Now, perhaps you think I sound a bit strange, and that's because I've been mogged.
The forces of chaos, they knew that we're going to do this interview, so Nurgle, he struck me down yet again with a sickness.
So, yeah, that's why I sound a bit under the weather, but I'll try to be a good interview host nonetheless.
So, with me, I have two fine gentlemen of high culture to cultured dads.
So, without further ado, I would like to introduce Mike Maxwell from Imperium Press and big Dave Martel from the Bizarre Council.
Welcome, fine gentleman, to the panel.
I love it.
Thank you so much for having us.
Yeah, it's my pleasure.
And of course, when I've been on Dave's channel, you always give me such a nice introduction.
I wish I could replicate with these great and glorious intros.
But yeah, anyway, it's good to have you both here.
So, yeah, to start off, I thought to ask you both.
I can start with Mike from Imperium Press to just introduce yourself briefly for anyone who might be unfamiliar with you or yeah, Imperium Press.
Right.
Yes.
Well, thank you very much for having me.
My name is Mike Maxwell.
I am the Rex Sacrorum editor-in-chief, main man behind Imperium Press.
For anybody who's not familiar with that, we are a publisher of classics with a bit of a traditionalist or you might say right-wing bent.
Really, what Imperium Press is, is it's a publishing company that's meant to reclaim the Western canon and to frame it in a way that's sympathetic to its aims and the content there.
There's so many publishers out there, even of classics, that are hostile to the Western canon, and we are not.
And we are probably the premier publisher in the world that is framed along those lines, the premier classics publisher in the world.
There's some excellent other publishers as well.
So, that's Imperium Press.
I'm one half of Culture Dads, along with my boy Big Dave, who's here.
This is a podcast that we do that is somewhat related to Imperium Press, and it's been going for, geez, a couple of years now.
And I think we're the best podcast to win the game, if I may be so humble about it.
But yeah, it's been really good to do that for a couple of years.
And yeah, I've got a number of other projects as well, but those are my main gigs.
Oh, yeah.
All right, awesome.
And I might add that you are doing a terrific job with Imperium Press.
I've read a few of the books, and yeah, this is something as a connoisseur of books that you can definitely sense the publisher, you know, with a foreword and footnotes and everything like that.
That, as you say, many of them, they are quite hostile to the material itself.
And you notice that if you read normie stuff, so it's definitely a great service to our cultural heritage that you publish these things.
So, the Poetic Eda, I read a while back, your edition, great stuff.
And then also commentary on it.
I published a book review a few months ago.
So, definitely do check it out if you're out for an edition of these classics that you can trust and you can trust to not infuse it with various woke things, to put it simply.
So, yeah, definitely great, great stuff.
And yeah, big Dave, introduce yourself.
Yeah, I'm Big Dave Martell.
I've been in the circuit for too many years.
You've probably seen me on various different shows and podcasts and live streams and so on and so forth.
I am the editor-in-chief of the Bizarchives Weird Tales of Monsters, Magic, and Machines, which is a based pulp fiction publisher that publishes up-and-coming underground authors and classic reprints in their traditions of sword and sorcery, cosmic horror, and science fiction.
Really great stuff.
Thebizarchives.com.
You can go check it out.
Buy books over there.
Follow us on Twitter and Telegram at TheBizarchives.
As Mr. Mike just said, I'm one half of the Culture Dads podcast, which is a podcast where two based publishing dads do deep dives into retro and pop culture for folkish and dissident minds.
You can go check that out over at Culture Dad.
That's culture with a K, culturedads.com and get signed up.
It's behind a paywall.
It's premium content, but it's lots of great stuff.
You get over there, you get signed up there.
You get Imperium Press hardback books and Culture Dads every single week.
We've been doing it for a couple of years.
We've done so many great episodes.
I've had so much fun with it.
It's great stuff.
I've also been, I was the host for the bog.
Some folks might be familiar with that, which is coming back with Hearthfire Radio, which we're going to talk about in a few minutes.
But yeah, that's me.
I'm a writer.
I'm a poet.
I'm a podcaster.
I'm a freaking tabletop game designer.
I do a little bit of music, a little bit of voice acting.
I do a little bit of everything.
And I'm very active in my faith community.
You can tell Dave is the guy that does the plugs for our podcast.
Yeah, the Monstro plugs.
Yeah.
As I said a few minutes ago, I wish I could have given you such a great introduction that you always give me.
But yeah, great stuff.
Do check it out.
And yeah, we'll get into the weird tales of monstrous magic and machines later on, perhaps, because as you all know, I'm an enthusiast of Warhammer and Horace Heresy and stuff like that.
And as we know, they have the Black Library and Gales Workshop.
They've decided to swing a bit to the left, so to speak.
So that, of course, gives us an opening on our side to perhaps present culture of our own to fill the gap for those who are, yeah, who like this type of things, which I do, by the way.
I think science fiction is a great medium to explore various ideas.
Perhaps one day I will get to write something myself.
I'm not going to say too much now, but yeah, we'll get back into it in a little while.
So that's a good introduction of both.
Now I want to get into the juicy stuff and the juicy stuff, at least for me.
I'm always interested in the personal stories, the personal stories of how you came to be in this very conversation on this fine day.
So we can start with Mike, Imperium Press.
What was your enlightening, your awakening, your red-pilling process?
How did it begin and how did it look?
Well, it's interesting.
I've answered this question many times, and each time I do, I seem to push it further back.
Like it started when I read my first book of myths and legends when I was four years old.
Or maybe it was when I was a teenager and I read Darwin for the first time and so on and so forth.
But the proximate answer, I would say, is that I was a libertarian for many years.
And libertarianism is like a lot of guys will gainsay it in our thing as not sufficiently red-pilled or whatever.
But I do have some respect for it.
And I don't want to, I don't want to gainsay it or come across hostile or whatever.
But it is kind of like baby's first, you know, counterculture or like it's anti-regime ideology or whatever, right?
And there's a lot of truth behind it.
But I found, because I took it very seriously and I spent a lot of time in online forums trying to defend it.
The long and short of it is I found that ultimately I could not defend it.
There were some principles behind libertarianism that just really didn't actually hold up.
In particular, to do with ideas of property, what property is, where it comes from, and who says what, like who owns what.
Like if you try to really dig down into the fundamental into the fundaments of those questions, you find that libertarianism starts to not really come up with any satisfactory answers.
So for a little while, you know, I try to be as intellectually honest as I can, and I just found that I couldn't, I could no longer maintain it.
So I was a little bit homeless for a while, drifting ideologically, not really certain where I would land.
And I came across the writings of a gentleman that everybody knows or many people know now by the name of Mencius Moldbug.
So I kind of got into the post-libertarian side of things into neoreaction.
And neo-reaction is very interesting because basically what it does is it takes a very scientific look at social systems, at what you might call social technology, things like traditions or culture, religion, and things like that.
And it tries to look at it kind of the way that an engineer would look at things in a very hard-nosed and square-headed kind of way, very rationalistic way.
But it does so in a very, very honest way.
And essentially, the answer that it comes up with is that the oldest technology is the most durable.
And this includes things like religion.
It includes things like patriarchy.
It includes things like ethnocentrism and so on and so forth.
Like all the things that you're not allowed, basically not allowed to like today.
It sort of realizes that these things pass what you might call the Lindy test, right?
Like, you know, for anybody who's familiar with that, all these things that the liberal machine says that you're not allowed to stand behind is basically what kind of holds up everything in our world.
So that was kind of like my political red pill.
And I would say there's a parallel line as well with my religious journey as well, which when I was a kid, as I alluded to before, I got very, very hooked onto like myths and legends when I was quite young.
Throughout high school and, you know, as an adolescent, as many Gen Xers or people growing up in the 90s did, I became like a very hardcore atheist.
But I had an experience when I was in my early 20s.
I basically got hooked up with a scene of hippies, of all things, one of whom really sort of turned me on to esotericism and things like Kabbalah and whatnot.
And this actually got me very interested in the Bible.
So I read the Bible back to front a few times because, you know, if you're going to get into that sort of thing, you kind of need to know the exoteric stuff.
You need to know the meat and potatoes.
You need to know the basics.
So I thought I'd get all that stuff under my belt.
But, you know, for reasons that we can go into if you like, I just didn't find that it was for me.
It didn't speak to me.
I didn't feel like what was in those stories was about me or about my folk.
And so I was, again, sort of drifting for a little while.
And of all things, I sort of came, I came to Taoism, something that very, very few people in our thing actually get behind.
And Taoism still has a special place in my heart.
Taoism matches up very well with libertarianism.
Those two kind of dovetailed for me.
But it also felt very alien.
It felt like it wasn't my thing.
And, you know, being sort of growing up steeped in mythology and traditional stories and everything, my parents were really cool about introducing me to that stuff.
I was just kind of craving something that was, to use a phrase from Stephen McNallan, drinking from my own well, you know, taking what's coming from my own people.
And I kind of felt like I wasn't able to do that because it couldn't be reconstructed, or perhaps like, you know, too much had been lost.
And then in my political journey, getting into things like the counter-enlightenment, I came upon a book that we have subsequently published, which is called The Ancient City.
And I read this book, and it was, in a way, it was a spiritual experience just reading it because I was kind of forced to read it by circumstances.
And I got, you know, I basically sat down for a good four hours and I read like the first however many 50 to 100 pages or whatever I could get through.
And by the time I put it down, I knew something in my gut told me that I had been changed and I had been moved into a different path.
So that book just basically kind of gave me license to take paganism seriously and Indo-European reconstruction.
And that has basically set me on the path to where I am now with Imperium Press.
All right.
Awesome.
So just to clarify, you are now a pagan, a European pagan.
Yes, I am.
I'm a Germanic pagan.
And I sort of like a lot of my practice is focused on reconstructing as far back as we can for Germanic and Indo-European practices.
Yeah, awesome.
Yeah.
Yeah.
For the record, for those who don't know, I'm also a Germanic pagan.
Of course, I have a certain liking for syncretism.
So I have a few Hellenic gods in my pantheon, but the main gods are the Nordic, the Germanic ones.
And of course, I have an interest going deeper down to the common Indo-European roots as well.
So that's why I sometimes talk about this Indian and Iranian gods as well, because they ultimately came from Europe as well via the quoted were culture.
But yeah, that's a big, long rabbit hole.
So we're not going to go into it right now.
But yeah, thanks, Mike.
That was a very nice background story indeed.
So we'll get back to the religious stuff in a little while, I suppose.
We'll let Big Dave give his enlightenment journey.
So yeah, take it away, Dave.
Oh, man.
I don't, it's hard to pinpoint, right?
It's when did it happen?
I have a journey that's a little bit similar to Mike's as far as, you know, I went through libertarianism.
I had a brief stint as a Fedor Lord atheist.
But going all the way back, I have to say that I was, I believe that I was sort of, it chose me.
This path chose me.
It's like the cult of Cthulhu, right?
The slumbering one calls to the sensitive few.
And I heard it.
And I feel like I was maybe fate has called me here.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I feel like I've always been this.
But if I have to trace a lineage to kind of my journey, it starts when I'm a little kid.
When I was a little, so my father's, so my paternal grandfather was Pennsylvania Dutch, and he was a, he was actually an engineer.
He's the son of coal miners, has part of the old blood American lineage, some of the first German settlers.
They landed in 1689, been here in Pennsylvania for a long time, fought in every war.
But he was an engineer.
He was a very pious man.
He was Church of the Brethren, but he was a very, very kind of inquisitive mind, very brilliant man, brilliant, brilliant man.
But he always was really big into getting to teaching how to question things and understand things.
He was a very learned man.
He was what you could call like your typical Yeoman farmer.
He was, he was, you know, he went to, he went to college and everything like that, but he was also an autodidact.
He was kind of a polymath in these things.
And then on my mother's side, my maternal grandfather was a Italian Catholic.
He came over from Calabria, Italy, when he was a little, when he was a little kid.
And he was somewhat similar.
He was a very, very pious, very superstitious man, but he was very art-minded.
My grandfather, he played guitar.
He was a painter.
He could draw.
He was very charismatic.
He was really big into telling stories.
He was a tremendous storyteller.
And these two men were kind of the like the two parts that inspired me to go on my path for my whole entire life.
And one of the things that probably was my first journey, I don't know if I want to call it the red pill, but one of the things that kind of sparked my journey when I was a little kid, my grandfather, my maternal grandfather read to me The Hobbit.
It was the first book that he learned in English, that he read by himself in English.
And he loved it.
He absolutely loved The Hobbit.
So he read it to me.
And I just fell in love with that.
The idea of magic and adventure and heroism and mythology and dragons and trolls and everything that's in The Hobbit, all the beauty of Tolkien.
It just became part of me.
And that inspired probably my entire life journey.
From then on, growing up, I just could not get enough of the imaginal, of the ancient, of the old.
And on top of it, I carried with me my paternal grandfather's sense of that kind of mind, the learned mind, to always try to learn and understand why, right?
Always understand why.
So that kind of inspired me to be a disagreeable curmudgeon my entire life.
Everyone would say, well, this is how it is.
This is how it is.
And I'd be like, why?
Why is that?
So I would always try to read things.
And growing up, I kind of went down the journey of this, you know, this kind of stuff.
And I can't remember my earliest memory, but probably what led me to what you would call the red pill is my faith.
When I was about a teenager, I don't know, 15, 16, or whatever, me and some of my buddies were all into it.
And a couple of those buddies are actually now, they practice with me today, but they're in my kindred.
But we started to just read everything we could get our hands on about ancient religion, specifically Germanic ancient religion.
Because those of us that are from Pennsylvania, many of us have very deep Pennsylvania Dutch heritage, Pennsylvania German heritage.
So we began to read everything we could get our hands on, you know, the Eddas and just whatever kind of books we could find, watching documentaries.
And we started to do what you could call pagan practices back then.
We had no idea what we were doing.
We were making live, we were doing libations to the gods and believing in this stuff.
And we thought we were the only ones in the world doing this.
We had no idea.
You know, this is back in, I don't know, early 2000s, you know, kind of early days of the internet.
So we couldn't really go onto the internet to find other people.
We were young, you know, all that.
But from there, eventually I got into the kind of fedor lord atheist phase during the Richard Dawkins and all this kind of stuff.
And I also fell into libertarianism.
I started reading books like by Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman.
You guys are familiar with this kind of literature.
And listening to different libertarian podcasts is where I found like Prison Planet.
And honestly, this is when I, this is about this time I found Red Ice, Red Ice Creations, back when it was just Henrik, when they were doing the really cool, weird conspiracy theories.
I'm going on and on.
But long story short, I went through that phase.
And then eventually I realized that I was a very bad atheist and a very bad libertarian.
And I really just didn't understand what those things meant.
So I got into guys like Thomas Carlisle.
I got into guys like Nietzsche.
I got into guys like, you know, these types of thinkers.
And then I got into Ludism.
I read Ted Kay and Jocko Lul and thinkers like this.
And eventually I came back into faith.
It brought me back into faith.
And from then on, I have kind of all of my beliefs have been downstream from my faith.
Obviously, I found my way to things like 4chan, various platforms that distribute dissident ideas and stuff like that.
And it took me on different journeys reading a lot of Imperium press books.
I'll tell you what, Imperium Press books, I can't tell you how many times they've turned my head upside down.
Crazy stuff.
But yeah, so that's kind of been my journey, but it's mainly been downstream of my faith.
To this day, as my faith develops and as I've learned more and matured in my faith as a heathen, everything else has always had to contour to that.
So if I've learned, hey, I misunderstood this thing, then all of my politics must change.
One thing that I can say is as a heathen, to me, the will of the gods and the teachings of the ancestors have always been utmost authority.
And to me, everything political must contour to that.
So the reason that I'm kind of in these spaces, as I guess you could say, right-wing or maybe nationalist or whatever you want to call it, the reason that I'm here is because I am a heathen and that these beliefs are downstream of heathenry.
So that's kind of my journey.
All right.
Awesome.
Yeah.
So this is quite interesting.
I hear this so many, so often.
So many good guys, they've been through two stages in particular.
So fedora tipping atheist stage and a libertarian phase.
So I haven't been through these stages myself because I believe also this is because I'm grown up in Sweden.
So the default position is sort of that you are that you are already atheist and then you sort of find some sort of faith.
But I know in America, you have a much stronger presence from Christianity still.
But yeah, I mean, the church in Sweden has been greatly reduced for at least 70 years.
So it was never really a presence.
But could you both just give your take on this?
That it seems like many guys, they're going through these two stages often at the same time.
And then they sort of overcome it.
Do you have any good take on why that is?
So why you get to the libertarian stage and the atheist stage and then you get through it to find a more higher stage, one could say.
Well, go ahead, Mike.
Well, I was just going to say, I'm not sure that I have like a real sort of deep hot take on this.
I think that basically both are essentially approved.
It's like approved dissident channels within the mainstream, that these are things that are actually, they are there to kind of like corral you back into liberalism, back into modernity, back into everything that sort of keeps the machine running.
But it's like an, you know, it's like the two sides of the coin, like that you're allowed, it's, that you're allowed to have.
So what libertarianism basically is, as I said before, it's sort of like baby's first dissident ideology kind of thing, where it is, in fact, you know, if a libertarian regime were to somehow take over in some place in the West that was like hardcore and like actually standing on its principles, like if Ron Paul was king of the United States, like magically back in 2012, then it would actually be a problem for the regime.
But it wouldn't be the problem for the regime that it would be if you had something else, something that sort of was like pre-French Revolution in its orientation.
That is the one thing that you are not allowed to have.
And atheism as well.
You know, a good Jonathan Bowden had a good quote one time where he basically said that there are two things that liberalism is unable to, completely unable to integrate into itself.
One of them is the radical right and the other one is religious fundamentalism.
So these are basically, they're sort of countercultural, you know, channels that you're allowed to go into that seem to oppose the mainstream, but are actually there to kind of reinforce it ultimately.
Yeah.
I would say that for libertarianism, it was kind of an aesthetic thing.
You know, growing up, I am, I am a homebody.
I am a home.
I'm proud of who I am, where I come from.
I shout from the rooftops.
I'm proud to be a Pennsylvanian and all this kind of stuff.
So I've always been like that.
So for me, it was like an aesthetic thing.
Libertarianism was the most 1776.
It was the most American.
And that's kind of what it was when, you know, in the United States, it was either mainstream kind of bowtie conservatism, neocon stuff, or you could go hang out and go read books that are recommended by these like militia guys and these like, you know, patriots and all this kind of stuff.
So what are you going to choose if you're a young guy?
The guys that like guns and do cool badass stuff or the dorks that you don't like.
You know what I mean?
So I went with libertarianism.
And then atheism, my atheism phase was simply a reaction to Christianity.
That's all that it was.
And I'm not a, I've matured out of that.
I don't, I'm a grown man.
I'm 37 years old.
I don't bear any sort of like resent towards Christianity.
I'm not, I'm not barg.
You know what I mean?
That's not part of my identity.
I've, I respect it and I respect men that are reverent and pious in their Christian tradition.
But as a kid, it just didn't, it didn't fit.
It felt weird.
It felt, it didn't feel right.
So, and also growing up, a lot of my family were the boomer generation.
They were very kind of irreverent.
And I didn't respect that because I respected my grandfathers who were very pious men.
You know, my maternal grandfather, he would bless doorways before he walked through.
He'd cover mirrors because he thought demons could see him.
My paternal grandfather was a deacon and understood theology.
I had a whole little mini library dedicated to theology.
And he read the Euthyphro Dilemma and freaking, you know, all this kind of, like these guys were really about it.
And I looked up to them.
And then their children, my parents' generation, like didn't take it seriously at all.
They were only kind of Christian when it served them, right?
And I'm not doing, I love my parents.
I'm not knocking them, but I, as a young man, I rebelled against that.
I was like, you know what?
If it's not serious, if it's not this, also, it feels weird.
So I'm against that.
And then what was the other option?
The other option was, at the time, I thought, was atheism.
But, you know, it was also at the time I expressed myself, I expressed my belief in polytheism several times during this time.
And people laugh at me or maybe, oh, well, you believe in Marvel, this kind of stuff.
So they sort of mocked me out of saying it, right?
But in my heart, in my mind, secretly, I still believed.
And there is one point I remember that it was over.
Atheism was over for me.
I watched, I believe it was Richard Dawkins and he was on Bill O'Reilly or something like that.
He's on Fox News.
And Richard Dawkins was going through his talking points and he said something along the lines of, I'm only a little bit more atheist than you.
He says, I believe in one less God than you.
I also don't believe in Apollo or Zeus or Osiris or Thor.
And when he said Thor, for some reason, I didn't like it on a visceral level.
I couldn't explain it.
I didn't like it.
He made me mad.
It turned my stomach.
I was like, F this guy.
This guy's got blood memories kicking in.
Your blood memories kicking in, making you angry.
Yeah, yeah.
It was like he spoke blasphemy to me and I didn't like it.
So from that point on, I went away from that.
I couldn't explain it, but that's what happened.
Yeah, I suppose there's something when we're talking about blood memories, of course, we have, you know, inherited our DNA, so our physical appearance and our bone structure and everything like that.
And we also have blood memories.
So I usually, when I talk to Christians and they say, but why don't you follow the God of your ancestors?
Why don't you convert to Christ?
And then I say, if I line up all of my ancestors, a lot, many more of them will actually be of the old religion.
And of course, when you heard that, dork, because he isn't really physically impressive.
And when these dorks, they speak disparagingly about our sacred items, it can be whatever.
It can even be about Jesus.
If I hear a dork speak ill about Jesus, it doesn't sit well with me.
And now, of course, I'm not a Christian, but still Jesus has been with many of my ancestors.
So I also view it as an assault on European man in general.
It depends on who says it, of course.
If I've criticized Christianity quite a bit over the last while, but I definitely understand what you mean there.
And it doesn't sit well.
And then for me, I've had many of these moments as well.
And then in later years, I've come to understand why I felt a certain distaste for this smug, smug dorks talking ill about, same thing if we talk about history.
Oh, these ancient Greeks, they weren't so, they didn't have these cool physiques.
And the medieval knights, they had poor health or whatever it might be.
Just physically unfit dorks speaking ill of Chads, basically, in simple put.
So yeah, anyway, my take, my take in a brief, briefly stated about libertarianism and atheism is that there is an immature, and I see immature because as Mike said, it's the first baby steps on becoming a dissident.
It is a bit immature, the sense of not wanting to submit yourself to something higher.
And when I say submit, it's something good.
You do submit yourself to a higher cause, a higher power.
I say that definitely, 100%.
I am a humble servant of a higher cause, and it gives me joy and freedom in doing that.
And I think for many libertarians, they have a sort of knee-jerk reaction.
They say they don't want to be anyone's servants.
They want to be their own master.
And so, therefore, it's quite natural to not have any gods, not any higher metaphysical principles.
And it goes hand in hand quite a bit.
Now, I know, of course, there are good libertarians, they are pious, religious, everything like that.
So, but in general, just in a painting with a very broad brush here, that you have this reluctance to submit yourself to something higher.
And then it goes hand in hand, atheism and libertarianism.
That's just my take at least on the matter.
It's true.
Yeah, I think so.
And I agree with what Dave was saying as far as the visceral reaction to atheism specifically.
By the time Richard Dawkins came around, I was already sort of on the path to theism of some kind.
You know, I had read a fair bit about like Thomistic apologetics and like arguments for God.
And even though none of the specific arguments really convinced me, I always thought that there is something out there, that like there is a God or some sort of divine force or presence.
I've never refined that quite a lot.
But back then, I felt it too.
And I just, on a gut level, did not like the kind of person who would just sort of snicker and laugh about religious people.
It always struck me as being extremely unself-aware.
People who believe that they don't actually, like that they are perfectly rational, as in like every one of their assumptions can be rationally justified.
It strikes me as extremely unself-aware because you always have to start from somewhere.
You always have to start from a point of faith.
You always have to start axiomatically just to even reason at all.
You have to have axioms.
And the having of those axioms is, by definition, pre-rational.
It's something that's just assumed, that's just kind of a brute fact that's just taken at the outset.
And there's a lot of folks out there that kind of feel like they don't have those, and that everything that they believe is perfectly rational can be justified.
It seems to me that that is like the ultimate blindness, because at least religious people, you know, understand that they begin from a point of faith.
It's the sort of Dakinites or the new atheists that don't see that they too begin from a point of absolute faith.
And this to me is like, it's the kind of Socratic irony.
It's like at least Socrates knows that he doesn't know anything.
Like at least he's got that, even if he doesn't know anything.
It's that kind of irony that at least the religious person, there's a humility there that really is in keeping with the sort of essence of conservatism, conservatism like with a small C, like the Edmund Burke kind of conservatism.
It's a kind of epistemic humility that you understand that you don't have all the answers and that maybe the rational individual reasoning from his own self-generated first premises is not a very solid place to begin.
So it's that kind of humility that atheists and let's be honest, libertarians very often don't have, that they think that like they can construct a perfectly rational system that has always struck me as being extremely not humble.
And that has always kind of like rubbed me the wrong way.
Yeah.
Yeah, well put.
So Mike, you mentioned a few libertarian principles that you couldn't defend in internet debates.
Could you just explain those points?
I got intrigued.
Sure.
Well, it's going quite a ways back.
And I sort of have to reach back pretty far in my memory to think what it was.
But I think there was a so every libertarian feels obliged to defend the idea that taxation is theft, right?
And of course, as a libertarian, I accepted this kind of on faith, but also, you know, I mean, it's an intuitive, right?
The idea that the government comes and says, you have to give us a quarter of your income or whatever, it kind of feels like theft, right?
So that actually is, it's quite a strong argument.
But then I had to basically reckon with the idea of like, what is it that in fact makes something property in the first place?
So for example, I could say that I am the sole proprietor and owner of the entire surface of the moon.
And what is it that I, you know, what is it that makes that mine if I assert that claim?
Or what is it that makes it not mine?
What is it that actually makes property really belong to somebody?
And of course, being a good libertarian, I had read Bastiat.
And Bastiat says something to the effect of property is an agreement between people as to the status of a thing, right?
Property isn't actually like a thing.
Property is a social phenomenon.
It's like each person in the community agrees that this particular car belongs to Mike and not to his neighbor, right?
Like that's the only thing that makes the car mine and not my neighbors is other people agreeing to that or other people acknowledging that.
So property sort of against the typical sort of libertarian notion of sociality, property is an inherently social thing.
It's not something that you get because you've mixed your labor with the soil.
There's no like metaphysics, there's no like magic, like secret handshake that happens when you dig your shovel into the soil and you start improving it.
That's not what makes it yours.
The fact that you've improved it doesn't make it yours at all.
What makes it yours is that other people say it's yours, right?
So there's an inherent sociality to property.
And I just found that on that basis, I really could not say that taxation is theft because essentially what taxation is, is it's the sum total.
I mean, this can be kind of argued, but I think it's a fairly solid assumption that it's the sum total of the community saying you owe something back to us, right?
And there is nothing illegitimate about that.
And in fact, the idea of having something belong to you at all in the first place kind of presupposes this social element of property.
I guess basically, you know, a way of putting it is that property is based on a social contract, right?
And any libertarian that hears that is going to go, it's like the mark of the devil, right?
Social contract.
They hate that.
And I did too.
And this was one of the things that had started me reeling that I kind of realized that all of my ideas about like what it is essentially what makes a law, I suppose, that it really cashes out to is founded on something that libertarianism can't even touch.
It doesn't even get near it.
So that was one of the things that kind of played into my, what kind of dislodged me from libertarianism.
Now, I don't believe in the social contract anymore.
I have a much more nuanced take on it.
And of course, that term kind of has an ahistoricity behind it.
There's a Russovian idea that, you know, in the primordial, you know, ooze, we were radically free individuals that like came together contractually.
That's not the case, but as a kind of metaphor of, you know, you are kind of embedded, already embedded in a network of relationships that you didn't choose and that those relationships are valid and they have force regardless of what your choices are.
You know what I mean?
That is what libertarianism gets wrong.
And I think it's a fatal flaw in the ideology.
And also a right.
That's what, that's what got me was what is a right?
Well, you know, in order to have property, they say you have property rights.
You have these rights.
And I was like, all right, well, what is a right?
How do you get a right?
And they say, all right, well, you know, these are, these come from God.
These come from up on above.
It's like, you guys don't really believe in those authorities.
You have this kind of abstract authority that gives it, but really meat and potatoes on the ground floor in earth.
What gives us those rights?
Well, what gives you the right is the state or the king or whatever.
And I started questioning this because they would always say, I would say, because I always had a, you know, a love for monarchy.
I always thought kings were base because they are base, base.
They're very base.
And I would always say, well, why don't we have a monarchy?
That's like less bureaucracy than a, than a, you know, our modern democracies or whatever.
They say, oh, well, then you can't hunt on the king's land.
Dude, I grew up in PA.
This is the deer hunter state.
You still can't hunt on the king's land.
You got to get a permit.
You got to get a license.
You can only hunt in certain areas.
There's still rules and regulations about hunting.
You can't just go out and start like hunting things to extinction or shoot a deer whenever you want.
You got to get approved.
You don't have a right to do that.
So why?
So why is it that we, where do our rights come from?
Well, your rights come from an authority.
Rights are privileges bestowed upon you by an authority.
So it's like, how is it that you're against authority and you don't want an authority, but then also you want rights?
It's just a formula for strong men or bad guys to come in and just like take over and abuse you.
You know what I mean?
So it's like, what is a right?
And I came around.
It's a liberal spook.
There's no such thing as rights.
Rights are privileges bestowed upon you by an authority and you want that authority to be noble and just.
And when the authority is noble and just, like a benevolent king or a great leader or statesman or whatever, they bestow upon you good privileges that give you a good life.
And when the guys in charge are bad guys, then they give you, then they abuse you and they take away your privileges and everything like that.
And it doesn't matter if it's written in a constitution on a piece of paper.
They're going to ignore it.
It's all the will of men.
So when good men are in charge, you have a good society.
When bad men are in charge, you have a bad society.
And there's no abstraction or idea.
That's why American conservatives make, oh, well, it's my right.
It's in the constitution.
This is unconstitutional.
And they just, they scream that from the rooftops as the leftoids just abuse the crap out of them and send them through kangaroo courts and do all this kind of stuff.
It's because they're completely hamstrung and blindsided because they believed in this nonsense liberal spook that isn't real.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
And this is such a fundamental, this is a reality, a reality check, a truth that all white men just need to understand now at the moment.
They need to understand that political will is everything because ultimately it's about who wields the levers of power.
That's ultimately what it is.
It's a fight.
It's a political fight.
Who gets to say what goes?
And this is also when we're talking about the European situation with re-migration and everything.
And there are these dorks saying that, oh, you know, we can't repatriate because they have citizenships and all the rest of it.
And it's like it's a piece of paper.
It's your passport.
It's a piece of paper.
It can be revoked as long as there are, you know, good men on the inside who are committed to restoring order to the West.
And of course, when I talk about re-migration, we have in Europe, a good start would be to send out everyone who's committed a crime and then everyone who's on welfare.
So that's a good start.
And yes, it's absolutely fully possible.
We're already sending people out.
So it would just be to, yeah, get our guys into positions of power, guys with a good political will.
So that is the fundamental truth of politics.
It's a game.
It's a fight of wills, of political wills.
And a lot is possible if we just have this will, actually.
Yeah, dorks love rules because inherently they're narcissists and they just like ruling over other people.
They love to assume the role of petty tyrant where they can just be these kind of self-anointed hall monitors.
You're in trouble now.
They just, they love snitching.
They love being, you know, that's against the rules.
But at the end of the day, if you have power, if you have authority, you could do whatever you want.
Period.
Yeah, it's interesting because this actually ties in with what we were talking about before about atheism.
Because ultimately, what liberalism is, fundamentally, is the idea that the rules themselves can govern.
It's constitutionalism.
It's that if you get the right rules, that the system can essentially run itself without a sovereign, without a king, without somebody at the head of it.
It's just basically if you get the firmware set up properly, that it can just be a self-running system.
And there was a book written by a gentleman, I won't mention his name, it's called Political Theology.
And it's like the, he basically came up with the idea that this idea of constitutionalism, or that the like the rule of law in the proper sense, that the like that nobody is above the law, that nobody decides the law, this idea is essentially a form of deism.
Right, it's the political, like secularization of the idea of the clockwork god that just sets the world in motion and then steps away from it and uh, just let, leaves it to run.
Um, this is the idea of deism that sort of gets morphed into a kind of political ideology.
And what deism ultimately is, is it's the sort of penultimate step towards atheism.
So all of these things kind of link up together.
Liberalism is the result of the Enlightenment, like clockwork, you know, deist rationalist project, essentially.
So all of these things are kind of linked together.
And to break away from one, say, for example, atheism or libertarianism is really to break away from all of them if you're like a consistent thinker, if you're kind of like following these things down to the kind of bedrock of like axiomatically where they lead.
So I think this is why it's important to talk about these things.
It's part of why Imperium Press publishes a lot of the counter-enlightenment literature that we do.
Because if you get, you know, if you get one of these concepts and you kind of get free of it, it can be a way for you to kind of get free of the entire web of modernity in the worst sense.
Now, obviously, we don't want to go back to like earlier technology.
We don't want to abandon the internet or any of these things.
But when I say modernity, I mean like modernity in the kind of normative, like all the worst things about modern ideology, you know, that kind of thing.
Once you get free of some of these, you can kind of use that to get free of all of it.
Yeah.
And I'll tell you what, once you, once you kind of shed that dork liberal, like the libertine ideas and the hallmark, oh, we have to follow the rules and blah, blah, blah, you feel free, right?
Because those things demoralize you.
And I think too many guys internalize that.
And that turns into, oh, well, we can't do this.
We can't do that.
We can't, bro.
Obviously, you have to be realistic.
We can't say, oh, well, let's build a spaceship and go to the moon like us three here.
We can't do that.
That's a little, that's a little wild.
But if we're moderate in our visions, we could say, hey, we can build this.
We could build that.
This is why smarmy libtoads say, well, build your own then, because they think that you can't do it because it's against the rules.
Well, I have historically, that has become, you know, F around find out for me.
This is why I started the Bizarchives, right?
I was getting mad about the absolute just blasphemies that they were doing to these art forms that I love, these films, these books, and all this kind of stuff.
I grew up, I love this stuff.
This is part of who I am.
Heavy metal music.
This is part of who I am as a man today in 2024.
And the fact that they're just defiling it made me so mad.
And when I, there's one time I went on a forum and I was like, you know, talking about a book or an author, I can't remember who it was.
But then there's some smarmy lib toad with the soy face.
He goes, well, build your own then.
I was like, all right, dog, I will.
So I did.
And guess what?
Now we're crushing it.
There's nothing.
I don't say nothing, but if I still had that idea of all this is against the rules, we can't do anything.
We can't build our own, blah, blah, blah.
I would have never done this.
Now I'm seeing it.
It's like, dude, we could build our own Hollywood.
We could build our own music industry.
We could build our own publishing.
We already did, me and Mike.
How many publishers are out there crushing it?
We sell more books than some of these big publishing companies.
We can do whatever we want, right?
And as long as we figure out how to raise the money, we have the willpower to do it.
We have the manpower.
We already have the talent and the skill.
All we got to do is want to do it, get obsessed with it and work.
And you can freaking do it.
So it's like once you adopt this idea of you shed the chains.
This sounds kind of like a contradiction, but when you shed the chains of libertine philosophy and you adopt this idea, I am in service to the holy powers, to the high holy ones.
That's how I see it too, Mr. Marcus, is I am on this earth to serve the gods, period.
And nothing, there are no barriers, there are no obstacles built by men that I care about.
Yeah, yeah, that's super, super good.
And I completely agree.
It sounds a bit like a paradox, but I totally agree.
It is truly liberating to humbly submit yourself to a higher caste.
It's also similar in a way to fatherhood.
It's quite nice to just, you know, are the girls happy and content?
Then I'm also happy and content.
I don't need to think too much beyond that, except for, of course, everything else.
But you can sort of, if you place your focus and you humbly accept your position as a man, that you're a bit disposable.
I don't know if that's the right term, but you know what I mean.
It becomes, it's nice.
It's comfortable in a way to not be the center of the universe as many people are today.
So it's good.
It's nice to humbly submit yourself.
Also, in regard to the eternal dork versus the eternal Chad, this is like a typical thing that the lib toad snickering and sitting on the sidelines saying that it's not possible.
And then you have someone like, say, Arnold Swacheneger.
And he has a good quote.
And he said, to break the rules, not to break the law, but to break the rules to get ahead.
And I thought it was quite, I heard him saying that in a motivational speech like 10 years ago, it sort of stuck with me.
It was quite good.
So yeah, sometimes you have to break some social rules.
I'm not a contrarian, by the way.
I'm quite conformist in many ways.
But since our beloved civilization has been so mad for the last few decades, a normal person has to sort of go against the current zeitgeist.
But anyway, so really good takes.
I thought we could get into paganism a bit.
So we have concluded that atheism isn't really a viable path for a man of enlightenment.
And then we'll come to the eternal question.
And we don't need to spend too much time on it because we're going to get on to the project you have going on Hearthfire.
We're going to spend some time talking about that.
But if you can just give a few arguments or one argument as to why we should go with paganism instead of Christianity going forward, you can, yeah, let us know.
Sure.
Dave, do you want to go first or should I?
I would say because you ought to, because it is what people that looked like you, your forefathers, believed for the overwhelming majority of our existence, almost the entirety of our existence.
Our ancestors believed in this or something like this for all of our all of our time.
It is, I would say, to those who are kind of questioning, and I'm not coming at the Christians, but the Bible has no Europeans in it.
The only Europeans that are in the Bible are the Romans, and they're made to look like bad guys.
And I would say that you should just do – here's the deal.
Are you really built different?
Are you revolting against the modern world?
If you are, then you are observing tradition.
And what is our tradition?
Our oldest tradition is paganism, is heathenry.
And you should do it.
The gods are real.
The ancestors are still, they're just in the other world.
Regardless of what you think you believe, when you die, you will go to the underworld.
You will be judged by the holy gods, and you will enter the hall of your ancestors.
That is going to happen.
And the reason I believe that is because everybody, everybody who's all the most brilliant, powerful, great men in history agree with me on that.
And that's really the only argument I need.
But I do understand how it's hard for especially folks that grew up in countries or families or in cultures where atheism and rationalism reigned supreme and they kind of robbed people of their superstition and their magical worldview and their belief in the metaphysical.
But once you come around to believing and you fake it till you make it and you practice, the gods will prove that they are real.
And the ancestors are still there.
They still hear us and they still love us.
And that's why you should do it.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
That sort of goes back to my reasons for not becoming a Christian.
And I did try very hard and earnestly to do that.
But ultimately, reading the scriptures, I kind of, it became very clear to me that it was not about me.
It wasn't about my people and that my people really had a peripheral and in some sense, an antagonistic role to play in that.
So that kind of, I don't know, it struck me in the wrong way.
But in going down this path a little bit further, it occurred to me that, you know, I mean, if you want to justify anything, if you want to, whether it's religion or whether it's a political ideology or anything else, you got to kind of sort of think about like, what is it that people do to justify their positions?
And ultimately, what they do is they point to authority to do that.
So for example, a Christian, for example, will read something like the book of Job.
And the book of Job is my favorite book of the Bible by far.
I think it's brilliant.
I think that it is a treasure of traditional literature and that everybody should give it a lot of thought.
Basically what happens in this book is that there's a poor Shmo named Job, whom the transcendent creator deity inflicts punishment on as the result of a wager with the adversary, something kind of like, I mean, the Christians call that Satan, but the Jews call it the adversary.
And like that in itself is a hard pill for people to swallow, but that's not what makes it interesting.
If you look at the book of Job, what happens is that Job finally, he just finally had enough and he curses God and says, why are you doing this to me?
I've done nothing.
I've only ever been a good man.
And the God, Yahweh, gives a very interesting response here.
He doesn't give a reason.
He doesn't give a sort of abstract justification for his own actions.
What he says is, where were you when I created the world?
Which is a hell of a response.
What he's basically saying is that I make the rules because I created you, right?
And if you think about it, this is kind of the ultimate form of a response that pretty much everybody gives when they want to justify at a bedrock level what it is that they believe.
What I believe is good because it created everything that's great in the world.
Christians will say this when they say, Christianity created the West, right?
It's the same form of the argument.
And even Richard Dawkins gives the exact same argument.
It's like just an iteration on the same form when he would say something like, science is what has made the West great.
Look at what we can do with science.
Look at what great. things it's brought.
It's taken us to the moon.
It created the internet.
It has brought us, you know, modern medicine, split the atom, all of this stuff.
Science is authoritative because it has created modernity.
That is the basic form of argument that every person gives.
Like when all of the rationalisms, when all of the rational sinative Thomist five ways, when all these things fall away, and they always do, that is the basic bedrock argument that's left exposed at the end.
What I believe is great because it created everything great.
And if you take that seriously enough, and if you realize that that's like what people are always arguing ultimately, and you make that consistent and you push it far back enough, you arrive at paganism.
Yeah.
Because what created modernity?
Okay, let's say it's science.
What created the West?
Let's say it's Christianity.
But what created philosophy?
Well, that's paganism.
What is it that created governance?
What is it that created society?
What is it that created religion in the first place?
It is the deep and abiding, it is the ancestral religion that goes back to the very beginning.
What created us?
What created us?
It's paganism.
It's the ancestor cult.
It's all of these things.
What created the preconditions for Christianity?
It's paganism.
What created the preconditions for science?
It's paganism.
What created the preconditions for the West?
It's paganism.
It's paganism all the way down.
So if you really understand the form of justification, I'm giving a philosophical argument here.
But if you understand the form of philosophical justification, what it always cashes out to in the end, it cashes out to a form of argumentation that ultimately lands on paganism as the final justification for everything.
So I guess that's what I would say if I had to give a kind of apologetic case for why you should be pagan.
Yeah.
In the Edda, it says very clearly in Voluspo, it says that Odin and his brothers, Hainir and Lothor, right, give us the gifts that make us who we are.
Gives us our odor, our und, odor, our consciousness, und, the sacred breath that animates us.
And then Lothor gives us Lao, Lati, and Liter Goda.
And that means hair, blood, and good or godly complexion, color.
They made us in their image.
They are our sires.
They are our fathers, right?
And the whole point of Christianity and liberalism is to say, fuck you, dad.
And guess what?
That's not what tradition is about.
Tradition is about serving your father and being your father's son and your son's father.
That is your identity.
That's who we've always been.
You know what created the West?
You know what created this?
Created everything?
We did.
Not abstractions, not philosophies, not that.
We did with our blood, sweat, and tears and our bones and our skin and our flesh and our hands.
And who created that?
The holy gods did the holy golden.
So we must re graft onto the vine of Odin and off of the vine of Abraham.
Yeah, that's beautifully stated by both of you.
Quite robust arguments indeed.
I will say something to you just to add on.
So this is only something I realized over the last few years since I started reading more about all of these things.
And that's growing up, or like yeah, in my teenage years and early 20s, I thought Christianity had the more advanced metaphysics.
Then I realized that ancient Germanic metaphysics, you know, the soul complex, it's so much more complex than Christianity.
So in Christianity, you basically have a soul, but in the Germanic view of things, you are many different parts.
And speaking as purely from a scientific perspective or something, it makes a lot more sense.
And you can understand yourself and your everything about the world if you view it in that sense.
So yeah, that's a very deep topic indeed.
I might get into it some other time.
But yeah, that's perfectly, perfectly explained by both of you.
So we'll get back.
So we'll get on to the new project you have, which I am proud to be part of.
We have Hearthfire Radio.
So if you could explain first and foremost what it is and how you came to how you came to create it.
Right.
So what Hearthfire Radio is, is it's a video casting and podcasting platform.
We're sort of billing it as sort of like an a YouTube for heathens, but it's not like YouTube in that it's not just anybody that can kind of create a channel.
It's by invite only.
Now, we have a really excellent lineup of podcasts that we're launching.
Well, that is launched just a couple of days ago.
This month, September is the launch month for it.
But what we want to do is we want to make it a big tent.
We want to invite we want to invite everybody in who fits, you know, not everybody in the whole world.
It is going to be from people who share our perspective, but we don't want to just make it a kind of boys' club just for the guys who are in there right now.
We want to open it up.
But what it is, is it is a series of podcasts, all of which are either new or returning.
We're not just like taking podcasts that exist and charging this small fee for that, like monthly or whatever.
What we're doing is we're essentially creating a space where there's going to be a whole bunch of new content for people who are into heathenry or paganism or who are just like curious about like European history and religion and things like that.
There's going to be seven podcasts launching.
We originally planned nine, but we're going ahead with seven this month, among which is Marcus, it's your Physique Manufacturum, which I have just looked at the first episode and I am so jacked about this.
It's going to be so awesome.
Really.
All right.
Awesome.
Great to hear.
Great to hear.
Yes, I'm really excited about that.
We've got the bog returning.
This the bog was actually a big part of my original journey into heathenry and in into this political sphere.
It's like this is how I discovered Dave back in the day.
And the reason why I reached out to him in the first place many years ago is because I was a huge fan of the bog.
But the bog ended after a little while.
And now we're bringing it back.
And I'm so proud of that.
We're bringing back the Fergan with Dan from Wolkensman.
We're bringing out a podcast by our man Tom from Survive the Jive.
That one is really excellent too.
He's already given me a few episodes, and I've been binging those over and over.
Everything that's on here has a lot of, like, it's not just topical, like, throwaway stuff.
You can listen to them over and over again.
I'm going to be doing a podcast of my own.
Who am I forgetting here?
There's so many, there's just so many things that are going into this.
It's going to be such an excellent, excellent place for people to get heathen content.
Oh, Mimir's Bruner.
Yes, Mimir's Bruner.
We're bringing that back as well.
An amazing, amazing YouTube channel that fell by the wayside a few years ago.
I discovered it after it had ended, and I was really disappointed because it was so great, but it wasn't going anymore.
We're bringing that back too.
So the reason for Hearthfire, one of the reasons why it was sort of created in the first place is that, like, you know, as creators, Dave and I, we like to consume podcast content.
Like, if I'm working on Imperium Press stuff, I, you know, it's occasionally I have to do things that are kind of repetitive tasks that allow me to focus audibly on something else while I do a repetitive thing.
So I'd be like binging episodes of the bog, episodes of the Fergen, and so on and so forth.
And I noticed over a period of time that these podcasts were disappearing.
And that was such a shame.
Like I was so heartbroken when the Fergan ended or when the bog ended.
And, you know, of course, many years elapsed between that and Hearthfire.
But I sort of felt like, first of all, I had to keep a list of all these podcasts, some of which are still going.
And I listened to them.
But it kind of felt like, well, why do I have to keep a list?
It should all be in one place.
And the other thing was that many of these podcasts ended because essentially, you know, we're all busy guys.
We, you know, either we do this full-time or part-time.
And content creators, let's just be honest, content creators have to make some money in order to keep this stuff going.
So it felt like there should be a place where the highest quality content can all be collected into one spot and where a small, like there could be a small fee.
We charge $12 a month for all these podcasts and more and all the back catalog of all these podcasts where it could be shared amongst the creators in a way that makes them sustainable so that the Fergan can continue forever and make financial sense for Dan to keep it going or for Dave and Tristan and Andre to keep the bog going or for you, Marcus, to keep yours going.
Like there has to be a small, like basically guys have to be able to make at least a little bit of a living to do this.
So we figured that if we collected all the best stuff in one place and if enough people sign up, then this is what it's going to do is it's going to create a kind of center of gravity.
It's going to be create a place where it's the first place that everybody goes to learn about paganism, to discover new pagan content and heathen stuff and all of this.
It's going to basically be the one place where people start when they learn about these things and we go on the journeys that we described at the beginning of this podcast.
And I think having something like that is immensely valuable.
It's worth the small amount of monthly fee that we're charging.
And I just think it's going to, it's going to make our brand of heathenry, folkish heathenry.
It's going to really put that on the map.
And it's ultimately going to allow us to push back against the forces of darkness that want to push that away.
And it'll give us the capital to start building bigger things, right?
Man, we have big visions.
I want to get into film.
I think we need to plunge into film.
We have enough talent.
We have enough know-how.
We have it.
We need to get into film.
So I want to start focusing on the arts and who else to do the arts besides us.
This last year at Folkish Summer Halloween, which is a big event that I go to.
If you're on the East Coast in America, check out Folkish Summer Halloween.
It's a wonderful event every year headed by the Ermin folk who are a great organization, good friends of mine.
But one thing that I noticed going to this event every year and the other events is I look around and freaking just about everybody is some kind of creative, some kind, right?
I did a presentation talking about this theory that I call folk futurism.
And in the beginning, I said, raise your hand if you are a writer, if you are a poet, if you are an illustrator, if you are a sculptor, an artisan, or a culinary person.
Raise your hand if you're a musician, if you're this, you're that.
Creatives, people are running out of appendages to raise.
Everybody in the whole room is raising their hands.
If you go do that just about anywhere else, what are you going to see?
You're going to see a couple hands here or there.
We have a lot of firepower in our community as far as to create, to create film, to create music, to create art, painting, high art.
I believe that we are the people.
We invented it, dude.
Pagans invented poetry.
We invented music.
We invented theater.
We invented.
These are our things.
Why should we not have like a strong influence on this?
Why can't we be the ones to come back and create it?
Especially now as things like Hollyweird are completely, they're hemorrhaging money, complete free fall.
The music industry sucks.
Like look what's going on, Mr. Marcus.
You mentioned about 40K.
What a horrible blasphemy they're doing to the great black library and everything like that.
All of the things that we love, they're destroying it.
Rings of power.
We're the guys that can do it.
You know what I mean?
So it's not just about the podcast.
It is.
It is about the podcast, about bringing all of our great media minds, the good guys, bringing the good guys in our media together to build a flagship that can help guys.
Because let's face it, if you're listening, dude, all of your favorite guys that you listen to on your podcasts and shows and everything like that, they put their neck on the line and they sacrifice quite a bit, a lot for not a lot of money, right?
You effectively, when you step out into the light and you stand up and you say these things, you become unhireable.
It ruins your life.
But I will say, money is power, man.
And if we can get the capital, we can give the people great things.
You know, it's not just about like getting rich, you know, but getting rich is cool.
But like, I say it all the time.
I'm going to buy Cadillac.
And I say those things.
But in reality, if when the people give me money, I turn it into something for them.
I can't help it.
It's who I am.
When people say, Dave, we want you to make this thing.
Here's here, take this money.
I take what I need to survive off of it, and then I use the rest to create something for the people because we need aesthetics.
We need leisure.
We need entertainment.
We need things that make us happy and things that we love.
You know what I mean?
We need those things.
And who else to make them besides, if you're listening, who do you trust to make these things that like fill our lives out and make our existence fun and enjoyable and meaningful?
Who do you trust?
You trust these guys here.
You trust Marcus.
You trust Mike.
You trust Tom, Survive the Jive.
You trust these guys because you know that they're good guys.
You've been watching them for a long time.
You know where their heart's at.
Somebody's got to do it.
So, you know, why not us?
Yeah, definitely.
Well stated.
So yeah, we have initially planned for an hour, which we have gone over now, so many interesting takes.
But yeah, we're going to get into a somewhat similar topic.
It's still within the realm of culture wars.
And this is something we talked about a few months ago, Dave.
I sent you a message on Telegram asked you for your take on the 80s Zeitgeist when it comes to music and films.
So I just had, of course, I'm not the first one to think about this.
And I'm sure many others have talked about it and written about it.
But you have in the Zeitgeist of the 80s, you have a completely different feel.
If you listen to some of these songs, you can sort of picture yourself at a sensitive young man on a Friday night.
He's at an empty gym pursuing his dreams or whatever.
And you have this film such as Rocky and the rest.
I'm born in 89, so I'm a bit too young to have grown up with them, but I still got to see some of them at least.
And you have something completely different now.
Just listening to a song from the 80s, you sort of want to embark upon an epic journey upwards.
But now you have this.
Now, I'm not an expert in music, so I can't describe any of this, but you have a completely different build and you have a sort of low energy vibe to modern music.
Whereas in the 80s songs, you have like a really sort of high thumbs vibe.
So if you would just speak to that a bit, I would be personally interested in hearing your take on it.
So yeah, we love to invoke 80s nostalgia aesthetics.
Now it's very ontological, right?
We see it everywhere.
Everything has some sort of retro vibe.
It has these pastiches in the films.
You have completely modern films that are putting on overlays that make it look like it was filmed on celluloid.
You have people that are making music that is purposely to sound like an older recording, an older production when they don't have to do that at all.
People back then were bound by that.
This is a phenomenon that we're seeing so much in modern art and entertainment.
And we love it.
We love the neon colors.
We love the synths.
We love the vibe of the 80s.
Like you, Mr. Mark, I was born in 87.
I wasn't a lot.
I was three years old when the 80s ended, but I saw all the films.
I was young enough because back then, it wasn't like it is today.
Back then, you were still renting VHS tapes and we still had the 80s and the 90s sort of blended together.
It wasn't this rapid change between decades like we are now.
But now, since probably, I don't know, 2008 or 2005, around that time, we entered this hauntological stasis, this stagnancy of culture, where it's sort of this sort of blend of all things of previous decades together with no authentic identity, no identifiable markers to show that it is this era.
If I show you a picture of a kid with a with a baggy t-shirt and a and a Sony Walkman cassette player, you're gonna be like, That kid's from the 80s.
Look at his high-top shoes, you know, whatever.
You know, I show you some guy with some sort of uh flowy blouse type button-up, and he's got a headband and this, the John Lennon glasses.
That guy's from the 60s, right?
You could based on aesthetics, we can see time.
Art, art allows us to discern and see time.
And unfortunately, for the last 20, 20 or more years, we no longer have that capacity during the 80s.
They had a very distinct aesthetic identity, right?
Um, and with this, they had a very positive view of the future, they had a positive vision for the future.
Uh, if you go watch even some of their more somber movies that came out, you know, Blade Runner or freaking, you know, I don't know, you think whatever film where there's like a dystopian future, Terminator, dystopian future ahead.
It still aesthetically had a positive, had a positivity.
Actually, I don't want to say positive, it had a vitality, right?
That we don't have anymore.
And the word that I would say to describe the 80s, and uh, Mr. Marcus, when we first talked about this, you sent me a few songs, you mentioned a few songs.
One of them was St. Elmo's Fire, right?
I'm being a man in motion.
It's a great song, higher and higher.
That's what a great song, right?
There's so many great songs.
Um, this is a song that had vitality, and this is what's interesting about the 80s is when we think of the 80s now and we try to rep it's very pastiche.
We say, Oh, the 80s was so much more masculine, and it was, but I'm about to point something out that I think is interesting.
Um, and I'm Mr. Marcus, I think you're going to appreciate this, but um, we now have this kind of like pastiche, commodified simulacra of masculinity where guys are like, Yo, we got to get this beard stuff.
I grow a beard, right?
I'm a beardsman, but I'm not knocking beards.
But guys are like, Oh, I got to grow the beard to be manly, and it's very performative, very performative masculinity.
You got to get these beard oils, you got to buy this type of beer, got to get these guns to show and prove how manly we are.
And we got and uh bacon and whiskey and all that stuff, right?
Yeah.
And in the 80s, you had that we could listen to these songs.
Like, Mr. Marcus, you're mentioning that song St. Elmo's Fire.
Go watch that video.
You would, I wouldn't call that guy like a turbo Chad.
He was kind of scrawny.
He's wearing like he's got a lot of the 80s stuff was actually by our standards today, what we would call wasn't overtly like muscular and masculine.
It was because you had Arnold and Dolph Lundgren and Stallone and all this kind of stuff.
But you also had music that was written by guys that you wouldn't say were like that, but you would still say that it was masculine.
Wow.
Yeah, I would just sorry for interjecting.
I would say what appeals to me there is the passion and sincerity.
The Sant Elmo guy, like if you look at the music video, yeah, sure, he isn't a Jack Chad, but he is, you know, unapologetic in just letting his passion flow.
And that is something that I, in later years, I've come to realize what many guys are missing is, you know, unapologetic shows of passion and just letting the divine energy flow through you.
Yes.
And what it says is, yes, masculinity is muscular.
It's strong.
It's all of these things.
It is Stallone.
It is Arnold.
It is these things.
It is the warrior.
It is this.
But masculinity is also dynamic.
It can be beautiful.
It can be poetic.
It can be passionate.
It's not just, you know, meatheads.
And I'm not saying, you know, I don't want to say that.
That's a bad way to say it.
But it's not this, like the way the libtards say, oh, toxic masculinity is just these dumb yo jack dudes.
We know scientifically that tall, tall, strong guys are, on average, more, have higher IQs, period.
But what I'm what I'm getting at here is that masculinity is dynamic.
And the word that I would say that describes the 80s, and this is a very masculine thing, and some guys are going to like maybe recoil at this, but I want you to chew on it.
Romance.
And I don't mean just romance as in falling in love.
I do mean that, but I also mean romance proper.
The idea of this, like, this, this grandiose kind of like the passion, the passion for the world, the passion for life, the love of life, the vitality that goes into this.
And with this, Kane, romance minor, the love for a woman, when you listen to 80s music, whether it is muscular or whether it is a little bit kind of maybe a little fruity, like maybe Prince or Michael Jackson or the guy that does St. Elmo's Fire or Phil Collins, right?
Who would say Phil Collins is a man's man, right?
But Phil Collins has great songs.
He's a little bald, right?
All of these songs, they were dedicated to their love for their women, for their wife, for a lover, for whatever.
Not all, but a lot.
And it wasn't just for women.
It was for life.
It was about romance with life.
And what happened, a phenomenon that happened is the supposed love songs as they went on and went into the 2000s were no longer about wooing and romancing or being poetic or anything like that.
It was about like very visceral, bodily things like sex and lust and the gross side of it.
And it's very nihilist and irreverent.
It doesn't have that romance anymore, right?
And when it comes to heavy metal, I love heavy metal, dude.
I'm a man of warrior.
I love thrash.
I love death metal.
I love doom.
I'm a metal head.
But at some point, heavy metal became less about writing awesome songs and became about becoming guitar dorks that wrote just like all about riffs and everything like that.
And then the women stopped coming to shows.
You know what I mean?
And then we lost that vitality.
We lost that romance.
And because of that, there's many, many other factors.
But now it's not a big surprise.
It's since we've lost the romance of the 80s and the 90s and the 70s for our women and for life itself that we no longer sire children and we no longer have successful marriages.
So I have a take on the 80s and like why it was vital that I think actually ties in a lot with what Dave just said.
And it may appeal also to Marcus, who I know is reading Spengler a lot these days.
So most people are familiar with Spengler's like civilizational cycles, right?
Like it's he gives the metaphor of the seasons.
First you get the springtime.
That's like the cultural vitality.
Sorry, first you get like, you know, yeah, the springtime, that's where it all begins.
It's sort of like the barbaric explosion.
Then you get the summer, which is sort of like, you know, that's when the culture starts to question things and starts to get a little bit more intellectual.
And then you have the autumn where it gets really intellectual and maybe overly so.
And then you have the winter where things kind of freeze up and stagnate and become sclerotic and everything like that.
So most people are familiar with Spengler's ideas of that.
There's also a cyclical theory called the Strauss House cycle, generational cycles.
And it's kind of the same idea, but like zoomed in down to like actual generations of like, you know, the baby boomers like and the Gen Xers, right?
So the first of these four cycles is kind of like Spengler's, his springtime.
They call it the high, which would be for us, it would the last time that happened was like the GI generation, the World War II generation, where you have really high sort of like social conformity and like everything is leave it to beaver.
It's everything that's like people are, you know, they know their place.
Society is a very harmonious place.
Then you get to the summer, which they call the awakening.
And that's basically the baby boomers, right?
It's a time of revolution and enlightenment.
Collective values start to kind of break down a little bit and things become a little bit more individualistic.
Then you get Gen X, which is kind of like the autumn.
They call it the unraveling.
And this is where collective, you know, collectives have mostly been hollowed out and are now were very individualistic.
And then you get the winter, which is what they call the crisis.
And this is kind of like the millennials and the Zoomers, which is crisis, obviously.
All the social glue is completely dissolved.
So where the 80s fits into that, in like that sort of cyclical pattern, is kind of between the awakening and the unraveling.
We could call it between the summer and the autumn.
Now, where that falls, summer and autumn in the Spanglerian cycle is kind of somewhere around the Renaissance or the Romantic period.
That's kind of where the 80s is for this little micro cycle.
You know what I mean?
And if you think about it, most of what we consider to be like the classics of like Western art, like in the Christian era at least, is in that sort of period, right?
It's like it's between the Renaissance and the Romantic era.
And I think that there is a real romanticism in the way that Dave described the 80s that is actually kind of similar to the Romanticism of the actual Romantic era, of like, you know, the turn between the 17th or the 18th and 19th centuries.
That's kind of where that fits within like the micro cycle that we're talking about of like the last 80 years or something like that.
And if you wanted to go back to a different civilization, look the same cycles, really where the 80s fits in like if we're being analogous here, obviously, is that's where you get something like classical Greece, right?
Like the Periclean age with like the age of philosophers and all the like, you know, marathon and Thermopylae and all of this stuff.
This is where you get like, this is the Greece that everybody remembers is kind of like the 80s phase of Greece.
Or you could say the same thing about like, you know, Caesar's Rome or something like that, like that era, like Augustine Rome is like the high point of culture in Rome.
And that's kind of like the 80s of Rome.
I'm serious.
Like this is like in terms of the actual cycles here, the 80s into the early 90s, I would say, is kind of like that summer going into autumn of like the Spenglerian cycle.
If you take this Strauss-Howe theory kind of seriously, and I think it actually explains quite a lot.
So that's my kind of weird esoteric take about why the 80s and 90s were awesome.
I love that.
Yeah, that's an awesome take.
Definitely.
Super, super good take.
So one last thing that I wanted to say, Mr. Marcus, and I'm so glad you brought up the 80s thing because I'll just say this.
So a while back, I can't remember, it was a couple, few years ago, maybe it was pre-COVID, Marcus, you were kind of on the chopping block.
You thought you were going to get, you thought you were going to get shut down.
You really kind of thought it was kind of like your last days.
Yeah.
You made a post on Telegram that I'll never forget.
You said, if this is the last time that I'm out here, if I am, if this is my thing, remember my teachings that you should be strong.
You should love your wife and you should love your country.
And that was, I was like, that is why Marcus Folan is the OG.
He started the trend of the base bodybuilders, the base Chads and all this stuff.
You started that.
You're the OG.
And not only are you the guy that started it, you're still reigning the best one, in my opinion.
I'm not just kissing your butt.
I mean this because there's so many other guys that go, they go on and they follow your example.
And the end of the day, their teachings are antinatalist.
They have this men go their own way kind of stuff.
They have this like, oh, just go be selfish.
And it's just, it's like you understand at its core the beauty and the purpose and the higher point of being masculine, right? Is to serve.
You say, I am a humble.
I'm not doing this because I want to kick people's asses and prove and flex and do all this stuff.
You do do all those things, but it is to serve your country, your people, the holy powers, your wife, and your children.
That is what masculinity is for.
And that is what this romance was about, right?
Is the purpose of masculinity isn't, it is aesthetic.
It is strong.
It is muscular.
It is all of these things.
It is passionate.
It is beautiful.
It is dynamic.
It is all these things is what I said.
But at the end of the day, the highest thing a man can be, the highest thing a man can do is to become a father and a patriarch.
And you, that is at the core of your teachings.
And that's why I think that you're still the best.
All right.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Much appreciated.
Heartwarming words for sure.
So I think that will be a good note to wrap this up so I can feel all good with myself for the rest of the day.
Your words, they're healing my tormented body as I'm suffering from Nurgles torments here.
So yeah, awesome takes.
I really like both of your takes about the 80s zeitgeist, cultural zeitgeist there.
So before we wrap it up, you can plug your various sites so everyone who is listening can go and check both of you out.
Yes, absolutely.
And thank you very much for having us on.
It's very much appreciated.
And thanks for signing on for Hearthfire.
It's so great to have you there.
If you want to check out Hearthfire Radio, go to hearthfireradio.com.
If you liked the, you know, the interplay, the dynamic that Dave and I have here, you want to check out Culture Dads, go to culturedads.com.
If you want some based reading, if you want to reclaim the Western canon and read it as it was intended to be, go to imperiumpress.org.
And that's all my plugs.
Yeah, guys, CultureDads, CultureDads.com.
That's Culture with a K, CultureDads.com.
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And your love and blessings, all you guys, Mr. Marcus, I've been a big fan of yours for a long time.
Thank you so much for having me on.
This has been like an honor for me.
So thank you so much.
Blessings to you and your beautiful family, my man.
Yeah, thanks a lot.
Thank you both for coming.
It's been a pleasure hearing your takes.
And I'm sure we'll talk again soon.
So I'll leave the links to your pages in the description.
