Trump is still alive, though a lot of folks are excited that won't last. Maybe it’s testimony to the allure of the fantasy that he really is powerful, that his strongman schtick has legs, that he really has cast some magical spell over everyone—and that if he drops dead we’ll all wake up to a different world…
Of course we won’t.
But we’ll go through the fantasies today: the wishes, the schadenfreude, the diagnosis-at-a-distance, and what it means to imagine the death of a king.
Show Notes
ŌURA Announces U.S. Manufacturing Operations in Support of Scaling Defense Business
Oura Ring makers working with military to open first U.S. factory in Fort Worth
What Does Palantir Actually Do?
Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel to lead 4-part series on the Antichrist
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Music Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
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I'm Matthew Remsky.
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Conspirituality 273.
Well, he hasn't yet, but a lot of folks are really excited, and maybe that's testimony to the allure of the fantasy that he really is powerful, that his strongman shtick has legs, that he really has cast some magical spell over everyone, and that if he drops dead, we'll all wake up to a different world.
But of course we won't.
So today we'll go through the fantasies, the wishes, the Schadenfreud, the diagnosis at a distance.
Also what it means to imagine the death of a king, especially through the lens of Julian Jaynes.
But first, Derek has an infomercial for you.
Uh there are these new fitness rings he thinks you should wear.
I trust him.
Uh, and they happen to connect us all together.
They make us really safe from enemies, foreign and domestic.
And there's an affiliate code in the show notes.
Thank you.
A few months ago, RFK Jr. announced one of his main goals for Maha.
We're about to launch one of the biggest advertising campaigns in HHS history.
Use wearables.
That's right.
We're going to be talking wearables for this segment.
Matthew was my first customer, and I invite you to be my next.
Now, this clip I just played fits with Kennedy's health is a personal responsibility ethos.
And he apparently believes that obsessively tracking your fitness is the key to getting healthier, or at least one of them.
I'm not against fitness tractors, trackers, to be clear.
I wear a Garmin watch for my workouts.
I use Strava regularly.
There are great technologies for people who are interested in tracking their exercise patterns.
Then you get to things like continuous glucose monitors, and it becomes a lot more questionable that because there's an entire cottage industry of things for people who are biohacking and want to measure their blood sugar every hour, which is not great.
There's also full-body MRIs.
There's blood tests that make a lot of promises, but that experts say are potentially harmful because they measure values that could prove irrelevant.
And when it comes to measuring blood glucose, for example, it could lead to eating disorders.
We've done entire episodes on this already.
It's really a mixed bag.
Today I want to talk about one of the most popular fitness trackers, which is the Aura ring.
It's a titanium smart ring that continuously tracks biometric data like heart rate and body temperature and sleep patterns.
That one being one of its most popular features.
Every morning you get a sleep score, which purports to inform you about your sleep quality the night before as well as your stress levels.
While some people swear by this ring and aura says that they've sold over five million worldwide, there are a ton of criticisms about accuracy, claims of the nocebo effect, and a general sense of information overload, which leads to an obsession which track with tracking every minor fluctuation.
Okay, Derek.
So I have a question, but I also have a comment.
First of all, like how much do the these things cost?
Extremely affordable.
The low level is $350.
And then you can get the $500 one as well.
Now, I just want to say that that is expensive for a ring.
Smart watches, which I mentioned, my Garmin was 250 or 300.
So wearables are generally not cheap and ex in general, but with my Garmin watch, at least I have a watch as well.
The aura ring is just there for these biometric data.
Yeah, my comment was about, you know, you're talking about this sense of being obsessed with tracking minor fluctuations.
And I feel like this is one of the core Maha contradictions that's not going to go away because there's this intersection between naturalism, but then optimization.
And so, in all of the raw and slow food aspect of the culture, there's this rejection.
And I think it's really vibes-based, uh, a rejection of mind of grindset, you know, energy and this drive to unplug from the hamster wheel.
So that's why we get all of the homeschooling people talking about like, you know, doing things at their own pace and so on.
But I don't think they're doing a kind of full and conscious rejection of productivity norms.
So they need these disciplines and monitoring devices and like personal feedback loops.
It's like they know that the price of being free from things like public health is to become very anxious and hyper-vigilant on an individual level.
I find it interesting you mentioned slow food because I wrote a story on that in 1998.
And the one thing, the one thing about them is I would put them in the category more of actually really trying to honor something old, which is just turning off everything and enjoying meals together.
I don't actually see any indication of that maha, but I do think that that idealism of being natural persists in a weird dichotomy, which you just nailed.
Yeah.
And the strange kind of Frankenstein version of it is that we're gonna we're gonna cook the French fries at the fast food restaurant in beef cello.
And that'll somehow be much healthier.
But the other thing I want to comment on here too is that this is a really interesting use of tech in the service of pseudoscience that is really beguiling, right?
Because it's like we're gonna scientifically track all of this data and in all the different ways that you mentioned already in the in the lead-in to this, Derek, as if this somehow is a way of staving off disease.
It's somehow a way of taking personal responsibility for health that's gonna for your health that is not only gonna help you, but it's gonna, you know, it's gonna affect the whole economy, and this is gonna be a way to make our society better, and we're not gonna need uh all of the agencies and all of the medical care and that kind of stuff, right?
And there is also a sense that it is based upon confessing and a kind of guilt too, right?
Because you can track yourself, but every single time you fall short of something, you're gonna be going, oh wow.
I wonder what the ring thinks of me now.
Yeah, yeah.
And am I and am I one step closer to cancer or diabetes?
Right.
Yeah, it's like the confessional, right?
On your finger.
Oh, man.
Um, my wife and I are binging Mr. Robot, which I know is a little is a decade old at this point, but there's an episode where uh the FBI director is talking to her Alexa and saying, Do you love me?
Do you care?
And it just reminds me of this sort of relationship that it that exists.
I do want to point out, Julian, that it's not, it's not all pseudocides.
I would say that the blood sugar aspect is the interesting thing about the Aura ring, for example, is it's well known that trying to track your heart rate from your wrist or from your hand is is not going to be as accurate as wearing an actual heart rate monitor.
So when I was more into tracking whether I was in zone two, three, four, or five with my cardio, which I have eventually gave up because I found it ultimately useless, whether or not I was getting a good workout.
But the heart rate monitor on my chest was much more accurate at telling me those sorts of levels that I was achieving.
So, you know, just right there alone, the fact that you're trying to measure something off your ring is a little sus.
Yeah, I mean, obviously, there are things that it's that you are able to get some data on.
But for example, you know, the functional medicine kind of stuff, right?
Where it's like there's all of these blood tests that you're gonna subject yourself to on a regular basis.
And and as if these are gonna somehow end up giving you a superior grasp on your health.
And it's like, no, it it has all of these deleterious effects.
I'm also I'm just mentioning it because when I posted about the story I'm about to get into, people on social media were like, I like my Garmin watch.
And I was like, so do I?
Like there are there are benefits to these things, is all of them.
Yeah.
So I track how many steps I walk every day.
I love it.
Yeah, I I just I'm kind of trying to get over the fact that there are, I didn't know there were zones for cardio.
Like for me, the zone is like, did I get out of the house to take a walk?
That's zone one, I guess.
On the couch and off the couch.
Oh my God.
You're not paying enough attention to David Goggins then.
So I'm not, no.
All right.
So there's more to this story, which is why I think it's actually very interesting and pertinent to our beat.
The Finnish company that produces the Aura ring has announced that they're opening their first US factory in Fort Worth, Texas, but it's not for the influx of wellness devotees that we were just discussing.
The company began selling rings to the Department of Defense in 2019.
Oh no.
So that soldiers could track their sleep and stress levels.
Now they're expanding their business with their largest enterprise customer, which is the US military.
With over 20 million dollars in defense contracts, the $5.2 billion company says their rings are used to help optimize the soldier's fitness and to identify fatigue.
There's something else in their press release that really jumped out at me, however.
Aura is collaborating with the DEVCOM Soldier Center, the Air Force Research Laboratory, and the Naval Health Research Center to deliver mission-ready solutions for American warfighters.
Product development efforts include secure data collection configurations that enable offline capture from Aura rings and secure solutions for managing scaled deployments and working with defense researchers on next generation Aura sensing technology.
Oh, wow.
Underscoring its commitment to responsible data practices, Aura will be available to support population level analysis of risk and readiness on Palantir's Fed Start platform, which is authorized at IL5, enabling deployment of the Aura Enterprise platform in environments with heightened security and compliance needs.
This sounds really bad.
Yeah, there's a lot going on there, but what I picked out from that for discussion is the partnership with Palantir.
All right.
So their Fed start program is designed to help software companies deliver products to government agencies quickly by streamlining the complex federal accreditation process.
An important note is that the company's software is hosted and operated via Palantir's cloud infrastructure.
And critics have pointed out that giving one company this much access to data increases the risk of large-scale government surveillance and data centralization.
And it makes it much easier for the government to profile citizens.
There's also the usage context.
Like, are they openly saying the rings are not just capturing biometrics, but they're collecting external data as As like battlefield tech.
Like I it sounds like from what Julian read from the from the copy that they're beaming that data directly to Aura servers or the DOD.
Like, does this imply that regular users are going to become like walking surveillance and coordination ops?
The way it reads is this is specific to the government employees or the military that are wearing the rings.
But I don't see why it would be limited to them if, for example, the president declares a state of emergency in a city like Chicago.
Right.
And then you're starting to get data fed in from those areas as well.
Yeah, because the ring is going to be able to do that, like somebody at wherever it or is going to be able to flip a switch and turn on the surveillance aspect of the ring in Chicago or something like that.
It's definitely possible.
Uh and that's that's part of that's part of the issue where cybersecurity experts and and security experts are saying this much data shouldn't be centralized in any one place, especially with the government having access to it.
And this is the place, right, Matthew, where conspiritualists are not wrong.
Like Christian Northrop was right, it's just not nanoparticles in the uh in the vaccine that are going to be tracking everyone.
Right.
Well, ironically, Kennedy is someone for years through children's health defense has been warning about surveillance tech.
Exactly.
And that's the point of this is that he's now working literally, as we'll get to in partnership with Aura.
But let's just talk about Palantir for a minute, because if people aren't aware, this is a Silicon Valley startup that was co-founded by Peter Teal, who we've covered often on this podcast.
We're going to try to cover him again because he's doing an upcoming four-part lecture series on the Anti-Christ, which should be a lot of fun and completely biblically sound.
I'm guessing it's going to be a memoir.
This series will not be made publicly available.
But if listener, if you happen to know someone who's paying hundreds of dollars to go to one of these series, please let us know.
As of now it's sold out.
Oh my God, those last four sentences are so loaded with humor and irony and alarming truth.
It's like a poem that gets at the black heart of Peter Thiel.
Palantir, named after the black crystal ball that the bad guy in the Lord of the Rings uses to have all seeing power, right?
Another part of the issue with Palantir, as Wired recently pointed out, they did a great deep dive into that, is that people don't know exactly what they do.
And this includes people who work there.
Wired writes.
A number of former Palantir employees tell Wired they believe the public still largely misunderstands what the company actually does and how its software works.
Some people think it's a data broker that buys information from private companies and resells it to the government.
Others think it's a data miner constantly scanning the internet for unique insights it can collect and market to customers.
Still others think it maintains a giant centralized database of information collected from all of its clients.
In reality, Palantir does none of these things, but the misconceptions continue to persist.
So then what do they do?
Basically, I had to look around for a while for this.
They provide a collection of different applications that help companies operationalize data.
Uh-huh.
Okay.
Their tagline is software that dominates.
And they've used their deep Silicon Valley and government connections to secure a lot of money.
So as of recording this, they have over a billion dollars in contracts with the DOD.
That includes 200 million dollars with ice.
And they also have deals with the NYPD, IRS, and CDC, which falls under Kennedy's purview.
We know that at least part of what Palantir does is aggregate disparate data sources for law enforcement and government agencies.
So take ice.
Their software has allowed ICE to aggressively track and target immigrants.
Human rights organizations say they failed to conduct due diligence regarding the potential human rights impacts of its technology, but this is fucking Peter Thiel.
So what does that matter?
Now, Palantir initially said, this is amazing.
They initially claimed when they were founded that their reason for existence was protecting vulnerable populations, but that is completely untrue.
And now at least some Aura ring data will be stored in the same cloud as all the other government data that they procure?
Given complaints about data transparency from previous employees, there's nothing to say as we flag that all of Aura Ring's data will eventually find their way onto these servers.
I think they are openly telling us that personal health data and the freedom of assembly or movement are all accessible through this tech, right?
I could foresee Kennedy coming out through Trump some point, declaring a state of emergency on public health and saying we need all of the data on America's citizens now.
And so they already have access to one of the most popular fitness trackers in the country and in the world at their hands.
So none of this is without with all of this is within the realm of possibility to me right now.
Now I recently pointed out Kennedy's use of doublespeak on our Instagram feed when posting a video of him where he tells Tucker Carlson this.
You know, my opinion, I always tell people is irrelevant.
Um we, you know, be people we need to stop trusting the experts, right?
We were told at the beginning of COVID.
Don't look at any data yourself.
Don't do any investigation yourself, just trust the experts.
And trusting the experts is not a uh uh feature of science.
It's not a feature of democracy.
It's a feature of religion and it's a feature of totalitarianism.
And democracies, we have the uh obligation, and it's one of the burdens of citizenship to do our own research and make our own determinations about things.
So you can hear the bullshit because science is by its very design, at least in the last 150 years of clinical research, the fact that your work needs to be verified by other people.
So when he when he invokes religion and compares it to science in that sense, there was very much historically people who could only talk to their divinities.
That is just not how it works because in science said, okay, you have you have this divination.
Let's go talk to a few other people who are unrelated to you to and then verify that this actually plays out.
It's the actual foundational distinction.
Yes, exactly.
So Palantir also uses this sort of rhetorical trick.
Their name is a reference to Palantiri, which are magical stones that are used to communicate and see faraway places in as you flag July and the Lord of the Rings universe.
They also have the ability to observe the past.
Palantir employees are sometimes called hobbits.
And an early motto at the company was to save the Shire.
Just like Teal giving a paid lecture about the Antichrist, the company he's founded is either really committed to gaslighting the public or completely unself-reflective or both, which makes their partnership with Kennedy through CDC contracts even more fitting.
And I'm guessing there's going to be plenty of more work for Teal coming down the pipeline.
With regard to contradictions, I mean, Kennedy is so split.
It's like the worm ate right through the corpus callosum, right?
It's like you should do your own research, but you should also trust my friend Peter and the guys making these rings.
And as we've already said, in any other right-wing discourse, these things would be compared to the mark of the beast, right?
Yeah, here are your vaccine passports.
So we have this rush of tech companies who are moving into defense.
Meta is working with the government with its Llama AI models that will help power extended reality military devices.
And so companies like Aura realizes there are only so many rings it can sell to fitness devotees and the real money is in data.
And yeah, we are piecing together disparate pieces right now.
But if this administration has taught me anything, it's that they're going to tell you what they're doing every step of the way, and they don't care about democratic norms or ideals.
And we have to decide how much we want to enable them along the way.
That makes it sound like we're kind of powerful, Derek.
You know, but I the serious question is like what so what is not enabling them look like?
It's not going to be legislation, it's not going to be moral appeals.
Um, but it can you imagine a way of disrupting or sabotaging the data collection process?
Like even in terms of how Aura is broadcasting its its its data, like can is there any way of disrupting any of this?
You went on a meta level.
I was talking more micro, I just meant in terms of if you wear an aura ring, just know this is happening.
And that your data is being fed into a place that could result in this.
So for example, if Garmin came out with a similar contract with the CDC, I would stop wearing my watch.
Yeah.
So that that is that is just a very basic micro level.
On a macro level, no, I mean, data is being collected everywhere all of the time.
So unless anything short of completely unplugging from every friggin device that we have, we are powerless in that sense.
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As delightful rumors swirled about his ill health and even possibly already being dead, and a congressional vote on releasing the full Epstein files loomed for this week, President Donald Trump went on a manic social media posting spree over the weekend.
The pick of the bunch in his posts seemed to be tossing red meat to whatever loyalists are still left in his QAnon base.
In the post, he's pictured in his characteristic suit and red tie with his hands lifted as if in prayer.
This is the messianic version of Trump as opposed to the Rambo version and whomever else we have.
He has light coating his palms, his stern face is gazing up and into the distance, and behind him is a large image of the earth ringed in light, and then hovering over his left hand is the letter Q with a plus sign next to it.
And that Q plus may not mean what some of our listeners are familiar with.
It's actually the president's code name in QAnon lore.
Familiar QAnon slogans, uh, the world will soon understand and nothing can stop what is coming are emblazoned across the top and the bottom of the image.
Gavin Newsom and his Twitter trolling team wasted no time mocking up their own version of the meme that replaced Trump with an image of the California governor and added popcorn emojis in the caption.
I have two thoughts here.
One is that, like, once we have kind of this AI slop, you know, pipeline of the president and the White House, their social media accounts being able to create sort of instant QAnon memes, it's kind of lost the DIY punch that it would have had on the Chans back in 2018.
And so there's something I'm just wondering how ironic it is, even for the people who uh still sort of hold some QAnon allegiances.
And then the other thought is that like I don't know much about Newsom.
You guys are the guys from California.
Um, you know, I you probably have a whole bunch of thoughts about him.
To me, he seems like a standard centrist, but sometimes like a single image tells me a lot, like, you know, when the guy puts on his jeans and rubber gloves and plays this muscular democrat by throwing the belongings of unhoused people in the trash for a photo op, like that says a lot to me.
Um I'm wondering whether this rise in his media exposure, whether this aggressive trolling strategy uh will, I don't know, will accommodate any kind of real review of his politics amongst the mainstream of the party, because that gap between like, you know, how he's presenting himself and you know, maybe what he's actually doing is definitive, I think, in the fight against fascism.
Like he is playing dirty these days uh because the norms are gone.
You also have to have a moral core and change the conditions that provoke fascism, too, though.
Yeah, I mean, the the meme is created by someone on Twitter who who, you know, tagged themselves on it.
I uh if I forget the name, it's Street Fighter 17 or something like that, and then and then was shared by a small account, and then Trump shared it from uh Twitter onto Truth Social.
So yeah, it's a it's sort of a different pathway.
I think it's easier to create these kinds of memes these days, I think, than when Newsom jumps in, he is uh he's just trolling.
And I don't know that that one was a particularly effective troll, but he and his team are doing what they're doing.
Uh, in terms of the fight against fascism, you know, I just see Newsom as trying to read the room of what's happening in the culture right now.
He's doing a lot of stuff with with podcasting that I'm sure you find distasteful, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree with you completely.
He's doing a lot of stuff with all of the way he's fighting back against Trump in social media that's getting him a certain amount of attention.
He's trying to be a tough guy who's standing up to the bully and you know, calling it as he sees it.
Um, of course, I would also love to see him be a champion of more progressive policies.
So and having lived in California for over a decade and knowing him well, he is somebody who can you can completely be on board with one day and he can infuriate you the next day.
And that just depends on whether he wants to focus more on his more progressive values in California, or if he wants to try to play future president and politician and try to feel as if he could reach across the base.
And it's really, it's really difficult to balance those things.
But uh, I personally think that this ground war is extremely effective because of the amount of people he targets who reply to him and engage and are just showing their asses, which is where this particular segment of the fight is happening on these platforms.
So I see nothing wrong.
I'm happy somebody is doing that sort of work.
And then when it comes to things like what were announced today, which is that California, along with Oregon and Washington, are banding together to say that they are no longer going to follow federal advice from the CDC on vaccine policies and they're creating their own department to help the citizens.
So it's always been like that with Newsom.
And I literally, I think every Democrat in California will tell you the same.
It's just like sometimes you want to wring his neck, but at the same time, he is one of the few people who are out there actually punching their weight.
Yeah.
And let's see how, you know, how some of those uh confrontations unfold with regards to things like ICE and the militarization of blue cities and stuff like that.
In the recent controversy over how Pam Bondi and Cash Patel have handled the Epstein files, which were long awaited by the QAnon True Believers to finally expose the deep state.
There was this peak moment in which multiple MAGA influencers seemed to be turning against Trump and his cabinet.
And we did a video montage of these about six weeks ago that featured, you know, Alex Jones, Megan Kelly, Charlie Kirk, Nick Fuentes, even the QAnon shaman himself, Jacob Chancellor posted fuck Donald Trump and then briefly had his Twitter account deleted.
It returned mysteriously a little while later.
Tucker, Matt Walsh, Candace Owens, Laura Loomer were at that time very critical of the administration's handling of the files.
But they all had some kind of turning point, some kind of come to Jesus conversation, I would speculate.
And they've been remarkably quiet on it ever since.
So I checked their feeds on Labor Day here, which was the day before the issue was supposed to come up again before uh in front of Congress this week as they resumed operations.
And there was no mention of Epstein now from any of them.
Like Matt Walsh's videos were dominated by trans panic and cracker barrel logo change discourse, and also mocking Zoran Mamdani's bench press weakness at a New York City event called Men's Day.
Okay, what was what was the cracker barrel thing about?
The cracker barrel thing is just it's classic.
You know, it's it's it's classic in terms of this uh this right-wing culture war discourse.
Cracker Barrel changed their logo.
They'd had a logo for I don't know, 20, 30 years that featured Uncle Herschel, who's this kind of cracker looking dude sitting in a in an old timey wooden chair leaning on a barrel, and he was just part of their logo.
And underneath it, it said an old country store.
Right.
And so they changed it to make it just more generic, just like just a colorful background that said cracker barrel on it.
They erased Uncle Herschel.
They erased Uncle Herschel.
They erased the cracker, they kept the barrels.
Exactly.
That it's that is well said, yes.
And because they're such an institution in the South, and because they represent their headquartered in Tennessee, because they represent something that is considered such a sort of real Americana sort of style and and uh tradition, they were uh criticized as being woke for changing their logo like that.
And so there was massive backlash, they lost 100 million dollars in valuation over the course of a week, and then they very quickly changed their logo back and added a bunch of menu items that show their allegiance to Southern cooking and values and you know, names of dishes and stuff.
Yeah, okay.
All right.
So that's that one.
I kind of I had missed that.
But what about 135 pounds uh lifted by Zoran Mamdani?
Is that I I don't know anything about this, but is that significant as a bench press right weight?
Is it high?
Is it low?
Like what are they saying?
And can they rap in Urdu or not?
Basically, if you're a teenage boy, you kind of cross the threshold.
Uh, 135 is two plates and the bar.
So the bar is 45.
The plate, when when plate is referenced, it's usually a 45-pound plate.
Okay.
So it's just the first time you can put up two plates.
And there's a general feeling in fitness that you should be able to bench your body weight.
And if you can't bench your body weight, you have work to do.
That is just an assumption in culture.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's gym culture.
That's all that matters.
It has nothing to do with being a man.
It has nothing to do, but that is why the focus on 135 comes out here, because dudes are like, for a lot of people, it's a warm-up weight.
And so if you can't do that, then there's a problem.
So within gym culture, it's very specific.
Yeah.
In the broader terms of being a man, it's fucking meaningless.
It's meaningless.
And for me, it's like, here's this guy who's like, he's such a good sport.
He's like, oh, I'm gonna be at this event.
Okay, sure, I'll try and bench.
Yeah, you spot me.
Let me see what I can do.
But then they turned it into, well, he's not really masculine enough, right?
And it's the same, and also it's just the same fucking douchebags who are like all up on Kennedy, who was who was actually putting up, what was that?
95 pounds on an incline, right?
25 plates.
And when it was pointed out to him, Kennedy jumps out and says, Oh, it was a drop set.
That was my last set, and they were filming during the end.
So Kennedy is very much of that ethos because it was a lightweight and he had to defend himself.
Whereas Momdani was just having fun, literally just having fun after one of the most successful public events in New York and with the scavenger hunt in who knows incredible.
Yeah.
And and so again, it's just it's purely distraction.
Yeah, and the truth is, any time Kennedy tries to do some kind of like manly challenge with any of the influencers on his side of the help, they fail terribly too.
They're not particularly strong.
They're not particularly fit, they're not good at climbing mountains, they're not good at doing pull-ups.
But yeah, let's uh let's gang up on Mom Dani.
So that's Matt Walsh, uh, Candace Owen's latest videos.
No mention of the Epstein Files.
She covers how the French president and his wife, whom Owens has for a long time now been claiming is secretly a man.
She did a whole sort of investigative documentary on this.
They're suing her for defamation.
And then she has uh a prison interview with Harvey Weinstein, which is just stunning.
Tucker Carlson is focused on interviewing experts about demons and angels, and then also how antidepressants cause school shootings.
Meghan Kelly, for her part, is preoccupied with Jennifer Aniston's new self-help guru boyfriend.
And then, as for Charlie Kirk, his videos are all about abortion and DEI right now.
Meanwhile, the now adult and still traumatized victims of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghlaine Maxwell sadly have longer memories than those animated by the ever-morphing conspiracy titillation, which gave them a brief moment of unity around the Epstein files.
And I have to say, it's fascinating and telling as an exercise to cross-reference these right-wing content creators and to see the sheer variety of nonsense that they come up with, especially now that they've veered away from Epstein.
It's not like they're all reporting on the same stories at the same time and relying on similar sources.
It's this sweet, generous, bizarre stuff that's seemingly calculated to occupy their own lane in contrast with one another.
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Nobody listens to Paula Poundstone.
You probably know that I made an appearance recently on this absolutely ludicrous variety show that combines the fun of a late-night show with the wit of a public radio program and the unique knowledge of a guest expert who was me at the time, if you can believe that.
Embrace yourself for a roller coaster ride of wildly diverse topics from Paula's hilarious attempts to understand QAnon to riveting conversations with a bona fide rocket scientist.
You'll never know what to expect, but you'll know you're in for a high-spirited, hilarious time.
So this is comedian Paula Poundstone and her co-host Adam Felber, who is great.
They're both regular panelists on NPR's classic comedy show.
You may recognize them from that.
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And they bring the same acerbic yet infectiously funny energy to nobody listens to Paula Poundstone.
When I was on, they grilled me uh in an absolutely unique way about conspiracy theories and yoga and yoga pants and QAnon.
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They were very sincerely interested in the topic, but they still found plenty of hilarious angles in terms of the questions they asked and how they followed up on whatever I gave them, like good comedians do.
Check out their show.
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Find nobody listens to Paula Poundstone on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
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So when I saw that slack jawed photo of Trump stepping out of the SUV into the White House last week, so he's like palaris, seems to be swollen and puffy.
We're not sure where the hair was or is.
I thought immediately of how the ancients used to prop up dead kings and then hallucinate their commands immediately.
Uh that would continue apparently from beyond death.
And that memory comes from this really strange book that I've been obsessed with for about 20 years.
And as we've studied Trump and QAnon and the MAGA movement and the rise of fascism as a form of psychosocial chaos, this book has loomed larger for me, and I don't think we've really talked about it much.
I know we're all sort of familiar with it a little bit.
Um you know how historians describe the core feature of fascist movements is uh neurotic nostalgia for a lost golden age.
Well, in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, the late psychologist Julian Jaynes described a mental and emotional way of being in the world that is resonant with fascist nostalgia because he described a kind of state of direct hallucinated contact with one's god or leader,
uh, a state that provokes instant reactions and responses, but allows no room for self-reflection, critical thinking or doubt, or as you were saying earlier, guys, peer review.
So Janes spent his entire life on this one book.
I think the final version was five or six hundred pages, in which he scoured through ancient near-aste literature and architecture and compiled evidence that ancient humans lacked certain qualities of consciousness that we are familiar with as people living today.
And instead, he proposed that they experienced auditory hallucinations that they interpreted as divine commands.
And the most controversial and speculative bit around this is his usage of schizophrenia as a model for this experience.
And that led him to suggest that people who suffer from this today are experience a kind of experiencing a kind of evolutionary archaism, uh, that they're hearing distinct voices in the right hemisphere and acting on them through the left.
Now, by the way, um when I revisited this book after years and years, the first thing that I did was I tried to figure out like who has debunked Julian Jaynes, like who has really engaged with Julian Jaynes' thesis because it seems so unique, outlandish, and nuts that people have certainly trashed it.
And there are some people who are very skeptical, but the the rest, there the lot of the neuropsychology world that thinks that he has some brilliant ideas.
And I think Daniel Dennett, the late Daniel Dennett, fell down on both sides of this.
He wrote that Julian Jaynes produced a lot of really good ideas lurking among the completely wild junk.
Uh, he also said, though, that Jane's uh Janes was one of the clearest uh and most perspicuous defenses of the top-down approach to consciousness that he'd ever come across.
Okay.
So he compiled Hundreds of examples for how this bicameral mind worked, but I'll just flag the most famous one because he describes how in the early Homer of the Iliad, uh, and see if this reminds you of anything uh fashy, Achilles never introspects.
He never talks about thinking, feeling, making decisions.
He never thinks of himself as an independent person with agency.
So when he confronts an enemy, he doesn't strategize, he doesn't run cost-benefit analysis.
He hears an internal voice as if out of the Old Testament or as if from the dais on January 6th, saying, You shall kill them.
And this is partly why all of those scriptural and mythic characters seem so strangely flat and impenetrable.
And it's kind of hard to imagine them ruminating or, you know, having doubts or, you know, pondering things.
And one of James's key points is that these are not characters with a sense of individuated eye residing in some kind of analog mental space.
Achilles is not motivated by sorry, Achilles is not is Edit?
You want to put in, yeah.
So Achilles is motivated not only by voices, but by irresistible urges and sensations in his lungs or his liver, but no inner person seems to be driving the car.
I mean, this is really, really interesting in terms of the history of literature as well, right?
Because you you you do not yet have that first person narrator who's telling you about their inner life.
Yeah.
Who's telling you how things feel and why they're making the decisions they're making and what their conflicts are and their desires and what they're hiding from the world and what they're then revealing, right?
Yeah.
And if you grow up as I did in the sort of, I don't know, landscape of Renaissance to modernist literature, where that is standard.
That is just what writing is.
Yeah.
It never really occurs to you to ask, well, why don't the Psalms sound like that?
Or why don't the Veda like what is the what is the primal literature about?
Because it seems to come from another planet.
And Janes basically says, yeah, it does.
Uh, because he says if you fast forward to the later Homer of the Odyssey, the character Odysseus is suddenly having all of those secret thoughts.
He's scheming, he's planning, he's visualizing the future in this private space of his own mind.
And Janes is aligned with those classicists who say that these poems are not written by the same Homer.
There was there probably wasn't a guy.
Uh, and the first, the Iliad, is probably not written at all, but it's recorded after it's sung for hundreds of years.
But then he goes farther to say that something happened around the axial age transition that witnesses the birth of so many philosophies and world religions that extend into our day that ultimately mean that these two books evolved from literally different species of human.
And so he famously describes bicameral folks as noble automatons who knew not what they did.
I mean, sound familiar.
Um, their actions are initiated not with conscious plans, reasons and motives.
They are in, they are in the actions and speeches of God.
So Agamemnon wrongs Achilles.
And the uh the text is it is a god that grasps Achilles by his yellow hair and warns him not to strike Agna Memnon.
And then to broaden the example beyond the ancient Near East, in Indian wisdom literature, the chanting of the Vedas come from this bicameral space.
These are the channeled mantras of the gods that are heard and memorized from early childhood, and they direct rituals or they communicate plant knowledge.
But then the later Upanishads are dialogues between fathers and sons in which the son is asking to look in, in which the son is asked to look inside himself for the truth.
I don't know if it's a jump as much as an evolution.
First off, with the different species.
I mean, we now know that there were at least seven species of homo before Homo sapiens or alongside Homo sapiens and the fact that Homo sapiens either killed all of them or fuck them and then killed them.
So there were different species coming together at this time.
But the jump theory sounds more like Teres, Terence McKenna's stoned ape theory, which is that this fast evolution of consciousness occurred from a ingesting psilocybin mushrooms.
I'm not as familiar with Far Eastern religions, but my second favorite class in college was ancient Near Eastern religions.
And the thing you learn about all the gods is that they slowly morph into the next set of gods, which are usually conjured through either conquest or things like the emergence of city-states, where trading partners trade stories and the gods all become blurred.
So you have Enki, who becomes Ia, who becomes Marduk when he defeats Inlil as the king of the gods.
These are all fascinating stories, but it just points to an evolution of the storytelling.
Yeah.
So there's an evolution of the storytelling.
There's also an evolution of how we think of being a self and perhaps how we experience being a self.
You know, I'll just give a quick shout out here to the TV series Westworld, because the Nolan brothers are fascinated with philosophy of mind.
And they actually do, there's there's two or three episodes in there where they get very, very much into the one episode is called the bicameral mind.
Awesome.
And you know, the thing you just said about being automatons with no sort of self-awareness who are just following the um edicts of these inner voices.
That's very much what's happening in Westworld, where they're trying to say, well, you know, at what point does a machine who has consciousness, uh, does a machine who who is able to be intelligent start to exhibit uh signs of consciousness.
So yeah, it's all really fascinating stuff.
And Daniel, uh Daniel Dennett has a famous uh headline in an Italian newspaper that says, uh, you know, we're we uh our minds are made of tiny robots or something.
You know, this is this is a big part of this whole discourse.
I think the question that you're pointing to, Derek, about like the the speed of the changes is a really good one.
And and from my reading, Jane says that like there are broader, you know, general shifts from hallucinated commands to introspective ego activity that take place over like a millennium, and he's really concentrating on about 1,500 or 2,000 years uh BCE as forward as you know, urban densities increase and writing for trade begins to impact consciousness.
And he does use natural selection as well to describe what happens for individuals.
He writes in one place that individuals most obdurately bicameral, most obedient to their familiar divinities, would perish, leaving the genes of the less impetuous, the less bicameral to endow the ensuing generations.
So there are these patches of like direct, almost stoned ape speed, but there's also a more gradual selection process over dozens of generations.
But somehow he's trying to grapple with this thing of like, what the fuck is the difference between the Iliad and the Odyssey?
Because it's huge.
You know, that that whole thing about the possible evolutionary process, I think is really interesting too, because it's conceivable that there was a time where it was much more the norm for people to hear voices and to find them indistinguishable from voices coming from outside of their heads.
Yeah.
But even then, during those times, there still would have been specific individuals who had a more heightened version of this, and they became the prophets.
They became the ones who were really hearing the voice of God that the rest of us perhaps only get some hints of from time to time.
Right.
And then I would argue that that over time that has become less and less uh something that's part of everyday experience for most people, but there are still people who have variations in terms of how their brains work, where they do experience that kind of phenomena.
And some of them, you know, uh during the pandemic were telling us they were talking to the Galactic Federation of Aliens.
Right.
You mentioned writing for trade, Matthew.
And, you know, it also behoves us to remember that writing as a craft started as a counting.
Yeah.
So there was it was it was used for something very pedestrian and utilitarian for a long time.
And that could help explain also some of the more just direct language that as the craft evolved started to become more poetic.
Yeah.
But I've had Janes on my cell shelf for a while, and I still haven't gotten to it, but you guys both are fans, so I did buy it.
But it's worth it.
It's worth it, man.
It's a trip.
You know, the next time you next time you take a weekend off and you want to do mushrooms or whatever you do, then like I think you should take that book with you.
I do all the mushrooms.
All of them, yeah.
But this conversation reminds me of one of my favorite religious thinkers, Murcia Iliadi.
I opened up his novella, Youth Without Youth, which is about the origins of language in preparation.
And obviously, the origins of language gives us insight into the origins of thought and therefore of consciousness.
And this time it was the intro that caught my attention.
So after taking 10 years off of uh directing after doing John Grisham's The Rainmaker, you have Francis Ford Coppola who returned to directing to make youth without youth.
He was a big Iliadi fan.
He went to high school with Wendy Doninger, who studied under Iliad, and she's awesome.
I got to meet her in Atlanta a number of years ago.
She's a fantastic thinker in person.
The movie and the book, but especially the movie, it's stunningly long.
It's very esoteric, and it's about the search for the origins of language.
I'm sure a lot of fans of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now were like, what the fuck when this thing came out?
Okay, just a side note.
This is almost uh not on topic, but did you know that George Lucas was the original director for Apocalypse Now?
Wow.
I mean, that that could have turned out like Star Wars, by the way, which he opted to do instead.
Well, that's why he that's why he wasn't on it.
I did not.
And that just makes me think that Martin Sheen having a breakdown would have definitely gotten cut if directing and you lose one of the best cinematic experiences in film history.
Something jumped out at me as Coppola describes his struggles while making this film.
He writes about wanting to return to his original style of gorilla filmmaking, which is why the Sheen moment makes it in, most likely.
He was watching his daughter Sophia direct in this style, and he wanted to return to filmmaker in this way.
And he writes about the evolution of filmmaking and how experimentation became sacrificed when the goal of movies became being profitable and reducing loss.
Then he writes, I realized that, like Dominic Mate, the protagonist, I could take for myself the freedom I associated with youth, and along with that, a chance to be a young filmmaker once again.
So in the process of making this film, Coppola searches for and finds his own origins.
And that's kind of how I feel about the literature of the time period that you reference.
Uh, just to know Karen Armstrong also wrote a book about the axial age that I think is worth checking out.
Personally, in the 1960s, my father worked in a plant, and I've seen archival photos of the of this type of plant as well as the one he was in, where computers take up the entire room.
He was in charge of making sure that those room-sized computers talk to the newer personal computers on people's desks.
The phone in my pocket right now is far more powerful than what once consumed a room.
Because what we're talking about here is written language, we have to remember it's also a technology, as I pointed out, originally is for accounting.
Spoken language far predates writing.
Making symbols of those sounds took a lot of time.
But once the floodgates were open, complexity quickly evolved from that simplicity.
Now, obviously, we're just speculating, we're all geeking out on things that we've read and we like to think about, but we're never gonna know what had happened.
But I do think that observations of current cycles are informative, given the fact that our anatomy and biology hasn't evolved much in the last 250,000 years.
Yeah, and I think that's part of Jane's project, finding the origins of how and why consciousness is just difficult.
And I think it's resonant for me because it also makes like microcosmic sense in a couple of ways.
Like I think I can remember how, as a small child, I was not self-reflective, but rather I felt buffeted by internal sensations.
I couldn't distinguish from the weather.
And I think it's also microcosmic sometimes for me, to another huge shift for someone of my age, which is the breaking of the digital dawn.
Like my brain was different in 2010 before the internet became this constant presence in my life.
I do think that some neurologists are still trying to theorize around whether Jane's thesis is reflected in any possible recent brain changes that have not yet been mapped, but I don't think it's a booming research field.
Although, you know, who knows?
Uh I'm I'm pretty much arguing here that it might tell us something about fascism.
So maybe somebody will take an interest.
So, dear listeners, uh, now that you have been listening to us like the gods in your mind, uh, comforting you and perhaps distracting you from the terrible world.
I'm gonna put this all together and haul you back to reality.
How did bicamerality work?
Because of course we're talking about Trump here.
Uh, Jane supposes that small civilizations were structured peacefully and functionally around a hierarchical system of hallucinations until they scaled up in complexity and urbanization and writing, all of which force comparative and internalized forms of thought and self-consciousness.
And this is a painful advancement.
And it's characterized, according to Jaynes, by the sentiments in Job and Lamentations, where the writers clearly feel feel abandoned by God.
And this is a new situation.
And the peak expression and transition point of that is Jesus on the cross saying, Why have you forsaken me?
But he's transitional in that he supposedly shows that people can recover from that despair.
So here's our present question.
Did bicamerality disappear?
No.
Jane says that even today, when people channel, cast lots, use divinatory practices, undergo hypnosis, feel that they're possessed by spirits, they are in a throwback mode.
When Paula White speaks in tongues, she's not doing something that's just very old or odd.
She's embodying and inviting her audience to participate in a primeval way of being human.
When Christiane Northrop listens to Magenta Pixie's light language, she's entering her little cozy bicameral kitchen nook.
And when Trump or QAnon speak absolute gibberish, their followers hear those voices in their heads with searing clarity.
And Janes says that this is all related to what he calls the quest for archaic authorization.
You know, I agree with all of that, but I would say all the examples you gave are performative.
Like none of them are having a full-blown experience where they are literally convinced that they're hearing those voices.
Yeah, I think that would be a really good test because the question is how can you live in both worlds at once, right?
Like once you're exposed to the internal consciousness, how can you ever go back?
Like the only thing that I think of is the Tibetan shamans who go into full uh oracle mode when they wear the big helmets and so on.
But who knows what's going on for them.
So anyway, uh I'm jabbering about this as though Jaynes is in my head because he's talking about uh the crisis of modern consciousness being part of this experience of the isolated individual with a private mind who suddenly must negotiate a complicated social and inner world, and that comes to its peak when the hallucinated voice of a god dies.
So that's what I thought of when I saw that picture of Trump.
The God dies when the society becomes too complex for his commands to make sense or to be followed.
Or the God leader literally dies.
And that's, I think what a lot of us were thinking about during the last week, uh, considering the health or illness of the great leader.
And as James's story continues, he starts to look at what people do when they suddenly lose a voice or presence of certainty in a very complex world.
And it gets really weird.
He points to the story of the Tower of Babel.
He says that, quote, the clamor of swelling civilization and its Babylon of languages, metaphorically muffled older forms of more direct communication.
Now, for about four years, QAnon spoke, a voice in the wilderness of the internet, and then he disappeared.
And the Anons were left with the Babel of Facebook of X and Rumble.
And now we have these fantasies about, and these they're morbid fantasies as well about what happens when Trump dies, what will happen.
There's also a kind of divination around, you know, the mark on his hand, or like, you know, what's happening with his ankles.
But when the God dies in the bicameral world, Jane says that the person has to figure out how to keep the hallucinated voice alive.
So they might preserve the body as a mouthpiece of commands.
So at sites like uh Ainon, which is in northern Israel from about 9000 before the common era, the dead king was propped up on stones and his head was cradled and facing a distant peak with his tomb acting as a god's house, which is an idea that then scales up to the ziggurat and the pyramid and the basilica.
And Janes suggest that the living subjects would still hear the king's commands in their hallucinations.
Or the heads of the dead uh were severed or their legs were broken or tied up, and the food was placed in graves.
In some ancient Greek graves, um, there were feeding tubes that were leading to corpses or depictions of people literally stuffing food into the mouths of the dead.
Um, And of course, the idols and statues are everywhere.
And Jane says that the iconoclasm of monotheistic traditions like Judaism and Islam, and also the early years of Christianity, where they were not in favor of images at all, is partly a rejection of these bicameral vestiges and the attempt to locate all knowledge in a single God that everyone can argue about with their new individual minds and points of view.
So I was finishing up this draft a couple of days ago, and Trump hadn't been seen in about six days.
And then he pops up looking more or less himself just this past Tuesday at another craycray presser in the oval.
And going forward, there are a lot of possibilities.
None of them are good.
Uh, no matter how much he's hated, right?
He's he's either, you know, going to be incompetent, uh, or his handlers are going to be in charge and fighting.
At some point he might be dead and going brown and blowing death farts while propped up in the Lincoln bedroom so that Carolyn Leavick can keep taking dictation.
But it doesn't matter because politically it's obvious that he's a symptom of the unbridled capitalism and exploitation that escalates into fascism, and that's not going away anytime soon.
And MAGA, I don't think will be able to constellate around Vance in the same way because Vance is thoroughly and openly deceptive and conniving.
Like he's written a BS book about his whole internal world, right?
Hillbilly elegy is not like Art of the Deal.
Art of the Deal is pretty much a bicameral text, right?
It's like, you know, the market told me to do this.
So fascism is this pervasive political condition that's very hard to shift.
And I think Janes' thesis suggests there's a primal psychic level to this, that the MAGA way of being in the world is so locked in that losing that imagined voice or God will be traumatizing and it'll lead to all sorts of anxious compensations.
And the Godhouses have already begun, right?
Like 200 million for the new White House ballroom.
Um, the oval office is already gilded with those spray-painted Home Depot sconces.
I don't know if you've seen those, right?
But they're like $58 or something like that.
Uh and I think they're estimating that it's going to cost as much as a billion dollars to renovate the Qatari 747-8 gift plane into the new Air Force One, because of course it doesn't have any of the defensive systems or the comms or anything like that.
Like basically everything that you need for a plane to be a plane for a head of state, it doesn't have any of that.
And, you know, whenever he goes, he'll leave the rest of our institutional spaces in disarray, you know, replaced by detention camps and monuments of vengeance.
And what will the followers do?
Like if they don't attach themselves emotionally to the techno-fascist coattails of Vance, you know, if he's not godly enough or huge, um, they will perhaps be similar to those societies that Janes describes as having to reorganize in that short period of time.
They'll have lost authorization.
There will be anguish when the voices of follow the plan and MAGA and you'll get tired of winning, go silent.
And so I would count on an explosion of compensatory channeling and divination and oracles for a certain part of that population.
And Janes paints a very dark picture of what happens to bicameral societies when their citizens lose that internal voice and devotion.
Things collapse into chaos.
And I was reminded about those telegram channels that we watched implode, uh, the QAnon channels while Biden got sworn back in in January of 2021 because they were sure that was the moment when it was all gonna, you know, come apart.
Yeah, suddenly there would be the public executions and yeah.
And we could watch in real time that actually that spell was completely broken.
And, you know, there is this moment in Assyria where the people defend themselves against that chaos through this vigorous escalation of militarism.
So that's its own problem.
I guess if there's any good news, it's that just like there's no benefit in arguing with fascists, there really is no use in explaining to Paula White that she needs To develop critical thinking, right?
Or that she, you know, she should stop doing something archaic.
