March 1, 2024 - Owen Shroyer Live
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| Well, ladies and gentlemen, it's great to be with you here on kind of a pop-up surprise, Owen Schroyer Live. | ||
| Normally, we're live on Monday nights, but we're live on a Thursday night tonight. | ||
| Owen Schroyer Live, episode 54. | ||
| And I'm really excited. | ||
| I'm really excited for this guest tonight. | ||
| It's a very interesting guest, a very popular account on Twitter. | ||
| And we're going to be going into his mind and his thoughts. | ||
| That's the culture critic. | ||
| You probably followed this account. | ||
| And as always, we're coming to you through the Owen.gold microphone. | ||
| So, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, let me introduce my guest for this evening. | ||
| He is the culture critic. | ||
| And his account on Twitter has blown up over a million followers. | ||
| Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of life. | ||
| And that is the culture critic. | ||
| He joins me now from an undisclosed location in Europe. | ||
| Culture Critic, thank you. | ||
| Thank you for being on with me tonight. | ||
| Hey, Owen, thanks for having me on. | ||
| I've been a listener of yours for some time. | ||
| So it's an honor to be on the show. | ||
| Thanks for having me here. | ||
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unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Well, that's pretty cool. | ||
| And I, of course, follow your account with great interest as well. | ||
| And I just want to start with the basics. | ||
| Why did you decide to start this account that really, I would say, just archives history and art and architecture. | ||
| And I guess for you, maybe European history specifically, why did you decide to start this account? | ||
| And did you expect it to get so large? | ||
| Yeah, well, I mean, certainly not. | ||
| Certainly didn't expect it to get anywhere near the size that it's at. | ||
| But you can probably tell from my accent that I'm from England. | ||
| I live in London. | ||
| And so the reason for doing it was, I guess, a bit of a kickback against what's going on here in terms of the architecture and the arts that surrounds us. | ||
| And most of British sort of inner cities obviously fell victim to World War II. | ||
| And they were built back in some of the most egregious ways that we've ever seen in terms of post-war architecture. | ||
| And so you can't really go anywhere in Britain without being offended by some kind of concrete monstrosity of some kind. | ||
| So growing up around that kind of thing has always wanted a bit of a reaction. | ||
| And I'm not the only one to post about it. | ||
| There's a big movement and it didn't start with me. | ||
| Mine has just become one of the loudest voices in this space. | ||
| But there's a lot of resistance against these kinds of things all over the internet and especially on X and on Twitter back in the day. | ||
| So I'm just glad to be kind of part of that movement against the destruction of beauty, which has come in many different forms over the last century or two. | ||
| And honestly, there's a huge amount of support for it that I didn't actually expect. | ||
| And to have reached about a million followers in about a year is just beyond what I would have thought possible. | ||
| One year. | ||
| So one year, that's how long you've been active with this account? | ||
| Yeah, well, strangely enough, I was kind of on the naughty list before Elon took over. | ||
| And so I was posting before then, but I wasn't really getting any traction. | ||
| And I definitely think I was certainly guilty by association with conservative accounts and the kinds of people that agree with this message. | ||
| And so I really gave up until Elon took over and the brakes were off from then on. | ||
| So do you think then prior to Elon Musk taking over, you were being censored or shadowbanned? | ||
| It's difficult to say. | ||
| And I wouldn't necessarily say that was the case based on the message itself to its core, because I think what I'm posting about is relatively inoffensive to most audiences. | ||
| But I think it's this guilt by association thing. | ||
| I think a lot of people who agree with my message are people like you, Owen, who sit on the rise of politics and are small government people and stand up against a lot of the same things that I do in my private life. | ||
| And so I think when you start engaging with accounts that are on that naughty list, you get chucked onto it yourself. | ||
| Does Elon Musk follow you? | ||
| He does. | ||
| He does. | ||
| That was a few months back. | ||
| I certainly think that he enjoys the post to some extent and probably agrees with the message. | ||
| I think deep down we all do. | ||
|
unidentified
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But yeah, that's quite a surreal thing when that happened. | |
| So here's one thing that really stuck out to me. | ||
| And I think this is what I noticed because I'm not, a lot of the stuff that you post is new to me. | ||
| You know, I'm kind of learning along with some of the old English traditions or the old European traditions when it comes to art and history, architecture. | ||
| It's universally beautiful. | ||
| I think any person would see that and agree. | ||
| That's universally beautiful. | ||
| So the one thing that sticks out to me, just as a curious person, as a person that's neutrally observational, I would say, well, what's happened to civilization? | ||
| Why don't we build like this anymore? | ||
| Have you found the answer to that? | ||
| Or do you have, have you reached any conclusions? | ||
| I mean, look, there's a lot of things that go into that, that change. | ||
| And it's been happening over some time. | ||
| It's not new. | ||
| It's at least 100 years old at this point. | ||
| But it all really just comes back to faith. | ||
| And what you'll see throughout history that kind of drove great art and great building and kind of great people, essentially, was the devout faith. | ||
| And when you take that away, you take away something that used to be what really was the key formula, especially within the visual arts and within architecture as well. | ||
| When you look back at history and you see paintings of the Madonna, for instance, you see beautiful artworks from the Gospels. | ||
| Making those things beautiful once had a purpose in quite a practical sense. | ||
| And so when somebody like Michelangelo sculpted the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ, the reason for making it beautiful was a practical one in that if you did that, it would pull you into the gospel story as an observer. | ||
| It had more power and weight in doing things like that specifically. | ||
| And so when you take away faith from a society, you take kind of those key motivations away from creating beauty. | ||
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unidentified
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And beauty is something that something that is very spiritual. | |
| It's beauty, appreciating beauty is kind of what makes it different from animals. | ||
| It's one of the most important things that does that. | ||
| And so those two things, faith and beauty, are very closely entwined. | ||
| And when you take one away, the other kind of has fallen with a few decades of lead time to fall. | ||
| But fall, it certainly did. | ||
| I'm speaking to the culture critic. | ||
| You should give him a follow on X. I'm telling you, you're not going to regret it. | ||
| It's a bit of a timeline refresher as well. | ||
| There was one post. | ||
| I'm going to try to find it again here. | ||
| It was from Paris. | ||
| And basically, it's, I guess, like a walk through a park or a main area of Paris. | ||
| And you show how it looked, I guess, somewhat of a century ago compared to what it looks like now. | ||
| And one would, I think, argue, most people would argue that it's lost a certain beauty. | ||
| It's lost a certain touch. | ||
| Now, I'm just curious. | ||
| I'm going to connect these things. | ||
| How much have you studied or looked into the World's Fair when it came to the United States, specifically the World's Fair in St. Louis? | ||
| Yes, yeah. | ||
| Well, I'm very familiar with it. | ||
| And it wasn't a European phenomenon. | ||
| It was actually probably done even better stateside. | ||
| So, yeah, I mean, that was a pretty incredible thing, which to look back at those old photographs now, it sort of doesn't seem real because you can't really imagine us doing things like that and putting on displays of that level of pageantry without really necessarily a reason to do it, except for its own sake. | ||
| I mean, the perfect example is the Eiffel Tower. | ||
| People forget that that was put up for the World's Fair in 1889. | ||
| And the reason for doing it was, like I just said, a spectacular display of pageantry and beauty and ambition to build great things, which seems almost completely insane to do that now. | ||
| It would never pass a cost-benefit analysis for one. | ||
| It just wouldn't happen. | ||
| And so when you look at those old photographs, like in St. Louis and like in Chicago, you just think, wow, how different those people were to us today. | ||
| Yeah, I pulled up some images here of the World's Fair. | ||
| Now, the reason I asked specifically about St. Louis is because that's my hometown. | ||
| And when I saw some of these images from the World's Fair, it was like, this was like a fantasy land. | ||
| It was like out of some Disney movie. | ||
| I'm like, well, what happened to my city? | ||
| What happened to the culture? | ||
| And there is still some beauty in St. Louis. | ||
| Don't get me wrong. | ||
| We still have Art Hill. | ||
| We still have some classic architecture, even from the 1600s, dating back to when it was a fur trading post on the Mississippi. | ||
| They've done a pretty good job protecting some of that. | ||
| But I mean, nothing like the grandeur and the sprawling beauty that was witnessed in the World's Fair. | ||
| So getting back to the last question and then what you just said, cost-effective, because how much of that do you think goes into it? | ||
| How much of it they're just saying, oh, it's not cost-effective or it's a resource issue? | ||
| How much of that is paralleled versus what we might deem as more of a satanic, demonic-influenced society versus a more Christian-influenced society? | ||
| How much is that weighed against simply we don't want to spend the money? | ||
| Yeah, well, something I talk about quite a lot is what other people have called the useless beauty metric. | ||
| So you walk around St. Louis, for example, and certainly if you walk around regional towns of England or anywhere, you see incredible Victorian era architecture in the most unlikely places in factories, in sewage pumps, wherever. | ||
| And it's all ornate and it's all beautiful. | ||
| And you wonder why. | ||
| Obviously, it wouldn't pass a cost-benefit analysis now, and it didn't then either. | ||
| But people did it anyway because they knew that by building beautiful things, you create a society where people's eyes are pulled upwards to the heavens and you inspire them to be better people. | ||
| And that just kind of doesn't really become a consideration in a secular society, which you and I, for the most part, probably are both living in right now. | ||
| So the World's Fair, obviously a worldwide phenomenon. | ||
| I mean, what would be some other good examples for curious minds to go look into? | ||
| Again, for me, it was just, that's my hometown of St. Louis. | ||
| I was just enamored. | ||
| I was like, how did we go from this in 1904 to sadly so many places of downtown St. Louis really just a mess decaying, to put it simply? | ||
| What would be some other points of curiosity for people to look into when it comes to what happened at World's Fair over 100 years ago? | ||
| Well, I don't know necessarily specific events to point to, but I guess I would just point people to pretty much anything that went up around the turn of the 20th century and then contrast that to what happened post-war. | ||
| And it's obviously very different. | ||
| There are examples all over the world. | ||
| What happened with the World's Fairs was there were these proud displays whereby countries would try to outdo each other with building the most beautiful things possible. | ||
| And so if St. Louis is a point of interest, look at Chicago, look at Paris, look at London. | ||
| These things were happening not just at the turn of the century, but for decades and decades before then as well. | ||
| So there was a good century of these massive displays of beauty and architecture and artistic genius. | ||
| And it was happening all the time. | ||
| And people invested money in communities actually came together to fund them. | ||
| They weren't necessarily just done on the backs of big donors. | ||
| A lot of them are community efforts. | ||
| Chicago is a great example of that. | ||
| So I will just, yeah, point people to pretty well anything that happened prior to the world wars, architecturally speaking. | ||
| We're speaking with the culture critic. | ||
| Give him a follow on X timeline refresher and a bit of a history lesson. | ||
| Do you think we're even capable of building, sculpting such beauty in the 21st century? | ||
| I mean, I certainly think we are just from a technical standpoint. | ||
| And there are people still sort of, you know, making great art and certainly trying to push within those institutions. | ||
| And they, you know, deserve recognition for doing so. | ||
| But it kind of comes back to the fake point. | ||
| If people aren't driven to do it, then I suppose you can say that they can't do it. | ||
| I mean, from a technical standpoint, yes, we can make marble look transparent if we have the drive to spend seven years doing that. | ||
| People forget that, you know, they look at a Michelangelo or they look at a Benini and they forget quite how long that they were devoted to their craft for. | ||
| That didn't just come by accident. | ||
| These guys were working at it for decades before they got picked up by the Pope to do something spectacular. | ||
| So with a return to faith, it's very possible, but that's what it's going to take. | ||
| It's going to take people really investing in beauty as something that's important, something that is a fundamental virtue. | ||
| Yeah, you mentioned the work that was done with marble and specifically with sculptures. | ||
| I remember one of the points of interest or curiosity for me was they talked about, I think it was in the sculpture of David, and it showed how advanced the knowledge was even back then, how there's these muscles in the forearm that are just like just one little thread of a muscle in the forearm. | ||
| And they would even put that into the sculptures. | ||
| Just that they knew enough that there was that one thread of a muscle in the forearm. | ||
| And they had that tiny little detail in the sculpture. | ||
| They talk about making marble look like it's waving, look like it's weightless. | ||
| I mean, do you see, is there anybody that you follow or see now that does art or sculpting like that just in the modern day? | ||
| I mean, sculpture is certainly a lost art. | ||
| If we talk about lost arts, I will grant you that marble sculpture is one that just simply doesn't exist anywhere near to the same standard. | ||
| And what is obviously important to remember with people like Michelangelo and Leonardo is that they were masters of several crafts. | ||
| So Michelangelo knew so much about anatomy because he spent his time down in the crypts dissecting human bodies. | ||
| And so he was a genius of several fields. | ||
| And that's how he had that anatomical knowledge that went into it. | ||
| But yeah, look, if sculpture-wise, no, we simply don't do it. | ||
| But then I guess remember that our great artists, quote unquote, sit in different fields nowadays. | ||
| So the Michelangelo of today just simply wouldn't get the funding to do the things that he did. | ||
| Well, hey, now there was a famous artist, I think it was in London. | ||
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it in London where he taped a banana to the wall? | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, one of the ways that this account got really big was by poking fun and things like that. | ||
| And it's just so it seemed everybody knows it's ridiculous. | ||
| And people just aren't showing up to these art galleries anymore. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, we're now at a place where you can't discern prank from art. | ||
| It's all just blending into one mad joke. | ||
| But yeah, utterly ridiculous. | ||
| What do you think is the greatest modern marvel when it comes to architecture? | ||
| For me, it has to be, I believe it's the Segura Familia in Spain. | ||
| I think I'm pronouncing that right. | ||
| The gigantic church. | ||
| It's like you can see it from space. | ||
| What do you think is the most impressive modern marvel of architecture in your eyes right now? | ||
| Well, I think you're right to look at the church building. | ||
| And what I do occasionally in the account is try to not strike such a pessimistic tone and to point people to things that we are building. | ||
| And when you look at these Very religious societies that still exist. | ||
| It's inevitably the ones, those are the ones who are building it. | ||
| And yeah, here's a good one for you. | ||
| Look up the Saint Saba Cathedral in Belgrade. | ||
| That's a beautiful Orthodox church. | ||
| I do find that most of the things that go out nowadays tend to be Orthodox. | ||
| You said the repeat that. | ||
| What is it now? | ||
| It's the Saint Saba. | ||
| Sorry if I'm getting that pronunciation wrong, but it's S-A-B-A. | ||
| It's an Orthodox church in Belgrade. | ||
| And what's amazing about it is that it has what I believe is the largest mosaic ever constructed, at least certainly the largest mosaic that exists today. | ||
| And that was built, the mosaic was finished, I believe, in 2020. | ||
| And so I think people should look at things like that and be encouraged because where societies do have faith at their center, they are still doing things like this. | ||
| And it's enormously encouraging. | ||
| And yeah, your example is great. | ||
| Barcelona is a beautiful place. | ||
| And that cathedral is very close to completion. | ||
| And when it is completed, it's going to be, I believe, the biggest church in Europe. | ||
| So there's a lot to look forward to. | ||
| And I don't want to be pessimistic in everything that I say because there is a lot of stuff going up still. | ||
| Yeah, and most of this stuff, and this is why I find your account, and I'm going to pull up the Saint Saba. | ||
| It looks like we have some 4K footage that you can find here on YouTube. | ||
| They do a walkthrough. | ||
| That's the one reason why I enjoy following your account so much, because there's so much that you put up that I would otherwise never see, never hear about. | ||
| I mean, what are your methods for even discovering a lot of this stuff? | ||
| Well, I mean, to some extent, it's places that I've been. | ||
| A lot of it is just places that I've been and been overwhelmed by. | ||
| But I don't want to take all the credit because things like this are circulating if you manage to find yourself in the right pockets of Twitter. | ||
| And I would encourage people to seek out more accounts that do things like this because when you start to look for it, it really is everywhere. | ||
| And, you know, St. Saba is just one example of one of these things that you just can't quite believe was 21st century. | ||
| But it's everywhere. | ||
| And there is a massive community on Twitter who wishes posting about things like this. | ||
| And I would just encourage people to seek it out. | ||
| Well, I go back and look at history, and it's not just the turn of the 20th century when a lot of this started going up. | ||
| How familiar are you with, or how much research have you done into the phenomenon of the ancient megaliths, whether it's in South America or Egypt? | ||
| How familiar are you with that? | ||
| I post about ancient societies occasionally. | ||
| I generally kind of leave that to other people, but it's living in the ruins of great civilization, as I believe we are now, it is not, I don't necessarily think something new. | ||
| I mean, the Greeks, even the ancient Greeks, were surrounded by beautiful ruins that were wondrous even to them. | ||
| And so what I've seen recently is really, really great communities around that kind of asking these questions. | ||
| Was the timeline that we've been come to believe correct? | ||
| What do we not know about ancient societies and sort of how wondrous really were they? | ||
| And so I love to kind of go down those rabbit holes and learn things about that kind of thing. | ||
| But I wouldn't say I'm an expert. | ||
| And so I'll let others teach me about that. | ||
| I'm sort of focused on the Renaissance and less so antiquity. | ||
| Well, I would say from my research, I have no doubt that, I mean, anybody can argue what's superior or what's inferior, but there's no doubt we've been lied to about the history timeline. | ||
| And I think the big lie is the theory of evolution. | ||
| If anything, the modern day theory of evolution has actually been completely disproven by archaeology, anthropology, and the megaliths. | ||
| I would say that that theory has been completely disproven. | ||
| So if you do want to argue evolution, then you have to adjust your theory based off of discoveries by people studied and covered by individuals like Graham Hancock. | ||
| So I think obviously that the timeline that we've been given is a lie. | ||
| And I think that the megaliths are kind of the missing link. | ||
| I think the megaliths kind of prove it, whether it's the pyramids in Egypt or the pyramids in South America, the tunnels, the paintings and the sculptures that are universal all over the planet, dating at least 10,000 years ago before these humans could have possibly contacted one another. | ||
| I think that that proves that there either was some technology or some might argue a different form of intelligence back then. | ||
| But I think it also shows that there was always this appreciation and this yearning, this reaching for beauty. | ||
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unidentified
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Right. | |
| Yeah, I mean, absolutely. | ||
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unidentified
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And there are some great accounts that I'll give a shout out here. | |
| Jimmy Corsetti is a really, really great accountant. | ||
| And he's a rumble streamer as well. | ||
| And he dives into all these kinds of questions. | ||
| And it's fascinating. | ||
| But you're right. | ||
| That's kind of the one thing that strings it all together, really, is that people just had a sense of the wondrous and the beautiful and endeavored to build as much of it as they could, as much of it as they possibly could, even to a degree that would seem impossible. | ||
| And the Greeks knew this, and the Greeks learned a hell of a lot from the Egyptians and other ancient civilizations that came before them. | ||
| So we're kind of at this place in history where we're almost the only humans ever to not think about these things, as far as we can tell from looking back at the timeline. | ||
| So we're the only humans who don't build with these mighty goals in mind. | ||
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unidentified
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And that's a really sad thing. | |
| Well, and my concern is we're going to reach this stage where it's either going to be AI building it, creating it, conceiving it, or it's not going to exist. | ||
| I think that we're already in a way kind of seeing that. | ||
| But when you plug these sort of prompts into even artificial intelligence, it somehow seems to get it. | ||
| It somehow seems to appreciate it or find a way to recreate it in the same beauty that humans used to build. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, what's fun to do is ask one of these AI applications, what does a beautiful building look like? | ||
| And they inevitably show you something gothic or Romanesque or Baroque. | ||
| And it's never a concrete block, which is something I find pretty amusing. | ||
| But yeah, AI seems to know better than we do. | ||
| Well, there's a lot of talk because I think that we may not be aware of this. | ||
| We may not fully comprehend this. | ||
| But I think in a way we are in a modern day dark age. | ||
| And it's hard for us to even understand or appreciate that because we have all this technology, we have all this ease of access. | ||
| I mean, you could even argue that just around the entire planet, as far as we know, historically speaking, we live in the greatest time to be human as far as the ease of living, the life expectancy. | ||
| But there's kind of another side to the coin. | ||
| Because of that, we don't even realize that we're in a dark age with the ugly music, the ugly art, the ugly architecture. | ||
| I mean, just aside from everything that goes on politically, I mean, just culturally speaking, to me, we're kind of in that dark age. | ||
| But there seems to be a crossroads and there's a new narrative forming about a new renaissance, another renaissance that out of this dark age will be a new renaissance. | ||
| Do you have that same hope or are you blackpilled, as they say? | ||
| No, I'm an optimist. | ||
| And I think you're absolutely right. | ||
| And I think even if we talk about the, you know, the very small impact that people like me are having on the airways and on X, even just by doing that, I'm observing kind of a groundswell in terms of people's appreciation for these things. | ||
| It's now become quite common to ask the question, why don't we build this stuff? | ||
| Or what was it that inspired people to build this in the first place? | ||
| It's quite common now to hear those kinds of questions. | ||
| And so I do think we're at a bit of a turning point. | ||
| I couldn't say how long it's going to take to kind of reverse core something like this. | ||
| And I suspect we have some time to wait. | ||
| But I think you're right. | ||
| I think we will bounce back. | ||
| And, you know, maybe it's the case that we just go in this endless cycle of peak and troughs where we forget what's important. | ||
| We forget what's beautiful and true and good until it kind of forces us back towards it because we just can't bear to live without it. | ||
| So I think that will happen, but it's going to be a matter of time. | ||
| Well, we've now heard from the culture critic. | ||
| Again, I suggest giving him a follow, if nothing else, for a nice timeline cleanse, but you'll become quite enamored and interested in this stuff the more you see of it. | ||
| We get a bit of a perspective into his mind and his spirit and what's drawn him to this beauty and this art. | ||
| So a final question now. | ||
| Are you interested? | ||
| You seem not to be a fan of the new gladiator movie that's coming out. | ||
| You're not going to see it. | ||
| Well, I don't even understand why they're making it. | ||
| I mean, what function? | ||
| You know why? | ||
| You know why they're making it. | ||
| Nobody has any creativity. | ||
| Nobody has anything original anymore. | ||
| Well, yeah, but I mean, to what extent are they going to remake it? | ||
| Is it not just a money thing? | ||
| Do they want to remake it in their own image? | ||
| Is that what's going on? | ||
| Do they want it to be for a modern or modern day audience? | ||
| Can they not just let it stand as it is? | ||
| I guess we'll find out because the deal has been inked, hasn't it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, well, I guess, look, I'd encourage people not to watch it because I just have no faith that it's going to be any good at all. | ||
| Did you see the Napoleon movie? | ||
| Actually, I've been meaning to watch it. | ||
| I've heard good things. | ||
| It's waiting in my list right now. | ||
| Well, I did watch it. | ||
| It actually wasn't as bad as I was expecting. | ||
| But I just think that Hollywood is so obsessed with imprinting their own vision of the world on historical stories. | ||
| And it just, I think that's something that is going to come to an end pretty soon. | ||
| I think we're seeing the absolute collapse of the Disney share price, the collapse of earnings, and it's not going to last. | ||
| But I think unfortunately, we're going to have to endure another five or 10 years of movies like this. | ||
| Well, I tend to be able to watch a movie and not be too impacted by the propaganda. | ||
| I mean, once you know it's there, it's impossible to not see it. | ||
| But I definitely, you know, I can definitely still enjoy a movie and not just be completely watered down by all the propaganda. | ||
| You know, I do want to ask you one more thing because I have it on the screen here on your X account. | ||
| You know, it's funny because Russia, you mentioned, you know, Tucker goes to Russia, talks about all the beauty. | ||
| Russia seems to kind of embrace that Renaissance art and sculpture in some areas. | ||
| But to me, I see things, this is all happening in the East, unironically, I suppose. | ||
| But what I see going, and I think there's like two different, there's two different ways the future of, let's say, your metropolitan area goes. | ||
| And you have kind of the new age, advanced look and aesthetic of like a Dubai or like a Japan or a Hong Kong, which is very high-tech, lots of lights. | ||
| I'm a bit enamored by that as well. | ||
| But then you kind of have the ancient classical look, traditional look of Russia. | ||
| I mean, it seems like those are the two directions. | ||
| It's either you're going more classical, traditional, like Russia, or you're going more high-tech. | ||
| I don't know what you would call it, futuristic, like a Saudi Arabia, Dubai, a Japan. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So, but do you think Tucker was right about Russia? | ||
| Or do you think, or better yet, do you think the reason why Russia embraces the tradition is because it's probably the most fundamental Catholic Christian country maybe on earth right now? | ||
| Yeah, it's a good question. | ||
| I guess I'm not sure I have a genius answer for you in terms of why certain societies pivot to the modern and the touring skyscrapers. | ||
| But it was amusing to watch Tucker have that realization in Moscow because, I mean, he's just so right. | ||
| And it comes back to this sort of what I look for, here's how I'll answer the question. | ||
| What I look for is the useless beauty metric. | ||
| Look at things that just needn't be beautiful. | ||
| And it tells you a lot about what that society values. | ||
| And maybe the perfect example, as Tucker was going on about, is the subway system in Moscow. | ||
| There really isn't any need for a subway system to be ornate and to have colorful ceiling frescoes because you spend half an hour of your day down there and it's underground, you know? | ||
| And so it would occur to most people who plan cities that that kind of thing doesn't matter. | ||
| But they're just completely wrong because those everyday occurrences are what lift people up. | ||
| And that's one thing that Moscow just gets right. | ||
| And they have probably the most beautiful subway system in the world. | ||
| And I think to some extent you can look at youthless beauty as that ilk as a barometer of the culture and of the spiritual health of a society. | ||
| You know, I would say it's for the same reason why we want our house to look aesthetically pleasing and we want our house to be a place that we enjoy. | ||
| I mean, hell, even the video game The Sims, you know, they have a little bar in there for environment. | ||
| How much do you enjoy your environment? | ||
| So, yeah, you know, you're walking through downtown San Francisco that's covered in feces. | ||
| You probably don't enjoy that so much. | ||
| Or a subway in New York City that reeks like sewage versus something in Russia or some of these other areas that you cover on your Twitter account, probably a little bit more pleasing. | ||
| Well, I appreciate your time. | ||
| The culture critic is with us. | ||
| Give him a follow on X. I really appreciate your account. | ||
| I hope that you keep it up and I hope that others will enjoy what you post. | ||
| And who knows, maybe it'll inspire a future architect, a future designer to help us get back to a new golden age. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's the whole goal. | ||
| And if I can convince just a handful of people, then I feel like I've done a good job. | ||
| So but yeah, thanks for having me on. | ||
| And I'm a big supporter of the show. | ||
| And hopefully you can come on again at some point. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| We'll connect again. | ||
| Whenever, if you post something else that I'm like, all right, I got to talk to him about this. | ||
| I'm going to hit you up, even on the other side of the planet at an undisclosed location in Europe. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Thanks, David. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Okay. | ||
| So there you go. | ||
| I think it's undeniable when you look at what was done in the past, you cannot deny that we've lost something along the way. | ||
| We've lost a yearning for beauty. | ||
| We've lost a yearning for design. | ||
| We've lost the need to be surrounded in our cultural centers, in our civic centers, in our metropolitan areas to be surrounded by that beauty. | ||
| And you just can't help but wonder why. | ||
| And you just can't help but hope that we can return, that we can have our own renaissance, that we can witness our own golden age, if you will. | ||
| I certainly hope that we all get to experience that and be a part of that together. | ||
| All right, ladies and gentlemen, this is my hat. | ||
| I will have you know. | ||
| This is my hat, but it was a gift from the great Roger Stone. | ||
| And I got to make sure that I'm wearing it right. | ||
| Roger said you have to wear it right too. | ||
| And so it's got to have a little bit of a little bit of a slant to it on the side. | ||
| And going forward, so probably something like that. | ||
| And you want to keep your chin down a little bit. | ||
| You want to wear the fedora properly. | ||
| So it's actually a gift from Roger Stone. | ||
| I want to thank everybody for tuning in. | ||
| Thanks to everybody in the Rumble Rance. | ||
| AIM always with us as well. | ||
| Big supporter. | ||
| Thanks to everybody out there in the Rumble rants. | ||
| And we did, we were off Monday night. | ||
| I was unable to make it on Monday night, but we will be back next Monday night. | ||
| Same time, same plan for episode 55. | ||
| So thanks to everybody for being along with me. | ||
| Thanks to my guest, Culture Critic. |
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