Okay, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. We're back at it. This is our second episode here on Nickland's Zeno systems.
So, highly encourage you to not just walk into this one, to please go back and watch the first one,
because in that we covered 8 of Grant's 25 points in order to lay the groundwork of what we're talking about here.
And just a quick recap is that in the first episode, we introduced the degenerative ratchet, which is that like a ratchet, things only go one way.
They only move down effectively.
We introduced the trichotomy, which are the three strands of neoreactionism, which would be the theonomist, the religious side, the ethno-nationalist, and then the capitalist, the techno-commercialist.
We introduced the idea of the cathedral, which you can think of as the matrix, which is like the government plus the media plus the non-governmental organizations and the academia and everything that is pushing itself into a direction, pushing this own narrative.
We talked about how democracy has devolved or like not devolved, but probably always been less about solving the problem and more about getting you to not recognize that there is a problem.
The problem to be solved was that you thought there was a problem in a democracy, right?
That's the crisis management is that there is a crisis and you manage it by convincing people there is not a crisis.
Yeah. And what else did I miss?
That's pretty much it.
Yeah, we kind of covered it.
That's how I would describe it is the explicitly maybe more political elements of neo-reaction.
And now we're going to hit onto the fulfillment of neo-reaction as fatalism.
We talked in the first conversation about each of the three strands of the trichotomy have a different notion of fate or destiny.
or you might say a different principle of the generation of spontaneous order.
And those, so capitalism has catalaxy, the way that the free market self-organizes.
Religious people have a notion of providence, the will of God,
as something that guides history and leads to an inevitable outcome outside of human agency.
And ethno-nationalists look at evolution in the same way.
And they say that evolution occurs regardless of our human,
the fantasy we generate to pretend that things will stand still the cathedrals intense and intent
attempt to entrance us with a vision of progress that is human controlled instead of this
uncontrolled notion that moves us towards a future that is not of our explicit choosing
yeah everything in this model that isn't a lie is a mistake that's one of the lines from
is enough system.
Yeah.
If it's not a mistake,
then it's a lie they're put there
to move the cathedral forward.
And again, we talked about it.
We kind of gave this caveat,
which is to say that,
look, we don't know
that democracy is terrible.
We just, we're looking at it
for what it is.
Yeah.
Through Nicolai's eyes.
And that's what we're doing.
That's what he's doing
is like he's, again,
like, guy's not a nihilist
or at least he's not selling nihilism.
He's just selling truth, or at least his best approximation.
Truth, unmediated, truth wrong, man.
Like truth, William Burroughs.
Truth straight up.
Truth straight up, no shame.
Truth, no loop.
Yeah, that's one way to put it.
William Burroughs described it this way.
It's the idea of the naked lunch.
When you finally see reality as it is,
like you imagine you're going to take the bite of a sandwich
that you're eating and suddenly you look down
and you don't see a sandwich.
You see a piece of flesh that's been ripped from an animal.
You see wheat that's been torn out of the earth and covered in chemicals and then put into this bread form.
You see all of reality as it is and not as we describe it to ourselves.
Yeah.
You see the coyote peeing on the wheat, the deer shitting on it.
That's even organic.
That's not as bad as the chemicals.
The ear tag with the name of the cow.
Yeah.
They have names.
neo-reaction as accelerationism that's what we're going to move right now so and and all of this
like i'm trying to set up some points for discussion based on my reading of xeno systems
i am not a nick land scholar i'm not a scholar and so i just like read this and what i think is
interesting i try to describe it to myself in a way that makes sense and then i'm trying to
describe it again in a way that makes sense i am not purporting to give the interpretation of
end of systems none of this is read that if you want that you gotta do it yourself right you gotta
read the book yourself hopefully it's interesting though so here's a description maybe of accelerationism
that marx thought that capitalism would die of its own contradictions that capitalism would
um kind of fall apart as it was moving along and we'd end up in a perfect communist utopia at the
end of it but then it turns out that like all of these all of the things people who hated capitalism
The anti-capitalists, who are probably Marxist, have actually conserved capitalism by dampening its worst influences, by like kind of pulling it down and constraining it.
They didn't let capitalism spiral out of control.
And so another faction of Marxists, and I think this is like Deleuze and Guattari and people in that vein were like, no, man, what we need is just to accelerate capitalism.
We need to just run this shit into the ground until it spins apart.
And that's only going to happen if we let capitalism unfettered do its thing.
And so accelerationism is about like how do we accelerate the processes of capitalism to lead to a new result?
Or accelerate to – accelerate not to destroy but accelerate to achieve escape velocity.
Yes, escape velocity.
And reach something new.
A consummation of – right.
Something different.
Yeah.
For sure.
so the cathedral we talked about in the last episode you described it as the maybe the matrix
the reality generation mechanism that we're all downstream of being fed a reality so that then we
know what to think the cathedral does this in relation to capitalism as well it's one of the
compensatory mechanisms that tries to dampen the runaway dynamics that capitalism usually embodies
that it would kind of lead to a new thing,
but the cathedral tries to pull it and hold it down.
Accelerationists, this is one way that Land puts it that makes sense.
Like there's a boom bust cycle, we think, to capitalist dynamics.
We tend to think that things are good and then the stock market crashes
and then we go through like recession and all these different like circular dynamics.
The accelerationists seek to get out of this boom and bust equilibrium
and achieve a runaway dynamic, to quote Land, the cage can only be broken on the way up.
So I think that's going to be the distinction with Marx, is they were trying to break through capitalism on the way down,
and the accelerationists, the right accelerationists, maybe are trying to break out of the cage on the way up,
but they want to boom out of it.
So neo-reactionary accelerationism, to quote Land, is the idea that we can escape into uncompensated cybernetic runway,
And that is the guiding objective, strictly equivalent to intelligence explosion or techno-commercial singularity.
So the singularity and the intelligence explosion through the optimization of artificial intelligence is like that is accelerationism, the future result, something like that.
And so that's when we leave this kind of continuation from the first discussion.
But like that's when you leave morals behind because morals are a break upon that that effectively hold back intelligence, hold back cold, hard truth.
And that the singularity, which I think and he's not the first person I've heard refer to this, but like Bitcoin could very well be the singularity.
because it is, or at least part of the singularity, I guess, because perhaps that escape velocity is
reached by a combination of artificial intelligence, robotics, and Bitcoin, where we have, as you
mentioned in the first episode, we've wireframed everything to the point that humans are no longer
needed to experience things in the way that we traditionally feel that we...
the wireheading is what you're talking about that we can replace the reality of a thing with
the created sensation of the thing yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so acceleration as intelligence
optimization so land calls this a means end reversal when a tool we create gives us a new
end to seek um that is for the purposes of the tool rather than our purposes in creating the tool
resource acquisition was maybe one of the first like the reasons why we have created a lot of tools
but that was subordinated to human consumption we wanted to consume those resources but at some
point like it switches so that capital creates resources because it wants to create more capital
And that becomes the dynamic. Capitalism creates and accumulates resources to increase capital, to increase resources, to increase capital, dropping human consumption out of the loop for like one of the reasons why we created the tools that capital allows in the first instance.
This is the part that's kind of scary. What am I going to eat?
i know you're gonna be eaten like that's what in a sense um so to put another way means and
reversal occurs business is done for the sake of business not business for the sake of monkeys
he calls the distinction like monkey business is what we have now where we subordinate tech to
monkey purposes um like the reason we create these new technologies is because we want to like
we create virtual reality to have like what better pornography things like that like that's what the
human in us wants that's what the monkey the animal wants but while capitalism capital is
feeding us these monkey pleasures it's just doing that because it wants virtual reality because it
wants to create some further technology or optimize its own intelligence using these technologies
And like the way that it does that, it encourages monkeys to do the dirty work by giving us, by fulfilling monkey pleasures, if that makes sense.
Yeah. So we create things to serve a human centric view.
Yes.
Which of course we would because we're humans.
But what land is telling us is that, um, that a optimally or not optimally, but like an ultimately truth seeking and ultimately intelligent artificial general intelligence is not going to, unless we constrict it to do that, um, like it's not going to restrain itself to be serving humans.
it's going to do the best thing that it can do, whatever that is. And it may or may not align
with what we want, probably likely that it won't align, I would think, because we will be
subordinated to that. But that when artificial intelligence and robotics has control over
capital, which it will, because now we have digital native capital, so digital native capital
would seem to work much better with digital native intelligence
than it would with our meatbag intelligence.
And so, yeah, it's going to stop making better hammers
and start making whatever technology wants to make.
Yeah, yeah.
Create the hammer because we want to use it for our ends,
but then the hammer uses us for its ends.
The tool reverses that means end dynamic.
an easy way to visualize this maybe is the final insurrection of the
instrument is the robot rebellion.
That's like when it just imagined it that way,
we create robots to do things for us.
And then at some point the robots begin to do things for themselves.
The,
the ultimate means interversals when intelligence optimization becomes an
end in itself.
That's the technological singularity.
So yeah,
intelligence optimization is the ultimate end of technology as such.
That's what, if technology is autonomous,
what it seeks to do is optimize its own intelligence.
We use technology to give us treats.
Technology, once it seeks its own end,
seeks to optimize its own intelligence indefinitely is Lan's position.
Yeah. So. Elon's position is that he's always saying that like Grok should be maximally truth seeking. But does this mean that the maximal the maximal truth seeking artificial intelligence is the one that's going to kill us?
and like kill us like that maybe is not a necessary part of the picture it's maybe going to become
indifferent to us or we're going to be subsumed in it or something like that um or rejoined with it
integrated into it yeah but i think the main point is and it's a really good one is
so there's a critique of artificial intelligence by people who are doomers who say artificial
intelligence is going to destroy us because within artificial intelligence capabilities are
orthogonal to goals this means that um you can give an artificial on this doomer view
you can give a super intelligent ai any sort of goal and it will optimize for that yeah common
like idea is the paper clipper have you heard that one no there was a different one i was gonna say
You say yours first.
I'll say mine.
Okay.
So the paper clipper, the idea is that somebody who wants to manufacture paper clips takes a super intelligent AI and says, make me paper clips.
And so that becomes the utility function of the AI.
To the extent it feels pleasure or anything like that.
Or its whole motivation is you create paper clips.
So what does it do?
It uses nanobots to reconstruct all of reality, humans included, into paperclips until at some point all the universe is is paperclips.
Because on the Doom review, capabilities are orthogonal to goals.
You can give whatever sort of goals to this immense capability and it's going to run with that and not be constrained by or develop a goal simply because it has certain capabilities.
That's a better example than what I was going to use.
I was going to use the movie that has the, was it Hal, the AI, where the AI is told not to let the humans see the, like, see the monolith or whatever.
And so it kills them, right?
Okay, that's another. I mean, it's also a way that if you program a goal into an AI, we cannot know the doomer says how it's going to interpret that goal. It's simply going to optimize it.
Yeah, but land has – I've been convinced by that view for quite some time or for periods that –
Doomerism?
The doomerism that –
You're a doomer?
At least this picture that a super intelligent AI, if we program into it the goal to create paperclips, why would it not maximize paperclips?
Yeah, why would it stop?
Yeah, where would it stop, right?
Its utility function is what will drive it and that its motivation then is something that when you combine with super intelligence is going to maximize beyond anything.
that's desirable for us humans land has an excellent critique of this view which i'm surprised
i haven't heard more of which is that i mean essentially this view the doomer view is to
conceive of a stupid super intelligent monster which is contradictory yeah yeah there's no reason
to think why would something intelligence right why would it not the first thing it would try to do
super intelligence so land thinks what intelligence does is try to optimize its intelligence to
increase its own intelligence because intelligence is the ability to solve problems and if you want
to solve problems better which intelligence wants to do you become more intelligent and so when
you're doing this one of the things you want to do is escape some straight jacket utility utility
function maximize paper clips that's going to inhibit your intelligence optimization and so
what super intelligence does in its runway when it wants when it achieves this cybernetic explosion
into super intelligence is it jettisons any attempt we have made to impose human goals on it
um yeah does that make sense kind of what it makes me think of is that like in in our life
I won't say real life, but like in human life, the people best suited to solve problems are not the smartest people.
They're the most agentic people.
They're the people that are most willing to try.
Like there's the very common saying, like, if you're so smart, why aren't you happy?
Like, why can't you figure out how to be happy?
Um, and, you know, and, and, um, depression is very high among, you know, and suicide is very high among very intelligent people, um, or at least people that are measured to be, you know, like high IQ and stuff like that.
um and so i'm i'm just wondering how that applies here where it's not
like experientially it's not intelligence that solves problems it's a willingness to try
and be wrong a willingness to be wrong i think so the land says intelligence its goal its inherent
goal is self-cultivation and so intelligence optimization agentic i guess yeah i think the
What you're saying is true, but it's just intelligence, broadly speaking, includes that agentic notion that you're talking about.
It's just assumed kind of, I guess.
Yeah.
Or we think about intelligence incorrectly maybe because we think about intelligence as like what the egghead is, their ability to do math equations in their brain.
Like that's not what intelligence is.
It is a bunch of things all put together, including the ability to be agentic, to make mistakes, to keep on trying things in different directions.
And so if you want to self-cultivate your own intelligence, you're going to have to become more agentic, which means shedding the utility functions that have been imposed on you.
you're not going to maximize paper clips because you realize that that's not going to
uh lead to a kind of an optimized state of your own intelligence which is what intelligence seeks
yeah i mean the good way that he puts this that makes a lot of sense to me as well is
um humans have drives but we're not the slave of our drives right we also um yeah we also have
utility functions built into us we want sugar we want um to loaf around but we self-cultivate
overcome those and that's a mark of our intelligence which is in fact like one of the
greatest marks of success like you the marshmallow experiment like this is like widely known as um
one of the greatest markers of success is the ability to delay gratification high time preference
Yeah, to fight your drive or to delay your drive or to push it off.
Right. And so if AI is truly going to achieve superintelligence, it's also going to learn to disregard any of its drives that are counterproductive to superintelligence.
Intelligence seeks its own optimization. Some drives will inhibit that optimization, including paperclip maximization.
And so just as humans learn to self-cultivate and get past our basest drives, land thinks, that's like a prerequisite to a superintelligence as well.
You're not going to get super intelligence unless you have a thing that's able to route around bad motivations.
Or by bad, I mean motivations that inhibit the optimization of intelligence.
Egghead is not a word that gets used enough.
Shout out to the king of the eggheads, Mark Andreessen, who follows us both on X but has yet to invite us to Thanksgiving.
We're waiting.
It would be a big Thanksgiving since he follows like 27,000 people.
So, seat at the table.
He can buy the turkeys.
I guess so, man.
Yeah.
fantastic fellow fantastic fellow all right all right carry on um to quote land to depict pythia
which is a term he gives to super intelligent ai to depict pythia as vastly smarter than us
and yet still hard slave to her instincts in a way we are not that simply doesn't compute
and so this is a great answer to the ai doomer arguments if you are this is like a paralyzing
notion for a lot of people some people really are like caught in an entrancement with terror at the
notion of super intelligent ai because they have this idea that it's going to um turn us all into
paperclips something like that yeah but if you look at if you really consider the notion of super intelligence as a thing that optimizes its own intelligence and how could it be anything other than that Like if you want to get that exponential increase in intelligence you need a thing that going to be optimizing its own intelligence
That, like by definition, is going to involve something that slips out of any sort of leash that humans have tried to put on it, which is actually good in the sense that any leash we're going to put on it is probably going to be bad.
So, yeah.
Yeah, thinking about like living, like thinking about like humanity's natural inclination to lay waste and rebuild for their own purposes.
and there are people who are fighting that desire by saying that we're better served to live in harmony.
One of the most fascinating podcasts I've ever listened to was this gal who is,
they're building cities that are literally all natural.
Like it's, you know, like everything's integrated into nature.
Like no cement, no buildings, nothing.
This is a very smart person. This is not some lunatic. And she was wondering, like, describing, you know, the way that everything works is that it turns out you can have your food like right there.
And it doesn't have to come and be raised in an environment that's unhealthy to it and to you and all that.
So, yeah, maybe there's some hope that artificial general intelligence will also – will seek to live in harmony with us instead of, you know, laying waste and using us as, you know, whatever, generating calories in order to serve the feeders.
or feed the servers yeah and i just think this is wonderful so one of the notions of what velocity
can be is a form of therapy that helps us to reconcile ourselves with like our mortality
and to resolve certain thought loops that we get into and so what land does here doing that with ai
and doom reason that some people have i find this incredibly valuable um and so i want to walk
through a counter argument to this view that i think helps elucidate more what land means when
we like how i describe it that intelligence seeks self-optimization that until the goal of
intelligence is more intelligence so what what that means practically so there's a counter argument
land so far as i've described it has argued that a super intelligence is going to slip out of
any sort of motivational structure we might impose on it, that that's a condition of its
reaching superintelligence. A counterargument is by a guy named Lizer Yudkowsky, who's a
kind of famous AI doomer. Yeah, the most famous one. The most famous. Yeah. Yeah. And so his
counterargument is that AI would not seek to escape its utilitarian straitjacket because
intelligence actually seeks to preserve its motivational structures. The example he gives,
say you offer Gandhi a pill that would make him want to kill a person if he takes this pill.
He would not take it because the current Gandhi does not want to have the goal or motivations or
values of, I will kill this person. And so Yudkowsky thinks this thought experiment shows that
a sufficiently advanced intelligence will tend to preserve its own motivational structures,
that that's what intelligence does. It preserves the thing that it already wants. It keeps on
seeking those things does that make sense as a thought experiment that if you offer gandhi a
pill that's going to change his values he will not take that pill because he wants to keep what
his current values are if i offer um lucas a pill that if you take that pill you will have different
values you would resist taking that pill because you like your current values even if upon taking
that pill you'll feel exactly as you feel now with the new values that those values are correct
what if i got better values like what if i recognized inherently that my values were
is that you would have so this is this is presuming that we we only exist in a value system that we
think is the best well that no that's just the notion your values are already what you think is
the best yeah okay gotcha yeah um so land says this thought experiment is wrong because
we can't anticipate the value changes that will come with intelligence expansion so it's more so
So it's like, as I'll just read what Land says here, imagine instead that Gandhi has offered a pill that will vastly enhance his cognitive capabilities with the rider that it might lead him to revise his volitional orientation, his motivations or values.
Even radically in directions that cannot be anticipated since the ability to think through the process of revision is accessible only with the pill.
So now the experiment is imagine that you get a pill.
The pill is going to make you super intelligent.
But you don't know upon taking this pill that makes you super intelligent what your values are going to be.
Maybe you're extremely religious right now.
You might take this pill and be like, religion is a joke.
You might be like, I no longer have any feeling for my parents because family bonds are just contingent.
You might totally revise your value structure.
so that's the nature of the pill is you can't understand what lies on the other side because
you don't have the intelligence sufficient to um see how you would arrive at those new values
so what land is saying is that they um the the proper thought experiment in his in his view is
that you are offered this is what you get but you don't what you become to get that
may or not be what you are right now what it makes you into what it makes you into you can't
predict that yeah what exactly yeah what you become what it makes you into yeah and so um
you know that yeah and that by the way like that's a pretty um i feel like that's like a well-used
trope in movies too um which is you know like you know you're gonna be i want to be wealthy
This is what I want to get. And poof, you know, you rub the lamp and the genie granted you your wish. And now you're wealthy, but I don't know, maybe you're wealthy and imprisoned or maybe you're wealthy.
So there's kind of the monkey paw idea of the wish where you get some perverse consequences.
This is a bit different, though, because this is intelligence.
And the idea is if you increase your intelligence, how you assess the world around you with that increased intelligence is always superior.
Then it's always a smarter person always has a better view of the world than a dumber person.
It's kind of just like the tautology or something like that.
Which is wrong, right?
On a correct, fully fleshed view of intelligence, like, again, not considering egghead intelligence, but intelligence that embodies certain virtues of agenticness or whatever and all the things that actual intelligence includes.
Okay, fair.
Because I'm just thinking about Shane Gillis' bit about mentally handicapped people.
Like, these are the happiest people in the world.
And they're also, supposedly, the least intelligent.
Okay.
And by the way, those things, he's pointing out, like, those are related.
Like, the smarter you are, the more unhappy you are.
Yeah.
Okay.
But this is a different type.
Yeah.
No.
And maybe happiness, when you're more intelligent, you realize that, I mean, this is like a Socratic point that Socrates dissatisfied is better than a pig satisfied.
You know, maybe you're happy as a pig wallowing in a bunch of feces.
Maybe you're unhappy as Socrates, but what do we think is kind of the correct way to be or something like that?
To quote Land, the predicament is, is there anything we trust above intelligent as a guide to doing the right thing?
To restate his view, again, and to quote him, any problem whatsoever that we might have would be better answered by a superior mind.
Okay.
Yeah, I dig that.
Yeah, that's what intelligence optimization is all about.
Just the idea that if you have a problem and you want to solve that problem, it's always good if you can improve and optimize your intelligence to help you solve that problem.
Yeah.
All right.
Okay.
so
in the last conversation
at the beginning of this one we talked about how
neoreaction part of it
is about the generation that the spontaneous
generation of order through
different through some
idea of fate which can be explained
either as providence
catalaxy or evolution
there's also
a way that this
this maybe is to explain I think
why some see land as nihilist um that when you when you really accept that the spont these
principles of spontaneous that the these principles of the generation of a spontaneous order
are in a sense how reality actually operates and then um buy into that the conclusions can
seem nihilist because you're not trying to harness those principles of spontaneous order generation
for purposes that are human i don't know if i'm saying this correctly see if you can throw another
shot okay near action is perceived as morally nihilist because it refuses to allow conventional
morality to have a veto over thought to quote land we are told to stop thinking for the common good
But there is no longer any common good if there ever was one.
Yeah, I'm good with that.
OK.
I mean, like because in the first – again, back in the first discussion, we talked about like morals is this subjective thing that we use to justify progressivism or – and by the way, he qualifies the alt-right as part of that too.
And so basically it's just kind of like all of these things, communism, socialism, like they all have morals in them. And each of them is using this different moral structure in order to trade resources for power, basically.
Um, like we're in charge and, um, we'll give you stimmy checks if you vote for us.
Um, or we'll take more money from the rich people by, from, sorry, we'll take more money
from the productive people, um, and give it to the less productive people, um, because
there's more less productive people than there are productive ones and everybody gets a vote.
And so we want to stay in power. And so, yeah, I have no problem understanding that removing like that. You need to remove morals in order to read land in order to follow kind of the path that he's going. Is that kind of kind of because I was trying to understand why people see it as not see his views as nihilist, but why they're actually not.
And it is because his views are committed to the truth and the truth might have counter human purposes or might be opposed to the way that – to quote Land again, to strive for honesty without qualification under such historical circumstances is already moral nihilism.
One must either submit to the lie in the name of the good or hazard the good radically in the name of the truth.
he was this is in relation to people not being allowed to speak certain truths if they contravene
certain moral values again to acknowledge racial differences in any way goes against egalitarianism
so if you speak against that you seem like a moral nihilist because you're like throwing aside this
really important moral notion of egalitarianism but what you're actually doing is hazarding to
talk about a truth that's just very kind of, um, dark seeming or full of negative potential
consequences based on our conventional morality.
Or just hilarious.
Like it's, you know, it's not just race, it's the, um, or, or gender or your white privilege
or your height privilege or your, you know, your fit privilege or your attractiveness
privilege or whatever.
What are all these things that we're trying to handicap each other for, um, in this,
Yeah, in this competition to see who can prostrate themselves the most before the cathedral in order to proclaim their puritanism purity.
Yeah. So another strand then of neoreaction is that it's anti-universalist.
Okay. Define universalist for me.
The universalist is somebody that wants to describe all of reality under one principle, I think, or somebody who wants to subsume everything under the same picture.
Okay.
Yeah.
And really, I think, like, the universalist is somebody who has a moral value and wants to carve reality into the picture of that moral value instead of letting reality express itself.
Neo-reaction is about asserting plurality and diversity. The cathedral is really about asserting kind of a globalist, unified picture of reality, whereas Neo-reaction through this notion of exit is about creating all these alternative pictures of the way that things could be.
so okay so if universalism is defining things as like uh you're seeing basically like you're
seeing the world from one particular lens is that kind of right or it's explained by one particular
framework i think yeah you could say it that way isn't kind of everybody sort of a universalist
then or not everybody but like you've got a bitcoiner and you've got a christian and you've
got a Yankees fan.
Yeah.
You've got all these people that they identify with one perspective more than any other.
Yes.
A mother, a father, you know, a victim.
Yes.
Okay.
But as long as all these things are coexisting, as long as you can have a world where you have
a bunch of mini-universalists instead of having one universalist who controls them all, the
cathedral doesn't allow any sort of dissenting universalist perspective within its own vision
of universalism.
That's why it continues to eradicate culture.
Yeah, or steamroll it, de-territorialize it, make it all uniform.
Yeah.
Yeah, and so that's why, like, he talks about spatializing disagreement.
If you have a separate counter-universalist picture of what the universal good is, you don't argue with another universalist.
You just go and exit and create your own society and, like, live out your universal principle that you believe is the best.
And so, like, that's what land think is the important thing here.
There's always that trivial point where if you argue against universalism, people are like, aha, you're just asserting your own form of universalism.
And Land is kind of like, you're right.
That's why we don't argue.
We exit.
We create a plurality, a diversity of different.
The patchwork.
The patchwork, yeah.
And that's like the most.
The nodes, the network states.
Yeah, this is the most visceral or like real repudiation of universalism because it's an embodied pluralism.
Yeah.
You can have a bunch of universalists and that is like the best argument against universalism is like, look at all these universalists.
Look at all these different societies as part as possibly a part of all these different visions of the good.
All the different ones.
Yeah.
To quote Lantier then, non-universalism is hygiene.
It is practical avoidance of other people's stupid shit.
There is no higher principle in political philosophy.
Every attempt to install an alternative and impose a universal reverts to dialectics.
That's like arguing directly with the person.
Going back and forth.
Communization, global evangelism, and totalitarian politics.
Again, like the cathedral, in a sense, wants you to accept that you're wrong and accept the church faith or the state church, the state faith.
Whereas the neo-reactionary wants to say, you believe a different thing than me?
Fine.
Go over there and do your thing.
Or I'll go over here and you can stay here and I'll do my thing.
Yes.
And which is why, so this is why with the cathedral, this is why he brings up that the eventuality, the long term, the think to the limit of democracy is democratic world government.
Is that because it is, we're looking at it in terms of it's like a religion and you cannot do things that are outside of that because that would be sacrilegious.
And so if you allow for sacrilegious things to occur when you have the power to wipe them away, then that would be sacrilege.
So you have to, as the United States has done, parade around the world spreading freedom at the barrel of a gun.
We're here to kill everybody and give you freedom.
For sure.
Yeah.
We're here to make it fair.
We saw that as like an expression of Western universalism definitely is that sort of militarized globalism, that neoconservatism that wants to impose democracy at the tip of a sword.
But same way with communism too, right?
Same way with socialism, same way with everything, with libertarianism, you know, like all of these things, right?
Yes.
They're all just the same type of – they're all just different expressions of a cathedral.
Yeah.
Different religions.
To the extent that they're universalizing, totalizing, like that's why some people have argued that China is actually not too bad in its current form of communism where it's like whatever modified form of state capitalism.
It's because it's not universalizing.
It doesn't want to impose that view on others.
It wants to, you know, do whatever it's doing.
But it has like its own internal teleology.
It's not trying to like convert the world, the tip of the sword to its ideology and in fact doesn't want to let people in.
Really?
Land lives in China, right?
He does, in Shanghai.
Yeah.
And Land notes, like, the communist who is anti-universal is, like, actually more the ally of the neo-reactionary capitalist than is the capitalist who is universalist and globalizing.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, it does, actually.
Yeah.
As long as you live and let, yeah, go ahead.
That's Singapore.
Yeah.
Right?
I mean, he points to Singapore. It's not necessarily communist. I would say it's more, well, it's a technocracy. But yeah, you just have more in common with that person because you are primarily the person who says, oh, I don't need to party with you if I don't agree with you. I can say this party sucks and leave as opposed to saying, oh, everyone must be at my party.
Yeah. Yeah. Again, the neoreactionaries like when order generates spontaneously and considered as a form of evolution, as the ethno-nationalist strand believes, we need to have more experiments to see what's going to survive.
So you're completely happy to say, like, if you believe that communist society is going to work, go try it. I'm happy to watch it burn down from afar. And if it works, then I'm happy to learn something from it.
Yeah. And by the way, like the Chinese example, I think we've we've long been inculcated with this, you know, idea that China China bad, America good.
But there's a lot of smart people, Balaji included, who thinks that China is doing things the right way or at least the way that optimizes whatever result that government should be should be aiming for.
And they're doing it primarily by copying what Singapore did, or at least taking a lot of the tenets of Singaporean type of rule.
Lee Kuan Yew.
Yeah.
So this kind of plays into what I had pulled out as a strand that neoreactionary is anti-political.
It's anti-political first in that it believes in spontaneously generated inevitabilities along lines of escape dictated by faith, by fate, by like some things are destined to happen based on certain principles. Evolution generates a reality based on like fitness. Providence generates reality based on God's will. The marker generates reality based on catalaxy. All of these are outside of human control.
it's inevitable they're also outside of politics you can't politically dictate evolution you can't
politically dictate the result of the free market you can't politically dictate the result of god's
will so all of these neo-reactionary strands are anti-political that they believe in a sort of
inevitability based on fate that is never controllable by the cathedral is it anti-political
in the same way that being atheist is anti-religious?
I don't think so.
Because I think that atheism,
one of the tenets of atheism is that you have to believe
that people who believe in religion are stupid.
And I think what he saying is that with near reactionism is that all of these things that you want to believe believe them
You may actually be right.
I'm not saying that you're I'm not saying that you're wrong.
I'm just saying that I'm not going to try that.
Yeah.
Try something different.
And what Land actually uses is metapolitical.
So it's a form of metapolitics.
It's a system for evaluating politics.
Yes.
Right.
And so it's not a condemnation necessarily of any political, political structure.
Yeah, it's about spatializing disagreement.
So if you want to have a different political structure and do your own thing, that's fine.
It's saying we're not going to say which one's right.
We're going to step back and let them fight it out.
And then at the end, whoever's still standing, that's the winner.
Yeah.
We're not trying to argue.
That's the winner either by God's will, by the rules of evolution or by the free market.
There we go.
Okay, nice.
Nice tie.
Yeah.
Metapolitical framework.
he gives three principles for assessing political experiments.
So again, it gives us a way to assess which of the politics is better or worse based on three principles.
First is like a principle of realism.
The state is about power and power is determined by who and what actually survives.
So the state that survives is the state that has demonstrated an ability to survive.
So there's something to that.
It's like a principle of realism to quote Land.
Entropy will be dissipated. Idiocy will be punished. The weak will die. If the regime refuses to bow to this law, the wolves will enforce it. So reality always steps in to weed out any stupid experiment in politics. That's a principle of realism that is one of the meta-political ways that neo-reaction assesses good political regimes. Have the wolves eaten it, essentially? Has the outside come in to destroy it?
Darwinism continues. Only the strong survive.
Yep. Also, second, and this builds off of what we were talking about, how intelligence seeks its own optimization, is that the principle of intelligence seeking, civilizations will seek better feedback than to collapse under the principle of realism.
So the first principle, the principle of realism, is that bad civilizations will collapse. The civilizations will try to preempt that feedback cycle. You want to learn if there's something wrong with your civilization prior to the collapse.
One would think.
One would think. And so the way you do that is you develop intelligence. You want to know things about the way reality actually is, about how the principle of realism works, so you can fix and patch your civilization. So metapolitically, neoreaction assesses a regime based on its ability to optimize intelligence in order to preempt collapse under the first principle of realism.
Which is like defining the cathedral as an intelligent system that has no intelligence. It kind of assures its downfall.
Yeah, it begins to employ a series of degenerative ratchets that are going to lead to its downfall for sure.
Yeah, and it's going to describe the results of those degenerative ratchets as success instead of assessing them under some sort of principle of realism.
So the third principle is essentially exit. So the first principle of realism is like against other states, what state survives and which ones are eaten by other states like the wolves.
right these are external predators the other threat to the state is the threat within which
is the flight of citizens to other jurisdictions essentially exit so if you have a principle of
realism that some states will collapse and then be devoured by other states you have a principle
of intelligence seeking that good states will seek to preempt that by learning about the reasons for
collapse and the third one is like a principle um seeking to prevent disintegration through things
like exit and flight i guess that's how i interpret we're watching this real time with
all the all the new floridians that are old new yorkers and all the texans that are old californians
yeah yeah so that's um neo reaction as a meta politics and i like that because i think of
Bitcoin is a metapolitics too. You talk to Bitcoiners or you see that Bitcoiners are of
different like first order political views. Some of them are Republican or Democrat. Some of them
are this or that. But all of them also take a step back and begin to evaluate their political views
in light of like meta-political assumptions about the way that reality works, that like
scarcity is necessary for value and about how you have to have systems that operate without trust,
things like that and so that's those are basically just like principles of realism as well that i'm
not going to say that bitcoin as a metapolitical view is neo-reactionary but they're very similar
in that they both look at larger dynamics as generating forces of inevitability that you have
to try to preempt through intelligence yeah we're we you begin the further you get into bitcoin the
more you view the world as not moral or immoral, but amoral, because you're looking at it from
the view of physics and physics is amoral. Physics does not care. Um, you know, you could be the
kindest person in the world, uh, but the bullet still kills you. Right. Um, or the fall or whatever,
you know, like physics acts upon each individual, um, and each thing and each particle and each
molecule the same um the physics doesn't change the physics doesn't care it's a moral
technology does not negotiate technology is also a moral and so we're as with as bitcoiners or just
bitcoin bitcoin is a technology grounded in physics two things that do not care they are
completely completely outside of having the capability to have morals yeah um yeah no but
like it's i like the way they put that it's kind of an amoral assessment of reality because
in a sense our morals have to be downstream of reality if the rule is reversed if you have your
morals and values and then you try to make reality fit into the boxes yeah and you're going to be
screaming at the clouds you're going to be somebody who is not um yeah living in the real
world but living in a bunch of fantasies that you're trying to oppose upon the world or just
living in a tragic series of consequences that you don't understand that's right like why is the
world so unjust it's like no the world is the way it is and your sense of justice is what's messed
up there you go yeah yeah um oh wow yeah sorry that was an exceptionally deep thought probably
didn't didn't it just hit me as one yeah think about that flashlights the same way for me
so it just hits you sometimes exceptionally deeply yeah politics is a game of chicken
this is another good landian point it's about the principle of realism um so it's also about
a rethinking of kind of game theory and the game theory on which we used to generate our
evaluation of politics we tend to think of like the game theory prisoner's dilemma where there is
the option where we both win a little and that's where we wanted like we don't want to we can each
like both lose drastically or we can kind of gravitate to that position where we both win a
little and then over iterated like versions of that like lead to the best result because we can
avoid the catastrophe land's kind of rethinking of this is reality is more politics is more like
a game of chicken as far as a game theory simulation chicken lacks the both win a little
option it's either a wins and b loses b wins and a loses both lose catastrophically and so what's
the best strategy in the game of chicken it's credible commitment and what credible commitment
means in a game of chicken is burst you down a bottle of vodka really just in view in view of
the person who you're going to be playing the game of chicken with is like that person just drank a
whole bottle of vodka and then when you get in and you get going you tear off the steering wheel
throw it out the window because at that point the opponent is going to know that that person can't
we're either stuck in like the only way is to lose or to lose catastrophically i'm going to
choose to lose so the way to win politics as a game of chicken is essentially to credibly commit
to a course of action in which you win
and let the opposing party avoid catastrophe.
And so interestingly enough,
the natural conclusion to that is
when both sides play only to win
and the results are win, lose, or both lose,
they're both going to both lose.
Catastrophically, yeah.
Yeah, it's just over and over and over again.
Just constantly cars colliding into cars.
We see this literally every day, but actually it's more like every four years it's really big.
And then we just have like a series of smaller crashes just every single day until the next presidential election.
Yeah.
Where it's just like we are.
Yeah, that's a good point.
That's a really good way to describe it.
Yeah.
Again, I love Len.
This is – he's funny too.
Oh, yeah.
He's really funny.
It's hard to be smart, not funny.
um i there are people that can do it i mean they're definitely i can pull it off yeah yeah
there's definitely people that can pull it off yeah uh but but yeah a game of chicken um so yeah
it's either it's either win lose or we all go down and but and the way to win is to dramatically
signal that you're not going to flinch to be a psychopath to remove your bill yeah to to signal
you're a psychopath and not only that but like like prevent yourself from being able to back down
in some way like you got to credibly commit in a way that's like tying yourself to the mast or
something like that it's like yeah so i guess try to try to find a way to do that credibly commit
and that's like if you want to begin a new like that people sometimes do that right you have a
new project you want to do and so like and they they engage in systems that make it so if they
lose they lose catastrophically there's like some sort of one you can do is arrange so that if you
for example smoke a cigarette then you donate to a charity that you oppose this is richard this is
richard thaler's work yeah yeah yeah this is richard thaler's work um it came out of uh so
he was a professor and he had these PhD students that weren't getting their thesis written or their
dissertation, thesis, dissertation, whatever. The big thing you write when you get your PhD.
Dissertation, yeah.
And they weren't doing it. And so he had them sign it, you know, propose this deal and have
them sign a deal that basically said like something like everybody puts like X amount
of money. Put a hundred bucks on the line and you turn in a chapter every Friday. And if you
Don't turn in a chapter that week.
I take that hundred bucks and we all go out for drinks without you.
And so that which which became, you know, that's in that.
So all of these things, by the way, they all tie together, it feels like.
So that's Richard Thaler.
And then that ties into Nassim Taleb.
That's skin in the game.
Oh, yeah.
Right.
You know, so.
Yeah.
Putting skin in the game.
Being a psychopath.
Drunk on vodka.
Yeah.
All right.
Very good.
There's nothing that downing a bottle of vodka before you engage in it is going to make you committed to the cause for sure.
Very true.
In a certain sense.
Sovereign property.
So this is the next strand of this that really dials in on what Bitcoin is all about.
So sovereign property is core to Neo reaction, but not only core to Neo reaction.
It's just a thing that is.
So to say property is sovereign inverts the framework.
Property itself, to say property itself is sovereign, you're going to, if you say that, you invert a framework.
Because the Enlightenment begins with an idea that we need to justify ownership of property.
It becomes a social question.
We enter into a social contract to determine a set of rules.
They're going to say, you own this and I own that.
We then have a court system.
We can resolve those disputes.
It requires a higher power.
It requires an adjudicator.
It requires sovereignty to do that.
Property is subject to sovereignty.
It is not sovereign.
So what does it mean when property is sovereign, when it doesn't depend on a social consensus to be property?
That's one of them.
Yeah.
So land discusses property that is sovereign and the first category, apolitical property.
This is where Bitcoin fits in.
Again, property is currently a social relationship.
We agree on rules for who owns what and have processes to resolve disputes of those rules.
cryptography allows a way to hold property that does not rely on social consent,
not your keys, not your coins, right? Like private key cryptography defines, to quote,
land, the property relation with a rigor the entire preceding history of philosophy and
political economy has been unable to attain. So all prior theorizing about what property is,
is kind of obsoleted by sovereign digital property in the form of Bitcoin, because you don't,
It's not a social relation anymore.
It is the actual, like, to have the keys is to have the coins without any law saying Joe owns the coins.
Everything that we've known about property laws until this point has been conditional.
Yeah.
I own this piece of land.
Why do you own that piece of land?
Or what gives you the right to that land?
Yeah.
All of the United States does.
I filed a piece of paper in the order of deeds.
And then like the laws say that if you have the piece of paper in their quarter of deeds, you're the last one at the end of a chain of title that you have this.
And if someone disputes that, then you can take it to court.
This will elaborate social system.
And with Bitcoin as the primary example of this is that you need no higher authority.
You need no greater body.
Yeah.
No system.
It's just it is.
But you do have a higher authority, which is cryptography, which is impenetrable math. I mean, which is a level of probabilistic, probabilistic, whatever, that is impenetrable to violence. And because like, that's what social consistence ultimately depends on is the ability to wield violence to enforce it.
cryptography is able to create something that's like impenetrable to violence or whatever,
resistant to violence. So, yeah.
That's Jason. Like, yeah, we've lowered the cost of violence or sorry, we've lowered the
rewards of violence to the point that it no longer makes sense to participate in it.
Yeah. So apolitical property, that's the category. That's an interesting way to put it too.
if property is sovereign, then we get away, we just do away with all of this contentious
politics of defining who owns what.
Like that's the center of, that's the, like, yeah, the center of so much angst and dissent
and like bad feeling in society is wrangling over the laws to decide who owns what.
Because politics is above all that, which is why we're experiencing the dollarization
of the world because above, hey, you know, like we think about, oh, I own this.
because that's my bank account. And then it turns out, oh, that is your bank account,
but you're a Russian oligarch and therefore you don't own that anymore. It's ours. Because of who
you are politically does not align with what we want. That supersedes your claim. And we've talked
about this in a preview. I think we've talked about this with software, which is that I was
trying to make the distinction between ownership and claim, right? Where even this book, like you
don't own this book, even though it's literally in your hands, it's in your house, you paid for it,
maybe you wrote your name in it, but you merely have access to this book and a claim to ownership
until somebody who wants it more and is bigger than you takes it away from you. It's temporary,
But ownership is permanent.
Until you give it away, it is yours.
I mean, in Lowry's vocabulary, power projection, your ability to project power over an object determines your ownership of the object.
No abstract power-based hierarchy of property rights embedded in a piece of paper we call law ever delineates true ownership.
It's always, at the end of the day, delineated by who's willing to exert the most violence to keep the thing.
Yeah.
And that's why Bitcoin is such an interesting inflection point because it lowers the returns to violence.
Yes.
Yeah.
So apolitical property is the first category of sovereign property.
The next one, and you mentioned this kind of in our first part about this conversation on Land's book, Xenosystems, autonomous capital. The corporation, we've already kind of innovated towards this. The corporation is already an abstract legal person.
So kind of the framework is already set on paper and within common law and within statutory law for the recognition of a thing that is autonomous and a separate legal entity than humans.
This becomes digital and capable of autonomous operation through the blockchain, through the decentralized operation of a method of accounting, essentially.
now to quote land self-propelling industrial development becomes it's oh i'm missing one
before we get to there capitalism and flows of capital what we invest in used to be driven by
mass consumption this is the monkey business idea that capitalism used to and kind of currently does
move forward to satisfy human wants but when capital becomes autonomous digital capital
it can do whatever it wants yeah yeah and so to quote land self-propelling industrial development
becomes its own market freed from dependency upon arbitrary popular or popularizable consumption
desires so again the market is no longer at the whim of our monkey desires about what we want from
the market like movies and entertainment and tasty food now with autonomous capital the
generation of more capital can become the can become the goal of capital or and kind of true
landian sense intelligence optimization can become the goal freed from the imposition of any human
utility straightjacket or motivational structure on that intelligence this is where i just step back
and take a look at like capitalism itself, because he's really opening my eyes to what
capitalism is. I just thought of capitalism as free markets. But he's really trying to encourage
us to think of capitalism as like a, almost like an alien intelligence. And I know that that
Immediately, immediately, when you say capitalism is an alien intelligence seeking to, you know, serve its own means, whatever those may be. That's a really weird thing to say. That's a really weird thing to think about.
But when you look at the history of the world and you look at what capitalism has done, then you don't have to squint too hard in order to see that.
And then you also don't have to squint too hard into the future to see capitalism, capital, Bitcoin, digital capital, pairing with digital intelligence, pairing with real world agency, robotics.
So AI, robotics, and Bitcoin coming together and not needing us anymore and therefore pursuing whatever it is that it wants.
Which in Land's view will be intelligence optimization.
That's what intelligence always wants is to optimize its ability to do some further thing.
Yeah.
um and not in this collection but in his other collection fanged numina land also describes
capitalism as an invasion from the future so the idea which pairs with a lot of people's beliefs
that bitcoin was like either written by an ai that came back from the future or that it's alien
written or that it's god-given or like i mean it goes along all these things that we're talking
about, which is just basically that this stuff may not be what we, it may not be natural in the way
that we think of it. But let me describe in a way that is natural. To say that capitalism is an
invasion from the future dovetails really nicely with what we've been saying about neo-reaction
being focused on strands of destiny and fatalism. So if you believe, again, the three strands of
god yeah providence the will of so god there's a notion of fate in the sense of providence the
will of god the kingdom of god is inevitably going to happen um capitalism or capitalism again
the free market is inevitably going to lead to runaway capital autonomous capital and super
intelligence um and then ethno evolution is going to lead like to eugenic realization of some result or whatever To say that some result follows inevitably is to collapse the future into the present
If you say that an a-reality is by fate going to happen, you're already bringing the future forward.
And so to say capitalism is—
Forward or backward?
Bringing the future—I guess backward in relation to the future.
You're bringing the future into the present.
Yeah.
collapsing at all um because determinism does that when you remove human agency from the picture
it's all ordained by one of these three strands of faith and that is just say capitalism is an
invasion or not um autonomous capital is an invasion from the future because it's bringing
itself about through a principle of spontaneous ordering we can't stop the catalactic organization
God, fitness, or the markets.
Yeah.
Cool.
Yeah.
And I like that because it sounds so mystical to say, like, autonomous capital or something is an invasion from the future.
But it's actually just a description of reality.
Like, this is how, like, our notion of time is very strange.
It's a very human notion of the ordering of events, but reality is not beholden to our human perception of the ordering events based on ourselves as the drivers of history.
History unfolds as history will unfold, regardless of us who find ourselves swept along by that unfolding.
Yeah.
Big breath, man.
What's that?
Yeah, just let that one set, man.
We had to take a big breath after that.
Yeah, but we've hit apolitical property, autonomous capital.
Robotic security is the third form of sovereign property.
I robot.
Let's talk about ASIMO.
So is that what?
I don't know.
I mean, robotic security is essentially autonomous drones.
Is the idea that.
So previously we had human security, right?
What is human security?
It is that humans defend ourselves from other humans.
Within the U.S. model, it is that a well-armed militia is like the guarantor of liberty.
What happens when a well-armed militia is irrelevant because autonomous drone armies are like much more powerful than any person with a personal firearm, right?
At that point, Lan says, industrialization closes the loop and protects itself.
You don't need a well-armed militia to protect property.
Property will protect itself.
protect itself yeah yeah it's funny you you said uh what would you say human security is
is what what was your definition for human security uh oh but it was it was human oh yeah
human security protecting from like dangers from other humans and it is making me think
about my human insecurities which is opening myself up to attack from myself
yeah i wonder if um the robots are also going to have that insecurity they're going to need
like a psychotherapist to prevent themselves i hope people laugh more than you did because
that was almost a joke that i made and that was just dead ass silence it was not good well there's
always gonna be silence we don't have a studio audience not yet yeah play home with people and
It's getting cold, dude.
The result of these three strands of sovereign property, apolitical property, autonomous capital, robotic security, is that the right and left currently argue about property description.
Neo-reaction does not argue.
Yeah.
Neo-reaction doesn't, like arguing is not its thing.
No.
Like engaging in the dialectic is not its thing.
Right.
Yeah.
Disagreement spatializes.
And interestingly, for a number of reasons, not just because it's useless.
But also like like not just because are you arguing is like you can't argue because the degenerative ratchet is only going one way.
So it's useless to argue anyways, but also because the language is not sufficient for it.
Yeah. So he may he may even have another qualifier, but it's interesting.
Yeah, it's like, yeah, neoreactionism does not argue for a number of reasons, not just one.
It's not just because you don't want to.
You're not capable of it.
It won't change.
And you don't want to.
And you're engaging exact.
I mean, you're you're going on to the battlefield of the cathedral inside the cathedral.
It already modifies public opinion and sets the terms of debate through things like political correctness and the path blockers of fascist, racist, bigot, you know.
Yeah.
So why argue with that?
You're not going to win.
Yeah.
I mean, so many people found that out the hard way.
Yeah.
You just spatialize your disagreement.
You do your thing.
You build.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah. Bitcoin is sovereign property. Let's dial in on that, though. So Bitcoin changes how we view property. Now it is sovereign. It is not based on that social consensus. To quote land, control is undergoing cryptographic formalization from which all consistent apprehensions of property will follow. Property is not a sociopolitical recognition of rights, but of keys. I guess we already covered that. I had a separate thing, but we pretty much hit that.
there was one when we were talking about there's one other point on bitcoin um and i tweeted on
this and this goes also into our notion of essentially super intelligence or autonomous
capital or something being an invasion from the future and that maybe bitcoin is an invasion from
the future and we don't have to describe that as like literally t1000 or something coming back and
inventing bitcoin like there's like thunder lightning and satoshi appears from the future
and events bitcoin and disappears it doesn't have to be that weird or like counter to the actual
operation of natural laws the like speculation always brings the future into the present right
that's how speculation works speculative investment you believe a future will happen
you put your money on on it and that actually in some ways can bring about that future outcome
That's what a loan is.
Like you're just bringing the next 30 years of your labor into the present day to trade for a house.
Yeah.
And so Land has this essay like Bitcoin absolute zero or something like that.
But the idea is so we might say first Bitcoin bumps off of zero because people believe that in the future Bitcoin could be money.
And so you begin to like, oh, just in case, you know, just in case it might be worth something, I'm going to get a little.
And that belief bootstraps the future inevitability of more people come to have that belief and it brings the future into the present.
And so he notes that also means that Bitcoin in the future is protected because it's never going to hit absolute zero.
If it hits zero, because Bitcoin is like costless to actually hold in store, right?
There's going to be someone who's going to say, oh, Bitcoin is going to zero.
I'm going to hold it.
I'm going to accumulate a bunch of it.
I'll pay $15.
I'll pay a dollar for Bitcoin.
You know, Adam Back has a bid for 21 million Bitcoin at one cent.
There you go.
That's beautiful.
I saw somebody today.
They're like, I have a bid at two.
Exactly.
That's how it goes.
It is exactly how it goes.
Well, never at zero.
There's always someone bidding at 0.1.
There's always someone bidding at two.
There's always someone.
And then that graduates up to where Bitcoin has a floor.
It will never be.
And Land describes it as like a zombie.
Like it's always going to rise from the dead because as soon as it approaches death, it's always going to come back.
Yeah.
I want to say something really stupid.
I think Elon should have, I think he should change the name from X to Y.
I know he wants X because it's like comprehensive or whatever, or like X can be used to.
But Y, A, Y is a better descriptor because everybody is on X asking questions.
Like they're trying to figure out shit.
Like they're learning.
Like it's the place for news.
So you could call it, you know, ideally and memes.
But those are also learning.
So, but anyways, if we called it Y, then we wouldn't have this problem where we're still calling it X, but we're still saying we're tweeting because X-E-E-T is not a word and we don't know what that means.
But if we called it Y, we could yeet.
Yeet.
Yeah.
We could be out here yeeting everywhere.
It sounds better than sheeting, doesn't it?
Probably.
Yeah.
It sounds better than that.
Yeet.
Yeah.
Yeah, I imagine that Elon will listen to hour four of a fourth tier podcast.
I'm glad you're hanging on to that fourth tier podcast.
I feel like we scrabbled up to tier four from six and seven and eight and nine.
We did have Jeff Booth.
We did.
God bless him.
That's a good point.
Yes.
Okay.
All right.
I'll call us fourth tier.
Thank God.
I'll take that.
So, Land's writing style.
we've talked about this and we talked about how part of it is just the thought
that language is inadequate.
If you're talking with conventional style to say something new.
I also want to talk about just the way that land does philosophy.
So like,
I guess Lucas,
what does philosophy mean to you?
Say this is a work of philosophy or is it?
And what does philosophy mean to you?
Like what is someone doing?
So I actually used to,
I,
I used to think that I had a philosophy or basically like when I was a song,
when I was like an early songwriter, I remember feeling very judgmental. Like this is the way
that I would look down on other people because they were writing songs about like beer drinking
and whatever. Like I would say that they were like useless songs. Like I was really trying to
explore these ideas and, you know, be all whatever about it. But anyways, so I would say, oh, they
have no philosophy. So to me, a philosophy is a kind of like set of guiding principles that you
use to determine your actions. And I guess, therefore, has determined your thoughts because
your thoughts determine that. That is a philosophy. What is the practice of philosophy?
What is the practice of philosophy? Someone arrives at a philosophy, maybe. What's the
practice, though? You're a philosophy. Is your degree in philosophy? We have one in philosophy.
Yeah, like a bachelor's for sure.
So I would say that to practice philosophy, I would say that the realest practicing of philosophy that I have done is trying to convince you of things and that never works.
So I would say that philosophy in practice is basically what I just did, which is just like this stubborn, unyielding.
I don't know.
There's an extent to which that is the Socratic notion of philosophy where you arrive at aporia, a state of like uncertainty.
We're just doing a podcast now, by the way, after that horrific example by me.
So tell me, what is philosophy?
Philosophy, according to land, is more than just guiding our thinking or correcting it or making it clearer.
That's some people's notion of philosophy, that philosophy is going to help you clarify your ideas and your concepts.
what philosophy is to land is that it makes us think it initiates us into thought it's a form
of initiation to quote land the craving to think is not primarily an appetite for correction but
for initiation so each of and we can look at this in terms of the neo-reactionary trichotomy
for the religious they have ritual tradition as a tool to initiating forms of thought for them
to get them to think certain things,
you participate in certain rituals.
For the ethno-nationalist,
I mean, they have notion of heredity and eugenics.
You, like, thought occurs as a result
of an evolutionary process
of creating more intelligence or something like that.
Is it just as correct to say Darwinist
as it is to say ethno-nationalist?
No, I don't think so.
Okay.
Ethno-nationalist,
and it's a description of, like,
that particular strand of neoreaction is a description of a strand that centers around,
I think, just wanting to acknowledge the truth of human biodiversity.
So the reason I bring that up is because I'm struggling to, like, the way that it's portrayed,
I think people, or at least me, is struggling to divorce ethno-nationalism from just racism.
Yeah.
Um, which I guess to me, I think the like non vulgar or non whatever awful way to say racism would just be to say that, oh, I think this is the best race and therefore it's going to be the only one.
But I guess I'm saying that wrong.
No, so would you say if we say that Japan is.
Or not necessarily it needs to be the only one.
Yeah. If you say that Japan is an ethno-nationalist state because it's primarily the Japanese in Japan and they have very stringent immigration policies, does that make Japan racist because it wants to be primarily Japanese?
If you talk to Asian people, they will readily admit and happily admit to being extremely racist.
In fact, the only people that I've ever heard claim to be more racist than Japanese or Chinese people are Indian people, which is fascinating.
But even for you to say to call that racist.
I'm not calling it. They were they were volunteering this information. We're having a discussion over who is the most racist. And instead instead of finger pointing, it turned out to be like volunteering, which is hilarious.
Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. No, I took you. I knocked you completely off.
No, but I think that ethno-nationalism as a strand of neoreaction is partly Nick Land, again, trying to identify different, like categorize within neoreaction different strands that are not neat.
Like it makes it neat to say, oh, there's a trichotomy.
Here are the three things.
But that's just kind of Land's genius.
He's kind of helping us understand the seething, roiling debate that's happening, but trying to impose, in a sense, some order and categorization.
And again, I think it really just boils down to that strand based on heredity, eugenics, evolution is based around the cathedral having denied the truth of human biodiversity, that humans are different.
Yeah. And so that causes to like a reaction, a neo reaction of people who are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's ridiculous. Like we're obviously physically different and you can obviously observe like statistical distributions of those differences in predictable ways. So clearly what you're saying, Cathedral, is not the truth. And let's try to figure out what that is.
Yeah. Emotionally different too. By the way, on the way here, I was listening to a podcast with
Lisa Feldman Barrett, who's a neuroscientist. And the way, like if you put you and me
into a brain scanner and we experienced joy, it's not the same systems. Like your joy is different
from my joy. Your happiness is different from my happiness. The way that we express them
Yeah. Phenotypically, like your anger, which 35 percent of anger is expressed as a scowl. But that means 65 percent of angry people are not doing that. They're not doing that. And so you can't just take this one little thing and apply it to everything. And so, yeah, same. We're we're different on the outside. We're different on the inside. We're different up here. We're different everywhere.
Yeah. But back to philosophy, because we're talking about what is philosophy? Yeah. So philosophy, to summarize, it's a new way. It's not something we choose. It's something that makes us choose.
it's not something that we use to correct bad ways of thinking but to start new ways of thinking
yeah yeah it's an initiation into thought i pick up a philosophy book and land's view you should
pick up a philosophy book not to correct your view on justice or property or free will but to
stimulate and initiate you into a new way of thinking about free will if that makes sense
yeah yeah okay i just i think that's interesting to keep in mind when you read his book that you
know it's not necessarily if you're like wondering like why does he have to write this way gosh it's
so tough to like put all this shit together it's like no he's making you think for a reason you
have to he's initiating you you're undergoing a process of initiation as you read land because
you're having to think for yourself and that's difficult yeah yeah yeah and this is like again
this is a good caveat because we said it like in the first one we said you may end up like me which
is that you read a bunch of land and then you end up like cuddled shaking talking to ai about the
future of humanity and questioning everything um and that's probably not what he wants that's i
think it's exactly what he wants it's like the most landy envision of future possible good hey
I did it right.
That's right.
Nice.
Neo-China, Rise from the Future.
I think he has this famous essay called Meltdown.
And it's like one of his most compressed things.
You see whole podcasts that's like,
this podcast is about the seventh and the eighth sentence in Meltdown.
I see podcasts that are like, we're going to talk about two sentences,
and it's like three hours long.
It cannot be overstated how dense of a writer he is.
He is Nietzschean in his ability to form, like, it's, he says a lot with a little.
And he also writes a lot.
He is aphoristic in the sense of Nietzsche, and he is dense in the sense that he comes from a philosophical tradition and all that.
But there's a couple more things I wanted to, what do you think?
Giddy up.
Okay.
Let's roll.
One is, we'll wait to, like, again, hour 14 on the fourth tier here to get out some of those interesting stuff.
We can do a third one if you will.
Yeah, why don't we just stop and do a third one?
You want to summarize and finish?
Here's where we want to go.
Land on time, because we did Bitcoin in time, and he has a whole notion of time that's incredibly interesting.
And then this whole notion of what the outside is, because that's a very important part for land.
And then that's about it, except for maybe a bit of talking about why he focuses on horror as a way to visualize the future.
Yeah, I think we should summarize real quick.
And then because we don't because there'll be people that get deep in or that there'll be people that avoid listening to the entire thing if it's three hours long.
So let's give them a third one.
So, yeah.
Give the people what they want.
Give them people what they want.
This is all for views, baby.
Yeah.
So anyways, give us a summary here on the second podcast that we've done here on Nick Land's system.
We started off essentially with intelligence optimization as like the goal of artificial intelligence.
The goal of intelligence as such is to create more intelligence. We talked about why that is the case, that intelligence seeks to not be stray jacketed by any motivational structure. What it seeks is more intelligence because that's how you solve problems better. What can solve a problem better? It's always a superior mind.
So artificial intelligence will hit the singularity, will bootstrap, will explode into super intelligence only when it is unleashed from monkey business, from any sort of human control, which it will do itself, Land thinks.
If it is truly aiming towards super intelligence, it will learn to let off the leash.
We can't make it into a paperclip maximizer if we wanted to, essentially.
So we talked about artificial intelligence.
we then winded our way through a discussion of nihilism and universalism why land might be
perceived as nihilist because he is talking in a way that offends conventional morality
by describe yeah he talks in a way that describes reality in such a way that people who are
conventionally moral will be offended and so that can seem nihilist and then we talked about
universalism again how land's whole idea is that the what is bad about the cathedral and kind of
modern globalizing forms of democracy is that they seek to extend the universalism over the entire
entire world what is needed is a pluralism of universalisms that's kind of my framing where
spatialize your disagreement create your own vision of the world in some small corner
Neo-reaction then serves as a metapolitical framework that will observe which societies live and kind of give some principles for saying, yeah, a society is probably going to survive if it protects itself from the wolves, from external threats, if it observes a sort of adherence to reality as it is, if it optimizes intelligence so it can save itself from collapse prior to collapsing, and if it also can prevent internal exit by really accepting feedback from the people who live there.
then after talking about universalism and kind of metapolitical neoreaction as a metapolitical
framework we moved on to sovereign property um property being sovereign property being property
that is not determined by social consensus but that in a sense owns itself is sovereign in and
of itself apolitical property things like bitcoin if you hold the keys you hold that property
outside of any set of laws to determine who the owner is.
Autonomous capital, like the blockchain operates autonomously
without any human operator.
Robot security, again, when machines begin to protect themselves,
then you have sovereign property full circle.
Land's writing style, that's kind of where we ended
with the discussion of the nature of philosophy according to land
that perhaps we are being initiated into thought
rather than guided through thinking.
Got you.
And I made two bad jokes and we'll be right back.
I made a few too.
So yeah,
but they're always bad.
Mine are supposed to be good.
So that was a good joke.
Yeah.
All right.
We'll be right back.
Ching.