Terence McKenna and the Death of Rock & Roll w/ Aureus Press: Ep. 463

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All right, are you stressed? Welcome to the J-Bird and show how you doing.

Hey, thanks for having me. Thanks for us here.

Yeah, I'm glad to have you on. I've read your sub-stack often on

for years now. And one of the few remaining good things about Twitter is if you have an interview show

like me, you can ask the masses who you should talk to. And people will give you names. And

quite routinely you'll get the responsive, oh shit, how come I haven't sent that guy a message

yet. So I'm glad to have you on, man. Thanks a lot. Thanks. I didn't even, I haven't had the

sub-stack for that long. But I guess it has been years now. It hasn't been maybe two years.

Yeah. Well, I'm getting so old. I don't know. It feels like that feels like to me maybe

six months ago because I was late to that little game, the sub-stack. But it must be there probably

two years or something. And honestly, to that point, as the internet, the news gets more and more

frenetic, right? You look back and you're like, oh, JD Vance having sex with a couch. That was

ages ago. You know, okay, so it's a stupid news story, but it sticks in your brain. Yeah.

It was two years ago. Not more. Yeah. I feel like time is speeding up. I know I'm getting old,

but if it's just me or like it's time, literally, you know, as a matter of fact,

that's something mechanic would have been, you were talking, you were at the sub-stack article,

you were saying to me before that you liked that I did was about Terrence McKenna. He was all

about reaching that singularity of things. I don't know if you've met, I don't think he

in my time actually increases in speed or maybe it feels like it does, but certainly,

as the complexity grows, everything kind of gets like roars to a head.

And I think at least a part of that is technological advancement, where there are a few things I'm

less interested in engaging in than AI discourse, right? I don't know if there's anything else

to be said on that front, but you see this in the evolution of image creation tools,

you've ever talked to truly old sign painters or guys like that,

their form of graphic design was a manual process. And then all right, you get color printers,

and sure you still have to design it in an analog way, but a machine makes it. And now it's like,

you know, I'd type out a shit post that's, you know, a sentence in a half long, and an image is

created. And you know, it enables that turnaround time goes down. And so, you know, an idea can

propagate, explode, and then be dead in an afternoon, practically. But before we jump into this

article, I think it's probably worth digging into it. Look, I realize I gave you nothing to prepare

other than, you know, what are you doing Tuesday evening? But could you sort of contextualize

who McKinnell was and where he sort of sits in culture? Oh, Jesus Christ. Okay. He was like a

hippie. He's probably the smartest hippie. He fancied himself as a shaman, but he was really,

he was a great Western chauvinist in his way, because he was completely, I mean, this is back

before things got really silly with the wokeness. And, you know, someone like him who was essentially

kind of politically, I don't know what you'd call him. Sort of, you definitely had hippie-ish notions

about universality and inconsequentialism of race and gender and stuff like that. But he didn't

go on about it much. And I heard him actually complaining outright about political correctness

and stuff like that. But, um, yeah, he was like a hippie guru guy. He was actually very smart,

though. He was big into his drugs. He was always on, taken lots of, um, mushrooms primarily,

and DMT. And so he's very much a psycho, not character. However, he, unlike many of the others,

I mean, a lot of them actually, I do have admiration for it. In case he and these people,

you know, a lot of them were actually very erudite and well-read. And they saw the whole psychedelic

experimentation as not just as a personal adventure, but they were truly into expanding their

consciousness, I would say. And amongst them, he was probably the most forefront. I think

the most well-known maybe, formerly that would have been, who was the guy, Mr. LSD? He died quite

young. Shit, what was his name? Uh, not Nick Sands. He was the, oh, no, um, who was the, oh, God,

I can't remember his name. Oh, it doesn't matter. There was a guy, there was a guy probably more well-known

before him. It would have come to me later. But he didn't, I didn't, you know, he, uh, he, he had

nothing on mechanic. Mechanic had a great vast knowledge of science and history. And he was sort

of conspiratorial. He was all into his hermeticism, but he knew it all historically, rose accrucians,

you know, stuff about aliens and UFOs, certainly, but he did it all intelligently. It was never,

you never got a feeling of, you know, he was pulling your leg. He was a bit of a, you know,

a bit of a chancer and make up stories or anything like that. He would just, um, he was, if you

listen to his talks online, at least I always found them very, I learned a lot of stuff from them.

And I was always a fan of his. I mean, he said some like drippy, hippie stuff as well.

Mostly it was very good and excellent ideas and, um, and, uh, yeah, so I, you know,

well, what do you call someone like that? Psychonaut guru who's, uh, I'm sure he had some sort of

PhD that's escaping me now. I have a book of his, but anyways, yeah, um, were you, were you thinking

of, uh, Tim Leary earlier? Yeah. Yeah, he and he died. He took acid all through his death. He died

of, I think, cancer. He took acid through the whole experience, thinking it was the last big,

of which I can't imagine to imagine doing that. I mean, that's devoted to fucking

psychedelics where you're there. And he was okay, Tim Leary. Um, I think he had some kind,

some connections with a little man, some thing too. He started out as a guy he wanted to, um,

something to do with Hollywood. Was he a script writer in Hollywood? I think, oh, I can't remember.

But he became, he was the one who's famous for saying tune in and tune out. What was the saying?

The hippie said, tune in and drop out or whatever. Like to basically get high and get out of the

system. And they were kind of right about that. I feel that whole 60s vibe, but really hijacked by

Abby Hoffman and these other distributable characters to form what became a kind of negative thing.

I think the original energy of the 60s was actually very positive and good, excellent music.

I myself, when art school did experiment with psychedelics and I've always, a lot of people

are against it. And I can see the negative points, but I do not regret the experience. I wouldn't

do it now. And I think I would actually, um, McKenna may have taken it right up and

during his, his dining days as well, but he didn't talk about it much.

Well, yeah, he was, he was really implying that it's his interests were vast because he would

talk endlessly about horticulture or space or series and history. So I'm not sure. I wasn't

prepared for this. So I didn't actually, like, I don't, I don't remember exactly what is,

what is, I have a new study specifically was, but he seemed like a great kind of polymas guru guy.

Well, sort of an interesting thing. It's an interesting article. You obviously mentioned

in the AI aspect of it, but also, you know, this idea of kind of compressing human thought to a

narrow band. And I am not as harsh on American conservatives as some are on the right,

because they're my people, right? I grew up around the, my, a certain degree of affection for them.

But they're, to your point about the, the 1960s, there is an element to which the kind of

rosy childhood of someone like Pat Buchanan, right? The kind of 1950s you see in, you know,

back to the future or something like that as the kind of apex of America or the West more broadly

was ultimately absent of meaning, right? It was fake, was materialist. And many of the critiques

labeled at the baby boomers while accurate also apply to silent generation. You see this in

the development of advertising, right? The, for instance, the explosion of suburbs sure the boomers

were the first group raised in that. They were the first generation of children raised in these

sort of, you know, artificial planned communities. But they were targeted towards their parents. And

so that instinct to search for accountability, or sorry, to search for authenticity rather

is understandable, even if as you said, it was, you know, ultimately pulled in sort of a useless

facile direction. And I'm curious to, to get your thoughts about, you know, because look,

boomers are in the discourse one way or another. And you yourself mentioned that, you know,

there's a part of Leary that's very much a man of his time. But how do you balance that against

the sort of, I guess you could say, the valuable, you know, parts of his thought, right? What can

be harvested from it? How do you sort of plumb that line? You mean of a mechanic, is it?

Yes, yes. Oh, God. Like, how do I plumb the line? You mean about him being part of this

revolution against, yes, against a culture that was inauthentic? And yet, you know, he is very

much kind of a product of that generation, right? With all its own. I'm not sure he was so much in

the camp of, like, I myself wouldn't necessarily call the 1950s inauthentic. And I wouldn't be

against that either. I do, I like and appreciate a lot of the elements of the 60s. A lot of it

was brought on by drugs, really, by, especially by psychic explosion and psyched out and stuff. Like,

you know, when I talk about it being hijacked politically later on, it really did start more as a youth

music and art movement and sort, you know, the beats and all. So, I mean, there was, I guess,

there was always a political angle there, but kind of a lot of it was just sort of an orgy of

creativity. And there was that kind of, you know, the beats were like, when did the beats start?

Where they is early is the forties, even, or there's the beats and then the beat next,

there are two different things kind of, but the original beats were quite old, quite old. But a lot

of the stuff that happened in the 60s was already going on. The 50s were also very creative period.

I always think of, what's that band? The Cramps. I used to like that band a lot and they,

what's their name, Poison Ivy and that was like, her favorite and they were very much

psychedelic, rock out people. But their, her favorite era of music was the 50s. And she liked the

60s only in so much as it was a continuation of the 50s. And if you think about it, it really was.

Like, the rock and roll stuff that they were that really inspired all those guys that later became,

you know, these huge bands, the Who and Led Zeppelin and all this were, did start in the 50s. It was

really a continuation of the 50s. They just got crazy and crazy. They just went from the Elvis

hairstyles to the fucking, you know, to Black Sabbath basically, you know, they just kind of,

it was an extension of the same thing. It wasn't that massive,

fuck you turn around. I mean, in many ways it was and what later happened. It really wasn't until

the 80s or even the 90s before the actual cultural revolution took place and a kind of

anti-family thing set in like in the 50s. You're saying it's inauthentic. That's what I just don't

quite agree with. You know, I know they were rebelling against a kind of

starchy idea of a normal guy living his life and supporting the wars for his country no matter what,

I guess. They'd leave it to be where type people that was that was an archetype that they were

railing against. But I don't know that I would call it inauthentic. It was sort of, I mean,

it was very industrial and post-industrial way of life, especially the food they were reading

that some of their carry on was was starting to get a little bit hive mind, I guess. But they were

still nothing like now, or anything like that. I don't know that I would call them inauthentic.

So in a mechanic, I don't know if he would, when was he born? I guess he lived through,

he died in 1990, but he was young. So he must have lived through some of all that. I think he

started out as just a scientist. That was his or origins. He was a scientist who went to South

America to study butterflies, I think. And then he got just by half an instant, so being in South

America, he ended up taking ayahuasca and then went on this journey. This became a cycle, not.

So he's basically an intelligent scientific guy that got into drugs. And he never, like,

politically speaking, I don't know what he would be today. He definitely would not be a woke

person. He was definitely talking out against them and all that. Yeah, in terms of your question,

I don't know what to say, because it's not quite so black and white for me. And I don't know what he

would say about it. That, you know, the 60s, whatever my whole point really is that the 60s was not

necessarily a wholesale rebellion against every value of every Western value and overturning

Western civilization completely. It was more so that the people came along and made it a specifically

more political thing. And that all their efforts didn't even really take hold until they really

created socially liberal people, much closer to the 90s, even in reality, 80s and 90s, with the

yuppies and later on. So, you know, that was well after the fruitful creative period and all the

wonderful music and all the stuff. And even people like Mechanic, like the writers, you know,

he was more of a nonfiction speculative guy, but, you know, the pulp writers and the fiction and

the nonfiction of the period. And these guys taking these drugs, these intelligent men,

experimenting with acid and, you know, coming over these notions. This is where we got all our

most archetypal modern myths, I think, was really from around that period, especially in the 70s,

in my view. But maybe I'm, I don't know if I'm answering your question. I'm sort of just

disagreeing, I guess, essentially, that the 50s was, that the 60s were the wholesale rebellion,

I guess, the 50s. It became so, it became large. They created that idea in our minds, I feel like.

And it wasn't necessarily, I feel it was a rightful continuation.

Evolution is what I would think of it. So, in terms of how Mechanic would think of his role in that,

I think he was a believing hippie until he died. If he felt that way, that it was a,

he'd overturned that apple cart and he was proud of it. I don't know. I mean, like I said,

he was very into his history, European history. And he knew a lot about it. And I never heard him say

anything of a political slant about these things he would be talking about from the ancient past,

from, you know, the Inquisition to. These ancient texts he would talk about, you know. So,

it just, I don't know, I'm not sure. That's my only answer.

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So, in your piece, you speak about Kenny's view of sort of progress and evolution,

right? This sort of what Carl and Cole like, this unprecedented historical run on the stock market.

And he projected that and technological advancement into the future. This kind of singularity

of complexity. So, one, do you think that that's an accurate assessment, right? That sort of

self-determined evolution, right? And how do we as kind of a, you know, a nominal right-winger

make sense of that, right? Make sense of, you know, this sort of, like, unincredible run of progress.

Because, you know, you look at the, you know, the more reactionary types and, you know, I may

well have my sympathies there, you know, who view, you know, that idea of progress as inherently

entropic, inherently left-wing. So, what's your take on that? I'm a bit of a reactionary myself,

but I've never adopted the view that progress doesn't exist. And that's a, I do believe there's

a kind of overzealous view to it and people adopt a lot of bad ideas and things just because

they're blind believers in progress and think, oh, this is new, we must do this now. And I do think

there's a lot of that, but that not necessarily there's definitely a kind of evolution of progress

and technology. And I do have a certain, I never, it's very difficult for me to say anything with

absolute certainty or that 100% agree with anybody, but there's some truth to me again as notion, I think.

But then, you know, right up to the point you died, it did seem like things were accelerating.

And like, the whole notion of the singularity is that, um, complexity is going to increase,

like in every sense in it, like, he's talking about existence, not just human life, but like,

the universe is kind of hurtling towards it. And this, this event where I think, like, and there's

going to be so much novelty and ongoing novelty on top of novelty and it's going to, the rate of it

is going to increase at a breakneck speed. And this is sort of, it's a bit of a slightly, I guess,

it could be sort of an indulgent, um, sort of just sort of based on his own experience,

you know, throughout what was happening in his life times and towards the end of it, but, you know,

he was very smart and he didn't have a lot of knowledge, his finger on the, he didn't have a lot of

things he said that it didn't wind up coming true as well. And, um, it's, it's hard to say,

you know, because since he died, it almost feels like things stiltified and have slowed down,

it's because he died in 1990. It was really after that that it felt like culture kind of

ossified and we've got frozen in a permanent episode of friends or something for the last 20

years, you know, that a lot of things did not change or innovate and the novelty seemed to,

we seem to fade somewhat, although it's happening again now. And I don't know how, what is

explanation for that would be, you know, you might think it comes in stops and stops and goes or

something, but yeah, there did seem to be an increasing novelty to things and that it reaches for

it's like, what was his, what did he say was going to happen at the singularity again? It was

going to be a kind of a crunch and then, uh, what was his belief? I can't even remember now.

It's actually a while since I wrote the article. I can't since I wasn't sure what we were going to

talk about. Well, what does he believe was going to happen at the singularity? Do you remember?

He, he, and this is a direct quote from yours where he talks about this sort of year, year zero

compression point, right, where it's sort of like you reach so much entropy that there's sort of

needs to be, you know, kind of a coalescing in another coalescing in another sort of big bank

to mix metaphors. Right. And I think that that does map very well on sort of the last what,

you know, 60 years of, you know, Western culture because there was this explosion of creativity.

And, you know, many of the, and it's perhaps easiest to look at this in kind of pop culture,

right? There are all of these sort of, you know, new or kind of syncretized, you know, forms of art.

You know, we're, you know, bringing in kind of disparate, disparate factors jamming them together.

You know, there's a social upheaval and you get this huge explosion of, of creativity,

right? Music is a great example. And then as sort of more and more,

kind of, I guess we could say disillusion if we wanted to look at it negatively occurs,

you know, things fracture and splinter. There is that sort of increase in complexity from a certain

standpoint, but you have this sort of bizarre situation where, you know, and I realize complaining

about, you know, modern cinemas is sort of wrote at this point, but you see that sort of sense of

going through the motions, right, of replicating something that has been done, I'll be at different

technically with different people, but sort of going through that same motion. Similarly,

I kind of pose against what he was saying though, because his, his thing was about in novelty

increasing. And like the fact that we've kind of slowed down, I think, I do remember that he was

AI, he did, like he was, this is back, he died in 1990 and he did say that AI would play a part in

this is one of his foresight. I think it was very astute is that AI would eventually take over.

And from that point, the acceleration would go crazy and would be completely out of our hats.

And that's something I guess people say, but in like, it's not, must, I'm asking those guys,

I'm not sure how they phrase it. I think they think AI is going to just turn around and kill us all

or his, well, his concern is about that specifically. I'm not sure, but with McKenna, it was that,

that would cause the absolute runaway acceleration of novelty. And he's like, like, it'd be beyond human

control, beyond the universe's control. And that was going to lead to this ultimate moment of whatever

the fuck it is. That way, I guess the, and I want to be specific here. So I can make sure I'm not

misunderstanding. But from my perspective, what if essentially we are seeing is that there's sort of this,

it's sort of this bizarre kind of paradox of increasing, increasing immediate novelty,

leading to sort of less overall creativity in the sense that, you know, there are,

metals, a good example, right, where there are, you know, tens of hundreds of different subgenres.

Right. There is a, you know, technically a novel form. And yet, there is not the same sort of

level of like unified organized creativity in the sense of like a movement or like a, you know,

400,000 person concert as an example that you're sort of seeing both increased novelty and also

a dissolution. Do you see that sort of tension I'm pointing out? Yeah. I'm not sure that McKenna

thought that way. Or if he did, maybe I overlooked it because like, it's not just the specific,

the arts or anything like that. It's like an information and everything. And you can also make arguments

like things like metal and things we have enjoyed, genres and vocations, human,

endeavors we have joy, just they reach a point and then there are no longer valid or needed, you know,

we've almost reached a point right now where I know there's still a need for human music and human

movies. These certain like pop art things that we've come very accustomed to and everyone

believes in and relies on. But that's almost kind of fading away and it's possible that they can

be replaced by, you know, just completely something comes in a spangler in sense that it's come

and gone and the new art farm will simply be making memes or something. I don't know. Some other new,

like music itself could kind of fade away, especially if things get totally more and more and more

controlled by AI. What use is there for music? What's the need for it or what, you know, things

like this can come and go in their entirety and it doesn't mean necessarily that we've gone off

the track with McKenna's increase in complexity. It means that it's been, it's been

supplanted by something else that's going to keep charging ahead in some other direction that it's

you know, as I used to say things we think, some of the things we think are innate and eternal

and maybe they are, I don't know, but some of them might be more subjective than we think. It's like

if you show a, I started years with my friend about stuff like this and I'd always say, well,

you know, you would say, how can you argue that this art is eternal and so this and that. I was

like, well, go show your Stanley Kubrick movie to an aunt or something and, you know, what's he

going to think of that? And, you know, what's the ultimate meaning there or like he can show you

this brilliant aunt, Aunt Hill, aunt SNS, he's built and sure you can maybe appreciate it, but like,

I don't know, it's a bit subjective, you know, and so I don't know if that goes, I'm not sure that he

saw a sort of slowing and stagnation as part of the process unless I unless I miss something or

forgot something. It just probably thinks remains that it's going to be supplanted by some other

ever-increasing thing at breakneck speed. This was an interesting sort of, I think Dave,

the distributist wrote an article where he mentioned, smashing pumpkins, frontman, Billy Corrigan,

has made a number of comments about the death of rock and roll, right? That's sort of something

that's come and gone. And, you know, on unsubstack in other platforms, you've seen a variety of

reactions to that. And at least, one that I thought was an interesting take was a guy making the

argument that rock and roll may well-deviewed in the same way that people of our age view the kind

of patriotic marches of another era, right? The big band music, the kind of Susa-esque, you know,

music is something that is, you know, primarily notable for historical reasons. And it's one of

those things who knows, right? Without, you know, neither you or I could prove that assertion one

way or the other. President Barack Obama. Virginia, we are counting on you. Republicans want to

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But it is an interesting thing in the sense that many of these things, whether it's

film or kind of, you know, the modern three-minute song, is highly relevant to you and I because it

sort of saturates our life. But it's sort of up for debate if that outlasts the current moment.

And you see this particularly on, or in kind of, you know, right-wing countercultural art

spaces, which, you know, I enjoy as much as the next guy, where I wonder if there is an over-focus

on sort of the forms, the sort of currently existing forms of art, right? Sort of trapped in that

moment. And I wonder if there's an underlying assumption that sort of things will stay the same

forever, that these will continue to be as relevant, that, you know, the novel is still, you know,

the primary way of sort of conveying, you know, emotion through time. And so I found that that

conversation about the, you know, the death and broken role was perhaps interesting for that reason

if, you know, if nothing else. Yeah, I mean, I said it for years and I'm glad that he said,

he had a specific take on it that certain people he even knew told him at the time,

while we're making this decision and going this direction. But it was obvious to me,

and my age, having lived through it to what, that it was just kind of, they shut it off,

they decided to shut it down and go with rap music and push rap music. It's more or less what he

said, but he kind of explained why. And it had to do also with the decline of the system they had

with DJs and so forth, you know, playing the top record on the radios and the internet,

internet changed a lot of stuff. I think as well, I always said, I think the people in charge

of the music industry and the film industry as well, but like, not quite as bad as with music,

they kind of, they used to go to great pains to find bad, to find talent, to scout talent and

get the, you know, the best band going kind of thing. I think it's somewhere along the way,

they realized around the time of the boy bands in the 90s, they'd just, they realized that

actually, no, that doesn't matter. The fucking, the normies will fuck, the normals will

imbibe whatever slop you put out as long as it's put on the top 40 system and, you know,

played on the TV and the radio and they don't have to go to all those works trying to find

original music and bands. They can make the bands out of nothing, bring people to pay people to come

together, give them any kind of remotely catchy slop and they'll imbutton. So I think they just

kind of discovered that, oh no, we have the power. So having control of the media, we don't actually

have to try and find them good culture like original music or, I think, something like that

occurred as well. But yeah, I like Billy Corgan's little thing he does actually. I didn't expect

to, but I thought, for some reason I thought it'd be more of an Egypt, but he's not bad and I like

his little interviews and it reminds me, it takes me back, I guess, to the 90s in that time as well.

But yeah, in terms of losing rock is, I mean, I mean, we're talking about sub-stack and stuff,

like this, a lot of more people have put an effort into stuff like that and internet type stuff.

Everyone's fighting this culture war in one way or another. Painting is one art, one medium that's

really gone by the wayside because it got a two-front attack by being swallowed up by digital art.

Well, first of all, there was the modernism. I wrote a book about this. The modern, the philosophy of

modernism kind of negated the whole point of becoming like anything resembling a classical painter.

And then there was a sort of, there was at least work, there was a vocation going in illustration

for anybody remotely inspired by classic painting for a long time, but digital art kind of

changed that up too. I mean, it's still sort of there. And now AI has really done a number on that one.

So it seems like if there's one thing progress, hate, it's an artist, like they just fucking hate

and they want them gone. And I see that with the AI, people are really into AI prompting in that too.

I think they seem to take a strange delight in having finally done away with the need for

artists whatsoever, which is hilarious. But I think I'm off here. What was your question about

Corrigan just that? Oh, that was sort of where I wanted to get to, right? That kind of changing

landscape of the arts is generic, is that phrase sounds. And forgive me, man, if I'm too cynical

in this. But I think at least a large part of it as well is that many young men are ambitious,

right? They want to see themselves in a position of prominence, whether that's getting the girls

or the fancy cars or whatever. And there isn't really a way in the same way for

you're kind of like young white guys to do that in music in the same way.

There isn't that clear progression to rock star. And I can say that I have teenage kids and I can

see that they don't. Music is not important to them the way it was to us. And I can see why

like just for the reasons you're saying, they don't see themselves in it, you know, they don't see

the point like they enjoy it. But it's not a serious thing like it was for older generations.

Well, and you know, it's sort of for a while, maybe for there was sort of a 20-year lag time,

at least in America in Nashville, right, with country music. That was the place you could still go.

To the point where, you know, there's sort of semi-saturical songs about that, right? I can't

remember who wrote it. It's a famous song, but talking about, you know, all these series of artists

who failed, you know, the New York actress, you know, the guy playing shows in Vegas. And they all

decide, all right, fine, I'll go to Nashville. I'll make my money that way. And I think a lot of that

creative outlet really does get directed towards social media. Right? Sure, you're not a rock star,

but you know, if you're a streamer, if you're some other kind of public facing performer.

Yeah, everyone's doing it. Yeah, influencers are, I hate this term influencer because that's like,

I really hate it, but I know that the type of person that calls to mind, but I mean, almost everybody is,

really, almost everybody is working at their own little corner in niche in this fashion, right?

Oh, yeah, because it is the aspirational goal, right? That's the new version of, you know, going to LA and making it.

Well, even in a hobby of sense, like, you know, it doesn't even have to be, and some people actually,

you know, do take off and that in just doing something sort of incidentally or out of for kicks,

you know, some people take it very seriously. It's just like everybody's doing it one way or the other.

Which, you know, it's good and bad and it's not a wholesale negative thing. It's good to have it,

I guess, but it's strange. It is strange. The arts and things that are going by the wayside and things

that are vanishing on somewhat unnecessarily. And it is hard to imagine that would,

that music, for instance, not just, not just metal, but the music itself could lose its

human currency. But I mean, we're entering a stage where God knows what's going to happen. Like we are

in jeopardy as a people, you know, we better like fight for, fight to get our place in the future at all.

And whatever, whatever technology and things or mechanical singularity are going to mean to,

you know, totally foreign people that are waiting to inherit our legacy. You know, it seems more like

things are going to ease back into another long, dark period, maybe instead of, instead of

accelerating to his point of collapse and crunch and whatever that else was to happen. I mean, maybe

that's what it's, his point is supposed to be that you just kind of go back to the fucking

neolithic age or something. I don't know. I'm glad you brought up the kind of increased

multiculturalism because that goes hand in glove with sort of algorithmic recommendation.

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An interesting conversation with my grandmother who is a core baby boomer.

Right born in 1950. She has a very reasonable question to my wife and I where she said,

well, what sort of music do people your age listen to? We were forced to give her kind of a bizarre

answer which is there's really no one definable genre. I explained it to her this way. I was like,

look, you have a song that was the summer of let's just say 1966. You hear it and it takes you

back. And if I asked another 100 women in your same city, 80 of them might well give the same answer.

But now partially due to the fact that my country is I don't know exactly where you are but I assume

you've noticed a similar trend is no longer culturally unified. But on that point,

you add in the algorithm and there's actually a lot of data on that's relatively interesting.

The percentage of new music listened to is lower than ever. That more and more people are listening

to the oldies, which is a more and more expansive term. But listening to things that came out 10,

20, 30 years before they were born. When I think of my freshman year in college, the song I was listening

to came out when I was in grade school and it was served up to me by an algorithm. And you see a

similar thing in any number of subcultures where there is this bizarre resurrection of Y2K culture

among people a little bit younger than me. But that's an internet trend. And okay, sure, there may be

one or two people you know who dress like that. And they have a community of people on the internet

that dress in a similar way. But her best friend, her boyfriend, might not look like that. There is

this bizarre sort of disillusion of centralized culture. And there's, you know, as a counterculture,

right, that is someone who does not agree with, you know, the sort of mainline values of the West

from a certain perspective. There's something to be thankful about in that, right, that is a relatively

good thing. But also it does make it, it does make, you know, that this sort of like artistic memory

almost impossible. Yeah, I do think it speaks to again what I was saying that they really

what there was a natural creative flourishing, you know, fruiting going on in the 60s that was good

and that was kind of taken and hijacked into this political thing. But again, it didn't really

didn't really hit to later on the end of the 80s and the 90s. And that's what really

ossified culture and leftists. Because the reason people are going and harkening back to the older

things is they're just better. And I think it's almost entirely an objective thing to say that,

you know, they really fucked up. And like, especially with the woke stuff, I mean, as well as being

woke, they just kind of got frozen in time. It's like, there was no more. And things were so rich

and complex before. Like when I was growing up, you know, you had all your different groups,

you would have goths and skinheads and skaters and metalheads and bunks. And I wrote another article

about this actually recently. And it was all very, you know, there was a complexity and it was

everyone took it very seriously. But there's there may be some of those that are still around. Maybe

there's new variations now, but that kind of, you know, there was it was like an ever-changing,

ever-deepening complexity. Like you can see why mechanical would think what he thought, that's it.

And a lot of that just went by the wayside. And this kind of everything became a kind of

Taylor Swift slopfest, you know, everything became very generic. People became more conformist.

It's like they, I think because the when they hijacked that revolution and they made it sort of

an anti-western thing and it's like, get rid of all your traditions. Fuck everything that can

happen before it's evil. That really, they really convinced people from the 60s to kind of work

to enact that. And it took a while to actually set in. And when it did, I think it rendered us

artistically fucking castrated. Absolutely. You know, that's because you, well, you do want to have

new new arts and be free to investigate and explore and create new things. You'd need a certain

lifeline to tradition. And you're nothing without really what came before you and some knowledge of

what people built before you. And you have to work, you have to build on it. You can't just like

throw it all away, I think, I think is a great example of having done that. And the consequence

is nothingness. So maybe we hit, maybe we hit my kind of singularity already. And we're now,

we're lost in the void for a bit until we can make this realization. And I think you, like,

just like you can't, because the truly Westerners, Western liberals have discarded the past. They

hate it. They think it's evil. They think there's around every corner or some new brilliant fucking

Shangri-la. You know, they don't, they think they can do without anything, anything rooted in

blood or the past. One of the things that I found most interesting. So I went to college

right after Unite the Right in a location fairly close to it. And as you can imagine, progressive

college, the alt-right was very scary. And in right wingers of any type were very scary. It was

this sort of moral panic. And this was sort of my first exposure to kind of a woke classic,

right, the kind of 2016 era stuff. And what I found very interesting as someone who, you know,

hadn't given it much serious thought, is that in a certain sense they are iconoclastic,

right, this desire that, you know, anything that is, you know, pale and stale needs to be completely

and totally, you know, thrown out. But in a weird way, they're bizarrely weak to their own

sort of brand of deconstruction. You know, they're quite used to applying that cultural acid to

the kind of faint imagining of, you know, 1950s America, you know, the before times. But in a

weird way, they're also sort of playing at their own tradition, right? You realize, okay, sure,

you know, this woman in particular, she has changed out the proper nouns. But her book, her lecture,

whatever, is really sort of out of time, right? It was written in the 60s. It may have been updated

in the 90s. You know, they're not, they're not really a generative group of people. And there's

not really anything alive, even in their own tradition. And I think that that's sort of ironic,

right? It's that they have, you know, they have sort of, you know, adopted this idea of, at

least this kind of spoken commitment towards, you know, eternal, you know, progress, eternal change.

But if you even scratch the surface, you realize, they're sort of the like worst caricature of,

you know, stuffy conservatives, right? In the sense that they have a very narrow band of thought,

and they cannot go outside of that. And I think that if we're talking about why culture feels

stale in many ways, it's that, you know, effectively, we've been working from the same three barely

literate source texts for multiple generations at this point. And okay, yeah, sure, I imagine that,

you know, whichever one of these luminaries may not have imagined the true excesses of kind of,

you know, what culture, you know, they may have been only speaking about, you know, women,

and not the kind of pharmaceutical variety. But realistically, the thought has not been expanded,

but so much. You know, it is sort of, you know, thought terminating. And it places us in a bizarre

position, right? Upon one hand, you know, people like you and I, whatever our sort of counterculture is,

is also reaching back into tradition, right? We are anchoring ourselves to things much older than we are.

But also, we as well are in this bizarre position of sort of pushing into something new and

undiscovered. It's an interesting tension there. And when you spoke in your piece and I realized,

you know, again, you're referencing someone's own words back to them, it's somewhat poor form,

but it hasn't stopped me so far. You know, this idea of sort of, you know, consciously guiding your own

evolution, whether genetically or culturally. And I think that that is a position we sort of

as, you know, the radical right, whatever scare word you want to use. That is a position we find ourselves

in. You know, something new must be done. Clearly, the system is not workable. It must be changed. And

yet, you know, there is also this sort of unbreakable chain to the past. Those two ideas intention,

I think, are what make this space so interesting. Yeah, there's many, I mean, there's many complex

things I could say about that. Like it's hard for me to even really consider myself a full blown.

You have to say you're right wing if you're thrown into the modern context and that you don't believe,

you simply don't believe in feminism and things, you know, you're automatically, and you believe

race is a real thing. And, you know, it's, you're automatically thrown into right wing, but like

traditionally throughout my life, even now, I'm much more in character sort of a bohemian than

artist type of person. And I don't, like what you're saying, well, yes, we must have tradition,

the knowledge and understanding of tradition in art and all the arts and all everything that

formed brought us to this point and all the great geniuses of, you know, who did this and who did

that and be, you know, respectful of them, especially if they're of our kind.

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Paid for by Virginians for fair elections. And, you know, that gets in the in the in the great

void of the new and the passion to create newness that becomes sort of an evil thing to understand.

But at the same time, I am kind of like, I'm not as, you know, this is a battle I have with

other people who consider themselves right-wing traditionalists. Is that okay, you must be

Catholic, you must be, you know, you must be into classical music exclusively or, you know,

this kind of thing where it's I don't, I'm not into any of that. I'm into, you know, there's

certain things that have gone on in these spaces and in the culture that's being created online.

There is, there has been a synthesis and you mentioned the alt-right or whatever we call

what's going on on there today for people that are, you know, don't like any, and you mentioned

how the modern liberals are really the new conservatives, yes, and that they are absolutely

bourgeois. That they are that same silly bourgeois class signaling class of people, yes, the

normals basically, who have been the same bane on everyone's existence throughout history.

That great poor g-mass of, like, unself-thinking imbeciles that just get directed this way or

that, depending on who has enough money to, you know, advertise something in front of them or

however it works, I don't know what the fuck, but yeah, they are the problem, yes, and they're

absolutely in their, in a stupor, but it's, yeah, that bourgeois perfectly encapsulates what

those people are, even though they can shift from left to what we might consider left to right.

But again, as I say, left to right to me is a strange distinction. Apart from being racist and

sexist, I would be otherwise, and like, I believe in, you know, there were times that passed

a person, like McKenna would consider himself a leftist, but he could talk about the beauties of

hard-line, theocratic monarchy, like ancient Egypt or something and not be, and not blush or

feel ashamed or, you know what I mean, like, he wouldn't be, he would be like us more against the

sort of starship bourgeois. Oh, you say you're more of a sympathetic to American conservative types.

I mean, I, I don't, I can be sympathetic towards him as well, but like, you know what I mean,

I consider them quite bourgeois as well, like the Fox typical modern Fox news guy would be,

to me, very normal, just in a kind of different way, but, um, that's the way I would do all that.

So it's difficult. And this is a conversation I had, right, I don't remember if I had,

this is the problem thing on the internet, right? These are two of my friends. I know they were

talking. I can't remember if I was in the digital room or not, so to speak, but Andrew Edwards

and Carl Dull, right, two very talented writers who have considered friends. We're speaking about

exactly this, right? It's like, well, right wing, but what do we mean by that? You know,

written a novel that has, you know, from a certain perspective, you know, traditional

western themes in it, right? You know, maybe if you really squint, you could, you know,

pick up more than that, but it's not didactic, right? It's not some piece of political propaganda.

It is true human expression, right? Okay, sure. It is referencing reality. We could say it is,

you know, quote, unquote, based in that sense, you know, it's something real and it's something that

cannot be expressed, you know, in kind of common culture. But, you know, past that, these terms

sort of fall away. And, you know, on the subject, I think, you know, back to Jonathan Bowden.

And in one of my favorite books, it criminally underdiscussed is pulp fascism, right? A collection

of, you know, talks and essays he gave. And he talks about these kind of pulp heroes, you know,

whether it's the kind of, you know, Batman to Robert E. Howard. And, okay, sure, they are

political in a sense, right? Okay, sure, you know, if a modern, you know, politician, you know,

lived like Conan the Barbarian, they would refer to him as far, right? You know, on a more

fundamental level, right? It's, it's, it's addivistic in human. It's showing you something real

about yourself and your culture. And that has only become political in the sense that there is a

faction in culture built on denying those simple facts. It's like, well, just, I don't want to say

shouldn't be political, but in a more sane time, would be outside of the realm of the political.

You know, it's like, can you imagine, you know, even, you know, 400 years ago, a situation where

men and women become too distinct political blocks. It's like, well, no, and this is a society,

of course, where politics still happened. You know, it's just sort of that growth of, I guess,

the culture worked to encompass all. I think if we, I think we might be reaching,

heading towards a singularity where politics does not matter. And it's more of a purely,

not just individual, in tribalist, externally, kind of a free-for-all or something.

You made me think of a couple of things there. First of all, yeah, about and about makes me think,

like that reminds me, this is a great example of what we're saying about bourgeois and what we might,

what we should be classed as instead of these, left and right is fine and good and all, but I think

at hijack so easily, and then people think you're meant to be this and meant to be that, but like,

I think of Hunter Thompson, let's say, because he actually reminds me about in certain ways,

in these and about leftist. Like, you read his writing as full of slurs for gays and blacks and,

you know, he's certainly not, you know, he's, he's, he's, he's more of a Conan type guy, really.

You know, in a mean, he's a very individualistically out to get all the power he can

prove for himself. He doesn't give a shit about the main thing he's against is bourgeois society,

which I'm sure about and would say as well, I think, you know, which is sort of, so in a sense,

our whole thing is that, you know, it's very inherently masculine attitude and all the great

innovators and artists are in that sense. I mean, if you want to talk about the people who created

the West and all the great works in it, we're looking at tomes and mute and, you know, we're looking

at a enormous library of Alexandria of, you know, 95% white men. So there's something to the fact

that it is inherently masculine to talk about characters from the left or the right that are

truly creative and innovative and doing things and, you know, so not to say that this is an argument

for transcending politics necessarily to compare Hunter S. Thompson to Bowden, but

that whatever it is, it's something in the primordial sense, let's say, or what's happening online

that I was trying to get to earlier that there's, there is a good, there is a converging singularity

of sorts from being online, working online for whatever, how long have I done it now? Oh,

geez, 20 years or something. I slowly got transformed by just like listening and observing and

you know, absorbing information is like a giant library of history, you know, if you use it right,

if you don't get trapped into looking at K-pop videos and, and, you know, useless shite, like

Instagram influencers like my wife, she won't like that, she won't hear this. But, you know,

your knowledge increases and it did create this weird corral of people that have understanding

of all these things like we do. We would be, we would have been a very rare, very rare type of person.

You know, 40 years ago, right? Whereas now there's a certain corral of people who have

a massed information across all these different avenues and things about art and politics and

this and that and they can see a kind of clear direction things are going and don't like it. But,

you know, we have a great knowledge of different, of all these different things and we can talk

about them and try to, at least try to speculate on what we are and where we should be going,

which is exactly what we should be doing and we get away with it. So, like, there is good

things about it. But, like, I do like, I do enjoy that. I do think there is a singularity happening

that's bringing, to me, it means, I think, over time, the trend you see amongst people like us

with those interests and, like, observing it, you know, it leads, it lands towards in several

directions. To me, it definitely heads towards things like paganism, believe it or not. I don't,

there might be contentious, but I know the strange stuff like this. Like, there's an esoteric

element, which is hilarious, you know, stuff like that. Paganism and awareness of, you know,

racial and sexual politics, or it must be a better way to put that, would, you know, there's

this whole wash of different things that come together and create these people that can relate

in these bizarre ways about these crazy things is what I mean. Well, and that sort of is the positive

side of that, you know, general cultural splitting that, you know, sure, the cultural dissolution

that, you know, takes, you know, top of the pops from being, you know, required viewing to,

you know, sort of a bizarre, you know, containment box for Jimmy Savile until 2006, right? That sort

of declining, you could say cultural institution. It was so good before that it was so good

that 70s and 80s would be. Right, but that, that same dissolution that on one hand, we could say,

oh, you know, we could look at an end sort of, you know, cry about the, you know, modern,

why America or whatever, but that is also the same thing that enables the rise of, you know,

what you and I do, right? That enables a sort of, you know, genuine capital T traditional,

so whatever term you want to use, you know, camera. Yeah, that's the thing. That's the problem,

isn't. This is what I'm getting at. Like, what the hell fuck do we should be going to get

traditional, traditionalism was hijacked. Then the word tried and traditional was hijacked by the

people who got turned into Catholics on Twitter. And it became all about just being chased and

cottage core, you know, and this like checks on Instagram in, uh, in sun, sun dresses, baking pies

and stuff. It got a bit silly. But I guess what can we do if like terms get, you know, nothing

stays the same ever. This is the law of life and evolution. This is another law I abide by.

The change is, change is the only thing we can count on. But so we shouldn't fuss about

calling ourselves anything. Maybe it's better that it's amorphous and vague. Probably is.

Not a hundred percent or anything at either, you know, like we all, there's a vague agreement,

right? There's a consensus of sorts, right? Well, it's, it's a negative identity, right? It's like,

you, you know, you pick whatever the current outrage of the week, you know, whatever video is going

around that, you know, all our guys are mad about. It's like, well, we all agree that's not good.

You know, whatever that, you know, current hate object is. But past that, it's like, well, it

just devolves into, you know, an Orthodox guy and a Catholic guy, you know, throw it bombs in each

other. Yeah, the religious war. And then there's, there's a few things, right? Because like,

you get a bit more, well, I mean, just tons of things. Anytime there's a big event, like,

obviously there was the Russia business. Everyone split over that. Yeah, you know, everything's ever,

any big event, potentially splits up people that you would have previously agreed with about

everything. To the point that, you know, no longer friends, sometimes. But that's like, I mean,

you know, what's it? And, you know, that's the, that's the, I, I will say, to one of the,

the things that's enabled me to have whatever bizarre, semi-successful internet career is,

it turns out, dear listener, you do not have to have strong opinions on everything. You can

look in a situation and say, well, I have no idea what's going on here. I won't stake my entire

credibility on asserting that the, you know, the, the prime minister of France's wife is a man.

That's a discussion for the other time, right? Yeah, man, this has been a fascinating discussion.

I appreciate your time, and I'm glad to get you on, but where can people find you?

Right? Where can they find more of your work? Oh, I got my books. I do pulp fiction books,

as well as I did a wrote a book about art, just to kindly follow Western art. That was the most

popular book I did. I'm working on one about religion. I'm going to come out, it's going to come out

hopefully soon. I've been saying this for a long time. Again, time slips by. Like, I probably,

I've been saying that for years, really. Anyways, I am working on it. There'll be a new guts,

guts, I've got a comic series. Second one of that is coming out soon. A new Aegean dream,

the sequel to my novel, The Dream God is coming out very soon. It's done. I just got to like,

I think it's, I'm waiting for Amazon approval, and then I'll start. I'm, of course, peddling that.

So that's all on AureusPress.com, de AureusPress.com. And I'm on X's AureusPress, Facebook,

AureusPress, and Telegram, and yeah, just on Amazon. You know, some of my books work on my books.

And yeah, you should get to people like them. I may well have to have you back on,

because in protest of the Iran War, I have been doing more and more cultural content.

And I haven't done a book review in what three weeks now. So I'll have to grab a copy of your novel.

And it's always, I will say selfishly, some of my favorite recordings are conversations with

all pairs on their own work. But anyway, make sure, make sure to check that out. As far as my stuff,

the J-Birden show, Apple Spotify, YouTube, anywhere you listen to podcasts. This is what I do.

If you want to support me five bucks a month, it gets you everything early and ad free.

The same content everywhere. I just realized the ads are irritating, and there's a way to support

what I do. And also, you know, opt out of, you know, back-to-back looped ads for Chumbo Casino,

which yeah, I'd be honest with that, but that would annoy me too. Anyway,

anyway, at home, keep your head up. Well, I can't last forever. Good night.

Okay, thanks.

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by voting yes by April 21st. Help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters

decide not politicians. Vote yes by April 21st. Paid for by Virginians for fair elections.