Recapturing the Narrative: Bret Speaks with Mike Nayna on the Darkhorse Podcast
*****View on Rumble: https://rumble.com/v2ysgoo-recapturing-the-narrative-bret-speaks-with-mike-nayna-on-the-darkhorse-podc.html***** Bret Speaks with Mike Nayna in the wake of his release of the Reformers film series. They discuss the art of conveying meaning, narrative, and the current moment. Find Mike on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mikenaynaFind Mike on Substack: https://michaelnayna.substack.com/ *****Our Sponsor:House of Macadamias: Delicious and nutritious macadamia nut...
I see the mainstream media as a cartoonification of reality.
And I find a lot of my work is just trying to complicate it.
Just kill it by complicating it.
Because that's the way the world is.
And so, I did think in the last episode, when we released the project, the goal was to use influential people just to get the maximum amount of information out there.
Hey, folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
I have the distinct pleasure of sitting this morning.
Well, it's this morning for me.
It's this evening for Mike, but with one of my favorite people, Mike Nayna.
Mike Nayna is a little bit hard to encapsulate.
I know him as a documentary filmmaker.
That's the capacity in which I met him.
I'm not sure that's exactly the right description, although it's accurate.
It just seems to me now somewhat incomplete.
Mike, welcome to Dark Horse, and how would you describe your role in the universe?
Wow, that's a big opening question.
Let's just say filmmaker.
It's nice and neat, and then we can complicate it from there.
Yeah, I'm a filmmaker, first and foremost, I guess.
You're a filmmaker, okay.
It's what I like doing.
It's what I like doing with my time, and I call myself when I'm in rooms with dignified people.
Yeah, but the problem with it is it's a little bit like calling a builder a wood shortener, right?
You do a lot of wood shortening to make a building, but the building is kind of the objective.
And the reason that I am a little bit hesitant to just say filmmaker is that your films are Unusual to say the least.
And maybe that's just simply the nature of filmmaker.
Maybe all filmmakers who are not just phoning it in are trying to do something dramatic with their art.
But anyway, maybe because I know you and I also know the subjects of at least a couple of your films, I'm able to see How thoughtfully you characterize your subject matter, and it raises all kinds of questions in my mind about what it is that you are actually seeking to accomplish, whether it's even doable.
But anyway, maybe filmmaker is exactly the right description, and I'm not giving the category enough credit.
But in any case, I am interested.
You're here on the occasion of the release of your latest series, The Reformers, which is a four-part documentary on the Why am I blanking on the moniker?
Grievance Studies Affair or Sokol Squared.
It's got a few different names depending on... The Sokol Squared... Infamous Grievance Studies Affair.
The Grievance Studies Affair, which is...
An interesting episode in academic history, at least.
It's one in which I play a sort of very distant auxiliary role.
We met as you were filming what ultimately went on to be The Reformers, and you did a sort of side project on the Evergreen Meltdown, which I would encourage and I have frequently encouraged people to look at, because I think it does An excellent job of encapsulating what took place at Evergreen, which I thought, frankly, was impossible.
I did not think it would be possible to present it in a way that the public would actually understand what it was like.
I thought they would always see a caricature.
And anyway, you did a great job with, you know, Benjamin Boyce has done a much more exhaustive dive.
It's a very different Corpus of work.
Um, he of course was a graduate of Evergreen.
So he was on the ground and has a very different perspective, but anyway.
And he did some meticulous archival work, which I kind of lent into to do my thing, I guess.
Um, he was the one aggregating all the footage and, um, meticulously submitting freedom of information requests.
And he was even behind the camera on a few of the things.
So I think he was working for Evergreen AV.
And so, um, He was very, I guess we collaborated on that series, you could say.
Yeah, it is.
Yes, he did an exhaustive, you might even say an obsessive job of unearthing material, which I think the world has to be grateful for because it is In many ways, a study of a kind of dysfunction that has now become so widespread that exploring how it actually unfolds on the ground is important work.
It's an interesting case study.
I guess I don't want to harp on too much because our audiences have seen so much of Evergreen, but Evergreen is the case study.
It's kind of like a small version of What happens when these ideas reach critical mass and don't really have much of, much of a pushback.
And what happened there was, was, was fascinating.
And anyone who's, who looks through all the footage and speaks to people about what went on the ground there, it was kind of a modern day witch burning event or something like that.
And it draws you in.
And so you've got yourself talking about it for many years.
I mean, you're part of it, so everyone asks you about it.
And you've got me who got drawn into it and obsessively focused on it.
You've got Benjamin Boyce who obsessively focused on it.
You've got Pamela Pareski who helped Jonathan Haidt untangle it in The Coddling of the American Mind.
You've got Tim Urban who recently released his book and there's a whole chapter on Evergreen and he mentions the series on it.
Several people have reached out to me and someone did a PhD thesis on it.
Several people have looked at it and actually studied it in a kind of sociological way.
There's something about what took place there that draws you in.
Yeah, if you haven't seen the series or Benjamin's series, just go check it out.
I think it's worthwhile.
Yeah, it does draw you in, which it has just done to us once again, which as you point out is not the right place for us to focus.
But I will say it is cousin to your work with the reformers, your project, in an important way because the evergreen meltdown Was the product of the kind of scholarship that the Sokol Squared folks were trying to unmask with their work, right?
So they're like two stages of the same process.
And in some ways, by starting with the meltdown or releasing the meltdown work first, you are revealing where it goes.
And then it actually, I think, makes a wonderful argument for what the reformers Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose.
I take it they are the reformers to whom you refer in the title of your your doc.
But it explains why they would have gone to the extraordinary lengths that they did to to reveal the full depth of insanity that had gotten loose in the academy and taken hold in all of these phony fields.
So anyway, I do see them as great This episode is sponsored by House of Macadamias.
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You won't be sorry.
But let me ask you, I've looked at the Reformers, I am simultaneously, I don't want to overstate it, but I'm delighted by it and I'm terrified by it.
There's something about, let's take Alan Sokal, right?
The Sokal squared hoax is a play on the earlier chapter in academic history when physicist Alan Sokal He perpetrated a famous hoax on a postmodern journal.
He effectively, you correct me if I've got it wrong, but he submitted a paper that when you translated from the academic jargon, effectively said, we used to believe in reality, but now we know better.
It was accepted and published.
And then he revealed his hoax in a second journal.
And the point was, if the peer review process can't spot an obviously nutty claim like this, then what's it good for?
What is it feeding us if it doesn't have a sufficiently decent filter to spot obvious garbage?
And the contrast, sorry about that, the contrast that I would draw is that in Alan Sokol's case, the only thing I know about Alan Sokol is what he chose to present of himself.
And so there's a way in which the Sokol hoax Has taken on a degree of respectability, a powerful degree of respectability because of, I wish it didn't have to be this way, but the careful curation of the presentation of Sokal and his meaning and intent and what you do in the Reformers.
It's interesting.
It's an interesting take.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Cause it's really hard to, um, James and I call them the intellectual country club to get them to listen to anything.
And there is a lot of kind of meticulous, I would say pedantic work that needs to be done in order to get their ear.
And so, um, yeah, I, I, I found it interesting that you would look at it like that.
Cause I haven't really looked at it like that before.
Well, even if I don't have Sokal right, and I'm not convinced that I don't, what you do in The Reformers is you effectively follow Bogosian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose Through the development, you capture them actually conceptualizing how they will perpetrate their hoax.
You follow them through the trials and tribulations of their papers as they work their way through peer review.
You know, let's just say I can't be objective about it because I know and like all three people and I know and like you as a filmmaker.
And so that makes it a really difficult exercise to see what's just simply on the screen and separate it from my personal feelings.
But I do worry.
That you present such a, I think, complete and accurate picture of the people involved, that it may be hard for those.
I mean, in some ways, we all know where we are because we ignored Alan Sokal, right?
Alan Sokal revealed the problem.
And a generation later, things are way worse.
And so now this is sort of a next phase of Trying to ring the alarm bell and here you have these people and the question is can the public, is the public mature enough to accept a warts and all presentation of these folks you call reformers presented as you do?
Well, I find it very, very interesting that you look at it that way because let me talk about the intent here.
Um, I have a problem with filmmaking as activism.
And so for me to present them in, in any different way, other than what I genuinely saw of them would be a form of activism because it's the, the film is designed to an end.
Does that make sense?
And so, and so I just don't want to make films like that.
And I think on some level it's, it's kind of, Too much of that takes place and I don't even know if it's effective anymore.
It's just a complete and utter discourse engineering in a battle with the content that's being thrown back and forth at different targets and things like that.
So, it's a kind of very constructed environment in which we find ourselves.
I resolved and I even said this to the guys at the time while I was making it because I want people to know what I'm doing.
I don't want to kind of reveal too much of them without, without them being okay with that.
And what I did, what I did at the time was, was I'm happy to get involved in the project itself.
And I'm happy to create some activism, which you see in part, I think it's part four, which I get involved in the presentation of the media release and kind of Present them in such a way that the Intellectual Country Club will be interested in what they have to have and actually just look at the information.
But after that I said that I'm not a PR guy after that point.
I'm just going to show what I saw.
And that's all I wanted to do.
So I guess it's in some sense it's a faith that revealing all or revealing the truth as I saw it will do something or even perhaps I don't even care that much.
I don't think I care about the activism side of it.
Yeah, which you're making me grapple with now.
Yeah.
I mean, it's interesting to me that you hear activism as a relevant part of what I was saying.
It's really not, or at least I don't know it to be.
I think you are involved, now that I hear you talk, you are involved In a gamble.
And oddly, I think I am involved in the very same gamble in a very different way.
Right?
Your gamble, if I, you tell me if I've got it wrong, is that complete authenticity will move us in the right direction.
And I am pretty sure that authenticity is the reason that Heather and I survived, in some sense, what did happen at Evergreen.
That the ability to respond to it with no fear that exposing the whole picture of what we believed wasn't going to reveal something, some, you know, dire flaw in our characters.
That that actually attracted people because, as I've said elsewhere, we live in an era So drenched in bullshit that people have become rightly cynical.
And when they detect that something does not require that cynicism, Many of them respond positively to it, so am I right that your presentation... I think you're right in some sense, but I still detect activism there, because it's almost that I don't really care.
It's that I want to live in an authentic world, and so I proceed that way.
And it's, it's not to an end.
Do you know what I mean?
I think that it's, I hope maybe, but I, but I don't actually know that.
Do you know what I mean?
The way you set that up was you're involved in a gamble that your authenticity will change the world in so on and so forth.
I don't know.
I don't know that far.
I can't abstract that far, or I don't have actually any understanding of what my actions will do past a certain point.
But I, I do want to live in a world where we can reveal and explore characters in a real way.
And I guess tell the truth in some way.
And I guess I set out at the start of this project that way as well, because I came into it without a solid understanding of the huge, huge activist academic canon that I was stepping up towards.
And I thought, well, what do I do in the face of that?
And one, you do a shitload of reading and you try to understand it as best you can.
And I think I've come out the other end with the ability to say something about it.
But at the time while I was filming, I had to find a way to tell the story that wasn't from some kind of God's eye view where I knew what it was, where I knew the right questions to ask or I knew what it was exactly that I was attacking.
And so the answer to that to me was, all right, I'm going to have this experience and I'm going to share it and I'm going to share my learnings along the way.
And so anything other than that with a, how do you say, an end game, an end kind of point that I'm working towards, to me, it strikes me.
Yeah.
some kind of activism.
I just, it's...
Well, I hope I don't drive the audience crazy by pursuing this, but I do think my guess, the professor in me thinks, if we keep digging here, we're going to find something interesting.
Yeah, okay.
You keep hearing activism.
I don't think that's what I'm saying.
I think what I'm saying, let's put it this way, activism, I hear you talk about activism and I hear you talk about an end point with which you do not resonate.
I don't think I'm talking about an end point.
I think I'm talking about a net change.
And that the, what I see you doing, again, you tell me if I've got it wrong, but what I see you doing is engaged in an unusual kind of filmmaking that, and maybe I'm working from what I think I know about your character, that you believe advances the ball, that we are better off for your film existing than not existing.
And that means that the content of your film, which is, I would say, radically open about your subjects, Is it net positive?
Well, I would say it's net positive because otherwise why would I do it?
But a big part of it is it's kind of my DNA.
It's just how I see the world.
I don't think I can see the world in another way.
And if I was to create something that was more traditional or another way, it would feel like manipulation.
I would feel like I'm manipulating the audience.
And so what I guess I'm trying to do is To share my experiences and my, my genuine perspective and my fondness for the humans that are involved in this.
And that, that, the end there is filmmaking.
The end there is, is to have a presentation that, that people can enjoy.
And, um, it just so happens to be in this extremely politically, uh, what would you call kind of, Volatile landscape.
But it's the thing that interested me and then it's how I saw it.
Okay.
Um, but, but, but I did, I did have a goal.
I did, I did have an activist goal throughout and I show it in the film.
And so it might not make sense in, for the people who haven't seen it, but, um, that that's another layer that's in it.
The other thing that's going on here is you're, you're asking me to get very analytical about something that feels natural.
And so it might, it might sound like gibberish to a lot of people and maybe you're even, maybe you're even better positioned, Your perspective might even be better than the thing that's coming out of me right now because when you try and look at yourself, it's like Alice in Wonderland.
You're chasing your tail and it's very difficult.
Well, you know, I do.
This is this is part of my the weird aspect of my character as an evolutionary biologist and also an absolute addict when it comes to nature, especially watching animals.
Right.
So I am both involved in trying to understand the nature of those creatures and why they would do anything that they would do that is expensive.
And I also just freaking love watching monkeys.
And so the point is, to me, it's very natural to take an analytical approach to what you did as a passionate contribution to the world.
Those things are not inconsistent.
They're two sides of the same coin.
But let me ask you.
Oh, go ahead.
And if you, if you had a response to that.
No, no, I guess I was just, just backing up the, the, the realization earlier, which was it's very, it's very hard to, when you're making a piece of art, which I think that was, um, which I think it is, it's, it's very hard to describe why you do it.
You just, you just do it.
And I always hated the write-ups next to paintings.
You've got the paintings and then you've got the write-ups next to them.
What is this?
And you know that you have to fill out a form in order to get your painting into an art gallery and you're just going to say some bullshit.
You almost plug in something into the political landscape so then you can actually get seen by people.
But I often find myself reading the descriptions or even the descriptions the artist gives.
I'm like, what are you talking about?
Yeah, I have that same instinct.
And you know, I'm not an artist in any realm, I don't think.
But I do resonate with the idea that almost inherently, in fact, I can only think of a couple of exceptions.
Almost inherently, art, in order to be genuine, has to be motivated by something other than analytical purpose.
Right?
Escher would be the case that I might argue actually blurs that distinction where create a staircase that cannot exist.
Yeah.
Any single point is visually compelling.
Like that's something you can explain.
That's why it's mine then.
He's like trying to, he's yeah.
Yeah.
That is interesting.
Cause the, the, the endeavor is paradoxical.
And so the thing that comes out of it is paradoxical as well.
That's interesting.
But I actually worked with James and Helen on Cynical Theories, which I see as an accompaniment to it.
Because they wrote a book that tracked the intellectual lineage of the things that they were attacking in the Hoax Project.
And they did a lot of analytical work there, which I became very interested in.
I was maybe a research assistant or something.
I don't really know how to describe what I did there, but I was involved in it.
And I always saw, I always felt, felt like that gave me leeway to do something, um, a little more weird, I guess.
So a little, little more artistic, a little less analytical and maybe that, yeah, I think, I think they work well together.
Those, the, the, the book and the film.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
Wonderful companions for each other because they really do.
Uh, one is the fiercely analytical approach and the other, um, I mean, it really leaves a lot to the viewer.
You have created a window, a literal, almost literal window into a period of history that explains an event, right?
And I guess the question is, well, what will the audience think?
I really, really like that.
Cause that's, that's kind of how I thought about it.
And also, also I walk around that window.
I'm messing with the fourth wall in it.
And so I'm trying to, I'm, uh, I'm walking around that window and turning it around.
And yeah, I really like that.
I mean, there's one scene in it that is, um, there's a, There's a thing that James Lindsay has been taken to merciless task over, which is his, I don't know, experimentation in his own backyard with some absurdly long sword.
Anime size.
Yeah.
It's like an anime size sword.
And he's doing some, uh, Some combination of Tai Chi.
I don't know.
He's doing some art.
It's a martial art.
I forgot the name of it, but it's a martial art that he really likes.
And it's actually, it's quite graceful.
It's like, I call it sword dancing.
We made a song to go underneath it and we called that sword dancing.
Right.
It's sword dancing.
And my feeling is this is beyond critique.
Right?
The fact that James gets something out of this, there is literally nothing that you can say that calls it into question in any regard until it becomes public and it is so easily mocked, right?
Yeah.
And so by showing... Wait, can I come just before you go in?
Oh, please.
There's an interesting thing that took place around this.
Someone sent me...
There's a kind of cottage industry on, on critiquing James Lindsay.
And so there's a lot of people who are, who are gaining a lot of notoriety just by constantly critiquing him obsessively.
So, and, uh, someone sent me, um, that a post or a series of posts from one of these guys who had, um, Pay to see the film and then rip sections of it and then we're sharing it to mock James.
And the interesting thing I found was he was mocking James for this particular event.
We won't, we won't go into it.
Um, I mean you can if you want, but we won't go into what happens.
This sword dancing event in the film.
And I really liked a lot of people came in into his defense.
It's like you're missing something.
If you don't find this endearing, you're some kind of idiot.
And so lots and lots of people came in to defend him.
And I really, I really enjoyed that.
I really, I thought about blocking the guy cause he was, you know, quite literally ripping the film and then sharing it.
And I want it to be behind paywalls for, uh, for my own reasons.
But then I just left it open.
I was like, I don't know.
This guy can't, his trick isn't working here.
It's, Yeah.
Well, that's beautiful, actually, and it mirrors a bunch of experiences that I've had and not known what to think about them.
But I guess, let's put it this way.
If the environment in which the public comes to understand what it thinks about stuff was truly indifferent, right?
If there was not a ghost in the machine playing games with trying to cultivate certain perceptions, then I think there is something actually wonderful about exactly the scenario you describe, right?
Where something that is valid, easily mocked, is then presented in public and people do not retreat because it's easily mocked.
They actually stand up and say, no, this is unfair, right?
You're being unfair.
That's a great process, right?
Where we come to correct our emergent understanding of something in public.
And I've seen it happen.
Because the whole game, the whole game is to cartoon, cartoonify someone.
And so James makes it very easy to cartoonify him on social media because he's playing some cartoon.
It's not the James I know.
And so then if you show, It's vulnerability?
Perhaps it's human vulnerability.
It's all of a sudden this big, giant, famous monster that's ushering in neo-fascism or whatever is a human being and then it's quite difficult to differentiate the person you're seeing on the screen from, sorry, to not differentiate the person you're seeing from the screen from the cartoon that's being created.
Well, you know, it's funny.
I do want to get back to the three primaries in your film and their radically different personalities and approaches and how the film reveals those distinctions and what those distinctions actually mean.
But I want to cover two things first.
One, As somebody who has been demonized and falsely portrayed and cartoonified almost endlessly for the last six years.
I resonate with the idea that one approach is to try and put enough pieces of what you actually are in public that it becomes almost impossible to portray you as anything other than you actually are.
In other words, if you're comfortable with a warts and all presentation of yourself, one way to immunize yourself from some of it Is to be more complete than you would like to be.
And I have noticed that the next phase in that arms race is a concerted effort to get people to feel icky for giving you a chance.
In other words, there's an army of sock puppets that erupts in the replies to anything I do and its purpose is to create the impression that I have been discredited and that anybody who doesn't see through the obvious bullshit that I am putting into the world is themselves revealing their own mental deficiency.
Right.
Now, this is nonsense, but the point is, if you didn't know who I was and you encountered that, you might think, oh God, I don't see through him.
Maybe that means I'm being a fool.
And the point is that's such an annoying thing to have to wrestle with that I'm sure large numbers of people walk away at that moment.
It's not that they accept the portrayal, it's that they accept that they do not know what to think and they don't want to take the risk of being revealed as foolish.
So anyway, there is an arms race but I do think the The unusually complete and maybe unfortunately complete picture that some of us put into the world is a defense against being caricatured.
And that might be very much a description of what James is doing.
That's interesting because the people with audiences who have traveled with them a long time Tend to have a force field around them.
Um, there's, there is an attempt often aided by the mainstream media to cartoonify someone and then critique them into the ground with cynical critiques and gather the warts and not leave the all and just gather the warts and present them and create this, this effigy that people will then go ahead and burn this digital effigy.
Um, And the, the, the kind of, how do you, how do you, how would you say the inoculation is, as you put it, is having an audience that has been with you through some shit.
And so, um, who will stand up for you in, in, in these times, um, when, when people come after you, it is, it is, it's like an arms race of building identities and influence, and then taking those identities down.
And both, both of them employ a kind of cartoonifying or, or, you know, persona building.
Um, yeah, I find, I find this, this line of conversation very, very interesting because I think it's the main theme in the film, but from a, from a, from a, from, I didn't know I was doing it with the characters that much.
I just kind of did it.
But it's kind of how I see the world.
I see the mainstream media as a cartoonification of reality.
And I find a lot of my work is just trying to complicate it.
You can just kill it by complicating it.
Because that's the way the world is.
And so I did think in the last episode, when we released the project, The goal was to use influential people just to get the maximum amount of information out there about the project and what was happening and what we found and so on and so forth and I thought that that kind of Flash flood of information would make it very hard to construct the project into something that was easily taken down.
And so I think that there's this kind of mass communication strategy that can take place in these things.
And I often think about how individuals are cartoonified on the internet and how I don't see them as cartoons.
And so it's hard for me to To string someone up who's, who's being shamed or something like that, because I just don't see them as the effigy that's getting burnt.
But, um, yeah, it is.
I like it when people watch my films and then deliver something back to me that might be going on in them.
Well, you know, I mean, obviously this is a fascinating topic to me for reasons that are very personal.
Um, but, I have had the experience many, many times, especially over the last six years, of encountering somebody who I had what I thought was a pretty complete picture from their public presentation.
And then I encounter them in personal space and they are very different than I had imagined.
Very different.
And I then watch this happen to people with me, right?
People who have gotten some impression and then we meet interpersonally and it In some cases rocks their world because it reveals how false an impression can be if you're standing in the wrong spot.
And so, you know, again, I don't want to torture you as an artist.
I don't want to torture you by trying to stick the label next to the piece that you've put on the wall of the gallery.
But I am fascinated by what it is and how it works.
And one thing I see you doing, you are, you make no bones about the fact, in your film or anywhere else, that you like the subjects that you are documenting.
And that means that you document their warts out of affection and not out of malice.
If I was in, if I was in the presence of a perfect person, I don't think I'd like them.
No, you'd hate them.
But I guess my point is, look.
Not out of envy, just out of you're boring.
But anyway, go on.
Most people are not in a position To meet James Lindsay.
And the presentation that he gives online makes many of us uncomfortable, I think.
Right?
There's stuff there that I just wish he wouldn't do.
Yeah.
And what you are doing is in some sense providing a friend-level view of the human being That is a wonderful corrective for the aggressive, yeah, for the monster.
And so anyway, again, I do think that that's kind of a gamble, but I also don't think anyone is good at presenting themselves on the internet.
I think that there is some... I don't think anyone is good at presenting themselves full stop.
That's where you get these body dysmorphia things.
You really don't know how you look to the outside world.
And, you know, most of Jungian psychology, which I find very interesting, is to try and figure out what parts of yourself you don't see so you can come into alignment with them.
Um, but we won't go too far down that mad rabbit hole.
But, um, I think that something's taking place on the internet where we're forced to consciously construct a persona.
And I think, I think it's driving people mad.
I think that a lot of, a lot of people think about, think about an identity in a town with no, with no internet where internet hasn't, hasn't, come into play.
You're in a small rural town where I am now, actually, you're in Germany in a farming town.
Your identity is, is built in concert with the people around you.
And it's usually something that you're doing.
Identity is done, not presented.
And so, you know, you might, you might wear some weird clothes or you play with it, especially when you're a teenager, but that's kind of like a, a, an awkward phase you go through where you're trying to construct what the world sees of you.
Most people just kind of, I think healthy people, um, well-rounded people just, just do their identity into adulthood.
And now we're forced to construct your persona digitally.
And it's, it's very, it's also very hard to see people receive your persona in a way that you don't want them to, to, to receive it as well.
And so there's a lot of pathologies around wanting to control the way that people see you.
Um, and, and other people are trying to control the way people see you for their own purposes.
And so there's this, there's this kind of mad, um, mad persona building and destroying process that's taking place.
And it's also making people build their morality.
You know, it's someone who's too online.
There's a kind of digital super ego that, that people are around trying to construct.
And I think that these grievance studies people are trying to create this, I'm This, um, this, this construct in order to literally, um, so yeah, I guess literally in a way, program the personalities of the world to, to their activist ends.
And so there, there is this kind of construction of these, these super egos are going to war on the internet, trying to build the people on the outside.
And if you're too online, you are going to be, Head into all kinds of pathologies when you're playing with that.
And I think that's something that's very interesting.
It's very interesting being here in Germany where I know the language enough to get by, but I don't know it very well.
So I get to avoid all the bullshit and just interact with people.
And indirectly, I really love being in a place like this because we don't abstract too far into nothingness.
We're just there together and being, and these people, these people don't really mess with the internet.
The next generation is for sure, but, um, they're all farmers and doers and well-rounded kind people.
And I really, I really, really like it here.
All right.
That was a rant.
No, that was the nugget.
That was the thing that I was torturing you to get you to say, because it's incredibly deep and important and actually dovetails with something that Heather frequently talks about.
It's not only the artifice that arises out of the online presentation and one's ability to curate it in a way that is unnatural, but it is also the durability of past versions of it.
In other words, you are supposed to go through that awkward phase as a teenager where you get to figure out who you are, and you are not supposed to be dogged for the rest of your life by a snapshot from it.
That is not something you're supposed to be permanently stuck with.
It is something that is supposed to decay in the memories of those who knew you at the time and becomes unimportant.
So I do think there is a kind of insanity that arises out of the ability to curate your own image.
The ability to curate other people's.
There's that awkward moment the teenager has that disappears.
But think about someone that doesn't like you.
They're probably doing this mentally.
They're aggregating all your slip ups.
And now that now they can do it in a, in a, in a more, I think it's, it's digital, but it's still physical.
They do it in a physical way.
They're aggregating all of your slip ups and then, and then casting their version of you out there often in some kind of political assassination.
Not even, not even slip ups.
Um, reframes ticks, ticks, ways that you phrase things, words that you use too frequently, right?
All of these things are vulnerabilities because, and here's one of the punchlines from my perspective.
I think the insanity that you are diagnosing actually goes back to the invention of the, the proper mirror.
Before there was flat glass and a silver coating that made an accurate mirror, there were polished pieces of metal that gave you an impression of how you might look, but it wasn't highly reliable because they weren't really that flat.
The closer you get to being able to regard yourself as someone else sees you, the greater the temptation to try to alter what they see, right?
There's a positive feedback that kicks in.
If your only understanding of how you looked to other people was how they reacted to you, It would cause you, you know, if you did something one day and it caused people not to interact with you very well or not to look you in the eye or whatever, you might not know why you didn't feel so great about what you did that day, but you would over time adjust your presentation so that it resulted in people interacting with you in the way that was best, right?
So you might in fact end up accidentally You know, you ever meet somebody and they're not classically attractive, but they are undeniably attractive the way they carry themselves is appealing and you just think, I like this person, I like to be around this person, right?
That genuineness would encompass a much wider range of phenotypes than this artificial situation.
I mean, it's become hyper artificial in the modern world.
But the ability to know what you look like, the ability to modify what you look like, the ability to surgically alter what you look like, the ability to cultivate that which you present online, and now the ability to use filters and other kinds of tech, including artificial and now the ability to use filters and other kinds of tech, including artificial intelligence, to present something that's preternaturally one These things are definitely driving us crazy.
Yeah, yeah.
And we'd be better off without them.
And I do believe you, based on what you just said- Can I say something?
So- Please.
I'm friends with two crazy South African boys who decided to make social media platforms.
And we were trying to make... We were collaborating on this for quite a while.
We're trying to make social media platforms that were healthy.
And so, there was one social media platform where... It's a bit obscure and hard to describe exactly what it was, but it was...
A social media platform where the people around you actually ended up building your profile.
So, people would write letters about someone and then it would be an aggregation of these letters and then you could go there and get a view of who someone was but seen from the outside.
And I mean it sounds kind of basic and weird and you know it's very very difficult to scale something like that up because it doesn't have all the brainstem stuff but we saw some very very interesting psychological things happen from that.
I went around and shot interviews with people who were using this and I was able to make every one of them cry just with one single question.
One question.
You would find one letter that said something and you would ask them about it and they would seriously cry and they would Would be so fascinated about the way that the world viewed them that, you know, if you look behind the scenes, you could see that everyone was looking at their own, uh, profile and, and, you know, rereading their own letters and things like that.
And the other thing is the, the, the process of writing about someone else was very therapeutic for people because it was almost like gratitude for having these people in your, in their lives.
And so I found that that very, very interesting.
Um, as I said, you know, you can't scale those sorts of things up.
It's not sugar and fat, but, Um, it, it, it taught me a lot about the, you know, the psychology, the psychological interface that we have with our current social media platforms.
And there's something, I think it's something in that, that cultivation and present, uh, presentation of a constructed persona and actually like analytically doing that rather than a naturally happening is, um, is, is very, very, very unhealthy.
Yeah, this is fascinating.
And by the way, that doesn't sound at all strange to me.
It's not surprising to me that this hasn't taken over social media space.
But there is something, your social group in a, you know, 300 years ago, Your social group has leeway to reflect back at you things that you do need to know about yourself out of genuine concern for you.
And it may do this by mocking you, right?
Your friends may have a good laugh about something that you do that you don't realize is a thing, and that good laugh may be Kind of painful, and you may laugh along with them, or you may not.
But the point is, if you have a group in which everybody agrees, hey, we like you, or you wouldn't be here.
Yeah.
Right?
So if we're mocking you about this thing, It's not because we've changed our mind about you, right?
It's part of it.
It's like a mirror.
It's like an intelligent mirror that doesn't cause you to obsess on something that's actually not important because you can't figure out what it is.
But it's actually, you know, if done by the more decent your friend group, the better job they will do at letting you know what you need to know and insulating you from things that are probably not in your interest to know.
And we have lost touch with this in part because You know, the modern internet is, A, you have too much power to curate how you present in the world.
B, you have way more antagonists than is normal for life, unless you're not doing anything interesting.
But if you're doing something interesting, you just automatically have people trying to tear you down, looking for vulnerabilities, pretending, you know, frankly pretending that they are more people than they actually are, showing up in places
With anonymous accounts trying to create a chorus where there's one person, you know trying to exploit something all of these things are Routes to a kind of insanity and To bring it back to your your art and
It is a kind of antidote to this because it is undeniably, I mean, you know, Peter Boghossian talking to you, his friend, about the status of his project while lying in his bed, you know, under the covers.
Like, you didn't stage it, right?
That's real.
Whatever that is, that is real.
And that's Pete.
It's Pete, one of the most open humans on the planet.
Yeah.
He is.
I mean, it's strange.
I was watching it and I thought there's a part of me that wants to apply the term guileless to Peter Bogosian.
It's not the right term.
Right.
He is.
He is like a noble impish.
He's like, you know what he is?
He's like, The coyote character or raven character from Native American myth, you know, the sort of mischievous creature that reveals your foibles, that kind of thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's the joke.
The Joker is the same thing, right?
Yeah.
The trickster.
He does occupy an interesting mental space.
I get so much joy.
I get so much joy for him.
And he often, he often slips up and says something that, that, you know, my, my kind of millennial training goes, Oh, you shouldn't have said that.
But once he, once he can get over that, he gets a lot of enemies because of that, that, that kind of nineties bro-ness he's got going.
But if you can get past that, he's an endless well of joy and peep moments.
There's all these like really funny peep moments that I can just, James and I laugh about it all the time.
We just, we just talk about Pete moments and giggle our asses off.
It's really funny.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it does sort of reflect that, uh, more ancient style of friend group that I'm talking about where, you know, you recognize Pete is, uh, Pete is imperfect, but he's trying to do the right thing.
And, uh, and he does have, you know, he's, uh, He's tireless and quite capable and fun.
And anyway, I think it is very well revealed by your documentary.
But I wanted to come back to something else just to kind of cap off this piece of discussion.
Have you ever met somebody who is engaged in radical honesty?
You know what I'm talking about?
Can you talk about it more?
Because radical honesty is difficult.
Difficult concept for me.
I mean, a lot of people try to be honest, but they're kidding themselves.
So it's hard for me to... Yeah, that's not what I mean.
What I mean is somebody who has reached the conclusion that dishonesty is the problem and therefore they are committed to saying exactly the truth at all times.
Yeah, I have.
I've got a particular one in mind as well.
Yeah.
It's a complete disaster.
Yeah, it's not good, is it?
No, it's terrible.
It's the worst because what you really want is somebody who is aligned in terms of values and objectives Who you can trust to be as honest as necessary for the situation, right?
An artificial commitment to the idea that truth is so good that there's no amount of it that's too much is just completely inconsistent with the animal that we are.
To be honest, it was probably a personality, I would regard it as a personality flaw of mine for many years.
I would, I was that guy.
And there was a kind of noble feeling I got from dealing with the negative consequences of speaking, you know, what I thought to be the truth.
And so people would recoil and friendships would break down and things like that.
And then I would stride on going, I told the truth.
I did my duty.
But I guess, yeah, in more recent years, I kind of see that as a mistake or kind of, I mean, it's egotistical in itself in some way because you are going, you are thinking that you are noble and better.
And it's, it's not, it's not living in concert with, it's not living skillfully.
Maybe that's probably, probably a nice way to put it.
Let's put it this way.
It leaves a lot of value on the table.
It destroys some value that doesn't need to be destroyed.
Yes.
Yes.
That, that, that's probably it as well.
I think that the progression towards the things I wanted in life, And it's not a matter of lying to get those things, but it's a matter of just, you know, biting your tongue sometimes.
Well, I mean, I think you can get to the problem with it with a reducto ad absurdum, right?
The point is there's lots of things that we do as a function of our culture, which could be read as dishonest, right?
You closed the door before using the toilet.
Oh, what are you hiding?
Well, nobody's confused about what you're hiding.
You're not really, you're not misleading anybody.
Yeah.
It's just that, hey, if we all close the door when we use the toilet, then we don't have to think about somebody else using the toilet and life is better.
And the point is, you know, is it dishonest?
Arguably, but not in any meaningful way.
Right?
Maybe I shouldn't share this.
Oh, no, no, I won't share this.
Pete's got a crass way of saying that.
And I think this is interesting because I think that the way that James goes about his business is too radical with what he sees as honest.
And Pete often hit him up on that and said something very crass about what he did this morning.
And he's like, I'm not about to tweet about that.
I won't say what it is, but it's very funny.
Anyway, go on.
Well, no, that's perfect.
That's exactly right.
And actually, in the three subjects of your documentary, you have three very different thresholds, right?
Helen is, in her own way, a proper lady, almost from another time, right?
And Peter is...
A trickster who pushes limits for noble purpose, sometimes beyond either his skill level or anyone's skill level to pull it off.
But nonetheless, I have no doubt knowing the man, what his objective is.
And then there's James, who I was thinking about it in looking at I think it was part three of your, your documentary.
And, uh, I was for some reason reminded of an immortal technique song, uh, that a student of mine pointed me to some years ago, where it's basically a description of why he has been pushed too far and is in a take no prisoners mode.
The point is I've seen too much.
I understand too much.
And, uh, I'm active.
I'm now a warrior against this.
Yeah.
And I get that from James and on the one hand, I know exactly what he's reacting to and I don't really think he's overreacting.
On the other hand, is it the best use of the tools at his disposal with respect to achieving the values that he's targeting?
We have so many conversations about this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A lot.
But anyway, I guess, so I wanted to compare what you're doing in your films with, which I do not think is a disaster.
I worry a little bit, can the public handle what you're showing them of something historically important, like the Grievance Studies hoax?
I also kind of want to drag down that kind of button down intellectual country club thing that goes on, because that's a facade.
I just, I kind of, I want, I like the dirty grubby people that can do exactly what the guy in the suit can do, but doesn't need all that crap.
And I know you do need, there's a lot of customary behaviors within academia.
That me, you know, as a kind of far eastern suburbs boy, entering that world, I just, I don't like it.
I just, I really, I just, I, you can see straight through it.
And I do understand the, the, you know, the pedantry is part of the, the actual, how would you say?
Tradition and what you have to do.
And I understand that there are some... It's not all customary and it's not all social because the underlying thing that you guys are trying to do within academia is very important and should be respected and so on and so forth.
But there's all these social behaviors that I think are built on top of that, that I would like to drag down because I want...
Anyone who can do the thing to do it and for them to be accepted.
And so maybe that's part of it.
Maybe that's part of the protest.
I don't know.
I mean, you're talking my language and because I am an academic, I'm maybe in a position to be more aggressive about the perspective that I think you and I share.
So I've had a way of saying this, which is, um, The country club is a place of tremendous politeness, right?
It's a diabolical place in which schemes are hatched by people, right?
Important business schemes that create tremendous carnage, but it's very You know please and thank you and you know The pinky is lifted when you drink your tea and all this stuff.
And so I have no patience whatsoever for the trappings of Decency when they surround something indecent and the destruction of the Academy has left a facade Of academic behavior behind that I find completely intolerable.
I find that very interesting because I was about to, I was about to pull back what I was saying before by, by, cause I appreciate someone like a Roger Scruton or there, there are a lot of these, um, English born and, and educated people that are the thing.
That we're talking about and there is something authentic there and I'm, I like it and it kind of, even being around it makes you want to stand up a little more straight.
But, so yeah, I was, I was trying to want, I was trying to separate what it is, what it is that I recoil from the customary behaviors that I'm looking at and something like that, which is actually beautiful, you know?
So I liked it.
I liked that you said that because It puts it into perspective.
But anyway, go on.
Well, I mean, I think the thing is, I want there to be an academy, right?
I would love it to have beautiful buildings that do make you want to stand up straight.
And I would like it to employ people who provoke you in the classroom to live up to the standard that they set.
All of that stuff sounds great to me.
But I'm now allergic to it because I've watched it be the only thing that remains.
That something has invaded that structure and it has replaced the science with something that looks superficially like science but isn't, right?
This looks like a truth-seeking institution, right?
It speaks as if it's a truth-seeking institution.
It is anything but.
It is a truth-obscuring institution.
And so, you know, in this way, I'm, you know, I'm almost on on James Page here, where what is taken over that very important structure is unforgivable and dangerous.
And so I'm all about storming it from the outside and not pretend that it's better than it is.
And like you say, I love it when somebody Proves that they can do the thing, but they don't look like the academy that has now become a farce.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
I love it when somebody does great science or deeply insightful.
I just love it when people are doing the thing and have done the homework.
And when you're in the presence of someone like that, you don't need You know, patches on your elbows and smoking pipes and all those weird customary behaviors that we know, you know, the rich mahogany and leather bound books.
You don't need any of that when someone's done the homework and you know, you know, you know when you're sitting in the presence of a person like that.
You do, you do.
And I wish the public understood how little the degrees imply about whether or not somebody should be listened to.
And I say this as somebody who has a PhD, right?
And I'm in no way embarrassed by what I did to earn my degree, but I also know that that degree does not in and of itself mean a damn thing.
It means that you had the persistence to get the degree, period.
It doesn't mean you know anything.
In fact, it might mean that you have spent six, eight, ten years making yourself dumber.
That is something that frequently happens.
And I will say, as a So I don't know how much you and I have probably talked about this, but I was an absolutely terrible student.
And not because I disrespected the idea of being a good student, I just didn't have the skills for it.
And when I became a professor, one of the weird things about Evergreen was that it gave you, because the founders of the college literally threw out every single normal structure that a college would have, right?
There were no departments, there were no majors, there weren't even classes.
We had programs that could go on for a full year in which a student took one program at a time, professors taught one program at a time.
These things were sometimes team-taught.
Because students didn't have multiple obligations, you could take them into the field.
I used to take them into the field all the time with no particular purpose, just to get them to let their guard down and talk to each other and talk to me and think about things deeply and stop thinking that class stops at the end of the period or whatever.
But anyway, the point is, in that milieu, I felt I would have felt like a phony if I had taught in a way that wouldn't have worked for me as a student, right?
So I had to throw out all the normal professor stuff and I had to start more or less from scratch and figure out how can I teach in a way that's effective at reaching students and giving them something valuable but is not a betrayal of my own obstacles in school.
Does not pretend that I'm assigning them to do things that I would have failed to do, right?
And one of the punchline of this story is that when I was in front of the class, I was aware that I was very much the same person that I was at home.
I was very much the same person that I was in front of my kids, and that that, I think, would surely be alarming to almost anybody who believes in the academic structure.
You walk into a classroom and you find, you know, a professor goofing off, cursing at some normal rate, right?
You know, I used to do stuff like, if I detected that a student was trying to game the system by telling me what I wanted to hear, I would latch on to what they were doing and I would mislead them as to what I wanted to hear and I would get them way out on a limb, right?
And then I would saw it off behind them, right?
Because I don't want you doing that.
You won't learn if you, if you please the professor, if that's your game, you will not learn.
So unless, unless the professor is very good.
Sensei behavior.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I, I mean, I did, I thought of it not as sensei stuff.
I thought of it as, um, Imagine that I was a tennis pro, right?
And I had a bunch of students who didn't know how to play tennis, right?
I could spend all day at the board diagramming shit and telling you about the way tennis is played by people who really understand.
Or I could get on the court and I could volley with you and I could put the ball just out of your reach so that you would get better at knowing where the ball was going and you would extend your reach, right?
And so it was like, well, A, do I know anything that's more useful than just volleying with these people on the topic that they signed up to learn?
Yeah.
Right.
So anyway, um, yeah, the doing thing is key.
It's way better than the explaining thing, in my opinion.
And we might be in a time where the doers can get a signal boost now.
So, um, I feel like the Academy might bleed out onto the internet.
We'll see what happens, but there seems to be a lot of interesting things going on on the internet that are replacing the actual core function of what the Academy did when you draw it back to its first principles.
And so, I think the research aspect of it, there's just not enough finance And, and kind of, you know, the ability to, to do that outside of the, um, the academy outside of think tanks and things like that.
But, um, it, it, it, it seems that whatever function the university was, was providing civilization.
There's opportunities to, first of all, it's not really doing that at some scale.
And then secondly, there's a lot more opportunities to just do that thing outside of those walls and the mahogany and leather bound books.
I believe you're being far more careful than you need to be on this front.
And in fact, I would argue, COVID perfectly reveals the problem, right?
It's not that the academy is falling down on its obligation.
It is actually actively making things worse, right?
And you could say the same thing for the official halls of medicine.
You could say the same thing for the journalistic institutions.
You could say the same thing for government.
And that is a truly terrifying thing to discover.
You know, I'm personally a little annoyed because I feel I've been trying to call attention To the hazard of capture for 15 or 20 years.
And the problem is the whole idea of capture is so boring that it's impossible to get people to pay attention to it enough to understand how much danger it's putting them in.
And so we are now decades late in addressing the problem.
It's been a runaway problem and it's it's fully captured almost every institution, maybe even every institution above a tiny size.
But Having discovered that, and I believe, how could you miss the across-the-board failure that was COVID?
Every single institution fell down on its obligation to you, and that not only left you adrift, it actively steered you into self-harm.
Once you know that, then it's not exactly clear what you're supposed to do.
But it is clear that you need to figure out what to substitute for that institutional layer, right?
It's not hard to beat an institutional layer that is actively steering you into self-harm.
And so what you're pointing to as the internet being a place where we are discovering what else might do that job, I think is quite right.
And we're doing it.
It's noisy.
Very noisy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think, yeah, things will get worse before they get better, but you can only try.
And, um, I think there's some very interesting stuff happening.
Um, and, and opportunities for very interesting stuff to be discovered and done.
And so, yeah, why not be a digital pilgrim and try and build that world?
So I know you've been down this road fairly far digital, uh, pilgrims and, uh, New Protestants, I've heard you talk about.
What do you see as the route forward?
You say you see some hopeful signs, I guess I see a few as well, but what do you see that makes you hopeful and where do you think people should be looking for a better direction?
Yeah, it's hard to say I'm hopeful because I I think things will get worse.
But I do also see a scattering of opportunity all over the place.
We've got all kinds of technology at our fingertips.
We've got a lot of interesting and motivated people that you can get in contact really easily.
I mean, there's something about the film, if we want to bring it back to that, is it's a very digital story.
How strange that these people could even Contact each other.
I'm in Australia, James in the southern part of America, Pete in the Pacific Northwest, Helen in the UK.
It all seemed to work and we were collaborating.
Those things weren't possible before.
You know, maybe snail mail, you could do something, but it just wouldn't happen at the rate and scale at which it's happening now.
And so, I'm utilizing the technology at my fingertips to have all these really interesting experiences.
And so, I think it was horrible when I was in Victoria during the lockdown, and that was a very, very horrible time because I didn't... All my opportunities were...
Squashed into nothing, less than nothing.
It was really, really a horrible time.
But now, I'm overseas and meeting with people and, you know, making some money from the film, which is really cool.
I'm starting to be a little bit more optimistic again.
But had we had this conversation, let's say, even a year ago, maybe Um, I would have been speaking very, very differently.
So I don't know what I can say as to, you know, the, the, the macro events that are going to take place.
If, if the planet had a dashboard, every one of the lights would be flashing right now.
So I'm not super, I'm not super confident that we're not going to see some, some, some major changes and some, some really horrific events, but, If you boil that down to my first-person experience and the opportunities at my fingertips now, I'm a little more optimistic from that level, from the ground level.
Well, let me, uh, let me try to point the evolutionary lens at that a little bit because I see the same thing.
And I think your description, every, every single light on the dashboard would be flashing red based on all of the failures, the simultaneous failures.
And incidentally, they're flashing red in a system where we have allowed the fail safes to be unhooked, right?
We have a fragile system.
You know, it's one thing to have, You know, a fire on a well-maintained ship where everybody knows what they're supposed to do and you can put it out.
It's another thing to have had somebody throw out the fire protocol so that the extinguishers are, you know, nobody's checked them in 10 years and, you know, the smoke detectors have had their batteries removed or whatever, whatever the problem is.
And that's, you know, we have all the lights flashing and a system that can't handle one disaster, let alone 10 simultaneous ones.
But, the analogy I would use that makes me somewhat hopeful is we talk in evolution about the adaptive landscape in which opportunities are represented as peaks and obstacles to moving to better opportunities are represented as valleys.
I won't go into the detail about why it's so useful to evolutionarily think this way.
It reveals certain things about evolution that are counterintuitive once you start thinking in these terms.
But one thing I can say is there's no guarantee that as you descend into a valley that you survive and you emerge to climb a peak on the other side.
No guarantee at all.
What is guaranteed is that it's very unlikely for you to move to a significantly higher peak without going through a valley, right?
You can go into the valley and your telemetry can be off and you can point yourself in a direction where there's no peak.
That's a disaster and you go extinct.
But if you go into the valley and you have some idea where that next peak is and you find yourself on the foothill, climbing it isn't as hard as it looks.
So, I guess what I would say is the fact that things are very, very dark is not information one way or the other about what the future is going to look like, right?
It's necessary that we go through a dark phase in order to be motivated to climb that next hill.
Growth spurts are painful.
It could be, yeah, a civilizational growth spurt that we're going through, but it's going to hurt.
Well, let's hope it is.
Let's hope our telemetry is good.
But, you know, I mean, people can detect this in their own personal lives as well, right?
Very dark stuff actually precedes a radical reorientation of your life that allows you to do something new that maybe you didn't see coming.
And so in this dark valley, Which maybe is the end of us, or maybe it's not.
It's the beginning of some next phase we can't see.
Certain things are true and quite positive.
As you point out, the modern tech facilitates collaboration between people who wouldn't have found each other even if they had.
The obstacle to collaborating would have been so great even 20 years ago that it wouldn't have happened.
But in this era, we have tools that if we can keep them from being commandeered by whatever the authoritarian monster is, we can utilize.
And the beautiful thing about the era is that the force that wants above all else to prevent meaningful change, which I call Goliath.
You can use your own term.
That force has simultaneously demonized all the best people.
Right?
It has shoved them out of normal trajectories.
It has purged them from the institutions.
Right?
And so, to my way of thinking, Goliath has created a dream team on the outside of the institutional layer.
Right?
And let's put it this way.
I don't know where we are in history.
But I sure as hell know what team I'm on.
And I'm pretty happy.
You just had a very interesting, I've been reading a bit of this elite theory that all the post-liberals are kind of circulating in those post-liberal circles.
And you've just created your own, Brett Weinstein, a high version of this elite theory where there's not an adequate circulation of elites.
And they've got the problem now that a new elite network is growing outside of the kind of established order.
And, um, I, I, I, there's, there's a lot to it.
There's a lot to it.
It's a very compelling argument and it maps onto how power is working right now.
Um, I do worry that that's the, that's the story that animates me.
You know, you, you're, we're on a podcast called the dark horse and, um, you know, the, the, the big short is one of my favorite films.
If someone is going to like that as an animating narrative, it's probably you and I. But I think that it does map onto a lot of real world observations.
I like to observe things and then theorize afterwards.
Anyway, that's the one.
I think I'm with you.
All right.
Well, I want to fix one thing though.
You said elite and my blood pressure went up and not in a good way.
I want to borrow a little piece of kit from the many interesting special forces folks who are circulating in these intellectual Realms, right?
This is something Heather pointed me to.
Not elite.
It's not the elite forces.
Special.
Special.
The two things are different.
Elite is an eye-rolling category and one I do not aspire to join.
I am not interested in hearing what they have to say.
I've had about enough of the elite.
I'm interested in, you know, the special forces.
In this case, they will be special forces that are not Someone said something very not PC, but when they watched the film, they said, man, it's like the retarded Avengers.
These superheroes who are very, very strange and yeah, yeah.
They are.
But I mean, look, the thing is, there is something and I can't swear that I've actually seen the Avengers or could even, you know.
I haven't, but I get it.
The superhero saves the world.
Yeah, yeah.
Right.
And there is something to be said for the idea that, look, I use the term Goliath for the force that opposes meaningful change, right?
The prime directive of Goliath is there shall be no meaningful change.
There can be plenty of change, but anything that meaningfully adjusts the flow of well-being and control is forbidden.
But that thing is not a dude, right?
In biblical times, there probably was a giant called Goliath.
He was probably a pituitary tumor victim and a brutal dick.
And it wasn't David who actually felled him.
That was, you know, biblical stagecraft.
I believe the guy who actually felled him was Elhanan.
But nonetheless, there was a time when there was a Goliath and there was an El Hanan and the story unfolded as it was.
Everything has been scaled up.
When you think about the number of people who would have been on Earth at that time and the number of people who are on Earth today, right, were orders of magnitude away.
And the point is Goliath isn't a dude anymore.
Goliath is a composite between various conspiring cabals and institutions and emergent properties that facilitate what Goliath does.
And, you know, David slash Elhanan isn't going to be a person either.
It's going to be a collective of people with very different skill sets who realize that our wellbeing, our persistence even, is dependent on getting control of the structures that allow us to run the planet and, you know, to right the ship.
The problem with those people is they're usually so Contrarian is not the word, but they're usually very, very difficult to work with.
And getting them to collaborate on anything at scale is near impossible.
I think that's a major problem for this David construct that you're putting together here.
Well, here's the thing.
When I was thinking about what to call the podcast, dark horse was the right term, but second in line was something like, The lone wolf pack, right?
That's interesting.
Yeah.
So anyway, I see the problem.
Yeah.
These people are not well built for partnership in some ways, which is a problem.
And I think there's a second problem, which is that all of us have grown up.
We've gone through our development in a market and a market teaches very bad lessons about
Partnership because effectively you source all kinds of things on the open market that Become shallow when you do right if You know the the job once done by a trusted Friend or a clergy member is now done by a psychologist you pay by the hour That's interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah, that is interesting that's The it's almost, it's almost Marxist really, isn't it?
The, the, the market as the atomizing process that, that, yeah, I haven't really considered it in that way, but yeah, that, that, that is what happens, right?
Yeah.
It is what happens and it teaches us very bad lessons.
So, you know, I worry when I hear the modern special analytical forces considering their How to organize.
I worry that people aren't even aware that they have, you know, they may be very good at certain things, but that there's a skillset in which they're novices that actually they need to become much better at if they are to accomplish the job.
And it has to do with deep human partnerships of the kind that maybe now we only see on battlefields.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's interesting.
There's definitely some food for thought there.
Yeah, for sure.
Well, are there other topics that you would like to cover before we close this out?
I don't think so.
Yeah, let's do it again sometime.
I always enjoy talking to you.
Yeah.
Always enjoy talking with you as well.
You're never in the same place.
You seem to move around a lot, which... It's a weird nomad.
I don't feel comfortable in Australia anymore.
So I'm trying to be somewhere else, but my visa keeps disappearing.
And so I'm always at a new place.
On the move.
All right.
Well, okay.
Mike Nayna, it has been a real pleasure and we have gone places I did not foresee.
Uh, which is always great.
Your current project is The Reformers, a four-part series which people can find on your Substack?
Yeah, yeah.
MichaelNayna, Substack.com.
MichaelNayna, Substack, and Nayna is N-A-Y-N-A.
Right?
That's it.
Um, great.
Uh, anything else you want to point people towards?
Twitter handle?
Um...
Yeah, just type in Michael Naynor or Mike Naynor and then you'll see it all.
Alright, awesome.
Well, thank you so much for joining me and I look forward to seeing your next project and to talking to you about what it looks further on through the Adaptive Valley.
