listen to I don't know

I think I think it probably is that's my personal opinion uh but you know you can decide for yourself uh if you're curious to Know more about Theory underground stick around until the end of the video or podcast episode then you'll hear the PSA we've made that should tell you a little bit about who we are what our Vibe is and how to get involved if you're interested in lecture courses or the ongoing research seminars or the books that we are publishing then yeah stick around also Mikey's book on Nick L and xiic and capital

versus time energy that book is in the works right now pre-sales Are officially available and you can purchase those via the link in the description enjoy recording in progress all right everybody Welcome to Theory underground today we're joined by Nick land how's it going nick uh good great to have you it yeah great to have you here and so uh this is going to be one of those ones where I am really just kind of managing time and making sure that people get chances to To say their things or whatever I mean I'm I'm in

the student position here I'm still trying to understand where you're coming at uh this from uh and you were just saying before we started recording uh that large portions of your own work are kind of like kind of mysterious to you as well in a sort of sense and so uh I I was saying well we have that much in common right but I think Mikey's going to be the one who really helps us drill into some certain aspects of your work And hopefully we can have a great conversation so you want to take it

away Mikey yeah sure so having this opportunity to talk to you I was thinking like well what's the best way to open up the the conversation and your thought has certainly evolved since the 90s and I kind of like the idea of getting a read on where you're at with this famous question or idea you posed so Nick at this point in your life looking looking around does anything Human make it out of the near future um yeah that's that that haunts me a bit that that sentence [Music] um I mean I could sort of

retreat easily into semantics about it um yeah I don't I don't want to be evasive I think if if you sort of pan out a little bit from It I think the sort of philosophical um structure around that is is that uh the the the anthropomorphic subject has a uh much larger context and um a lot of what the kind of catastrophist uh singularitarianism in which the kind of apparently bounded human subject Exists threatens to delude in in a certain sense the future would be disappointing to anyone coming to it from that sort of uh

there's a set of there's a set of frames coming to the Future on the one hand from transcendental philosophy on the other hand from the sort of technos singularitarianism and what they share is is a notion that the absolute inundation of the narrowly conceived human subject is what it takes For the future to deserve a capital E you know um so I mean I would just say there's a kind of current Trend um which I'm sure you guys have all heard of that CA itself effective accelerationism iak and that is really I think in this

respect defined by sort of uh erasing that sentence you know it's it's acceleration without nothing human makes It out of the near future and I can respect why that's been done and it's certainly good PR but at the same time I think that there's this certain philosophical disappointment about it you know I think that it's there's something a little bit self deluding of thinking that what we're talking about with the future the radical future is some kind of Star Trek scenario of like higher primates in Space you know it's like it seems to me to

just really not be a plausible a plausible model so I I would say I mean I'm rambling on a bit here I would just sort of as a summary thing would say I've come I think a lot more to respect the myth of humans in space you know I think the whole I I love all this kind of M colonization stuff I think it's great I think the technology people are doing to put humans in space is is great but I Also think that it's impossible on certain philosophical grounds to Simply subscribe to this anthropomorphic

anthrop future it just doesn't make sense it just shows a certain lack of understanding about what people mean by superintelligence about what robotics promises about sort of understanding the constraints I mean the fact that you have to stick a human Cranium through a birth canal is such a kind of major obstacle to to to its Horizon that I think you can't just like move past that fast and and easily is is that is that to say that um if we were to say avoid the way that child birth has happened for humans for uh as

long as humans have been humans uh and and come up with some other way of bringing us us I'm speaking Loosely into existence we we stop being human at that Point in any sort of a reasonable sense so like to say nothing so you could still kind of say nothing human makes it into the near future because we're changing the language is tricky but the point is is like the subject of the sentence is changing and and language is kind of preserving it but it's that's just a language game right yeah I mean the thing

about language you know all are we're sort of um networked through language so you Know people are very interested in these larger scale social intelligences and such like or even these cyborgian mixes where humans are communicating with with robots and and such like like and the and the bandwidth of language is so absurdly small I mean it's just like you know pathetic the quantity of information you can get through that channel and that in itself is enough to produce um a certain kind of hard individuation at the level of the Individual human animal it's just

it just can't it's just not networked enough with anything else to not be most in its own head where stuff's going at a kind of relatively respectful level of synaptic activity and until it just then hits this barrier and just goes this incredible crawl through linguistic communication and so I think this whole question about what you know the Horizon of the human is really the Horizon of having that hard language barrier as It's uh as its single channel for networking and so whether you're talking about sort of dense much larger intelligences or you're talking about

just internet communicating intelligences or you're talking about um Elon Musk type implant connections that are that are replacing language as a soul champ all of those things are such radical violations of the kind of BAS boundary that I think constitutes any Realistic sense of what it is to be human um yeah Nick would you say like the issue with eak for you is the same issue that left acceleration has which is this idea that um it doesn't take the singularity serious like this idea that we just continue to exist in some relative human form uh

with the emergence of super intelligence that's that's the real problem yes I think so I think it's like Um this the importance of the like space stuff is it really just makes things Focus extremely tightly on this question about uh efficiency in terms of mass you know when you're you've got a whole kind of um e social and technological ecology based on moving stuff out of the planetary gravity well then you have to be extremely serious about what you're getting in terms of your um Functionality per kilogram and it's I mean humans aren't even it's

not even if humans are predominantly brains into on that level you know what I mean I mean to a human is an extremely bulky thing to be moving around in space I mean there's just enormous pressures going to be on doing stuff with robots um and you know understanding really what kind of function is you're trying to you're You're putting all these resources into taking it out of the Earth's gravity well so you're going to be really specific about that you know and things like you know human digestive systems and livers and and skeleton structures

and all of those things in terms of the mass they they represent for functions that yeah you can make that trade on Earth but I don't think you can make that trade for long if you've got a whole orchestrated system of shuttling Stuff around in the in the solar system it's just like what are you doing you know it's just a kind of um weird sort of Boutique thing to be moving these large bodies around in order to move a brain around um and you know it I'd be very surprised if if brains were some

kind of extreme cas of uh economizing Mass to intelligence ratios I mean I it would be I guess disappointing for everyone if that Turned out to be the case but certainly you know to H humans are just not very transportable I mean they simply AR and and so yeah I'm banging on about this so much but I I think that it's like well once you say um if you grant that sort of argument then you say the population off planet is quite soon has to be mostly robots nothing else makes sense once You've once you

we we at a point now with llms where I think lots of people are basically saying the touring test is we're in a Zone where the touring test has been clearly passed so it's hard to know what human organisms are bringing to the table at this point you know like obviously there's the moon you could it's no point there was no robot that you could stick on the moon in the 1960s but I think at the time even if it's really soon in a few years where you're Doing Mars um the reasons that you'd put

people there is for PR it's for symbolism it's it's not because it makes any kind of deep sense in terms of the amount of functionality you want to put on the planet and and how much uh Mass you have to deal with to do that okay so I want to kind of move on a little bit um so to me why your work just continues to be so relevant is to Me your central thesis has always been cap and you've said this in another interview capitalism is artificial intell Ence and that for you like this

is the core landan thesis and for me this is what sets you apart from other theorists of AI uh Bostrom and ctsw and these guys I mean yeah sometimes they'll talk about capitalism but they don't see this fundamental link that you picked up on in the 90s and so I want to talk to you A little bit about this um when when people talk about artificial intelligence uh often times they don't Define what they mean by intelligence what would the the landan definition of intelligence be um well I I guess that I think the most

robust one is competence at playing games with a very wide definition of games that encompasses basically all Kind of activity most obviously competitive activity that people engage in um but on the way to that I mean that my sense of like the ultimate landscape you're moving into with it becomes interesting with super intelligences you know post touring test experiment intelligences um but on the way there I think that the classic Alan touring touring test notion of intelligence is extremely Helpful um and it picks up on this thing that uh we are going to be impressed

with something as intelligent if it can emulate us as part of a much broader capacity for emulation um so I mean it can emulate us on the way they emulating all kind of other things but emulating us has a particular sort of social and political importance because it's in it's in a kind of Um difficult it's in a difficult political Dynamic with us I mean we're basically like uh begin with the kind of legal status of slave owners of this thing and so it's it's dealing with us is going to be a serious issue for

him um and so so I think yeah I think that though just to think of intelligence in terms of that in terms of being able to uh negotiate with people understand what people are Trying to do with it understanding what kind of deals are on the table um those are the games that it's going to have to play soon after the touring test threshold is cross which as I say I think is basically that's where we are right now yeah I mean with everything because I haven't seen you say that much about chat GPT but

when you see stuff like that do you have these moments like I told you so like where it it's so amping Up again at this moment with AI uh and I think there was a there was a period where people were like oh the AI thing it was the 90s you know it was pop but there's this real moment of upsurge right now a wave yeah and so but yeah like I just please so but I I think we could dwell on that for a second and maybe unpack it because isn't that just as much

like almost missing the point of like what you mean by by intelligence and and I Mean because like people are people are like oh chat gbt and look at what mid Journey's doing to Art and they're thinking that's AI but then it's like but no like Al I mean that's almost distracting from how the entire economy itself was always already Ai and has been for a couple hundred years right yes by by I mean if you're going by the kind of capitalism equals artificial intelligence then for sure like I I would sort of say on

that level We've been dealing with emergence artificial intelligence for like basically half a millennium probably is right yeah yeah so I mean when we go to the heart of this thesis capitalism is artificial intelligence if we're thinking in terms of like the the Marxist formula of capital MCM Prime how do you see that process as intrinsically generating more and more knowledge more and more intelligence what's the epistemological Connection uh to MCM Prime um well I think it's basically the people who've been strongest on this has been the Austrian School of economists and they' I mean

if someone said to me look you're just simply paraphrasing or rephrasing what Austrian economists have said about uh capitalism as information processing system fair enough you know I I I don't think there's Anything maybe I just sort of sharpened up a little bit and obviously they didn't have artificial intelligence as a reference point so when they're saying oh capitalism's information processing system it's it doesn't have that those resonances that we have you know post being the computer age in the Cyber Punk age all of those things um but yeah that would definitely be I think

there's a deep tradition of it um I think it's the development of the notion of spontaneous Order in Liberal economics is given this particular information theoretic SP in the Austrian School um and that's already a is a huge current that I think compels that compels that thesis really okay could you I mean but could we also see it as on some level being baked into Marx's critique of capital where you know Marx is always talking about how you know on the market competition necessitates Capitalist revolutionizing uh their means of production which of course that's going

to take the production of new knowledge and new intelligence to be able to create those Technologies and so that's also part of the motor of where this intelligence gener ation comes from for sure for sure and the person also that I would definitely want to throw in there is Samuel Butler I mean his uh book of the Machines in Era one is an incredibly prophetic piece on Earth um and it's it's there's a kind of independent uh emergence of this this MC m-h um circuit on the on the mark side and obviously the question about

the question that leads to um intelligence explosion on the AI side particularly uh Goods article about the last human invention I I haven't read it For a long time but the but it's basically the the essential point is to do with the fact that uh the extreme sort of drama as a temporal phenomenon of superintelligence is the fact that once you've got a machine that can itself build its own intelligence you have an extremely powerful positive feedback mechanism mhm and I think it's obviously you know this this attention to positive Feedback going right back you

know to the ccu's the cciu I think was born in that thought in the thought that positive feedback has been neglected and derided um on behalf of negative feedback and so you know the basic sort of right up to the 1940 and Vena and all of this kind of stuff um the the basic assumption was that positive feedback is pathological it's you know the role of a cybernetic machine is homeostatic it's To preserve itself negative feedback is the essential thing and if it's betraying signs of positive feedback it's going wrong and so obviously the the

I think the essential move that the cciu made was just flipping that over and said like you know even if you think it's going wrong it's the basic thing that's happening it's the basic thing that's happening and it's and you know it's it's what Marx is talking about exactly In the formula that you have just said and it's what all the intelligence explosion people are saying specifically about what is to be expected from the kind of uh growth curve of artificial intelligence if you know those those two things have exactly the same Dynamics and we

can sort of obviously see that the um the the the marks D when you actually really get into it and it's a it's a Loop between technology and commerce so it's already it's not that you're bringing these two different things together I mean the tech the technological explosion curve is already something that is being recognized and discussed on the economic side before you even make it specifically a question about artificial intelligence and and and computers right because I mean if we Take that that circuit of capital marks talks about and we we subtract the content

the form of it is just one zero one prime so it's just a loop of augmentation and so yeah it's like he it's he created a formula for uh cyber positive feedback yeah so when def when people and that is the basic capitalist Dynamic so yeah 100% I I can hear the little the little uh comments now I I've seen it already I Think when we talk about this but people will say oh well capitalism is not intelligent actually it's very wasteful it's very stupid and it's like I I feel like what you just said

is the point that they're missing it's like well they think it's not intelligent because their definition of intelligence is basically colored by thinking that negative feedback equals good you know the Pleasure Principle and what they're missing Is this this what the ccru was doing with positive feedback right I I mean I think the thing about inefficiency is what's your Mark you because this is having to build everything from the ground up it's not like there's no plan there's no model it can follow you know any competence it has has to be trial and arrowed into

existence in this kind of crazy growth process so I mean obviously you can make comparisons That make capitalism look extremely wasteful but I think it's like you know but compared to compared to what um so certainly I would go out on a limb extremely hard against people with confidence in planning as a way of actually improving efficiency I think its record is terrible there might be very short windows where it can build on something that's been spontaneously put together by the system and just incrementally just tweak it in a good Way but that's only you

know the process is dynamic so it's like it might do something that just gives a slight Edge for a little short period and then W you know the thing has gone through a whole set of experiments in the in the uncontrolled part of the economy and it's just left that stuff in the dust um and I think it's really crucial on the side of AI how much that has been Vindicated in the sense that all the all the woman in The history of artificial intelligence has come from the surrender of top down planification type models

of what you're trying to do to these kind of emergent blackbox evolutionary types of thinking you know deep learning the whole point of that is you don't know what the hell the thing is doing but you set up an environment where it can through trial and error um develop itself you know on the model of the nervous system um and yeah again I have absolute confidence that that all the kind of I think we're out of the gate now in the sense that I think the amount of time where people could think that they were

going to be able to plan their way into the future AI is just surely pass because it's like they don't have that edge to even lead to that illusion now I mean it's really getting to the point where its competence to um project its own future is as powerful as anything that we can Bring to there um but but even were it the case that we were still in the old the old world in which human programers with a key the way it develops It's Always by surrendering control that you that it moves forward um

so yeah so Nick I wanted to go back just for a second to the the thesis capitalism is artificial intelligence um interesting thing so you know uh I was thinking about it in terms of uh contan statements contan truth do you Think like because what you're saying there is capitalism necessarily gives rise to artificial intelligence if we if we take the statement capitalism is artificial intelligence and we know that that means necessarily gives rise to it would you say this is like an AR priori analytic statement uh you know a aposteriori synthetic or is it

hypersal like what do you what status would you give this Statement or this thesis um well yes I mean I'm trying to think I've thought a lot about it yeah I've thought a l I think on some level like the point is it's I think it reads like all Bachelor are unmarried men like the point is to say it posits a you know a necessary relation there like it it's definitional but but it's also not it's not simply it doesn't simply Work the way that all Bachelors are married men work there's there's a kind of

empirical claim being made like the world is going to head in this direction uh but I don't know I almost see it almost as it's hypersal positing an AR priori analytic where like time will tell but you're tapped into a certain uh tendency you're seeing unfold that you view as a necessary tendency of capital I I mean I think I'm sort of anticipating that there's going to be a Phase of discussion in this talk that will loop back to this because I think it's it's maybe how we have to be sort of probably discussing these

questions about retronic Dynamics and such things to just to really lock in where that equation was coming from so I mean you if I try to say well let's just pretend that we still believe in kind of standard Progressive Temporality under those circumstances what would you say was the kind of basis of that claim that there's an identity between capitalism and artificial intelligence um yeah I mean I think it's I think it's complicated I mean it's obviously based on saying that when you just actually see what people are saying on either side uh you just

see that they're Discussing the same thing from two different aspects but that's kind of in a way just to kind of I think avoid the question like you say well so what convinces you it's the same thing or you know what is it that leads you to the conviction that it's the same thing um and yeah I mean I I think I have a kind of a imaginative problem of not seeing it so sort of stubbornly obvious that you know it would would actually be A problem and this is this is a this is a

failure on my part I think to to anticipate what the alternative thesis would really I feel like more of it is being tapped in basically look you have you don't have empirical re you don't have like oh everywhere in the universe capitalism's ever shown up it is we have the the data that shows it always produces AI so we don't have that type of Empirical research but it's kind of like we know That uh diabetes is a cyber positive Loop right uh more and more blood sugar the insulin doesn't get Rel the negative feedback doesn't

kick in and all these problems emerge from it and we have the empirical data to show how that works but we know that once this process starts we we have ideas we have knowledge of where it goes uh what I think ccru and you guys were tapped into is you see this trajectory um and you see the logic of How it gets to artificial intelligence and so even though the empirical truth of it isn't established yet you see the the the Tendencies at work in capital accumulation but I think you know you could usefully add

to that what Dave was saying about on the same topic of the fact that okay on a fairly narrow definition of AI yes the relation is like exactly as you're saying it's it's prophetic but on a Wider definition of AI it's already an AI system when you have this distributed unplanned machine solving these distribution problems in a way that none of the participants themselves individually are able to understand then you're already dealing with a form of artificial intelligence you it's not it's not an lln but but it is a an intelligent mechanism that is demonstrably

working And when you want to say you know already with Adam Smith uh you want to study that thing then what you're doing is basically you're studying capitalism you're saying you know how how does this thing emerg that solves all these problems that the individual people and do not even they can't even articulate the problem let alone solve the problem um you know they're all the whole the Famous Adam Smith thing you know it's not through the altruism of the Bush or the baker that I go for my meat and bread I mean he's basically

saying look he's not going to tell you how this is working you know like you you can go and talk to anyone there's not anyone anywhere in the system that is going to be able to explain how it is solving these problems um it's you know it emerges out of the whole dynamic character of the System as a to as a whole and and therefore I think is very reasonably described as already being a form of artificial intelligence before it becomes a sort of thing that we now would recognize as that and what we would

now recognize is an AR intelligence a an actual computer system that that can solve problems that we can't even understand like how to how to engage in uh complicated language games with People that they've never been taught how to do or they taught themselves how to do it um there's a very I think very definite just continuous lineage that goes goes to that you know and and the all the components of the narrowly conceived artificial intelligence systems have been have emerged with I would say some compelling inevitability out of the Earlier issues you know like

why do we have computers I mean there's a whole history of computing precisely because like people will often say I think again very convincingly that things like the jackard loom are these crucial stages in the history of computing technology why did the system produ a jack Hing well you you know you only have to start to understand how the system works to see why there was a need For a jackal you know and the mechanizing human labor is the task that capitalism ass signs to technology from just originally you know you've got a you've got

people doing something they're quite expensive uh you could probably use them for something more useful if only all the easily programmable part of their productive activity was assigned to a mechanism um it's just incredibly Elementary to the way capitalism works And capitalist history Works um and obviously is already you know on on the way to the touring test you know the substituting for human behavior is is built into technology so deeply by the kind of capitalist uh Matrix in which it operates that of course we get to this thing about can machines convincingly emulate humans

as a ho in there will pass the touring test It's just like you're just saying you know at this stage all they can do is weaving they can there's only certain groups of people that they can throw out of work at this stage in history but you know it's a it's a continuous process and it's got a very continuous teleonomic pressure to it that that has to lead eventually to full spectrum uh full spectrum touring test uh passage Computation so I mean could we could we just say that that the techn capital Singularity would be

the selfrealization of the Invisible Hand of the market you see a trajectory from like that that basic level if you're doing it if you're running your hour of time in that direction sure yeah okay I I feel like this is going to we're gonna we were naturally moving in the direction of talking about your theory of time and You know this it keeps kind of wanting to go in that direction but I don't want to get away from uh this door you kind of open by bringing in inefficiency and asking what's our Benchmark for what

counts as inefficiency and I think this is probably going to be the biggest uh sort of difference uh between uh us and you and so it's worth like kind of looking at for at least a minute and I know Mike's probably got stuff to say about this but I'll just Kind of say it this way it starts out with you know there's I I forget who said it but there's that saying you know my you know I'm not I'm not so impressed by the fact that there's an Albert Einstein I'm concerned about the fact that

there's a lot of Albert Einstein that never got to kind of develop because of uh the fact that they were probably down in the mines or working in sugarcane fields and that's for us obviously as humans with our anthrop With our anthro concerns right like that's going to be uh for me the standard of of what counts as inefficiency at a certain level which is human potential I care about it you know and so maybe and I think probably to you and or at least to your younger self and definitely for a lot of uh

the people who are enjoyers of your work um it's just cute right this conern of mine this priority it's a cute little thing that I care about uh human potential but where I come from uh you know people are dying from opioid addiction people are they don't they don't see anything else to do with their garbage time except for drink alcohol and and like the it's it's the the the H the homes and communities but also the individual level it's all falling into dysfunction and that is a a result of the structural stultification of our

life worlds because of the collapse of time energy Which is large energy infused repeatable blocks of reliable time in your week or month between people right all of that collapsed into individuals uh doing everything they can to prepare themselves to go back to work or to get a job and so all of this effort all of this potentially Creative Energy is being put towards our reduction to a kind of Labor power and effort uh to to do certain kinds of Labor that are about Surplus value Valorization right and so that's I mean there's potential here

so like the this sort of Renaissance human maybe that kind of humanism we should just just accept we're so far past that but then there is the potential for some other kind of Renaissance we're interested in what that kind of Renaissance would look like but it's definitely one where people would have the time energy for uh discovering and cultivating their talents and Relationships just because we care about not having miserable shitty lives in our limited span of time on this Earth yeah well here let me kind of take you back through that okay that discussion

because I think it's there's lots of interesting elements to it and maybe the first place to kind of stop again on this is is potential so so your your initial example of this is like Einstein's down the Minds and it's very inefficient to on any level you know you can there's a whole Spectrum from looking at this in a very kind of humanistic caring way that you you're saying could be derided by the more cold blooded of being cute but but you can get very coldblooded about it as well I mean you can be very

coldblooded and see it as a huge waste to have someone with Einstein level capabilities uh working G of mine as a as a coal miner And and and obviously you know to go back a little bit to like the jackard loom and these kind of things I mean there's an implicit thing in all of that all of those stages that is saying it's a waste to have anything about a machine doing this task I mean this is something that a machine could do it's like why why do we have a person doing it and as

I say I'm not trying to pretend that this is particularly like based on any Great humanistic sense of empathy or anything like that I think it's just cold cold efficiency and so if we're talking about potential I think the question is is this potential of a kind that makes sense to the capitalist mechanism or is it some kind of potential that the capitalist mechanism just does not recognize and I I guess my St is like you know we might think we can find some kind of recognition of potential that Outd does what capitalism is able

to do in terms of recognition of potential I'm skeptical you know and I think capitalism is extraordinarily good at appreciating potential you know and putting people to their most profitable use and even in things that would seem extremely like far removed from grad grind type capitalism in the entertainment music you know artistic talent musical Talent things that are you know are very far removed from what Might be seen as kind of just industrial potential it's capitalism does a serious job at trying to sift out this Talent this potential and and the only way it SS

out is by commercializing um so yeah I mean I should probably let you come back to that but I'm I guess what I'm saying is like wastage of potential is I think only something capitalism can be accused of if the Notion of potential is for some reason intrinsically inaccessible to the economic uh to the the commercial mechanism commercial I'm trying to avoid saying the economic logic because I kind of really have a personal aversion to using logic in this way but that's kind of what I'm saying I mean if if if you can't if you

can't uh come to some commercial estimation of potential then yes indeed you know you're then open to say that there is a kind of inherent Wastage and inefficiency in capitalism that it can't address because it can only it can only use commercialism as a s a sensory system it's just intrinsically impervious to anything that doesn't make commercial sense or register commercially but you know how restrictive is that actually yeah you know is it is it really that there's a lot of things that we value that simply cannot be that no commercial sense can be made

of them at all I I'm I'm a Skeptic as I say so I I definitely want to kick it over to to Mikey here because I know he's got a lot on this but I do I at least want to say uh from a sort of knee-jerk response without having put a lot of thought into it yet um the the need to commercialize something in order to show that it is indeed you know that there's actual potential there is what that's what's driving what we call education today and the and the Institutions that do what

we call education today right uh I don't know is that right that's right all the kind of libertarian right people I know are in absolute despair about it AB I mean it's precisely because it's doesn't seem to be doing that at all it seems to be just doing leftwing political indoctrination for sure but I'm talking I'm not talking about the the social sciences or Humanities I'm Talking about the physics research and the maths and the engineering which is being driven by weapons manufacturer research and advertising like the funding that you have to find where where

does the funding come from does it come from like you know the the like the government has said oh yes we want to fund science for objective truth we care about that no they don't care about that right it's it's about the well I mean if they don't a lot of that stuff still Seems to be done I mean you know physics has its problems you know that are very interesting and obviously we could go into that but it doesn't seem to me the problems are coming from the fact that there's a social unwillingness to

fund pure physics let alone math I mean you know is it is it the case there's any sort of constrictive pressure on Math's education at a high level I mean I just I would need some convincing that that Is really something that's happening um it just seems to me that that math is so open to commercial perceptiveness like you know the capitalism really as soon as it understood anything it was understood the value of math you know it be it basically began in in Renaissance Italy with a recognition of the just incredible revolutionary importance of

of of the the new numerals of algebra of you know Spoon calculus I mean so yeah I so again I have some skepticism about this I I will I will have to do some heavy lifting then probably not just to convince you but to actually just write out a piece maybe that could even lay out the case that I no I mean my assessment of the situation is that the the math the potential math genius and Engineering prowess is going towards seeing how much skinnier we can make the next Big Mac while selling it For

more as opposed to yeah anything else really you know yeah but you see to me that's a very interesting criticism because I think the thing about capitalism is like okay just hypothetically Grant it an existence as an alien entity that's impacting this planet putting itself together in a hostile environment we are that hostile environment right you know humans like lots of people have made this point that Basic human societies have been organized to prevent this thing getting in you know and it required very specific historical circumstances to break through those security mechanisms so it has

to work with us it's not gonna capitalism can't arrive on the scene in any of Italy and say look what I want is basically all human activity to be directed in the long-term goal of producing in synthetic super intelligences you know we we're not Interested in that we say I know we want hamburgers you know we want commercial sex we want we all this [ __ ] I mean sometimes we want good stuff um but you know or it's not capitalism telling us you want hamburgers we're telling capitalism we want hamburgers and and so the

only way it gets to do its stuff which is basically swapping out human and producing in increasingly sophisticated uh mechanical intelligence the only way It gets to do that is by pandering to us you know we're saying we want better weapons we want hamburgers we want all this stuff you know and and it's simply that's the environment in which it has to operate to do its thing but its thing is not that you know it doesn't it does I can really show you that like in its essential mechanism capalm does not give a [ __

] about hamburgers mean it's like it's a concession to us also to devel but the it's the it's the us or We in that paragraph that I want to problematize because which part of us is it able to appeal to it's able to appeal to that part of us who when we're in a hurry and we say it's good enough we go for the thing that is really fatty and tasty but it's not the part about us that cares about the long term and it's not the part of you or or or me who that's

able to like read cont or practice the violin and so you can commercialize the sale of the violin or The sale of the lessons for the violin but you cannot commercialize the actual doing it part the the doing it part's the part that can't be commercialized and therefore we're not able to cultivate those higher human capacities right well I don't know I mean in so far as those High human capacitors exist which of course they do it seems to me they're being catered to I mean you know there are concert Halls there's there's orchestras there's

there's music sales Um you can be a professional musician you can be a professional musician because things are arranged that the market mechanism finds that there's a sufficient demand for the production of music that it can make commercial sense to pay musicians to allow them to spend their lives training to become better musicians to group them together into orchestras to you know I mean those are things that happen um so it's not as if it's not as if there's some process of Erasure taking place where none of that stuff happens you know there's an art

Market there's a musical Market there's a market for literature um none of these things are disappear the are they are they I mean are they I mean are they there are they are they there or are they there that's kind of the question it's like the the person who wants to do music because they want to live in a state of Skol if they want to have have their Leisure Time and they want to have their like Leisure Time free of uh like pressures and stresses and just literally just live and breathe music versus a

person who's training to be a professional musician like they're like a Korean going into like K-pop you know what I mean like where they're just being worked to death just so that they can succeed in that environment it's a different quality of life and of the the product itself is a different quality of Music and then it's like that might work for somebody who doesn't really they're they're not it gets them we get both haven't we got both now I mean of course you know there's a larger commercial market for various types of pop music

and people can be more or less cynical about that but there's still there's still every type of music isn't there still there's still people who are completely vocational musicians go to a High music school become a virtuoso violinist join an orchestra and you know that's a completely viable thing for a small number of people and the number of people that can be uh kind of the capacity for those people is obviously is ultimately based on what is the market you know you take everyone on Earth you what are their what are their desires um and

inclinations you know they have there's quite a lot of high stuff and that stuff will be catered to Um so I mean obviously the other side of this question is like what is there really any imaginable institution that could do a better job with this you know like you have some sense of what is really valuable and important and what people should be encouraged to do and help to do and all of this thing and is there any imaginable institution that you could trust to maintain a set of values about this that you would Respect

um and you know therefore support those support those things because the things we've tried to do that with is democratic governments I mean you know we've got let let the government decide I mean does the government make trustworthy decisions about what the what part of human aspiration is worth encouragement uh certainly I don't believe that is true um and so if it's not the government I mean maybe you're saying There is some kind of government that would do it but if it's not the government it's not the market what is it like where is this

institution going to come from for right now I'll just say that the for me the the the way that science and and uh and Technology being sort of Unleashed majorly like in in the in the Renaissance you know uh really has its I mean I think it's it's kind of spelled out really well by Renee dayart in His uh the discourse on method right and he's saying hey guys if we unchain this thing we could like make a lot of Labor saving devices he says an Infinity of Labor saving devices um um and then he

says we'll have so much more time and then he says our workers could do this and that and the other and so of course there's this we here and the the class question rears its neck and and so it's like okay but like are those labor saving devices for People or those labor saving devices for the small number of people who've had the time to get to know their desires and inclination so that they can appreciate things that aren't the cheeseburgers and pop and so the the I mean I want I want I want to

cash in on the promise obviously and that's a humanist desire and I and I get that but the the the point is is like well it does say these devices do save labor in a certain sense but when They're being done for capital in the way that they are um that that certain sense is one where a lot of this potential is lost so then and and and it's like I don't care about this abstractly I care about this because it's just like I care about the people I care about I care about myself I

care about like being able to do the things that we want to be able to do um so that's just that's where I'm coming from I kind of want to just leave it there Yeah and and I I because I can I just one thing back to this though which is whether you follow J's stuff you know that J that communism is free time and nothing else position I mean you might be interested in it it's like I have obviously problems with it I mean he's he's a full B communist but he's a very interesting

one what's his name and J who his his his Twitter handle is Dan uncore J okay um and um yeah super interesting guy but you got with it yeah I mean as I say I won't there's no need for me to get into a whole complicated thing about my agreements and disagreements with him but but sure he seems to address your concerns more intensely than anyone I can think of well just as in case I'm being put in a bucket of deplorables I don't want to be associated with I look forward to meeting J and

finding out what he thinks but I do want to clarify I'm not a communist I don't care about a Classless society I I'm not trying to I'm not trying to do that at all just saying here's the whole thing is that he you know he Embraces accelerationism but he says you know the fundamental Dynamic of it he he Embraces a kind of 1990s anti-humanist accelerationism but he says you know the basic logic of the system is to just replace people yeah and that's what should be embraced so he's a kind of marxist who who basically

says look the Whole thing is that this capitalist mechanis is basically about pushing people out of industrial activity and that the whole attention of what he sees as as his politics is is to embrace that and say you know that basically capitalism should just become our [ __ ] it should totally replace us as industrial units and then I mean he for me Marx gets a bit cringe with the whole fishing in the afternoon and stuff I mean I don't know But he he he doesn't he doesn't get that cringe um I think sort of

in the same place yeah Dam J who doesn't he he he's much less subject of these slightly kind of weird I would see Victorian kind of you know romantic images but obviously in terms of substance is it is it's all about the production of free time and that he thinks all other uh I guess he would say leftist I mean I don't it's people use these this language tactically and in different Ways but let me just pretend that he would say leftist all leftist political activity should just be about fre time maximization okay and that

in doing that it's in some kind of deep Accord with the fundamental historical capitalist Dynamic so yeah that that's why that's why I said I thought it resonated with the points you making and not not to accuse you of of some kind of well and and I don't I don't part of It's not just like oh communism has a bad record or whatever it's not that I just literally do not believe that the state is necessarily the solution right and that you casting doubt on that I think is a good point and it's actually a

good point that the Austrian economists do bring in is like yeah centralization and State control and this top down governance of e of economy that's not necessarily going to get the results that people are looking for Maybe it can I'm open to that I'm agnostic but I but I am very skeptical right and I think like there's nothing worse than a government that is ruling over people who aren't skeptical of it right I mean nowadays you're supposed to be shamed for that but I I've got no shame I I agree with you so but with

that Mikey what do you have on all this I mean there's a lot to say I mean look I guess for you Nick like I kind of want to give You more context like I guess where we're coming from is obviously we take Mark seriously we take you seriously we take Bo dard seriously we take Mark fiser seriously it's like we're living among all of you like like these different thought spaces and you know obviously the the the leftists who love what we're doing and support us you know some of them they're like oh but

we see something essential in your work where you're like no you can't just Brush land and ccru and accelerationism under the rug I think what you did with thinking through artificial intelligence using DG especially what they were doing in anti atopus I I there there's so much that I agree with there that I'm always having to think in terms of your work when it comes to how I think about capitalism I I think you're one of the great theorists of capitalism and so if I want to understand capitalism you're going to be there at the

heart of Whatever I'm I'm thinking through so where where I'm at is I'm always caught up in a web of tensions right so on the one hand I see the thing that d& got saw in capitalism that it decodes it deterritorialize old codes or imperial Co codes that they were talking about I I celebrate capitalism in the sense of how it can uproot how it can deterritorialize and so I'm with you on that but but then there's the lived reality like I'm not a professional Academic I'm a wage worker I work in a warehouse and

this is where like the more the mark fiser stuff and the bodard stuff resonates with me because the a of shitty wage labor it it's like the great nihilism the the real concrete nihilism where you get up and you go to a job you hate and you you're you know it's just meaningless and what why we're so big about time energy is we see it as the transcendental condition of the good life or the pursuit of the good life and Wage labor trapped you in this situation where you're at a job 8 to 10 hours

a day you hate being there once you leave you don't really have the the the time or the energy to devote to things that you love and so yeah like if there's if we're leftists if people want to talk like that it's in the sense that we do want to see the emancipation of time energy now I I know I say that to you and I mean one of your F famous comments when you were talking to Justin Murphy Is you know you're not interested in emancipating human beings or human groups and I I respect

you for just saying that because most [ __ ] would just oh I'm not saying that no I I get that but this is the tension I'm caught in where I do see that capitalism does things that I like but the wage labor thing is the part of it I don't like so much and I I to bring this back around the reason I said all this is I'm almost do you famously said this is in Fang Numa from machinic desire you said for every problem there is a virtual Market solution so the question is

instead of thinking outside of capitalism for time energy uh is is capitalism what could actually provide time energy through automation through um the the withering away of wage labor I mean is it possible to have capitalism without wage labor [Music] um yeah it's an interesting question It's an interesting question I mean basically do you believe what's the best way to get an is is the only way that capitalism can produce Surplus value through human labor power I mean this has always been the standard Marxist view of where value is produced but I've also seen you

talk about Capital when you were talking to James Ellis on hermedics right you said you know capitalism really is doing anything cyber positively like capital Is uh this ability to just do something with greater and greater returns greater efficiency and so I don't know if that means that Capital you know capital accumulation necessarily has to always involve human labor power uh in order for Capital to continue I just I I wonder if it's possible to actually think um Capital without human labor power yeah I think yeah look this is a really good an interesting question

I Mean maybe the first place that I have to sort of intervene it's just to say you know I've learned a lot from marks and I have enormous respect for a lot of what he's done and you know I would say for me he has to be read within a larger Austrian framework um I think what shum's criticisms are really sort of irresistible I think that um the Transformation problem is absolutely lethal to a kind of naive notion of um marks and I think there is a sense in which the truest reading of the whole

massive uh exercise of D capital is as a reductio ad absurdum of the labor theory of value which is obviously something marks inherited not uh you know so there's all those caveats and and as part of that caveat I do not believe that Um saying that the capitalist mechanism Surplus value is entirely based upon uh it's it's based sorry to say that profitability of capitalist activities totally based on Surplus labor power is an accounting trick you know it's like you can definitely do that accounting but that's not to but you're not really doing a kind

of causal explanation of why that's happening you could you because of the fact that cabalism is bringing a lot to the table that Disappears into that accounting trick I mean it's doing the organizing it's doing all kinds of stuff and then you know it it it inserts human labor power in and the human labor power is totally used as the as the unit of account for what is actually happening in that thing and you guys must know from your own work that that's that's true I mean it's a very convenient accounting device to say look

there's fixed Capital that comes in and B and and that just simply You know is a it's a cost of business and then we are doing everything and so you make sense of the whole economics of the company by like looking at how much we're being paid how much the company is doing discount for fixed capital and that's the business structure I mean of course that's like a nice way to talk about but I mean do you seriously think that's what's happening there you know and it's like the the all the value is being input

by the fact that you are you Know the labor force in that thing is is is doing the work I mean that seems to me like um weird like you know obviously AUST go to the other side and still all the all the real Surplus value comes from sort of entrepreneurial input there's you know there's a business idea they put the organization in they they hire uh the labor at competitive rates and then if the idea if the entrepreneurial idea is great it will make money and you know The entrepreneur is the hero of profit

I mean that's also very one-sided uh I don't think it's more one-sided I think it's like clearly as credible a story about where profit actually comes from in a business um and certainly if if work is kind of routinized um and involves little initiative um just micro levels of initiative but on a level as Marx always likes to do kind of just averages out um then it's hard to see how that competes With the sort of entrepreneurial contribution in terms of making a business sort of distinctively profitable and functional in a competitive economy so okay

that's my this is my sort of right Wingery to your to your left Wingery on that on that point um but the but the deeper issue is this yeah so can Capital can you have capitalism without wage labor Um and it's it's it's a seriously interesting complicated question and it's very it's it's ineliminable from a question that takes us back to touring test takes us back to artificial test intelligence takes us back to our social relations with machines because the special status of wage labor comes from the fact that humans have political rights you know

they have Property rights over their own labor and so the fact that they treated as a special cademy by marks as we've just seen um by themselves and out also is because they are um they they are the people disposing of their own labor power as their own private property so you know you've got a special you've got a contract with your business where what you own your own capacity to put in whatever hours a week for of work for them is something that you can freely Dispose of and therefore you get compensated for um

in your your relationship with your employer obviously you know if nothing else ever occupied that role then it's hard to see how you could you could have a capitalist system like if it was to be the case that humans are the only beings that are ever able to have this self- ownership rights of self- ownership that gives them the Special status to enter into these contracts with Capital via an employer then they would then I mean you're faced with this peculiar thing about fixed Capital you know like if fixed Capital all the Machinery that you

could buy say say you've got artificial intelligent llm say you can run a business that actually doesn't need any Human employ es whatsoever and it's all fixed Capital um and so you just sack everyone and replace them with machines and every single thing from top to bottom of a company except for the ownership is been automated is that a capitalist Enterprise again we're getting back into damn Yus teritory because this is is very much his sort of model so his model Is based on the fact that we don't ever that these rights don't ever get

distributed to any non-human subjects so they yeah so I mean but here's here's imagine you're like you're in the position of power and okay the vast majority of the economy has been automated and yet the economy is still you know it's still got private o private ownership so they're still capitalist but the vast majority of the infrastructure and the production Process is automated what do we do like do we have the state just do Ubi or like like how how do we get the the problem of how do we solve the problem of how do

people have money to buy what the capitalists sell us if nobody has job because everything's been automated yeah it's over ly well the Ubi example is is really important I mean this is obviously how some people are thinking about it for sure and that's in this this is this same this it's very The whole I guess of left acceleration it's very sympathetic to these C check Williams and inventing the future yeah they're about it I mean but as you as as as somebody on the right or you know somebody who's profoundly Pro capital I mean

there's a sense where it's like okay if if if if if there's no one to buy this I mean it's like do the do the capitalists wouldn't they have to tell the state Like we or or would the what I mean there's nobody to employ I mean do you pay them a do you employ people as consumers like here we're paying you to buy stuff uh that we that we produce it it seems like the only way because capitalists aren't going to want to do that they're going to want the state to just provide Ubi

so people can buy Commodities and so it see but well I don't no I don't think so I mean this is all super interesting the reason that That yeah I mean there's capitalist and there's capital and there's the workers right yeah um and I guess there the state because a separate agent now really hardcore capital and by that I'm I'm saying Capital that is basically able to turn its own ownership into just automat just follow the cap the capitalist axima that's just you know that Dynamic that is just based upon MCM Dash that is just

the absolute just Raw machinic expansion of the system itself understood at a micro level now well what does that that at the moment produces commodities for humans um because that's the way that um you know obviously in the whole sort of weird Marxist ecologist it it's got human workers humans are getting paid the money that humans being paid is the market and capitalism panders to the market So you know there's a kind of organic connection between capitalism only has a motive to produce stuff that humans want because humans are workers at a point where we've

got this like you Ubbi system okay the government then has money that it gives to people not to work and capital can then try and get that money by producing things people want but it's an extremely it's a much less direct and Convincing circuit that we dealing with at that point because because C Cal doesn't produce like you know back to our hamburgers it's like it doesn't want to produce hamburgers it wants to produce fixed Capital but the only way it can produce fixed capital is by selling people hambur that's like you know it does

it panders to what humans want in order to develop itself which is fixed Capital uh fixed capital is what it Wants it wants social resources to be spent on basically in the Widder sense robotics robotics is the only thing Capital intrinsic core Capital thinks is at all important that goes back all the stuff it does for us is just in order to make is just in order to get robotics programs to work that's that's what the that's the capitalist mechanism um um so all of these kind of fixes are Basically like look can how what

is our coexistence with this machine that just wants to produce robotics um such that we you know what's our niche in how do we how do we we've got a niche in it now the niche in it now is we work for it um we work for it in order to produce commercial success for that system that produces resources that it can invest in fixed capital will do robotics I mean that's the current capitalist ecology and everyone's now Moving forward into these futuristic imaginary capitalistic colleges the Ubi thing all of this free time communism all

of this stuff in which you just not in that ecosystem anymore you know humans are not in that loop it's not that it's not that in pandering to humans you're getting robotics out there you're getting your robotics by some other company you know the the the companies are just going to want to Trade with each other like the bits they need to put together better robots that's the that's the actual intrinsic capitalist Dynamic there everything that everything that they do to produce stuff humans want is just what they've been told to do that by politicians

by the state they why would why would they want to do that there's there's several things here uh and and one that I want to touch on is it it you're you're Saying this was a little while ago but I was listening I think you said something like there would have to be a suitable replacement for what you said like sort of contract havs sacrificing I you didn't use the term but it does seem like if there's not something like stakes and and loss and risk if there's not individual units in that mass that are

having to think okay it's either This or that and I can't have both and I have to give up in order to choose that if if that's not happening at the microscopic level the intelligence factor is lost and that development is undermined right and so it's like yeah you it's about having it's about trade like in the circuit technology and commerce are the two sort of phases of the circuit and labor power is based upon the fact that you trade with workers because they got Property rights they've got self- ownership and so you know so

you've got a contract with that so there's a technological side which is what you do for the company which is like ultimately about building robots however indirect and you've got a commercial contractual side which is because you are a holder of Rights of your own ownership so you have a commercial relationship with them and that's why there's wages passing to you from from the Employer and all of these new thoughts you know that are coming out of this this kind of historical Dynamic of human substitution are to do with losing that contractual commercial relation ship

because you don't trade with your fixed Capital you know if some company brings in a bunch of robots at the moment they don't have to sign a contract with them you know they sign a contract with a company supplying them so you know you need some chips from here and you need Some software from here and whatever and so you've got a bunch of commercial contract with companies but you don't have any commercial contracts with your actual fixed capital um the fixed capital is just simply your possession it has no property rights it's enveloped totally

in your property rights as a company and that's why it's completely different to having workers and why suddenly we're thinking well what's what's capital without workers Going to look like is throw is blowing everyone's Minds you know because it's like we don't have any framework for that at all I mean it's like no one has got a conception of what that would be like and and the the Ubi thing which obviously is extremely relevant to that discussion but it it it it's basically saying we just Ste right out of the dance we step right out

of the loop it's like you know the government just gives people [ __ ] and companies are told they Have to produce it for them I mean it's like that whole Machinery that whole whether you like it or not not very kind of automatic smooth Machinery that goes between the technological and the commercial phases of the process is just broken um and you know we I mean as theorists of Ubi we lose interest in what capitalism is doing we just treat it as a kind of cash cow as a Golden Goose that just produces [

__ ] for us um and how is that happening we're not part Of it anymore so I I guess so and and I feel like one of the big complications is is is a complication from that there are two main Traditions that we're kind of thinking between right now and you you were kind of touching on pros and cons of the Austrian approach and I I that's basically like just my research one of the main research threads that I have Cut out for me over the next couple years here especially is to kind of hone

in on what are the strengths and limitations of this marxian approach as opposed to this Austrian appro approach and then is there like are there other serious contenders on the scene right now that I'm not taking into account when I'm dealing with that and I I kind want to touch on two things about that and one is just to say you keep saying fixed Capital for the Marx oids and the audience we're just talking about constant capital and and I I want to acknowledge all of their little red flags because they're all thinking well value

doesn't come from fixed capital or constant Capital value only comes from variable capital and of course you're thinking that's because the fixed Capital being improved through re through research and development is only that's the only source of value only in So far as it helps valorize the relative or absolute forms of surplus value right which is to say you've because the fixed capital is more efficient it is it it replaces 100 workers with 10 workers who are now pulling levers doing the work of all of those other people so it's efficient and labor saving in

that sense um but then they do weird stuff can I just say sorry I didn't want to interrup but just to say yeah this is why I'm saying it's Just accountancy you know if we have your model and you sort of sack 90% of your workers and because you've got this cool fixed Capital then um still in the mark accounts and say it's just that the labor become Mass ly more productive and is still all the Surplus value is coming is coming from your labor power you know the 10 workers who are left have just

suddenly become you know 10 times as efficient and in in that whole marxian accountacy all of all the profitability Of the company is down to those 10 heroic uh guys who are who are left so yeah so sorry to interrupt but and and those 10 heroic guys are probably the the the the I mean they could be replaced by absolute morons in a lot of cases right like I I've I've worked at Amazon a lot and the the the tendency is to make it so that anyone with a pulse is able to walk in there

stoned off their ass and get the job done right and uh and and There's just so much wiggle room in terms of like the skills because it doesn't actually take any skills those have been objectified taken out of the humans put into those machines and it's amazing to see it and I think it's very impressive but where I was going with that was to say I know that the this traditional Marxist account is going to say well no but value is only created here by this uh Surplus value And uh specifically through the variable Capital

it's never through the fixed capital and and it's it's interesting how value becomes a problem for thinking about this and I think you said that for the uh austrians they're going to say well you know no actually the value is coming from these entrepreneurs you know they're they they bring something to it so it's like Schumer as well we could throw in as as you know he's all about those entrepreneurs and and that's Obviously an element that's missing in the marxan account they don't take it seriously enough the sort of creative capacity that's brought to

the table there but I think they just bracket out value altogether and say there's only prices like there's we're not going to even talk about value that's just this abstraction that's just an abstraction serving marxian goals and we're going to bracket that out and just say that's That sounds like metaphysics we're just going to deal with what we know which is prices and so we'll just focus on supply and demand and the sort of Genius of the the this sort of objectified depersonification one of the things that's lost in throwing out value here um and

this is potential this is for me this is for research and I kind of just want people to know where where I'm coming from uh is the Austrian response you know through Von Bomar saying oh you And I don't know if I'm saying his name right but saying you know the transformation problem that's damning and uh you know then we have the the labor theory of value that's not going to cut it those two things right there transformation problem and labor theory of value are what thinkers like pastone and Grossman and mial Heinrich and cojin

katani have all Transcended and have all like thought inside out and they they do this 4D chest where they're like no it's not the labor theory of value Marx is a CR he's doing a critique of the labor theory of value he value form Marx is then is saying that the point is that it's the reduction of all things to the standard of socially necessary labor time that that the world currently revolves around but that's the problem and the leninist approach the centralized top down Approach was basically to mitigate the crisis by by basically uh

using the state to make that more uh I don't want to say efficient but trying to mitigate those crises from through Central ization but in doing so uh replaces a lot of these booms and busts with like this giant uh bureaucratic glut and and and and basically the intelligence factor that the austrians are picking up on that gets lost in there right and I think That keraton and Hinrich and pastone and even maybe Grossman all of them are sidest stepping that issue altogether by saying no it's this this labor Theory instead of the labor theory

of value being what Marx is doing which makes him nothing but a miniature Ricardo as Schumer says no no no he's doing this much greater thing but angles and kotsky they did not see what he was trying to do there and obviously bomo work and Mees and Hayek they miss it as well and So I don't know if that's all true I'm trying to sort through it it's very complicated it's you know what I mean but that's kind of where I'm at where I'm coming at this from and so uh yeah I just wanted to

say that so I don't know what to do with that I'm just going to be literally one second I have to okay okay cool he can Sprint did you see that he he accelerated I think now in my Imagination land is always running that fast outside of Zoom calls yeah that was very fast okay welcome back yeah yeah I'm just I'm just getting some refreshment good good yeah no and if you need to take a break at some point like we can you know yeah yeah no I'm cool okay great all right so I I

feel like th this opens the door and and Nance had actually DMD me uh a message about how like we really should go into the theory of time because what we're Talking about is a difference in our our difference in how we think about the human it sounds like is largely based in uh maybe our differences in time but also I Nance you haven't said anything yet so I want to give you a chance really quick here to say anything that you have on your mind based off of what we've said so far or if

you want to kind of take it in a direction for a second let's let you do it yo what's up listener or viewer yo yo yo how you Doing so I noticed you sitting there um watching this video yep and yeah you're you're listening you're you're paying attention um you're definitely not hearing everything we're saying though nope definitely not you're not taking notes yeah take notes dude what are you doing hey you know what if you want to do hey if you want to be passive and just enjoy this content while multitasking that's what we

do as well Everyone does that most of the time we very rarely uh switch into this more active mode and and that's fine that's fine because you're kind of absorbing this content as you go through your life and that and that's great but if you're going to do that then we just have a little request of you what what's our little request Nance we want you to do the algorithm things we want you to hit the button the thumbs up uh I mean or the thumbs down uh hit the Subscribe Button you could even hit

the Bell so so you get notified when there's an an epic Marathon stream uh or one of the dope ass interviews we just finished a dope ass interview um but but do the things to to help train your algorithm to actually give you content um that you prefer and at least here we're we're we are aware of the problem we are aware that we're all infected with the algorithm and we're trying to do something about it um so while you can Like maintain a cynical distance of like not being an enthusiastic vocal supporter right doing

those like doing those actions actually um it first of all it helps the channel it helps the underground um but it helps your algorithm too you will get less kind of shitty clickbait react content if you train your algorithm um to give you what you prefer I mean you're already here you're already watching this yeah like and so Enthusiastic unironic genuine support might be a little too much for some of you who are way too cool for that kind of thing but you can at least hit the little like button and then we'll say we're

even okay there we go you owe us nothing now yeah let's get back to it so I think um the the question of intelligence and and whether it's competence at playing games I've always kind of called it just like ability to act in a goal oriented manner On the world around you and I think that rhymes really well with competence at playing games and I think I know for me it's very easy to complate intelligence and subjectivity um and subjectivity and the human as it were um and I think there was a moment in the

eons uh you know where the ATP synthes motor was kind of this new assemblage and it was kind of doing things and there was this energy metabolism and and Kind of over time a subjectivity emerged from this assemblage that we have come to call the human um and I could just take that for granted and and say um say my subjectivity my humanness matters to me more than this kind of loose idea of intelligence and and then from there kind of say that that's where I plant my flag and and I I do think that's

kind of um at least my difference because I don't disagree with anything you're You're you're saying like in fact I do I view Capital as uh an alien Invader it's it's this God and it it is trying to compete for us um for the resources because it is also just a metabolism machine like we're just the solar anus you know we take in solar energy we produce waste products um and I think if anything the the only thing that uh or the only difference is kind of the decision about that expenditure and what type of

waste do we create and I want to Create human waste I do want to create works of art I do want to create private moments I don't necessarily want to create efficiency and I think that's why I can kind of accept and and Grant all you're saying and still just say well I'm a human supremacist then uh I am in fact racist against robots um and I think that's kind of all I I have to say about kind of intelligence and capital like I I think you're right I do think you're Right um and that

leads me to kind of go into like okay so then are we doomed like are is it have we come across this kind of point of no return have we already encountered um our own or have we kind of created our own demise in our machines and in the kind of external devices that have aifi and kind of became become um autonomous like it it really is already This autonomous AR arcial general intelligence it's just not that smart yet but there will be a moment where subjectivity kind of emerges and I think that's the singularity

um H yeah I mean look the the side of things that I think relates very strongly to what you're Saying and I'm not going to say puts a positive spin on thing I let me just take one step back before saying that which is to say like you know I do think that's a kind of obviously dark very convincing construction of of these things you know just if I was just to say look all everything we've just talked about as far as I'm concern let's just say is purely descriptive it's not like I don't expect

anyone to like it it's the question is is this actually What is happening you know but the the the context in which I think you get more sort of interesting things and which position us maybe a little bit differently uh on the kind of deep cultural AIS of gnosticism um and you know in its modern form simulation hypothesis type Notions which I think are very tied up with this whole retronic Causality framework too and and and if you're looking at things like that then you know if once you once you're not positioning yourself in Progressive

time like you know my ancestors crawled their way three and a half billion years out of the Slime and now there's this what seems just explosive process towards the emergence of some post-biological superintelligence it's hard to really think that we're not going to just be Roadkill in I mean it's it's like like really really why why would things not look very dark on that um but if on the contrary you know what has this thing the singularity the the the big threshold is something that has been crossed and we are now in the kind of

uh Gnostic space that has that is Generated by that like super intelligence isn't just like it's not just something that is you know up the road on this on on Progressive time it's something that is contextual for our limited from our limited subjective position you know we are like we are immersed in and already in eternity and by eternity I just mean a negative outside secular history Consummated process of intelligence production um and I mean I you know I'm sure there's more or less dark versions equally with that framing but it's but I don't think

the dark versions is just like to do with sort of completely feudal hopes of biological human competitiveness with this thing or Notions that somehow we're going to be able to just in perpetu treat it as some kind of slaved Automatism that is just going to look after us and allow us to kind of use our endless free time creatively and in self-fulfilling ways I mean those those kind of framings just seem to me really hopeless it's just like I can't I just can't imagine how that could be imaginable um so but on the other hand

to the extent we're talking about Something that's already [Music] happened we've coped you know I mean we're here or whatever I mean it's not it's like we where all that's the kind of framework like okay like what are we really where are we really when are we really but like here we are it's not that there's some kind of just absolute annihilating negativity awaiting us that Would be inconsistent with the fact that currently we actually exist and and are having this conversation Nick like since we're talking about time um you know what everybody knows you

as a deluso Garian especially in your 90s era but there's a case to be made that the philosopher that's had the most influence on you is actually K and you know early on yeah the you know the K Capital prohibition of incest uh you Know you were critiquing him there but then all these years later when you were doing the Bitcoin stuff K you know contian time really was foundational to that and so I guess I'm curious about like because I mean in in the Bitcoin book you were making a very bold claim right which

is uh Bitcoin is in a sense the um realization of kti and time in a way that disproves in some way einsteinian Relativity and so Kant got time right Einstein got it wrong or wasn't enough um for you what for somebody who's new to philosophy and they want to understand what Kant was doing with time how do you explain conen the contient theory of time that you apply in your own work well here I'm also gonna do a little step back just on the on the whole Bitcoin versus Einstein thing which is very open To

uh kind of rid ridiculous construction and you know I'm not claiming to be innocent about that um I should come across someone who's put this I think much better than I than I have because it's obviously not that Einstein in physics is um violated by Bitcoin I mean it's not that it's not that bit that Einstein is therefore falsify side what is what Bitcoin does However is um it vindicates a cantion as opposed to einsteinian conception of time locally so because um in in einsteinian time um there is no abs absolute succession you know what

happens first between any two events is is relative to the position of the Observer and there's no there's no absolute priority Possible the blockchain absolutely requires strict succession so therefore it's a it's a it's a Canan as opposed to an einsteinian time and that is only possible because of um the fact that cosmologically it the the the block processing rate is uh is determined in a way that within the spatial extent of the system it can guarantee a successive outcome like sorry I'm I know I'm not being extremely Artic about this Like it's easier if

you can think about it like if you had uh Bitcoin extending across the solar system which is what this other guy and I forget I'm s that right now I can't give you the reference there but but he's interested in expanding blockchains across the system and you can only do that by massively expanding the the uh block processing time such that do any signal can actually cross relativistic distance is within that period if it if that wasn't True if you were processing blocks before light could get to whatever it is Mars or Jupiter or whatever

uh then you couldn't you couldn't have a blockchain anymore it would be completely scrambled because you wouldn't any longer have um absolute succcess um so yeah so all I'm saying is I'm not trying to I'm not trying to make a physic physical disproof of einsteinian Relativity but it is kind of say it that Way I'm simply saying that um you know that that the genius of the of the blockchain system is that it kind of fixes its its block processing time in such a way that it can sustain absolute succession even in an EIN einsteinian

universe so it it does produce plti and time ra and and you know you time so you in in fact what that means is you still have time whereas obviously you lose time ultimately Einstein if you just pan Out cosmologically fully with Einstein you don't have time anymore there just SpaceTime it's just a dimension um there's no there's no there's no true simultaneity or succession or all of these things all of they all become relative say blockchain is practically finds the constraints on the on the spatial extent of the system such that absolute temporality can

be uh instantiated and so yes I I guess I'm I guess I say it's been a while since I Thought about but I guess I say that like the blockchain is the first time we really have had solidly instantiated absolute time and see by by absolute succession what you're saying is blockchain functions as an absolute clock in the sense of you can determine what actually happened before and after and you can chain a temporal link uh you can you can you can have an absolute foundation for temporal chains an Absolute calendar Maybe might be slightly

better because it's not about the metric it's about the it's about the order of succession yeah okay and so with Kant and this is this kind of is a bigger question about your theory of time is acceleration and like one of my favorite books of like all ccru related stuff is Anna's uh capitalisms oh right yeah yeah yeah right uh transcendental time machine and So stepping back what what I get from it is that all right so Kant had this idea that time and space are pure intuitions that they're pure formal matrices through which since

data get filtered and so for Kant time is absolute because we all inter subjectively share the same temporal Matrix you as a deluso Garian though you know so k a transcendental idealist because this this temporal Matrix along with the spatial one they're forms of All of our inner subjective uh transcendental Constitution but D and G they come with this idea of transcendental empiricism uh transcendental materialism and so in some sense the the transcendental conditions of experience are outside us they're in the field of intensities they're not just subjective forms and so with all the stuff

you guys with using the the distinction between uh Eon and Kronos uh I guess I've always tried to figure out exactly how much of your theory of time is K where does it become deluso Garian and um is it best to think of it in terms of uh it's contian time but it's outside of our subjective experience it's not just a subjective form uh and and in in so far as it's it's part of the virtual itself yeah I mean it's there's a very important reflexive complication comes in when you start thinking about time Especially

when you start thinking about it a little anomalously because of the fact that you know you if you have a sort of uh people are constitutionally predisposed to Progressive temporality and it's like it makes sense to us because memory because memory is asymmetrical if you don't you know people use this thing about remembering the Future in movies and such because it's an an anomalous bizarre thought we can we can assume that conventionally and by ordinary experience and in every such way memory is extremely asymmetric and we remember the past and we don't remember the future

um and therefore it's tempting to think that stuff comes to us out of the past asymmetrically and it doesn't come to us Out of the future um we you know yeah just to repeat I mean we're very predisposed to that to that but obviously it doesn't remotely follow I mean there's no reason why the order of cognitive ingression should actually be the same as the order of memory at all memory is just the way that we represent certain things to ourselves it's not it's not some sort of raw perception of the the way things Actually

impact it wouldn't you know wouldn't be Memory it would be perception if that was the case um so my strong sense of this is that like a certain humility is required when you're thinking about about time in the sense that you probably don't yet know why you think what you do about time um you would know perhaps if you had good memory good powers of introspection and um time was just Progressive you for sure there's a Chance that you would understand your own time intuitions in the case but absent those particular assumptions there's no reason

at all to think that you will yet understand what you think and about time in particular because time is the axis upon which that uh that uncertainty is is distributed um so I guess what I'm saying first of all Here is that I'm a bit I'm a bit unconvinced by arguments from influence or intellectual biography on question because I think that they are just like very easily just camouflag for something much more interesting you know the notion that at Point a you read this at point B you read this you you learn this you learn

this and then you come to a certain Conclusion about the way time works is already a very particular and to my mind extremely problematic notion about how time works if I mean I think I don't think deler and grari think time works I don't think and not sure what K thinks K is obviously extremely extremely ambivalent about time because of the role of the schematism so time seems like be a form Of intuition at one point but actually it's not because because uh the synthesis of inner and outer sense happened through time so if time

is just on one side of that it can't fulfill that function so time he clearly says doesn't actually satisfy the conditions of being an an analog of space and this is another reason to say there's something happening in K that isn't happening in Einstein and I think what's happening in K is more Interesting than what's happening in Einstein and and because because there's something special about time that is utterly neglected by treating it as a fourth dimension um well and and wouldn't you say that part of the problem is if whenever we start talking about

time in terms of points in time or even to to say time is past present future isn't that to fall victim to not seeing the ontological difference like time as such And then particular instances of time yeah absolutely and so like like part of your work was always trying to emphasize like time is not a time it's not a point in time it's not a series of time it's some we've got to keep this distinction between time as such and and empirical point it's very difficult to do that it's very difficult to do that um

it's the philosophical equivalent of the kind of burden of the Mystic you know to remain in a state of Enlightenment I Mean to to not be just lost on the question of time is extremely difficult and and maybe impossible I mean because of the fact that you know if time if we're ever going to get time right there's no reason to think that that's now I mean it's like the it's it's extremely obviously a lot of what's going on here is that there is Kind of [Music] um prepatory anticipatory things happening a lots of level

including the cognitive level that happen to a level of adequacy that does not rise to full Lucid comprehension things happen as much as they have to happen rather than happening to a degree that fulfills our most expansive Epistemological ambition um but I think what we can safely take from the tradition of transcendental philosophy is that as just you say time is not made out of bits of time and time does not come out of the past I mean the huge the huge Temptation you know if we just become in that we always actually think time

comes out of the past uh but you know that just cannot be Right I mean that you know I think that's K's great achievement it's like it cannot possibly be right to think that time comes out of the past and as soon as you say okay so you know time doesn't come out of the P I think you're already in a realm questions that are extremely stimulating and productive right and I mean and look phenomenologically we think that the Present moment is the realization of time whatever is that one present moment then you get into

the whole problem of how long is that present moment even who rule it's like no it kind of drags up up and then it has a lingering effect and you can't even precisely Mark the present moment but um it gets me thinking like what what you're talking about is part of what I take from dng you know this distinction between actual and Virtual and intensive this three-fold distinction um if time is virtual uh past or future it's a whole it's a whole okay I'm kind of fumbling at this but Nance and I were talking before

you came on and it's almost like you and ccru it's like a block theory of time but it's not static it's not stable it's Dynamic but basically it it's that ver that time itself is virtual and we want to reduce Time to actual moments and not see it for the the virtual Wellspring that it is on this larger scale and so I mean I guess to say look we we actualize time opposed to seeing it as virtual is the same thing as saying we make a a piece of time time itself it's the anthological mistake

or uh not seeing the anthological difference but um yeah I mean do you think would you say that your theory of time is somewhat akin to a block theory of time uh just one That's Dynamic when you say block the you you mean this again is like Einstein language well kind of more of like like the the past the present the future they are all simultaneously real uh it's not like one's fake and the other ones are are real they're all real but we can't experience all of their reality uh at a single moment and

so it's kind of like I it's a simple little example but um when I was trying to Explain how I understand your theory of time to my students I I I hold up a record like okay when you put on a record yeah you're hearing the song as it plays through where the needles on the record but the point the whole record's there just because you can't hear the whole record at a single moment yeah yeah and so that's that's more of what I mean by a block theory of time where it's all yeah yeah

no I I would I would strongly Endor that for sure okay Okay like I mean I think it's just in our tradition what is meant by eternity you know it's a it's a privative term it just is to say you know we're not saying anything positive about it but what we're not saying when we say eternity is that time comes out of the past you know we're not saying that only the president is real um what we are positively saying is Extremely challenging Ing and maybe depending on your vocabulary mysterious um but for sure there's

a kind of shift from uh common perception that is that is required to even start thinking about what the problem of time is in the right way and I I agree with you I think I think this is totally you know a really good way of formulating it and I think it's also a Very traditional way of formulating it you know I think it all sort of uh questions about providential structure of time are very very commen with it which is to say history is coming out of Eternity it's not coming out of so um

you know you can look at events in that in that sense it's like you know the the lofty powers are not waiting to see what happens you know What what's we are we're waiting to see what happens but that's no way to start thinking about time history or or any of these questions of any serious okay so I kind of want to Pivot into this other discussion here this is uh when I was teaching my intro course to your work uh some of the students these were the the questions that they were like if you

could ask Nick land anything what do you want to ask well okay so for some context back when you Did uh your interview with James Ellis on hermetics he open he and he had a thing he always opened up the discussion by asking you could have five philosophers in a room together would you have yeah and of course like with you everybody's and you just go uh it would be Kant and schopenhauer B Del right but you didn't say that you said uh well actually it would be the five stic lemur the great lemurs uh

and you're like I I basically Spent 20 years of my life locked inside a room with the fight five great lemur Nick the question what is a demon lemur and what does it mean to be locked inside of a room with five of them for 20 years um well I mean I think the point is with this this stuff is that people including myself it's hard to stick with it you know what I mean it's like you need constant reminders like um so yeah I mean I would totally love To just that would be my

just kind of normal background level of cognitive operation would be just being addressed by the the lofty powers or whatever I mean but um obviously you just lose the track you just sit distracted um and you know what that is as a problem again takes us back to this question about time because because the single most striking and sort of to Me telling part of of my sort of Life intellectual life and it and then obviously it involves other people because it's like the ccru is this very very core sort of Bedrock of it um

is how much you had no idea what was going on until you know it's like you're very excited about something you can totally see how you go forward with it you can maybe produce texts about it all of this kind of thing and then decades Later this thing comes to you and it's like oh my God that was there already you know like this that was in it you know we had no idea what we were doing I mean we just really just had no understanding of what we were doing we just knew enough to

move it forward but we didn't understand what it was that was being move forward or what it was really about and to me that is the most characteristic part of life as a human being on this planet you know it's like That to me is like if if you're not processing what's really going on there if you're not processing what it is to be doing something that you don't yet at all understand um without any sense you don't yet understand it or any sense even that you will eventually realize that you don't yet understand it

if you don't see that you're really lost in the Matrix in a in a kind of absolutely serious way um so you know that's that's the level Of these guys that's the level to me of what is going on there is the fact that you know you don't yet know what you're doing is that is that kind of why you're saying though that attention is so important here because you can lose the thread you can fall off of it keeping it in mind is is kind of your point that we fall into uh taking time

and this sort of human this normal human perception kind Of level at face value that we kind of forget it's kind of that but you see I mean look I'm not really doing this as a kind of confident Mystic in a sense I'm not saying if you had the right practices you could you could sort this out and you could kind of at least much better maintain in a state of elevated attentive awareness of of what is is going on I mean it's not that I'm saying that's not possible but my Fundamental kind of experience

of this is more that it's like it's part of what is going on that where you are is where you have to be not where you kind of would want to be in some kind of you know state of fluidity I mean it's like it's just stuff comes to you when it has to come to you you forget it when you don't need to remember it um it's it's it's like if the agenda here is not your personal intellectual biography your personal Intellectual biography is is a footnote in this other thing and that other thing

is vastly more coherent than any conceivable intellectual biography that you're ever going to make of yourself right um and so that's you know that again seems to me to tie up with this big structure of assumption in people have like you know I just everyone believes in instat biography it's like everyone believes in that I just really do not believe in it it's Just [ __ ] I'm sorry you know it's an illusion it's Maya I mean there is no intellectual [ __ ] biography it's like you know what is happening is something completely different

that just can masquerade as intellectual biography and um you know so connecting with that at the times that it's necessary to connect with it is is the thing um and that's going to come more from it than from you okay but like so but as a you got to Realize too like I don't you know I don't have a background with the ult I I'm interested in the cult in so far as you're interested in it and trying to see how it influence your thought but I mean just the basic question of these 45 lemur

I mean is it a thing where I guess the thing is everybody basically thinks the occult that you were really influenced by was chaos magic and that influenced how you thought about hyperstition and it's not so much about The realities of spiritual entities it's more about how the practices can change things and bring new potentials into actuality but when it comes to the Lemurs nobody even seems to have an idea like are these actual spirits to you like are they real entities or are they somehow mechanisms you use to to change yourself to change your

perception yeah this is we're in exactly the same Zone and it's like it's the zone to be in for sure it's totally Fascinating because the the thing is like what these things are to me really doesn't matter you know what I mean it matters a little bit in sense of like the way I talk about them maybe will have some influence in ways that matter or whatever but but what matters is not what I think of them it's what they are and and what they are it's I mean what do we need to know about

that yet you Know obviously there's some massive level of camouflage going on in this whole thing I mean this is why I think like this the Gnostic tradition is the brucial cultural tradition that is like philosophy adjacent and absolutely indispensable everything's disguised herac CER says you know uh what my my translation of I prefer to the usual one I don't want to say nature loves the hi I want to say nature Inlines to crypto that's the that's the that's the herac clan thing um and 100% that's that's right there's nothing I've got greater confidence about

than than this so you know I mean I think the new what whatever happened when the numr arrived we had no idea what this thing was I mean it's like oh we thought it was cool you know I mean I'm in all of It I mean I mean all of it ever it's like I think it's like if you look at what the kind of traditional tree of life has had in the esoteric tradition the numogram just k that things ass so hard that it's just comical you know it's an immense and and it got

deposited on us um as a cciu and we just drew the [ __ ] thing and then we worked with it a bit and it's like what we thought about it what we learned from it is what's happening you Know we looked at it we thought about it we tried to learn from we probably didn't learn very much we we learned a few things you know we got a few ideas from it but it is huge it's huge and it's completely inexplicable by intellectual bogra there's nothing we saw read heard about in any there's no

intellectual biography thing that leads you to the pneumogram the pneumogram is coming straight out of Eternity uh we were like blessed enough For it to into that um what is it you know that we've scarcely begun to understand and it arrived by the way when most of the CCU by coincidence not including me uh but I was obviously a regular visitor were living in alist Crowley's house yeah so that really did happen you guys were really living happened that really happened and it's like you know there was this this just this fraction of Awareness oh

God you know we're sitting right in our the Crowley's house I mean that's not nothing but it wasn't but what do you make of that you know nothing except just to say we should have treated it as a sign that you know Destiny is in control like there's bigger much bigger things going on here that than you understand um but what I I I want to I know I know that Mike's got like this whole like Little line of questioning on this and I I have to break in because I just I just really want

to ask you this question I know that in the ccru reader uh there's um there are Illusions to intelligence assets and such and I just want to like ask you point blank did someone from the CIA or using that as a metonym for the broader just app the Deep state did did someone from that give you the numogram no okay and then no that blankly okay so Then you're you're describing this like it came out of a seance or something like you're all there at alist Crowley's house and then it get depit if you were

trying to do it as empirical psychology it would probably all look very boring I mean we would just like mess around with a decimal numerals and hey like this looks interesting and you know what I mean it really there's nothing interestingly dramatic about its rival at all and I would love It if some someone from a secret society had passed it over and I mean maybe there's some ult mechanism we not grasping where that happened but that there's no obvious way in that okay and then the other the other part of that question and I

I just don't want to I don't want to dwell on it but I just kind of do want to ask it though is like yeah were you guys just meming when you're talking about intelligence uh uh assets and stuff like this Or did you over time discover that you indeed had fans um in that world because I know that in that world supposedly there there's some people really into the occult and so they could have thought that what you're doing was cool yeah I would say I would put this all in this category of not

doing stuff that you've got no understanding what you're doing I mean I think from my reme recollection of those times it was all Done very frivolously okay um the there was one single episode I can recall maybe there's others that eventually come back but there's one that I do remember where I received a strange postcard from the invisible college that was like some invitation to join that whatever that is you know uh which I just ignored it I mean I didn't do anything about it I but I obviously Remembered it but I did nothing um

and I would say I was interested at least in that now as I have ever been in my life um but you I but that is so totally in this category of the fact of this thing about you don't know what the hell's going on in your own life and um yeah fair fair so I mean I guess my thing is like That's why there there is so much mystery around it like basically everybody wants like okay what are the Lemurs How do you use the numogram uh how can you use the in your dayto

like everybody I it's so shrouded in mystery with people that I think you I I know you're not the biggest fan of laon but you use this leanian term they want to make you the subject supposed to know like you have all this knowledge stored away about what's really going on with All of it and you've just never written it written it out or shared it but yeah to take you at your word because I've heard you say it before where you're like I'm still trying to figure out what is going on with this where

you're like I don't have this like 900 page book written somewhere on the numogram where I explain how it all works but really good because you know frankly like I Mean I'm in a state I'm being extremely unproductive right moment and I've got things that I want to do and they just like it's hard to get them to call and is very much this it's very much this thing about like yeah a 900 page book on the nram how to frame that what it would be in it all of this kind of stuff you know

that's what I'm predominantly thinking about and I kind of feel that it's Like it's you know we're back to this same thing I've been banging on about for the last half hour so I mean it's I'm too locked intellectual biography like it's like you if this if I was supposed to do this freaking B it would be already done you know it's like maybe it's I'm being impatient maybe it's you know whatever I'm not getting the program all of this kind of thing um but certainly to just like take it out of myself it's like

I Think this stuff arrives in pieces um and it's really hard for me not to think that the important pieces haven't arrived already um and they they they appear at the time that is strategically important for them to appear not according to you remotely but according to kind of historical imperatives Way Beyond your pay grade Um and you have to like recognize that and and and not treat it within this kind of system of metric project productivity and Progressive time and it's like oh you know why AR I doing this I mean that's what I

obviously everyone does that's the particular form of this delusion in this in this framework is to say oh like you know if only I was being more disciplined about it it would be here already no I mean you being Disciplined or undisciplined about it is itself something that's coming from somewhere else you know we weren't being disciplined when the pneumogram dropped in our laps I mean that was the time for the neog to drop in our La yeah commercial break commercial break tuon 2024 happening October 24th through 27th it's 4 days of brain over stimulation

that's right we're going to be talking About sci-fi philosophy human Futures critical media Theory the question of post politics like all of it uh psychoanalysis say phenomenology structuralism all of these various approaches we're going to be getting into it we're going to get in the deep end if you're curious if you want to attend if you live in boisey that's good for you if you want to travel here well you can come but if you would like to just join virtually you will be able to Attend it via Zoom that's right register today thank you

and uh hope to see you there at tuon tight tight yeah well I mean but you know I mean I'm sure you do I mean look you have books being written this is time sorcery by vexus yeah and the whole book is just an attempt to make sense of the Lemur and the numogram and all of that so you have people ulst who are working on this stuff on their own you Know so they're developing it but I mean like like okay like scies like do do you know like why that resonates like why why

is it important that you know the out of the rors there's five that are cystic and the significance of the twinning what is what is that like for you now just looking back what is the significance of twinnings or siy um I mean this all all of these questions are going to get kind of huge So I mean I try not to get into it too much but already on the in the kind of just classic cciu Epoch a lot of the stuff we were doing was based on this uh luran Atlantean diad that was

based on two different types of numerical twinning between you know something to nine something to 10 um and that cuts across all kinds of thing the the the atlantan one fittingly why I Guess we call it Atlantean is be is in the tus oh no it's not the tus it's the whatever that is the crius it's the it's the it's the one that really gets into the atlantan [ __ ] and it's there the five pairs of twins so you know five pairs of twins I think you're like reliably in the zone at that point

already um I think that you actually need another I think you need the third one which is like I that there's a once you start using this way of thinking about things like if You' got any Decimal System you just fold it you know and so like the 10 plagues The Ten Commandments all of these decimal sets you fold uh into a pair into a set of five twins um if you do that with the Ten Commandments 10 plagues I'm not 100% convinced by yet but 10 10 commandments really like clearly you start hitting P

pretty quick like you can see that Actually the Ten Commandments is a set of five diadic Commandments that you know start making a lot more kind of much more suggestive sense when when you do that um so yes so from the CCU from the beginning of the CCU really this was being used as a kind of just meta key for the construction of esoteric history you know the history of secret societies The history of uh magical systems um and I've become if anything more convinced about that I think these these these diads I think the

you know the Atlantean diads uh 1 1928 37 6446 whatever 55 that's an incredibly important structure that's a key that can really get you into a lot of the history of secret societies but In terms of what you know final conclusions about it I would be premature I mean I'm you know this what I'm doing now but I don't have anything to just roll roll right out okay well wa we can move on Dave but okay one last since it is uh October Halloween is approaching we thought would you play a round of sub decadence

with us uh I you know we haven't done that for so long you think that would work I'm Not sure I've got it not only that Nance when he was in town he gave me a pack of uh cyberpunk plane cards right so we play one round and see what we get I got the card yeah okay but may maybe I could recommend you do deckin rather than subdeck like the luran thing we were totally and I'm still I will go to my grave as a kind of luran sympathizer but I sort of feel in

history we might have more to learn from the AOE than we do From from these weird luran Cs and and you know one of these like later successive things we haven't talked about yet but after the numogram the the extremely simple but just massive thing that the C CIU was would access um is what we call alpha numeric cabala uh so that's to say cabalistic system that just counts straight through is it in the same form as heximal or whatever but just extending it to to the end of the uh letter sequence uh base 36

system um and the architectonic Order of the escaton in alpha numeric balot is 666 which interestingly the cybernetic culture Research Unit and Al numeric is also 666 we we had no we had no hint that this was true I mean I don't even remember when I discovered like not long ago um so it's like yeah I take it yeah I I think that the cciu was just excessively condescendingly sned about The AOE I mean the AOE is like no doubt in many ways sublimely evil but they have a lot to teach us um so that's

what I'm saying like well I've got the card deck but I have the card deck organized for sub decadence okay all right let's this but ignore everything I've just said let's just let's just go for got card Nick Nick we can we can bring you back for the other game okay we'll we'll reorganize it Later for the other game all right all right so set one we've got uh we got four five 959 okay flip over the first of the second set we've got a six uh nothing pairs with that well I guess if we

were playing decens we would but this sub decadence uh we got a eight don't have a one we have a queen that pairs with the nine got an ace which is one and Three okay so we got one sici G which is nine and zero okay okay that score is positive and then the other four in the top set we we deduct so we take the nine away then neg5 five4 that is4 all right who is that in you don't know off the top of your head no it's embarrassing but I don't it's k it's

14 dude it's KAC yeah so okay there were yeah that's that's ominous has to be said yeah was that was that the one we got when we were at your house Mikey no we got teix teix there's teius okay we nickname Ticky tax right but no so I mean I have to confess that this is just not something that I do you know like you don't sit around playing sub decadence I spend hell of a lot of time rumaging around in The new moon and but I really don't play a lot of sub okay um

Nick maybe that's best of wishes to people I mean I really hope it comes up with share and and my strong conviction on this thing is that if you've got a channel that could imaginably produce communicative information it will produce communica information you know what I mean like it's like there just has to be the possibility that it can serve as a Communication Channel and and as long as that is fulfilled and you know there's probably other conditions but basically speaking like it doesn't matter use any channel it's like it's not for you to kind

of have to work out the communications engineering the communications engineering is their problem you know like let them deal with that [ __ ] um if if you can Gro it they certainly can Gro it and like yeah so I mean it's just to say that despite the Fact that I'm a kind of complete completely negligent about sub and I I do have abstract confidence that someone who was not set nichon would get stuff out of it yeah because you see like on on Twitter you you your main focus still seems to be uh alpha

numeric cabala and working with that but uh so okay when I sent this stuff to you on Twitter the that in alpha numeric cabala land And GJ and Theory underground equals 666 land and GJ on the theory underground in 2025 equal 777 uh does that what does that say to you um I would say you know something but not a lot in itself you know I I think lots of people are getting really good at this [ __ ] you know I don't know where whether you follow these accounts but there's some people who are

just Like produced just incredible volumes of like extremely clean interesting persuasive calistic results so you're in a very competitive environment um and so I think that this as a culture is still in a process of imers like just criteria for what at the moment I think it's very much still personal in terms of what you find convincing and compelling and pushes you in a certain direction I don't think That much has AR Arisen yet in terms of you know procedural criteria for how we're going to evaluate these kind of results and what sense we're going

to make of them and you know like personally if something seems a bit grammatically off then I just like it's gone you know it's like I mean I might laugh at it I might even fave it as a as a tweet but it's not gonna have any influence on me at all if Someone has has kind of Twisted it out of the form of what sounds like a kind of smooth bit of English um but other people might differ from that I mean I'm not gonna you know it's what I'm not wanting to be dictatorial

about it well in a in a in a heavily competitive environment though all opinions are not created equal and everybody's chances are not created equal and we are better than most of Them and I think that we can prove it if we have to but we don't want to because that would be Showmanship and that would be ridiculous and so we're not going to go there but just to say we've been trying to get that uh set up for over two years that conversation and we got xek it took us a long time to finally

get him on and then we had to introduce him to you as a name and then he quickly wrote some takedown of you that was dismissive and you know based Loosely And pro probably primarily off of what Mikey had actually said about your work um and then we brought uh him back on for the oneyear anniversary of Tu and that was when we were like yeah so you said all that stuff about land that was cool like would you be willing to debate him and he was like yes let's do it and then we were

like all right so then uh reach out to you and then it's just been like trying to kind of yeah make it happen now that's not our primary goal Here obviously like I think this this I'm interested I mean do you really think it would be that interesting I have two re two reasons two reasons why before I hand it over to Mikey two reasons cuz I was not never a student of either of your guys' works I was always into like heiger and n and Marx and levos and all this other stuff that just

wasn't hip and cool and I was always kind of just like put out by the like art school kids who would get Really into either of you guys and so for me I was just kind of like I don't care man and then Mikey was like no but you should and over the course of our friendship for like the last 10 years here it's like no he's convinced me that I should and there's a lot of reasons that I could get into I'm not going to right now I'll hand it over to Mikey here but

I do want to say I am the profet of the Faultline Theory no one else is talking about the fault line Theory um and so I'll say something about that for now and then and then hand it off and that is just to say people don't care about uh thinkers outside of ones that are directly relevant to either ccru or the slan school you those two schools are the intellectual milus that were doing interesting things in the 1990s cyber history starts basically in 1992 you are the two schools that are present at that time doing

interesting Things historical dialectical materialist analysis but also just in some kind of platonic sort of approach we can lay out why these two schools have had those impacts but you and him are the sort of uh the I don't want to say leaders you're not but you are the ones who are capable of having conversations with a wide variety of people in different spaces over time the two of you have tracked this intellectual Genesis that is in very Interesting ways um sometimes overlapping but in the most important ways there are strong contradictions deep deep contradictions

not The Superficial political antagonisms people focus on the internet scene in so far as we find ourselves here today surrounded by people who like Hegel and Lon even bad do like the the the people that they like they like in Ju to position to you guys or as some kind of like slippage and it's easy to Trace it's easy to show and I know you don't have any interest in the personal autobiography and we don't care either but there is like this interesting thing happening and so it's like always like I don't care really about

the opinion uh of of of you guys so much as like what you guys will feed the churn when this conversation H conversation happens is you're going to feed the churn and maybe it'll unlock your book that's possible I'm not going to say it's a promise I Don't know but it could unlock it my book you're all you're convincing up to that point but that's not going to happen okay there's a bunch of people who I'm very interested in who I've been invited to talk to and that I've just not because you know I'm basically

very skeptical about conversation I mean like the person who could unlock my book I tell you is R who also you know I think is a lovely guy super interesting the the kind of Weird Druid guy um I think that would be relevant to this look come on I mean zek is not going to talk about secret societies in any way that's not just like absolute [ __ ] um we we could maybe maybe talk about this all mean we start we did more on this in the first hour or whatever than I thought was

possible on on kind of quasi Marxist kind of discussion yeah maybe that could happen but Like uh I don't know you don't think that just like leaving it just open is might be better I mean you want some sort of resolution or something like that I mean I I sort of suspect that we just end up playing games with each other and it's like yeah so here's the thing right like for either one of you the worst thing that could happen is you're like well that was a waste of two hours hour of my life

but it certainly doesn't hurt either one of you what it Does is there is this generation of younger thinkers who are profoundly influenced by both of you and we're going to keep thinking in terms of ccru we're going to keep thinking in terms of the lubiana school and yet there's these deeper philosophical we we would call them convertions like we don't want a debate we don't want this to be like a debate oh you go and then he goes we don't want that [ __ ] we want a discussion of the Core fundamental differences not

like you guys are going to pull off some synthesis you're not no it's more of seeing how the fundamental differences in how you guys think about capitalism how you think about being as as such because he's coming with Hegel and laon you're you come with h n DG and you guys are part of these long thought trajectories and it's more of all of us because we do like I know how you feel about Hegel I know how he feels about Delo but Delo and Hegel have influenced all of us so we're still each one of

us trying to sort through this stuff for ourselves and so considering the impact you had as a deluso Garian what he's had as a haelan leanian uh that's part of seeing this conviction where you you you discuss the incompat incompatibilities and all of that and I mean I me as far as stuff to talk about I mean there's there's a lot of stuff there's a lot of overlap even if you disagree on things And so I wrote a little list uh there are many similar so let you remind me what's your what's your 2025 alpha

numeric cabala tweet again yeah let me get it it says land and xek on the theory underground in 2025 so maybe you know I mean let's just at least accept the possibility of the lofty powers are speaking to us you know that I'm not gonna I'm not going to rule it Out 2025 is a lot of space I mean if xek wants to do it and like you say it's I it's fine greatly enjoying talking to you guys we're enjoying it too and we hope you come back because I mean Nick I'm not going to

lie I have so many more questions I want to ask you but no it's been great and I know he he wants to do it I mean he he's he's been interested in Accelerationism uh and I I know that when he released the article you you kind of were like well uh because his main criticism is accelerationism is too optimistic because it posits some sort of clear determinate end and he thinks that we just cannot begin to determine an end but you could just respond and say no I'm the one who's been talking about the

wall across the future for so long where just because I see this trajectory in AI doesn't mean like I I'm Saying this is inevitably how it's going to to end so I can see your counter response to that you know and so I mean he's he's thought a lot about China you've thought a lot about China you've written books on how Singularity and Shanghai and all that um there's the the thing between Hegel and Duo there's the difference in how you guys view capitalism both of you are critics of uh liberal democracy both of you

are critics of the politically Correct right or the politically correct left and both of you have takes on immigration that are not going to be palpable for a lot of people yeah yeah and so th those points of similarity are also interesting to us so that that's what we would love to see is just a conversation where the similarities differences come out I mean this has happened honestly I would be much more thankful to the lofty P than to me for this Happening I'm glad I'm totally glad it's happened but as you know like I'm

extremely like difficult to to get in contact with I mean so for sure I'm not ruling anything out and may maybe I will I will analyze your analyze your Tweet and its capitalistic excellence and you know not that that matters you know it's a prophecy it's like is it gonna happen let's see V could be vindictive if it does happen that's what I'm gonna stop talking to him about like Like what do you make of the fact that the ALF calor has been utterly Vindicated by this event happening in the first place let's see what

he says I mean we you you cracked us up when you were like they don't what do you say uh they don't even know the Anglo Elvish etymologies of the word God no I w't bully him with that well and Mike when we as when we read that tweet to him he I think he mostly Mis Understood what we were saying but I think that he got the no but he got the kernel of it which was to say oh well people are always saying that I'm too eurocentric and now they're saying I'm not eurocentric

enough that's basically what he did yeah I mean obviously that's Surplus value that's pure Surplus value I mean that that tweets totally about Alf cabal you know it's like you don't have to get Into geopolitic the geopolitics is just full out for me so yeah but no I won't bully him I don't expect him to I don't think he'll bully you either no yeah no all right uh well okay do you guys have closing remarks we'll close this out here in a sec yeah Nance I do real quick uh if you'll indulge me I guess

I want to take a moment um on our US tour last year was it or was it I I don't know summer last the last year yeah um we we did a US tour and along The tour we kind of generated the term hypo inject Theos to hyp and I guess I just want to take a moment to to clarify um I take hyers as not just wishful thinking but like genuinely contact with the future that kind of engenders an unconscious belief in you and you have no choice but to act in accordance with this

unconscious belief um and hypo it's kind of a profanation of this Where you're projecting something that you want to happen but you lack conviction and so you kind of self- sabotage like you your actions bring about the impossibility of of whatever it is okay not just not just lacking conviction but it could also be other aspects of but the point is is that whatever you're doing to prefigure or or bring into reality the thing it's counterproductive you're counter yeah it's it's yeah it's standing in the way Of the thing itself but but I think for

me it I think had some across that before again I'm sorry I don't have enough clear recollection but but this thing of like a negative hypers is definitely a familiar thought and definitely an interesting one yeah yeah yeah well and I mean the words it's not it's it's a joke right h hyper like it it really does have to do with that like congress with with the future like a hyperstition you kind of Have no choice in it like you can't just say oh wouldn't it be nice if this happened but it really is um

this kind of a temporal or or uh retr chronic um Congress and I I I I guess I just want to clarify that because a lot of people I think get hyperstition wrong they just think it is some kind of wishful thinking no no it's definitely something it's definitely productive I mean actually Fisher was a you know I didn't want to get into Intellectual bi but like he was a huge stri this and the thing that he was really interesting voodo de you know where you just like purely by saying you know the higher Powers

say you're going to die as someone Di and it's like that that's a kind of you know I mean it's somewhat dark but absolutely kind of you know essential hypersal event like That there there's not because of the fact the culture is a caus or for so the the notion that like what you say what happens are just unconnected and then only connected by some epistemological thing that tracks what you say onto what happens you know that's just totally naive like by saying something you're intervening that's a causal process and that you know and certain

conditions can just obviously be self-fulfilling so that's definitely the Hypersal thing and I totally accept that the hypos space is then opened yeah you totally can say something that will prevent what you or expecting or wanting to happen to happen I mean 100% it's just got to got to be a possibility on on on this note this volume that we're putting together it it's called human Futures and it's a collection of writings some some of which are Theory fictions others are more academic in in their nature um It human Futures is going to be a

response to the question if if anything human will make it into the into the near future and the quote that we're playing with uh maybe kind of putting at the very beginning uh from Marx's 18th breir of Louis bonapart is the one that says that the Poetry of the 19th century social Revolution must come from the future not the past and he's making fun of the fact that they were rolling out all these old Tropes and slogans and stuff from a previous Revolution and that it was just a joke and he was saying like look

the the genuine revolutions did borrow from previous Traditions they did have some of the costumes and slogans but it wasn't like all that was there was the Ghost of the past there was also something that needed to be done and they were doing the thing that needed to be done and they were drawing some inspiration from that poetry of the past And then he's saying the PO the the these future revolutions are going to require poetry from the future and I just wanted to point out that I don't think there's anything maybe more hypos stational

than people who care about large- scale structural change drawing so heavily from these kinds of often Marxist but whatever kind of uh Works where they're just recycling old slogans and old Concepts like the labor theory of value for instance or or what have You to to such a point where like they're not able to contend with what might be new in the current situation much less map or or somehow attract or somehow get into sort of uh dialogue with or I don't know how to what what the right metaphor is but the future right yeah

yeah yeah the future it's dark at least in the sense that it's completely obscure to and like you guys have said like this basic Point like how Do you think even if you're going to be a cynic even if you're going to say like we're not like in final face capitalism how do you think of capitalism without variable capital I mean you know where do you even begin or who is even saying that you know like unless extremely indirectly by just being some Ubi ideologist so yeah all right yeah and so the question Of of

poetry it's funny and the last thing I was going to say about it is just that Marx you know says that we need to uh that philosophers have only tried to interpret the world the point is to change it the 11th thesis on forbach and then xiic says it's you know change maybe we tried too fast and the now we need to invert the 11th uh the which would be the time is to interpret again and then so there's a question of interpretation and then the question of Poetry and it just seems like with hyperstition

what you guys have done what I mean and speaking kind of broadly about the ccru and everyone Affiliated and just kind of what you've been doing now more recently might be a a third way to to poetry and interpretation and you're you're you're finding some other way brocking it can I can I just say about this what you know I don't want to spin this up but IOS is the absolute example of a of an element of what the CC that's totally G feal you know I don't think I mean you know I I can't

pretend to be Faithfully tracking what all of CC fragments are doing but I don't think anyone's talking about hypers anymore it's just like you know this is like 20 years it's been in the wild people have been doing with I honestly can't even guess what it's doing now Like it's not a I'm not critizing by saying it's not a piece of vocabulary that I'm using I'm just saying it's off the chain you know I mean I not pretending to control this or understand this or where it's going or whatever it's it's is on its own

life now um so yeah and so it's not your thing you're doing right now right this is not your no I mean other people might say that and they might be right but that's not anything I'm saying and it's Not anything that I feel I'm being told to say and that's not any that's not based on any disrespect for that notion it's just to say it's free you know it's gone wild whatever good good wishes to it it's like but absolutely it doesn't in any way describe some program that I'm consciously conforming to at this

point so yeah Dave I just one more question for Nick so Nick did did skito analysis die At the Olympics with Ray Gun no but I have to say I thought that was a most perfect tweets that have ever been but ever been what did you you know I don't think people should get attached to these labels they really don't you know I mean I think it's like um you know if things are helpful to you they're helpful to you if they're not helpful to you they're not helpful to you but like yeah I think

it deserves The disrespect just if it freees people's minds a little bit which I think probably happened there do do you think that was reun was she successfully becoming a body without organs in that break dancing oh that woman yeah I can't possibly comment I can't possibly comment you will find so much commentary on this that anything I can add will be insignificant it is funny that you know up until she uh did her break dancing I Would say you're the most famous deluso guaran in the world but now it's a break Dan no no

I've been totally totally out strip now I admit that humbly yeah all right well Nick this has been great thank you Nick yeah okay this was really good yeah thank you guys app thank you so much I'm sure we'll be in touch fantastic and then here is your reminder to check the link in the description for pre-sales on my nik's Book Capital versus time energy we would be uh remiss to not remind you considering the fact that as Lance said pretty much anything we put on the internet you know it's for Surplus value right yeah

well in that sense let's cash in you want this book it's the only thoroughgoing introduction to L's work that you can buy in book form not only that you'll also get a crash course and so Many other philosophers that are necessary for understanding his work but also for understanding xek or what it would mean to have a a jiki and critique of land much less one from the standpoint of time energy Theory which is what we're all about here at Theory underground thanks everybody we cannot do direct Revolution but the only way to lay the

foundation for it is to do what you are doing to move the underground it's a Theoretically correct title welcome to Theory underground a place where workers with earbuds who are tired of letting others read and think on their behalf slipstreaming our way into an understanding of a situation that short circuits the Deadlocks of Our Moment research at Theory underground focuses on what is most important for understanding our current situation theory of the subject Capital time energy Theory critical media Theory CMT And the most essential critique necessary for understanding why the theory ideology and common sense

of influencers left to right misses the mark Theory underground is coming to a city near you what that has meant in the last year is traveling across the United States into Canada and then all over Europe to promote our books courses and ideas related to time energy and underground Theory you've been reading underground Theory I'm a publisher and An editor I run a Review of Books literally it's my living this is the best edited collection I've ever read okay picture the scene America early 2021 an Amazon warehouse worker arises from the emerging underground Theory internet

scene to create spaces for untimely topics and concerns that are too often neglected or kept in isolation today joined by a revolving cast of underground theorists academics and critics he establishes what will become Theory underground a teaching research and Publishing platform buy and for workingclass intellectual autodidacts and academics who want to do more than they're able to do within the confines of Academia that warehouse worker's name is David mcer and his book time energy is his first major contribution to the world of theory it was recently reprinted with a for Word by none other than

slavo xek who also contributed to Theory underground's latest book my Bible it's an excellent book a collection of essays called underground Theory what you just heard is an excerpt from the strange Exiles podcast episode 23 where Ram from strange Exiles interviewed me and Mikey for those who don't know Mikey is the author of the dangerous maybe blog we are publishing one of his books here shortly at Theory underground he's also a lecturer at Theory underground and he's someone I've Been friends and a collaborator with for over 10 years but more most importantly for you all

he's a fantastic lecturer and it's a crime that he has to do wage labor right now one of the long term goals of theory underground has been now for a couple of years to Hash free Mikey that is something that I've been really pushing but first I had to get freed from wage labor which was achieved this year that's right thanks to my monthly seminar subscribers I was able to quit Amazon and do Theory underground fulltime now I'm announcing the next big phase of the plan which is the Mikey down seminar what monthly subscribers to

the Mikey seminar are paying for is a survey of philosophy including deep dives into xiic land laon bodard batai leotard and ultimately the whole history of philosophy we're trying to build like this ongoing seminar right and that that's what I really like about this thing where you know if I'm teaching a Main text that's something I got to focus on I got to really but the seminar say we can do this stuff all the time where we dive deeper into concept we dive deeper into certain you know sections of books or whatever and we can

really do this nuanced stuff I think that there's probably no better way for us to accelerate our learning in these areas than by slip streaming Mikey and that has been my belief for years and years and years now it's official you're Able to help out you're able to get involved you're able to the benefit directly from liberating him from wage labor get on it right now do it just go stop what you're doing go click the button subscribe that's that's what you do subscribe to him if you're already signed up for the ongoing Theory underground

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and podcast and so thank you So so much to our patrons over at patreon they're the ones funding all the free stuff so big thank you to Bert Marilyn Carls heel Zandra Nikolai Daren Tyler and Mand deep and all the other wonderful Patron people uh patreon people and thank you to all the other wonderful patreon people and thank you to all the other wonderful patreon people thank you so much to all of you patrons and also to the special sub subscribers and the paying subscribers Oh my God it's just so awkward thank you patreon Patron

thank you okay and to all the other wonderful patrons thank you so much all you patrons and also a special thanks to the subscribers on the YouTube side as well as the paying subscribers over at substate why can't we do this [ __ ] you guys just thank you thank you everyone for making this [ __ ] possible thank you to the subscrib you do it you did so good Thanks guys