17: Anna Khachiyan - Reconstructing The Mystical Feminine From The Ashes Of “The Feminine Mystique”
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Hello, you found the portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and I'm lucky to be here tonight with Anna. And here it comes. Thanks for having me. Oh, did I? Did I screw that up? No, no, no, no, no. That's right. And Anna is half of the up and coming podcast Red Scare, which has everyone talking. Everyone. Not everyone. I'm exaggerating slightly. Yeah. Yeah.

But I just got introduced to you by a colleague of mine, Blake Masters, who's Peter Thiel's co-author. And I've been addicted to your podcast, not quite understanding why. It's one of the strangest things I've ever found. Can you say more about what induced you to do it and why you think it might be working? I have no clue why it's working. I know that it's probably due to some sort of

alchemical, inarticulable thing that's totally out of my control, that has something to do with my chemistry with my co-host, who's an actress called Dasha Nikrasova. But I think maybe it struck a chord. I know that it consistently infuriates all the wrong people, which was never my intention. It's so innocent, and it's so beautiful. But it's also...

Not entirely believable because it does seem like what you're doing is you're crowding out a certain kind of piousness. And we had an epic lunch the other day. Yeah, we did. We had what they call a power lunch. Is that a power lunch? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

I just learned at the last minute that this podcast is being filmed because I was telling Eric here that the way that we run ours is like a bunch of wires and crap strewn on the floor, like chain smoking. Dasha literally sits on the ground objecting, objectifying herself at every turn. And I sit on my disgusting stained and cigarette burned couch and

But this is my bad side. And I wish I was more of a diva like Mariah Carey and could demand that we switched seats. Really? Yeah. No, I'm kidding. I'm being hyperbolic. Well, and we always pick up the syringes before the get-go. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, what was the question? Well, the question surrounds...

What I was going to get at is that we had this bit of a riff where I've said that I'm trying to be long good and short nice. That nice doesn't really have a future because nice is really this kind of performative version that crowds out good. And you seem to have mastered this formula where I detect a deeply buried good and there's an attack on nice at all times.

Yeah, I mean, I think that nice on some level is a futile position. I mean, even you look at like female social politics, right? And there's always kind of a

Irrepentant bitches masquerading as nice girls. And then there's nice girls masquerading as irrepentant bitches. And I think I would like to think that I'm the latter. Remains to be seen. Yeah. I don't know that I have any sort of earnest or let's say, let's put it this way. I don't know that I have...

Kind of a sustained political vision that I would like to enact It's kind of out of my control as you know My father who's used to say you're but a crumb floating on the face of the earth, but it's a bill you're confident Yeah, the Russian way of parenting. It's like Russian self-esteem But at the end of the day I have kind of a very earnest ethical agenda that I'm hoping that

to populate the minds of my young girl and gay listeners with. - I would have said infect, but okay, populate. - Yeah, infect is another good one. - Wonderful. So let's just dig into a little bit of your background as you're mining it for the kind of motif that even though it's an intrinsically American show,

It's informed by the sort of broad Slavic soul and you were born in Moscow. In Moscow. Yeah. In 1985, the internet and my Spanish Wikipedia says that it's 1986. Every year I'm aging backwards on the internet. Next year I'll be 32. Yeah, that's great. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm like the Benjamin Buttons of neoliberal critique. But I was born in 1985 at the tail end, you know, right before the collapse of the Soviet Union. And there's no way that that experience, along with the kind of inevitable trauma of immigration, doesn't inform your worldview. So if I understand correctly, not only are you coming with this sort of tail end vision

Soviet influence, but it is also the case that you've got access to the twin genocides of Jews and Armenians. - That's true, yeah. I always say on Twitter, it's very depressing that my ancestors survived the Armenian genocide and then the Holocaust, so their descendant could become a podcaster in the Holocaust.

brooklyn now manhattan and no doubt because uh you're white of hue you are going to be labeled as privileged because you come from these two ethnic groups which for some reason we can't actually locate in human history or what these groups have been through which i find also weirdly amusing this is a very i mean this isn't a very interesting point i don't know if we want to i'm not drunk yet so maybe we should get into the um

intellectual yeah yeah let's toast to sobriety yeah um you i don't so i'll get into all the kind of like um heavy-handed intellectual stuff in the first half let's say but this is one of i think my central projects or critiques that i'm interested in uh i don't obviously i don't dispute the

completely gross, horrific legacy of American slavery, right? It existed, it plunged an entire population into poverty, into social fragmentation. The legacy is still alive and well today. What I object to, I think, is the wholesale export of the American view of race relations to elsewhere in the world, to people who don't have

the similar experience well i guess from my perspective what i find very odd about all of this is that having been close to people in the armenian and jewish communities there's a tremendous amount of intergenerational trauma yes because there has to be yeah my sister and i call call it hand-me-down trauma yeah it's something you inherit you know like a brooch or like

A necklace. Well, I would say it's also a set of behavior patterns for detecting when things are starting to get really dicey. It's sort of like you have to know that it's not that the generation that goes through these things is the only one that has a claim. The longevity of these populations is,

Is about saying we don't know whether there's going to be another one of these episodes in your time. So everyone always has to be ready. There's no state of not being ready. Like we've made it. We finally. Yeah. We're orthodontists. We're going to be fine. Yeah. I mean, you can't rest on your laurels effectively. And I think. You have to sleep with one eye open. Yeah. Well, yeah. You know, with the knife under your pillow. Yeah.

You're going to give away all of our secrets? Yeah. I have so many dark family secrets, but I think the basic correct principle, the basic critique of...

certain I guess leftist intellectuals in the United States is this idea that okay well somebody like me is not only white not only would be associated as white or would consider herself white but is essentially white passing so therefore even if I was not hypothetically white I could rake in the certain white privilege that for example or a black or latino person couldn't

Well, this is what I've called the intersectional shakedown. Yeah. And the populations that are maximally irritating to the intersectional shakedown artists are

Are the populations with recent claims to oppression that are nevertheless making it economically because really what it is is an attempt to take a real history of oppression and to turn it into cash. Yes. Well, I tweeted literally today moments before I came here that the kind of idea of cultural appropriation, that debate makes perfect sense in a culture where

identity is viewed as a form of capital.

Because it becomes then a zero-sum game if somebody like Rachel Dolezal, right, perpetuates this myth that she's a black woman. She is basically taking food out of the mouth, power out of the hands of an actually black woman. Right. So there's that absurdity. But then we actually have to contend with the weird aspect. For example, if you look at the exploitation of black musicians who very often, you know, at some point you had a lot of illiterate,

genius musicians in the Delta who are brilliant enough to produce great music, but weren't capable of defending themselves in a legal structure. And so you actually had cultural exploitation of one group by another through appropriation. So you would get,

I think at some point I saw Otis Blackwell performing in New York City and he had to say, look, I'm the guy behind Elvis Presley. And the idea is that when Elvis sang it, it was acceptable to a market that he couldn't sell into. So there is a real aspect to cultural appropriation and there's a totally fake aspect, which is this sort of, and they're coexisting. And so it's very tempting for people like us just to point at the bullshit

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I said, come on now, brother. No, don't be a fool. You got to let chili keep you cool. That's Chili Pad and Uler 2. It's absolutely true. I mean, you can give the example of like Hesh and the Sopranos, right? We talked about the Sopranos at our power lunch. Who's this guy who's kind of this like kindly, sensible Jewish grandfather. Within a mafia context. Within a mafia context. So warm and loving.

loving and steadily. And this is a guy who has historically stiffed black musicians for royalties. Right. And there's that famous reparations episode with, I think it was Bokeem Woodbine playing the, the rapper mini Gark. There's a question about whether he's going to visit violence upon him, but it turns out he's going to visit a lawsuit. Yeah, exactly. But then you have like these, um, cultural examples of like, you know, like Katy Perry or, uh,

Miley Cyrus wearing cornrows like Kim Kardashian wearing cornrows in a Kardashian like beauty photo shoot, which I find completely preposterous. No one owns cornrows.

I don't know enough about female hairstyling. There's no direct line of monetization, right? Okay. I don't see it that way. And so that's a discourse that I think, yeah, you're right, exists as like a proxy discourse because people are afraid to confront the deeper, more complex issues. Well, I think that, and you have one set of legitimate issues acting as the stalking horse for this conversation.

infernal shakedown. My hatred of this comes from the fact that if American Jews who have made it financially in one generation are somehow safe and secure and therefore privileged, something is entirely broken with your cosmology. - Well, how do you mean? - Well, it's just like, I assume that the German Jews in the, you know, before Kristallnacht, the two nights before Kristallnacht were privileged and should be worried about their privilege. It's just, this is stupid.

Yeah, it's a silly argument. And I think, you know, I get into spats about this and I'm, I'm frequently accused of like being racially insensitive. And I, you know, as Quentin, the late great Quentin Tarantino said, I reject that hypothesis. It's patently false. What I've always said is not, I'm not in the business. I'm not interested in having an oppression Olympics and saying like, well, okay, look, I come from, uh,

historically oppressed background on two sides, but yeah, I, you know, grew up in a totally middle-class milieu and, you know, but I'm going to use this kind of identitarian card. I'm going to play the card to be oppressed. That's not at all what I'm interested in. Um, what I'm saying is that as a person who comes from a different culture, I can view the legacy of American slavery at a critical distance in a way that American people may not be able to.

Right. Because in Russia you have a parallel system called serfdom. Right. These, the slaves and the serfs were emancipated within, I think a year of each other. Right. But I mean, I just had J.D. Vance in your chair. I've heard only horrible things about him. Oh yeah. I'll introduce you. I like him quite a bit. He, you know, his family of course is coming from Appalachia and he,

hillbillies were de facto enslaved, maybe a form of light slavery, if you will, just we served them as a different form of enslavement with company towns, company script, company stores, company housing, private armies of detective agencies. So, you know, the idea that that is seen through the lens of white privilege shows you the mental impoverishment of

the current woke ideology. And my claim is that we, we cannot afford to dispute it. We must ignore it just because it, it sort of shouldn't qualify intellectually. It didn't make sense.

I mean, as George Bush II said, you don't negotiate with terrorists. And this is, I think, my big opposition to it is that woke ideology by and large is an emotional hostage situation. It really is. It's a hostage crisis.

Yeah. Well, you seem to be ignoring the credible threat to your reputation. In fact, it's making your reputation. So you're metabolizing this kind of weird resentment and hatred that people are experiencing through fear because these are reputational attacks. In general, they're attacks that say, I'm going to make it impossible for you to earn a normal living by making an attack on your reputation, which you need to negotiate the institutional world.

Yeah, and it's like, you know, Jordan Peterson famously said, like, I've figured out a way to monetize the SJWs. And, you know, you could possibly say that about Red Scare, but it's not...

No, I think you guys are doing something much more bizarre. Yeah, yeah, I agree. It's not intended in that way. But that that was never the premise or the interest. It was kind of this earnest. It was truly kind of an earnest frustration with liberal mainstream feminism and liberalism.

I don't even know whether it's liberalism. I mean, like everything is so watered down and metastatic and bizarre. Yeah. That it's the vague whiff of the left gone mad. Yeah. Right. Like it's not liberal. It's not progressive. We don't even know what it is. It just sort of technically resides to the left. It's not conservative either. Right. No. You can't rightfully call it that. Self-hatred is obviously a very large part of it.

I think, yeah, self-hatred. I mean, this is another kind of, you know, I repeat myself loudly and often. Well done. According to the advice of my hero, Quentin Crisp, who said that that was kind of the way to make yourself memorable. And...

It the problem with the left and I'm talking about kind of primarily the online left is that these are people who are thoroughly infected with the virus of the neoliberal ethos. They're completely they play completely within the terms of the system.

And, you know, this brings to bear a very important point that I also like to repeat loudly and often by the new left critic, Christopher Lash. And I'm going to paraphrase it because I don't know it verbatim because my synapses have been zapped by being too extremely online, you know. But he said, like, hey, you know, all the kind of traditional bedrocks, all of the traditional values and institutions of society,

liberal society, we're talking about monogamy, marriage, the gender binary, any number of other kind of traditional values have already been dealt a serious blow by advanced capitalism itself long before the social justice activists got their hands on them, before they mounted a fight against them. And that's a very important point to remember.

So the way I see it, and you'll let me know if this dovetails or in fact conflicts, or maybe it's just total miss is that the family and the religion or culture provide many of the same things that the market provides, like let's say an insurance policy. All right. So for example, if you're trying to smooth your income stream over a lifetime and you have recessions,

a family might take in some members who are out of work and put them to work in portions of the family business that are still functioning or work inside the home in a way that sort of socializes some of the risk. And at the same time, you might buy some kind of a policy to try to smooth things out, you know, or you'll, you'll try to save in an institutional context.

As these things conflict, the market has denatured some of these older structures. When people talk about American families are weak, what they usually mean is, is that American markets have been regular and strong enough that people have leaned less on the pathologies of their mishpucha in order to try to get cleaner expressions within the market for, for their various needs. Like instead of having, you know, a mother, uh,

come and be with a child when a new baby is born. - To do your laundry. - What? - Yeah. - To do your laundry, yeah. - That you hire somebody to do it. And the idea is if the market is working in some sense, the family starts to fall apart because you don't need it. - Right, exactly, yeah. And you know, people are smart. They know that like seven, eight years of psychoanalysis is a very tall price to pay for having your mother come every week and do your laundry.

And they'd rather be, yeah. And there's this, you know, whole rhetoric now about a work-life balance, whatever. And I think that the market, part of the kind of psycho, let's say like the psychological anima of the market is that it provides people, yeah, with a scaffolding and infrastructure through which to relieve themselves of their family. Right. So one of the, um,

One of the things that's interesting to me is that you're coming from a background which is very familiar to me where you have a Jewish Armenian parentage and your father is a famous mathematician working in linear programming, sort of optimization science, and came up with

this amazing algorithm that changed our picture for how things could be optimized using smaller and smaller ellipsoids. Right.

And your mom, how did she figure into the story? My dad, his whole kind of level of achievement is way over my head, obviously. But my mom and my dad, I mean, they met when they were very young and they got married quite a bit later. My mom, I think, would probably be very surprised.

irate and disappointed if I described her like this because you know she's gonna listen to this. She is an artist but I, who became a housewife basically. - Okay. - And I think that she is the great genius of the family. She's the great kind of organizing and destructive force in my family. - Well that's interesting, very often

So I have to say that when we had this lunch, which you're describing as a power lunch, yet I drunk no alcohol during it. So I'm not positive that it qualified. I mean, are you supposed to drink alcohol? I don't really know. It would be my first power lunch.

Oh, right. I have to, I just, you know, a stupid, uh, girl bossy hyperbolic term. I have to, I have to drink. Okay. Well, very good. At all lunches. I didn't smoke. You didn't smoke. But I'm such a neurotic. I'm so shy. I was telling you that I can't, you know, I have to constantly occupy, uh. Is that because you're reveling in your neuroticism? No, no, no. I'm not like a Woody Allen person. I don't get off on it. Oh, you sure? It's something that I hope to shed with, uh. Okay. Uh.

the kind of accumulation of experience, like habituation. Okay. Yeah, that's not something I think you should look up to in yourself. I don't know. But yeah, I think that my mom is kind of like a bizarre, freewheeling artistic genius, a true eccentric. And I think that I derive a lot of my personality and my tendency toward critique from her.

I mean, she's always spinning paranoid polemics about the world. It's really quite impressive and she's right most of the time. I think it's very strange that, I mean, this really actually echoes your earlier point that we tend to see accomplishment only if it shows up in the workplace. And for a lot of us coming from kind of ethnic families, for lack of a better word,

very often people who were inside the home were well known to be the local genius and the eccentric or the life or the whatever. It was not clear in any way that if you were the schmata salesman, that that was really the higher expression of the two people in a marriage. And it happens that your father did something very creative in a very analytic context. It's hardly surprising. Like there's nothing at all surprising to me.

That your mom might mostly be at home with the family and be the major force of the family. Yeah. And I think like, you know, my dad probably gets all the credit for being kind of the genius. My haters like to point out that I'm coasting off of my father's accomplishments. Yeah.

which is not true because I'm actually way more famous than him on Reddit. So there, Dan. Yeah, there you go. He would be so... I'm here to disgrace my family name. But basically, I think that

It's a very interesting, this kind of old breakdown of my parents' marriage is a very instructive example of the way that women wield unofficial power through the domestic sphere. Again, it's like unofficial. The language is even wrong to me. It's like, in what world do we not...

I guess the idea is that it's official if it shows up in Wikipedia and it's unofficial if it only shows up in family lore. I think it's official if you're getting officially compensated for it, right? Well, this is the issue of kin work that I would bring up, which is that I think that a lot of the wage gap work is extremely weak and manipulative. But I think it's also the case that the real wage gap is that you have to figure out how to compensate for

for kin work, you know, taking care of, of elders, relatives or young children. And that you can arguably say that women should be paid more on average because that is uncompensated work and it has to show up somewhere. And sometimes it would show up in like prestige. The matriarch of a, of a, of a large family is kind of an impressive position to hold. And that with smaller families, it's no longer so cool to be grandma. Yeah.

Sure. And I think that there's a general disrespect for the institution of motherhood. Let's talk about that. What the hell is that? In the culture at large, particularly on the left. So that this is something which I totally resonate with. Like, when did the left go and they're going to claim, oh, we're not anti-family, but there is some weird anti-family thing.

I think that that's absolutely a kind of collective defense mechanism because we're talking about people much like myself who are millennials in their late 20s, early 30s. You know, my father always used to say like, well, Anna, you can't really ascend in class.

you know, contrary to the myth of the American dream, but you can't really fall in class either. And now we're faced with a generation that's quite a bit like the last generation in Russia, my father's generation, all of whom who drank themselves to death by the age of, you know, 52. Um,

Which is this millennial generation of people like myself. Your dad was two years younger than I am now when he died of a heart attack. Yes, yeah. And you know, he died in the United States, but I think that he is part of the same generational trend. What year was that? In 2005.

But there are a lot of people my age who are male and female who are confronting for the first time the reality that they will actually fall in class, especially relative to their parents.

They will never own property. They will never pay off their student debt. They will never have a safe and dependable health care situation. They will never be able to afford children. And I think the kind of broadly antinatalist trend on the left is a psychological defense mechanism because you have to reframe, I think in the neoliberal framework, you have to reframe all adversity as opportunity.

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what they're saying to themselves. I don't have to be burdened by babies. My breasts will be undeformed by breastfeeding. Yes. I'm a girl boss. I don't need a man. I'm an independent, strong, independent woman. So they've had to kind of recalibrate. By the way, this will work out for a minority of the people who claim this to be true. It's not BS. What's BS is how broadly they,

this plan is likely to work. Yeah, how applicable it is across. I mean, I started noticing, I actually got a lot of flack for this and I still don't know why, I started noticing in the pop lyrics of the last two decades or so, kind of minute shift. You can go back as far as actually the 1960s. I remember this interview with Amy Winehouse where she's like, you know, I much more prefer, I gravitate toward the music of the 60s

the 50s, 60s, whatever, as opposed to the music of the 2000s, because in the kind of female vocalists of the 60s, they expressed kind of a longing, a yearning for companionship and love, a desire to subordinate themselves to the will of others or something greater than themselves. Let's put it that way, that feminists have interpreted as a fundamentally kind of misogynistic or sexist outlook. Yeah.

Whereas now, you know, with the coming of somebody like Beyonce, you have these lyrics that literally are like, I don't need you. I don't need a man. All men are trash. I'm going to keep stacking my bills. And it's this form of feminism that I find to be very callous and cretinous and ultimately counterproductive. I mean, let's take what you just said. It was actually weirdly...

on both sides of the gender aisle. For example, let's say John Denver, when he sings about, you know, it's a kiss me and smile for me. Tell me that you'll wait for me. He talks about, um, when I come back, uh, I'll bring your wedding ring. Like he's excited about the fact that he's screwed up in this relationship. He says, I've played around. And then he says, uh,

But I realize how important this is and I'm gonna make it right. And I'm excited about becoming betrothed to you. - Right, I'm gonna make amends. - Well, not only make amends, like when Beyonce, I mean, just to connect these two data points, she's saying, if you like it, you should put a ring on it. That's really what she wanted.

But like you didn't exercise your options, very transactional. So now I'm up in the club getting jiggy with this other guy. You shouldn't be upset. Yeah, yeah, sure. It is a very kind of transactional ethos that permeates all. There is this like kind of stupid trend on Twitter where people, that people were mocking because other people were tweeting out kind of empathy templates online.

So, you know, somebody texts you and they're like, hey, I'm like really going through a hard time. You know, I'm having to get getting a divorce. My mom's dying of cancer or whatever. You fire back with like, hey, I'm currently at capacity. Do you know somebody else who slash I'm going through some personal problems to slash? And it's like a kind of prefabricated template for how you should respond to a person in need.

Wow. Yeah. This is the thing. Yeah, you're so lucky. You're so lucky that all this stuff is way over your head. I have to live with this every day and it shrinks my will and libido to live. But it's like this kind of thing that is hyper transactional. All relations have become so transactional. All relationships. I mean, look, my take on this is that all relationships have

an aspect of exchange, but that what distinguishes the transactional from the rich relationship is how many layers of indirection separate the people involved from the exchange. So dinner in a movie is a lot more abstract than turning a trick on a street corner. And then you go further, you know, with courtship, it becomes incredibly abstract.

distant in terms of the number of layers. And what we don't recognize is that those layers of indirection are essential to a rich life. - Yeah, and a rich emotional life. And what we're dealing with now are people who, if they are not economically impoverished or spiritually impoverished, because they have no institutions or values on which to depend.

Okay. So this gets me back to like your crazy podcast and your persona. So first of all, I mean, you're playing with all sorts of associations and breaking them in ways that the indicia and the underlying, uh,

Like the proximate and ultimate are separated. So I normally associate vocal fry and uptalking with stupidity. Right. I don't associate it with your level of insight and commentary. Right. You guys sound stoned out of your mind. And there's a tremendous amount of vocal fry. But what it speaks to is this like crazy metacognitive distance that you and your co-host have from the topics that you're discussing. And you're sort of.

you're constantly bemused by this sort of very weird period of the human condition. Is that wrong? Um, I think bemused is a nice way of putting it. I think that we're very frustrated. What do you want?

I don't know. Like all women, we don't know what we want. No, I mean, I think I want... I think you do know what you want. I think I want... I mean, on a kind of broad social level, I think that we have to take kind of the old Nietzschean adage, God is dead, right? People always interpret that as... You know, I think people have a tendency to interpret it as God is dead and therefore we can get like...

weird septum piercings and tattoo sleeves and go fucking and sucking and polyamorous arrangements and that's not at all what he meant he meant God is dead and now it is up to secular humanity to replace the value system that was evacuated with the death of God with an equally viable one do you think that's possible no I don't know but I you know what else can we do you know Dasha always says to me like you have to stay cheerful and

In the face of adversity like the Greeks. Yeah. Well, all right. So, I mean, in part, and I don't know how long the show is going to get away with it. Yeah. But ultimately it's about for me recognizing what the religious impulse was. It was a load bearing structure of our civilization because it caused you to think.

in intergenerational terms, like in our, the shared part of our tradition, the Jewish tradition, the concept of generation to generation goes under the name Lador Vador from generation to generation. And that thing about you have to be seeing yourself, you have to subordinate and submit. And like this is against the ethos of our time, but it occurs everywhere because our soma, the parts of us that are non-reproductive,

are finite, they always die. And if you do not link yourself in a chain with others, then Rome has to be built in a day because there's nothing more. - It's over for you, Hoes, as we say. - Well, that was far more eloquent than I had said. - Yeah, but I mean, it's true and look, I mean, investing or kind of honoring posterity

is a means of investing in the future. It's a means of envisioning yourself in a greater human chain, a human centipede of drudgery and debauchery. No, but-- And what's lost now, I mean, this is like the cardinal sin, right? In kind of neoliberal discourse is subordinating your will to somebody else. It's bizarre. And to see this kind of ethos then flourish on the so-called left is profoundly dispiriting.

Well, it's such a simplistic version of empowerment. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's one of the things that I've advocated repeatedly. So in terms of, I'm going to take your adage and start repeating myself loudly and often. I keep saying that magic happens when people pass power back and forth. If you retain all your power, then you don't get to the magic of giving your power to somebody else and having them give you an equal amount back.

you know, of a different kind back. And so we never actually build those super powerful relationships. Um, when we're hoarding our power saying, I'm not going to give anything up. Um, you're interested in motherhood like for yourself, for myself, of course, but in general. Yeah. I mean, I think this is the most kind of noble, honorable institution on the planet. And it really matters. I mean, this is one of the things that, um,

A family friend is very dear to me took me aside at some point and said you want to know something magical look at your children. That's what happens when a PhD stays home to raise them. Yeah, you know and it's just like are you getting a little over clamped? That's beautiful. I get I get way too very clever on the shows. Yeah, but it's you know, my wife is out of the workforce for like 10 years or something and

And, you know, she came back, you know, with mentally guns blazing. But I think that this hatred of motherhood has to be acknowledged. First of all, it's denied. Well, we don't hate motherhood. We just think it's about choice. But you look at it, the mommies who work and the mommies who don't. One gender is built to reproduce our species. And I just, I can't stand what we've done to it.

Yeah. And there's kind of no honoring also among men or women of the gender difference, which exists. It's very real and palpable. And I think feminists have this idea that if we acknowledge that we're different, we're acknowledging that we're unequal and that's not

at all the case. We're differently equal, we're differently abled. - So this is the weird thing. If you try to make this argument at the level of like racial groups or geographically separated groups, there really isn't a great way of saying that there should be equality because there's no reason that separated groups should have variables having common means. Within a group, there actually is this weird principle of Fisher,

the biological theorist, which says that it is as good to be female as male from the perspective of the fitness of the two genders as strategy. Right. And the problem with it is that you have to, you have, what fails is what you might call, um,

the Ginger Rogers principle. So the old, as the joke goes, Ginger Rogers could do everything Fred Astaire could do, but backwards and in heels. And the feminist version of this is women are as good or better at everything men can do except peeing standing up. And that can't possibly be the case if Fisher's theory is to hold, because then women would simply be better. Yes. Unless peeing standing up was like the be all and end all, which I mean, it's pretty good, but it's not that great. Um,

- That's part of the problem, which is if you claim that you're better at something, biology tells you you have to be worse at something else. - Right, so that there's a kind of an implicit trade-off, right? Or balance, let's say. - Well then it gets to this really, like, here, let's get into trouble with psychologists and psychiatrists. - Okay.

The whole codependence concept, yes, there is something which is really dysfunctional, but a lot of interdependence is labeled as codependent. And the modern notion that you should be a completely functional person who can do everything and able to walk out on a moment's notice, that completely destroys the concept of coupling.

Yeah, I mean, I think this all goes back to the atomizing logic of the market. And my big issue, I think, my big critique, kind of the central organizing theme of my work, right, is this idea that progressive activism is now effectively marching in lockstep with the very market imperatives that they are...

opposed to on the face of things. It's maddening. - And it's so intellectually incoherent, it's kind of amazing that it's still hanging together as a pseudo-philosophy. - Yeah. - All right, so now I feel like you're revealed, you're somehow reveling on your podcast in this really dangerous kind of memes, which suggest royalty plunged into

boredom and cocaine and wanton sexuality, but in fact, underneath it, you're coming from an academic tradition and embracing very traditional values. There's no reason to leave left of center thinking because traditionally, what has the left been? It's been about empowering working families. - Right.

And that's what I'm interested in. It's funny that so many of my critics and I, if you really look at us, it's like, you know, the narcissism, the narcissism of small differences. Like we are completely indistinguishable to like an Afghani fig farmer, you know, 99% of our politics are equivalent. Are they? I'm sure. I mean, like who are you pissing off? Yeah.

I think people that kind of are self-identified as leftists, but are basically, and I say this with the most empathy possible because I understand their position, feel completely insecure and precarious in the market. They feel that they have no future. I, up until a year or two ago, felt that I have no future. It was really a toss-up. Okay, so what happened when you got a future?

I mean, I started this podcast. I know. What happened to you? Did you have a physiological change? Physiological? When I've been shit out of luck. Yeah. And then I get some luck.

I'm the chemicals that are running through my body are totally different. Yeah I mean you start to even like look more like resplendent and wonderful and whatever but you get plumage. Yeah you get plumage. I think like but this is the first time I'm 34 years old. I'm kind of like an old geezer by millennial achievement standards. You know it's like you have to be like 23 when you peak or something. And

But again, I'm merely an individual, right? And there's a whole generation of people who are like now left behind. Do you know my friend Peter Thiel at all? I mean, not personally. So he's got a great quote. I don't know whether he said it publicly, probably has. But he says things to me and I just, I kick myself for not having thought of them first. He says a boomer's golden era is in his or her 20s. A Gen Xer's in his or her 50s.

And then he looks at me and he says, and we're just getting started. It's been, it's like, I didn't get suddenly interesting like in the last few years because I ate a mushroom. Yeah.

It was, there's this thing I've called the distributed idea suppression complex or the disc. - Is this your coinage? - Yeah, I coin lots of stuff. - Yeah, you coin a lot of, yeah. - Yeah, but then the weird thing is you watch it in the world and it only works if you're coining something that people actually recognize is real. It's not like you can make up anything and it just goes. But there is this thing that tried to suppress all ideas, it's still working, like they're trying to,

make Andrew Yang not appear on MSNBC on any of the graphics or Tulsi gets, you know, dropped at every opportunity. This thing just doesn't want to hear that there's a massive intergenerational transfer where the two vampiric generations of the silence and the boomers transfuse the Xers and the millennials in order to allow them to live in the style to which they become accustomed. And like the most obvious place that you see this is the university system.

Explain that. Oh, it's a pyramid. It was a pyramid scheme that was expanding. And when, when the growth that was natural in the system ran out, the, there was no way to give people professorships who had been contributing their youth to the research of those above them. And so what the universities did, almost every top university loaded up on administrators and,

and then made tuition insanely expensive and made it impossible to get rid of the debt in bankruptcy so that you can die getting a social security check and still paying your student loans. Mm-hmm.

I'm going to do a show hopefully with Sugar Baby University, which is a program inside of Seeking Arrangement Sugar Dating, where it would appear that the appeal is that young women who are, and some men, burdened with student debt can graduate debt-free by dating older successful people and getting an allowance every month, which I think is just like...

It's weird to imagine a generation sort of selling its daughters into borderline commercial sex work. Yeah. I mean, it's monstrous. And the idea that you would institutionalize this. Well, it's like a degree. It's like the university. Why don't you get a, why don't you get a job busing tables to pay off your student loans when student,

tuition has gone, you know, above medical tuition, which is above regular, regular inflation. I mean, sorry, medical inflation is above regular inflation and tuition inflation is above medical. The whole thing is mad, but the system couldn't be kept together. Right. And so that is an intergenerational transfusing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, one of the most, one of the biggest rackets in this country after management consulting is the idea that all people should go to college. Right.

I think Germany has it right. They send most of them to vocational programs. The idea that you should even be paying, you know, $40,000 a semester in tuition to get a communications degree as a super senior for five years is preposterous. Nobody needs to be saddled. Huh? You're going to blow it for these generations. Yeah. Why? Because it's a scam, man. They turned the most amazing part of our country into this scam.

wealth transfer scam it's just it's funny but it's painful yeah i mean it and it's horrible i was thinking about you know the kind of the idea of uh are you familiar with this concept stob the russian parody stob stob we can get into this later because it's a whole don't know it's a i think that this is like to really understand the trump era for example you have to

View it through this particular line. Well, give it to me. It's a it's a late Soviet parody genre or style that involves an over-identification so extreme that it's unclear whether you're endorsing authentically endorsing a position or perpetuating an elaborate troll. Okay, so it's basically a post ironic gesture if you look at like the golden age of liberal entertainment as you know

John Stewart, The Daily Show, right? Which was kind of characterized by, this is a really long-winded digression, I didn't mean to go here. Drink up, let's do it. Yeah, I'll keep going. As characterized by, you know, this kind of snarky, implicitly morally superior, ironic posture, right? That was, I think, supplanted eventually by this kind of Stubb over-identification, right? Where

Where it's unclear for example with people like me and Dasha, it's unclear what position we're actually endorsing right and Trump for example is the master of the strategy and so he Plays so we do we both acknowledge that Trump has some crazy genius to him. I think he's a total genius All right, but I think that he's an artistic genius not a political genius. He's an artistic. I think that he's an artist He's a Gemini just like my mother. My mom hates Trump and

With like a fire because they're the same person down to the kind of miserable Conti expression. They kind of emote when they're in a irritated mood. It's really... How is that Contian? Huh? How is that Contian? Contian. Conti. Conti. Am I? Oh, okay. But I'm very gullible, which is why I'm not a troll. But you take somebody like Trump, the guy...

is so over-invested in performing his own incompetence that any parody of him by an outsider reads as cringy and over-determined, which is why SNL has sucked for the last... - But in part, you have to get something right before you can parody it, right? - Yeah. - And I don't know if you ever saw this video

I think it's called something like, because of the music in the hall of the Trumpian King. No. Okay. So it's all of these liberal comedians from this golden era that you're talking about in the most knowing and oppressive way possible saying, buddy, you're not going to win. Come on. We all know it. And,

Everyone saying like, oh, please run. Oh, it'll be so entertaining. Like there's no concept that this is real. Yes. Yeah. And every single one of those people who appeared on this, including John Oliver and Stephen Colbert, became unfunny to me in just about everything that they did after. They went so over the top. Yeah, momentarily. Yeah.

That they showed that they didn't understand. Like you can't mock this stuff. And what a betrayal, like on a Freudian level, what a collective betrayal of parental authority that was. We really believed in these guys that they could be, that they could parse like sarcasm. They believed in them. They, yeah. Because, but this is this thing I've called the gated institutional narrative. It was protected against reality. I mean, I don't know whether you,

- You have to publish like a coffee table book of your like coinages and neologisms. - I'd rather you make fun of the word Red Scare. That could actually be fun. One of the things that, and again, this shows you how twisted my soul is, but as a pastime, I sometimes watch the last days of the Ceausescus in Romania.

Because like right up until the end. Go on a porn hub and Google the execution. Right. Under Slavic milk. Yeah. It's very much.

There's a rally and somehow the rally goes out of control. And order has to be restored and the cameras have to break the filming of what's going on. And so right at the end, they've got this shrinking group of loyalists who are still terrified that these people are going to regain power because that's the way it's always been. But everywhere, the spell is broken. And I guess that's sort of what I saw is that this thing was just

It was an American version of propaganda that had been so believed that when it started not to be true, the organs just kept pumping out all of this encouragement that, you know, think Hillary is going to win. There's no question. She's inevitable. I mean, even now they're running, you know, Kamala's out. So they're really going whole hog with Buttigieg. But it's, yeah, there's a certain, there's a certain lag between the progressive and, and,

Trumpian and between kind of like traditional Democrats and conservatives and the Trump administration. And I think like Trump uniquely among conservatives,

world leaders possibly in the history of the world has been able to do this thing. I mean, I wrote a whole essay about it. He was able to do what the Russian avant-garde and the socialist realists had been trying to do, these two kind of

sequential propaganda like arms of the culture industry in the Soviet Union which was maintain which is achieve a total synthesis of the material and the imaginable or the imaginative what you know sounds really good slow it down give it to me I mean what you know it's kind of like the typical like Soviet avant-garde idea that we were creating a total synthesis of art in life like a single kind of

art political project and trump alone has been able to do this though crucially under a very capitalist not communist regime he's been able to marry um what we can imagine like what we imagine and what is materially possible yeah he's been very ineffective in bringing in uh an entire

Like there is no theory of Trump because almost no one either on his side or on the opposition side actually understands how much method he brings and it's cryptic. So it looks, you know, it's a lot of indirection. He understands indirection. He does, but he's got these formulas that I, I can't,

tell you how bizarre it is. I mean, you probably know my friend Sam Harris who was sitting here and we were having this argument, uh, friendly, but an argument nonetheless. I'm going to rub the seat for good luck. A lot of weird stuff has happened in that chair. Um,

Has Joe Rogan ever sat in this seat? Not yet. I have a crush on Joe Rogan. I know he's married, but I think everyone. Yeah, everybody does. Yeah. I think that he really could be the guy who could run and win against Trump. He does not want me to talk about this. Okay. Okay. You can edit it out. Well, no, because he's not, he's got a great life. Yeah. And the fact that everybody loves him causes people to sort of do weird things in his presence. He just wants to be a regular guy. He's also,

- You know, and I don't mind saying this behind his-- - Average Joe. - That he is not. I mean, he's running an incredible operation. But whatever it is, there's a lot of method there. 'Cause if you think about how difficult it is to turn these shows out and to keep them fresh, it's almost impossible. So there's a ton of genius going on in Joe's front. He has not come yet, but we agreed to do each other's podcasts.

What Sam did was to say that he, Sam thought that Trump was the evil Chauncey Gardner, that that was his theory of mind. And I thought that is insane. I mean, it's not that Sam and I tried to have it out. We can't see each other's point. I'm not saying that Sam is wrong, but I see so much method to Trump's trolling.

And he doesn't, he thinks that this is all kind of like, well, I think what he does, you know, another thing I say is, is that Sam is more focused on honesty and I'm more focused on meta honesty. Trump is not an honest person, but in a weird way he is meta honest. Right. So he's right when he says he's an honest, honest person. He is. Yeah. Yeah. So, but what we care about is that like, for example, Trump knows that,

the liberal mind is automated. And as soon as you break through one of its shibboleths, it has an automated non-thinking reflexive reaction. And he can map that

And then you can say, okay, I'll do something that will cause the reflexive reaction, but I will put something in place, which is totally different so that when you have that reflexive reaction, you will be shown to be a non an NPC. Well, what's the, am I, am I allowed to look at my phone? There was that hilarious tweet. I will stall for you. No, that's okay. I don't even have to, but the, I have to look at my phone every 10 minutes or else I die. Um, there's,

that tweet that he had today about Greta Thunberg and how she needs to get her like anger issues under control. Hilarious. It's so wrong, but it's so, I mean, the man has like the Midas touch when it comes to Twitter. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about that tweet. So, so Greta is this, uh, self-described autistic girl who's mad as hell about climate and who is being, um, even if she has authenticity to her, there's an entirely inauthentic,

complex that has settled her on her, wants to use her the way the World Wildlife Federation used the panda bear as charismatic megafauna. So in some sense, Greta, the actual human is also the charismatic megafauna of a propaganda campaign, which is lying in order to probably tell the truth. So you've got this real climate emergency. Yes.

you should be able to do a truthful campaign, but that can't work. So you have to do a lying campaign and you use an actual human being as your mascot. So it's like layers and layers of confusion. And the idea of course, is that you can't attack an autistic child, particularly a female one,

And because she's angry. And so Trump's Trump sees opportunity. Yes. And he's going to go at the layer where he's going to say she has anger management issues. She should get it under control. Go to an old fashioned movie with friends. And then he uses chill, Greta, chill. Yeah. Where chill is both an admonition.

in terms of chill out, but also a reference to global cooling. Right. Yeah. And, you know, and also keep in mind all of this, um,

just days after on the heels of the Pamela Carlin remark about Barron Trump that prompted Melania to tweet in her little baby daddy voice, do not talk to my minor son that way. You know, I love when I read everything in her like sexy baby voice. Yeah. And,

So, okay. So by the way, I'm so jealous because I can't say anything like that because you have the XX going. Yeah. You can get away with murder. Yeah. The XX and like advanced, uh, what's it called? Like wet brain from my years of being a Russian alcoholic, but it's, you know, okay. So this woman who's a, like a state witness for the impeachment proceedings insult ostensibly insults Trump's kid. And that's not kosher, but she's,

He can insult a 16-year-old climate change activist. This is this whole thing. So if you look at how complex this troll is, he is appealing to all of the people who see the manipulation of the real Greta for this fake campaign, which in my opinion is actually...

crowding out the real campaign that should be there because climate is an issue, but it's misportrayed because it has to be done in a simplistic fashion. You've got like millions of layers there and Trump is finding his support in the people who see through part of it. Yes. Okay. The other thing is, is that he does have this thing where he knows that because his own child has been brought in as a combatant, that he should be allowed to do something like this.

You should be able to use somebody else's child as a human shield. Well, particularly one that is being pushed forward by time as person of the year. Yes. So. Oh God, are we there? Yeah, we're there. Okay. That happened, didn't it? Oh, I thought Lizzo was the person of the year. I thought it was Greta. Oh, I don't know. They should just mud wrestle and get it over with. Um, anyway, go ahead. Okay. So in any event, um,

That was a perfect version of this isn't Trump the child. This is Trump the master strategist. It's a trap. Because the liberal or left of center mind just says, whoa, Trump attacked an autistic girl. And if that was the simplicity of it, they'd be right. And it's in no way, shape or form the simplicity of it. Right, right. But he's really kind of a genius at doing that. And it's so sad that he, there is no,

Avant-garde art. It's I mean I said this on my podcast avant-garde art today is the sum of the Trump PR teams social media output and Coupled with the kind of unintentional comic fallout of woke ad campaigns. Well, for example, you use the word retarded Yes, if I were to say I I'm really offended. I have a developmentally challenged relative you might respond

Oh, I don't think retarded people are retarded. Yeah. Right. And they wouldn't understand that it's a comment on an overloaded term. Right. Well, it's a, it's a commentary. It's a critique. It's a mockery of, of people who disingenuously oppose the use of the word. It's not actually a commentary or a mockery of actually. But you can see that there was a reason. I mean, as somebody who, uh,

I'm developmentally struggled in school. I have a certain, Oh, we're talking. I was like, are you talking about you or me? Me? You don't know me. You can't judge me anyway. Go on. Well, as somebody who struggled in school, I'm, I, I have some sensitivity around, okay. Like being, you know, having somebody say like, if they see my handwriting, people say like,

Are you an axe murderer? Yeah. What's your handwriting? It doesn't look like anything. Okay. It looks like Jackson Pollock. It looks like prisoner scrolls. Yeah. I love that Trump's handwriting, by the way, is very bubbly and girlish. You can almost see him drawing a heart above the eye like they did in high school. Yeah. And it's very angular and swoopy. Yeah. But...

Can see how it started. Mm-hmm, but then it became like the language police and it's completely out of control Yeah, I mean look and I object to being I resent being policed by people who were guilty of the same crimes You know just right 18 months ago or whatever. Yeah I resent in general not people but how The culture the system or whatever you want to call it. Um

has become so callous, so transactional, so interested in meeting out kind of punitive justice and so incapable of giving people the benefit of the doubt. There's no largesse of spirit. Nobody believes that anybody does anything out of humor or jouissance anymore. Well, because in many ways it's become like a scavenger hunt where you have to collect

Do you have the head of a racist? Do you have the head of a misogynist? Do you have the head of a, yeah, an anti-Semite. And so you're, you know, and then you get bingo if you, if you call out all of these people. So partially it's a reward structure. I think one of the ways which was called out and I hate that term, but there you are, um, really well by Joe is that he had a, um,

I watched him work up a routine over several nights on wrestling is gay. And he starts off with wrestling is really gay. And because gay is an epithet in some cases, people made the association, okay, wrestling is stupid. That's not what he said.

He says wrestling is gay. So they take the bait. This is very Trumpian, but this is Joe doing it as a comic. And he says, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You just completed that in your mind. I didn't say what you think I said. And then now you're in the pitcher plant or the Venus fly trap is closed.

And he says, let's think about this. You got two guys in gold shorts with lace up booties rolling around. - Robbing each other's bodies together. - Yeah. If this isn't gay, what is? Well, when he starts doing it that way, you realize that you took the bait. You had an automated reaction as opposed to a thoughtful one. And that shows off the comic skill

by laying the trap i mean you saw another one of these with dave chappelle where he says i'm going to do an impression of the audience and the audience is insufferable you know he says i'm going to do an impression i'm going to ruin your life and i'm going to make it impossible for you to earn a living and like people thought it was trump and he says no it's you so the fourth wall is broken the finger is pointed um yeah i mean look and that's on some level i feel like i shouldn't

be fully confessional because that'll take away some of the allure and the mystique but this is what I do with my Twitter I set things up in such a way that people always inevitably take the bait and it's not because I like to those people don't watch this program don't worry yeah that they don't yeah and this is true and the thing that that's so kind of it's eternally amusing and yet disheartening

My only goal now that I'm like a glass of red deep is to get people to think and to draw their own conclusions.

And when, but when they do think this is why, you know, democracy on some level isn't possible when they do. Um, now we're getting into the ASMR portion. This now, this sounds like my podcast where like pouring, popping bottles, pouring wine. I'm going to light up in the studio. Just kidding. Um, but when people do kind of get their little engines a turning, they always somehow, or the people that I'm used to dealing with at any rate, always somehow, um,

draw the worst possible least mutually flattering conclusion that speaks volumes about where the culture at large is at. - But when you look at yourself metacognitively, like I have this thing that I call the robot, which is the thing that I observe making these automated decisions. And then I have another thing I call the metacognitive perch, where I watch my robotic self and I'm just horrified by what decisions it makes, how it conducts itself.

I see you as having this distance as an intrinsic part of your personality. And the person I'm talking to is really sitting on the metacognitive perch. Yeah. I mean, but this is the, the kind of, um, uh, blessing and burden of being a dysfunctional traumatized Russian person. Um,

It sucks being Russian. What are you talking about? No, you see the chessboard. Yeah. Which is a, it's more of a burden than it is a blessing because you, it makes life very difficult to live. Say more. You know, I sympathize with people like Brad Easton Ellis and Michelle Welbeck, who are my two favorite novelists. People will laugh because I'm not reading like Flaubert or Balzac, but, um,

Because they have this metacognitive perch. Their books are about metacommentary. It's social commentary disguised as fiction, which to me is kind of the most elite form of writing. Well, Brett, you know, so Brett sat in your chair and we talked about this issue that I had accused him of privatizing our mutual childhood since we came from the same milieu. Okay. And

he talked about the importance of the narrator, I guess clay in less than zero who's detached from the horrors of what he's seeing. He's weirdly drawn just the way we are to look at an auto accident, but he's also just clinically kind of detailing, well, this is what happened. And you know, somehow I brought up Joan Didion in that session and she's like,

and he confessed that this was his favorite author. And I think about her detachment where she was watching the sort of 60s debauchery and he was watching the 70s debauchery. And just the sense of having a traditional sensibility, viewing the destruction of traditional, like you can see that this is a very long story.

unraveling of the fabric of society yeah and that's I mean that's my beef with all these critiques of well back right the primary one being that he's kind of a nihilist and and misogynist and in my mind especially with this new book serotonin which I don't know if you've read but if you haven't you should read it it's the you know a giant eulogy for the decline of

Western civilization and the moral failure of liberal consensus But the main question the kind of principle organizing theme of his work in my mind has always been is love possible under advanced capitalism What kind of nihilist is that that concerns himself with a question as meaningful and significant as the possibility the question of love? Why do you think that comes up? What?

In order for that book to be interesting, that question has to be interesting. What makes that question interesting? Whether love is possible under advanced capitalism? If I said, is transportation by automobile possible under advanced capitalism? It wouldn't be an interesting question. So why is it even a question, is love possible? Because I think a vast kind of significant...

majority of people, at least people who are kind of in, kind of inoculated into some sort of intellectual society or professional society, professional class, believe that it's not or suspect that it's not. Well, but what is it? For example, if I were to ask you, go ahead. No, I suspect that they actually want it to be true and

that love is not possible under advanced capitalism because then that offloads their own say in the matter, their own responsibility to the system or whatever. If I asked, are novels possible to read? Like are great novels possible to read in the age of Twitter? Sure. Yeah. They're possible to read. I don't know that they're possible to write. Or to feel. I'm not positive that they are. Many of us have noticed that.

a bizarre inability to plunge into a book. We think of ourselves as book people. Right. But we don't, we feel that our brains have been rewired much the way porn has changed the way in which we find our lovers. I think that Twitter has changed the way we find our novels. Right. On some level. Yeah. I mean, there's no,

There's no longer a need or I don't know about a desire, but there's no longer kind of a necessity for a long for a work of art that has a long form expository narrative structure. I totally disagree. You think that I mean, I think most people don't sense that. Television got so weirdly good at it. Nobody was expecting that.

But TV came out of nowhere. Modern TV has longer narrative arcs than any movie. Yes, because the movie industry was completely eroded, right? Because the Sopranos and Mad Men and all that figured out something we didn't understand. Yeah, but I think TV is also like watching is meaningfully different from reading. Well, I guess what I'm trying to say is that

If you think about this from an evolutionary perspective, there's kind of an adaptive landscape for various forms of mimetic dissemination of story narrative information. And some of them have gotten terrible. But like if you looked at 1970s television, I went back to look at The Love Boat from my youth.

It's unwatchable. Right. I can imagine. But Game of Thrones is weirdly, strangely compelling. Yes, it is. Yeah. And the way in which movies like there was just this transfer of wealth from cinema into the idiot box. And that's fascinating because everything else tells us or long form podcasting is a very strange parallel structure.

Where are attention spans getting really long? They're getting long somewhere. Somewhere, yeah. It's being transferred. I mean, you know, I had this thought earlier today in my hungover state where it dawned on me that

I had a little bit of a kind of like a feminine imposter syndrome moment. And I was like, this is ridiculous that I'm like going on this guy's podcast. I'm some hostess from Bushwick, you know? And then I thought, yeah. And I was like, you know, that's a retarded, it's gay, whatever. It's all this kind of bevy of ridiculous words. It's a completely, by the way, to all the advertisers who just left the program, it's been a great run. Yeah. Um, but, uh, then I think about it and I, uh,

see that with podcasting there is the possibility of a revival of the era of the public intellectual, which is something that people crave also. Like the new class, undignified as it sounds, the new class of like podcasting personas are possibly, will possibly be able to revive something like that image or social role, which is important, I think. Yeah.

Well, I think you could also look at this a little bit like William Tell or, you know, Philip Petit walking the tightrope between the Twin Towers. Part of what makes long form podcasting exciting is the idea that we could screw up at any moment and destroy our names and reputations. And I think that that... Should I do it for you now? I can. Well, you started. Yeah. I'm a little wind up now. Is that right? Yeah, yeah. That...

Well, but you see, you're a vice signaler. Uh-huh. You said this to me during our power lunch. You have to re... I say this to the audience with no hint of sarcasm. I really like when men mansplain things to me. I think that it's fun and cool. So vice signaling, I think more people are talking about it now, but I originally...

Started talking about it because it came out of the theory for me of contract bridge where you have to say what it is you're going to do and then you're judged by whether or not you accomplished that which you said you were going to do. So what I view modern society as being is a game in which you're fitted with a white suit that you did not ask for. And then the key question is,

Do you keep it clean or does it become soiled? Right. Okay. Well, my first belief is you're crazy to accept a white suit because that's not going to work out. Right. So I picked Dan Bilzerian as my example. Right. And your fellow Armenian. Another fellow Armenian. Yeah. So his thing is guns, drugs, an automatic weapon. And that's. Don't forget. And money. Don't forget the hose.

- Sorry, sorry, guns. It's the wine. Girls, guns, and drugs, and money. Those are his four big things. You can't embarrass him

by saying, Hey, you just took a bunch of chicks out into the desert and gave them automatic weapons after you coped them up. Yeah. Or gave them weed because like, yes, that's my business model. And as a result, there's no industry trying to take down Dan Bilzerian. Right. I mean, I mean, I think I said this too. I don't remember because I was wind up then too. Um, I,

I said, you know, it's the same thing with somebody like Howard Stern or Donald Trump. They never promised to respect women, so they can't get taken down for not respecting women. Meanwhile, all these guys who are playing like the virtue game get at least they at least get their reputation. The two cases that you talked about, Howard Stern's original reputation.

gambit was that he wanted to be lashed to the mast and be surrounded by TNA and just as much cleavage as was possible. And then he would do nothing. And so that was his, that was his game was that he was Ulysses. And so it was a promise and he was married throughout. And then his wife would call up while he was surrounded by temptation. In the case of Bilzerian, he's got a different promise. The promise is that,

I will not lie to you and you will not lie to me. I'm not telling you that you have to be monogamous with me. I'm not telling you any one of a number of things. I will be straight with you. You will be straight with me. And if we can't have honesty, then you have to leave. Okay. So those are incredibly weird gambits. You have to give both of these men their due. They're very unusual. Right.

Or socially engineering something. Well, my favorite Dan Bilzerian post on Instagram is he's there, I think, with no shirt because he's also kind of a confection. He serves himself up as he self-objectifies. Yeah. And he's reaching out to this woman who's more clothed than he is to come up a step somewhere in Greece. And the caption is.

Come with me. I'll ruin your life, but you'll have fun. Right. And like, I really think that's his proposition. Yeah. I really have to hand it to Armenian men because they alone among men are just as vain as women. Are they? Yeah. They really like to objectify themselves. Well, but you see, in my opinion, women are really,

the males of the human species because as the adorned gender, no, no, no, take it seriously. - You are now echoing a thesis proposed by this woman, Andrea Long True, who's like a transgender writer.

who was also echoing Valerie Solanas, who has the same hypothesis. It's interesting to hear Eric Weinstein. You say Weinstein. Weinstein. Weinstein. I think the power move, the power move, Eric, if I may say so, is to have Harvey in this chair. No. No, you can't. No. Well, no. I mean, there are people who've been canceled who I'm interested in. Right.

And there are people who have been canceled that I'm perfectly happy that they are canceled. Yeah. And this is part of the part of my problem, which is that, well, I mean, this is a difference between us. Yeah. Which is the way I view it is, is that you have accepted the game, but you're going to behave really badly within it. Right. I haven't accepted the game. I've rejected the game. Okay. And I understand the motivations for how this woke stuff got started. Mm-hmm.

and I'm sympathetic with them to a point, and I'm completely unsympathetic with how non-self-reflective and shallow and mean-spirited it is while pretending that it cares. And I'm gonna carry that tension. So you and I are on slightly different missions. - Yeah, yeah. You're gonna carry the tension of-- - I'm okay being earnest. Like my answer to your Nietzsche point is around you. So for example, you know,

This is a three-dimensional projection of a four-dimensional convex polytope. Okay. And I find it transcendent. So I'm holding up...

What is this 120 cell which is the name of the convex polytope which is a generalization of the dodecahedron to four dimensional space? Mm-hmm, and you have one over there. That's yes. I do the 24 so it's Which is the unique one that doesn't correspond to one of the platonic solids, right? I look at that one by you And I just marvel at it and I think about it the way people think about like seraphim. Yeah, I

It's like, I don't have religion in my life at the same level that my ancestors did. Right. But you have some... But I have...

I have the wonder of mathematics and physics and biology that plugs the same religion-shaped hole in my soul. Yeah. And so that's how I've solved the Nietzsche problem. That's why I remain earnest, much to the chagrin of some of my listeners. I know, but I actually think that we're fundamentally at the end of the day on the same page about this. I think we're very close to being. And I think this is one of the reasons why I covertly brought up your father. Uh-huh. Because...

this, I think that the Jewish and the Soviet and the Armenian, you know, all of these things, these are very old traditions that feel very deeply and they were naked about caring. Right. And I guess we're actually, we're back to where we started improv baby. But the, there's this idea, I think the kind of

In America, there's this very reductive idea of like white people, right? White people, there are all these different non-white ethnicities and cultures, but white people are a singular block.

- Through the magic of this country only. - Right, but I don't know if you have the similar kind of experience. I've always felt, for example, very alienated from Nordic non-Jewish whites, right? Or just to give you an example. I don't have any beef with them, but those people are not my people on some level. - You'd think that, and then one of my largest constituencies abroad,

are Sweden and Norway. - Your demos. - Yeah. - That makes sense because they're also actually very earnest people. - And they're also weirdly having their idealism that has worked very well and is in fact, - Yes. - Trotted out by the left.

abused against them so that they are now starting to feel like WTF. Why can't we talk about some of the tensions that we're experiencing? Like there is something that it means to be Swedish or Norwegian or Icelandic. Right. And to be told, well, this, your identity is just that you're European. Right.

And even that is only like this whole question about software nationalism versus hardware nationalism. You have lots of people in the UK, for example, from South Asia who by going through the Oxbridge system sound entirely like the British upper crust. Exactly. And, and further sometimes they come from the high cast that the British favored working with in India or Pakistan. And,

Now, the idea that Enlightenment ideas or Anglo-Saxon ideas can run on any hardware, it's like boot camp where you've got an Apple machine that's running Windows. I don't really care too much about the hardware. I care a great deal about the software. And the idea that everybody of European descent or who are interested in European cultures should apologize, I'm having none of this. I mean, there's so much...

music and science and architecture and you know, all the terrible things that happened to, I will not have that watered down. That's an authentic experience. And the thing that bothers me about it is, and this is another one of my riffs, you have this problem with vanilla where vanilla has two meanings. One is boring, flavorless, bland. And the other is like the most flavorful of spices and flavors and tastes.

And somehow they're both vanilla. Well, white is the same thing. White is the most bland, boring. It's like a canvas that has been gessoed, but not painted upon. On the other hand, if you look at European culture, is there anything richer and spicier and more intricate and interesting? And somehow our minds are just bananas over these two. Yeah. I mean, it's, but it's, it's always, it's very offensively reductive and,

on a way that personally strikes me because the kind of the only thing keeping me from being, becoming like a typical Welbeckian protagonist or one of these like horrible millennial girl bosses who's fundamentally empty inside is the great deal of kind of like honor and respect that I feel for my ancestors. Yeah.

And the cultural kind of the amniotic fluid that we all came out of. Well, but it's worse. I mean, you're in a very funny position. You are culturally like your podcast is called red scare and you are culturally very Russian, Soviet, Jewish, Armenian. But if you really look at it, you can see that it's fading. Yeah. And, and,

you're not going to have grandchildren that relate to you. Yeah. And that's, that's really a terrifying thing. And it's actually a terrifying thing on two levels because right. A, you're not going to have grandchildren who relate to you on like a practicable level. Um, but B to even acknowledge that you want grandchildren to relate to you kind of flies in the face of this very leftist doxy that, um,

a culture is relevant. And it makes me think of like, you know, the idea of, um, narcissism that somebody like Lash was so kind of brilliant at identifying, diagnosing. Uh, and at the time he was writing in the sixties and seventies, uh, he built it as kind of the generational pathology of our time, the, the kind of liberated persona, uh,

But even at that time, narcissism was still at the very least a system of positive affinities. So you identified through affinity, right? Originally, maybe you identified with your ethnicity or your religion. And then later you came to identify with your lifestyle markers. You know, you did yoga or composting.

recycling or whatever and gradually over time that's yielded to kind of a negative narcissism where people at large identify with their oppression and their adversity. But Russians identify with their oppression and their adversity in a very strong way that doesn't look anything like what we're doing in the US. Okay, see I've never heard this one before. Oh really? Yeah. I just thought we were kind of miserable melancholic people.

I think there's a general kind of, you know, Anna Pavlova, the great Russian ballerina, said that the Russian soul is marked by melancholy. Yeah. Yeah. I think that it's... Well, you know, the... It's very interesting. When I had Garry Kasparov on the program, he...

There were some very odd moments. So I tried to do an intro in Russian where I said that he was unclear if it was Garry Kasparov or Garry Weinstein because that was his first name. And he immediately just didn't bite on it. Yeah. I'm jealous that you didn't do the Russian language intro for me. Really? One of my chopped liver. Just kidding. No, go on. Okay. Well, I felt that in order to...

Well, I mean, actually didn't even talk about it. Almost no one reacted to it. One of my hopes was for the program was to start personalizing it to all of the cultures that I care the most about. And so I did this thing about, um,

because in the Moscow subways and the subways of other cities, there's this thing which says, you know, warning doors are closing. The next stop. Yeah. You know, like that, that thing, I always thought it'd be cool that the portal was like the Moscow doors, uh, opening and closing. And he just didn't react at all to it. The one weird thing where there was like a shiver of recognition, uh,

was I talked about the Russian satirical magazine, Crocodile, and how dissent and irreverence existed within the Soviet Union.

But in this very specified way so that there was a valve to let things to let off steam. And it wasn't the American picture where nobody could say anything at any time because that would never work. The Russian system was much more sophisticated. Right. And that was the one moment at which he sort of gave me a little bit of a nod like, wow, you really know your stuff. And the thing is, it's very hard for an American to.

Connect to the broad Slavic soul. Yeah. And for us to connect to the broad American soul, um, I think I said this to you, you know, the kind of idea that Russians are basically optimists masquerading as cynics and Americans are cynics masquerading as optimists. I mean, that's like broadly on some level, like stereotypically true. Um, and I also remember saying that, uh,

Russians, unlike Americans, you know, if you have a classroom of American kids and you ask them like who's done X or who is Y, the hands shoot up because in America it's much less dangerous historically to identify yourself. And Russians are in the business of indirection, misdirection, non-identification. Yeah.

Because it was at some point a political problem that had material real world consequences, but has been handed down to successive generations as a behavioral quirk that's actually really problematic if you're trying to have a romantic relationship with an American man, for example. But yeah, we're very...

Weird damaged people. I mean I said this I tweeted about this that conversation with Kasparov was really weird because it was like an insight into all of my Communication impasses with American people say more about that Well in to the degree that I don't like to disclose or identify myself, right? I like to misdirect by saying a great deal of stuff that seems kind of superficially very confessional and personal but actually nobody knows anything about me and

People know a lot more about you than you think they know about you. Yeah, but only through kind of nonverbal or subconscious means. I think that's right. Yeah, not through anything that exists on the verbal register. Well, but I think that, you know, I don't know how many podcasts you've done like this. Probably none. Probably none. And I do think that you're going to find that your mystique...

with your revelation. They're not as rivalrous as you might imagine. Yeah, that's possibly a good point. But I think like... But what did you hear in the cast? So you listened to that podcast. Yeah. We famously tried to talk over each other. He's very forceful. Right. I would like to think that I've been far less forceful with you than I was with him. Yeah, but I'm also easier to get along with.

- Well, I view you as potentially more dangerous. - Yeah, but that's only because I'm a woman. Kasparov and I have the same ethnic breakdown basically, which in Russia is called Grimuchesmes. - Grimuchesmes. - Like explosive mixture. So it's like-- - A binary weapon that when combined-- - It's like dynamite. Kind of like when Armenians and Jews join forces in a single person, it's basically an incredibly difficult combative weapon.

categorical personality. And I think that's probably what he, he is. I mean, I don't know a ton about him, but I'm kind of obviously interested because he's cheated of his meaning because there's something about the fact that Putin to him is this unrecognized master menace that we're running a clown show. Well, the fate of the world spins out of control. He has very much of a cold. I mean, I have much more of a cold war, uh,

in my mind than most of my contemporaries and certainly than my millennial audience. I can't believe that we have nuclear weapons today

That they haven't been used in a long time and that we imagine that this will go on forever. - And that they're laying kind of dormant for now. I mean, but this brings me back to the whole concept of Stoab, which dovetails very nicely with the idea of hyper-normalization, right? The documentarian Adam Curtis took the title for his famous documentary from this term, which was coined by this guy, Alexey Yurchuk.

who's an anthropology professor who did a lot of kind of research on Stjoab with this guy Dominic Boyer, a fellow anthropologist.

And I guess the basic principle of hyper normalization as I understand it in my feeble female brain is that you know there was kind of an elite guild of experts technologists financiers Politicians who kind of if not conspired and agreed to Invent kind of a fake world atop the real world that we inhabit

because the real world had grown so complicated that it was that they had to model it into you know in simplified terms it's almost like fastbender's world on a wire where you're living in like a successive nesting doll of like successive simulation yeah um

And I forgot where we were going with this. But we now live in this kind of like hyper-trophied, hyper-real reality where you said to me it's like very few people can see that they're part of the simulation. I don't know if I actually agree with that because I like to think that people are a lot smarter than we give them credit for. Well...

See, I don't think it comes down to smart. I think it comes down to our self-blinding. Yeah. And so one of the reasons I was asking you what you had heard in the Gary Kasparov podcast was I wasn't sure what happened during it.

I think that he, I mean, I don't know if you want me to psychoanalyze. This is like a very meta podcasting. We've gone pretty meta. Yeah. I think that he was deflecting your earnest attempts, uh, mutual identification, which is like the basis of all kinds of bonds. Right. I'm so excited. Right. When I meet, um,

Kind of a fellow traveler in any capacity itself. Yeah, and I told you this during our lunch I was like, oh my god, we're like, you know relatives right? There's something very familiar. I've known you forever and I've met you twice Yeah, and there's something very familiar in meeting other people from a kind of a similar cultural background And I tend to collect them and you know, if that's racist, let me know. It's very but but

So I think the Russian tendency, which I've tried to, for example, minimize, mitigate in myself to adapt better to American society is to deflect any such attempts and to kind of not, to not give anybody an inch, to not let anybody get to know you and to stay kind of distant. Are you open to being the unreliable narrator?

I'm not sure what that question means. - Well, sometimes like, I forget, maybe if Edgar Allan Poe's Telltale Heart where you're telling a story about the self and the story reveals something to the audience, maybe Captain Quig in the Cane Mutant would be a better example.

he's talking about the strawberries and the men and really he's discussing his own paranoia in a way that's leaking out into the testimony he's giving so what i see with you is that you are russian post-soviet enough yeah but that you're very worried that it's not really a sustaining quality in this homogenizing sea like your mother you can see

There's no way she can get away from it. I have never met the woman, but I can feel her presence as being intrinsically Soviet. And your podcast is called Red Scare. But first of all, that's an invocation of like the 1950s or earlier. Yeah, and menstruation. And menstruation and the thong and there's a tramp stamp. And, you know, there's this whole aspect of...

You're worried that you can't actually keep it together. You can't hold the information back. You can't keep the identification with Eastern Europe because it's starting to fray. Yeah, on some level, but also on another level, I feel kind of like a complete dinosaur. I'm relatively young. I'm youngish, but I feel like that...

sometimes I feel kind of insane, right? Because I'm the only one who has in my circle, for example, has kind of an attachment to certain religious or ethnic cult. - I took an Ivy League admission at the University of Pennsylvania. And when everyone else went into investment banking or law or medicine, I went to math grad school like your father because there was something ancient

About and respectable about it. Well, but in the it's respectable in the sense of like yes, like a Jewish concept It was a very Jewish and self-destructive thing to do. Yeah to take this fantastic opportunity and say Okay, I'm gonna try to achieve something for all eternity that seven people are really gonna deeply understand something like that and there's an aspect to this which is This is what animates Star Wars. Mm-hmm the idea of

that Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda mysteriously survive. I mean, I'm not a fan of the Star Wars pictures that are supposed to come chronologically early, but there is one scene which is precious to me where the Emperor says, "Execute Order 66," and all the Jedi are killed except two, one of which lives by accident, that's Obi-Wan Kenobi,

And Yoda intuits, ah, shit, you know, this is the genocide and I'm going to be all that's left. So you are that thing that carries the seat. Yeah. That's a huge responsibility. That's why you have a podcast. But it's also the case that you're corroding in this extremely, uh,

alkaline environment. - That's like really beautiful and poetic and also a horrifying reality to ponder. But yeah, it's true. - First of all, it's a gift to a Russian. If I gave you a horrifying, tragic mission. - Yeah, we'll eat it right up, yeah.

But look, I remember, uh, Camille Paglia, I think I'm supposed to say Paglia really kind of re, um, changed my thinking on, on the Star Wars franchise, which I've always thought to be kind of like the nail in the coffin of the golden age of American cinema. Uh, say more. I really want to hear this. Uh, you know, it was kind of like, uh, it really opened the door. It paved the way for these mega franchises, the, the marvelization, the Disneyfication of

of film. And her feeling about it was that it was a kind of epic, eternal legend saga story that was fulfilled or produced by means of the most cutting edge technology and that this is where art resides now in kind of the technological capacity of the Hollywood industry. Because transcendence is difficult to manufacture. And when you first see what a technology can do,

The matrix would be an excellent other example to discuss. In that case, and I'm very partial to giving this example, there were multiple innovations. There was the wire work. There was bullet time with using still and moving elements.

camera images and interplaying between them. And then there was CGI. And so the mind was never sure what it was seeing. Right. And so you, you devote extra cognitive resources to the legend and, and archetype that's being explored when you're opened by transcendence. And that's why we litter the set, for example, with Klein bottles often because, you know, to have, to have a glassware from the fourth dimension, um,

that defies the laws of inside and out, opens people up to, well, what are these people going to be discussing? Is this a way out? Because I think everybody wants escape. Yes. And I think that if you go back to our Jewish tradition, the entire concept of like, what is the epic that we tell

Every year is our Star Wars. It's the Passover epic of the Jews escaping. Now is the time when we understand why we tell that story, because we need to get out of here. Yeah. I think the...

A flattering, uplifting version is escape. I think the cynical, not so flattering version is offloading your responsibility in the way that somebody like Eric Fromm described, foisting the responsibility for your life onto another. Yeah.

- Can I ask you sort of a final set of questions before I invite you back to the podcast when you're next in LA? 'Cause I hope you'll move here. - I wanna move here. It's so horrible. I'm meant to be an Armenian juice slut who hangs out at the Glendale Galleria. Not a New York girl. Anyway, go ahead. - I'm gonna pass on that one. Where are we in gender space? I have the feeling that men and women of heterosexual mindset

needed to put their own mask on before helping everybody who was trying something different. I like that. That's like the plain and out the oxygen mask. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And that at the moment we're trying to like solve 12 million things that have all been lumped under trans. And I always give the analogy that strokes occur from excessive clotting and thinning. So you can't say something about strokes in general.

Because you don't know which type of stroke. So we don't know which type of trans. But if you just say, look, okay, we've got all these things about polyamory and bisexuality, homosexuality, non-binary relations, et cetera. Very complicated. Let's assume we have the best of intentions to everybody as a soul. We are now neglecting male, female, heterosexual, procreative relationships. It's like an afterthought.

We got to do something where our concerns for all of these other variations don't obliterate the major workhorse of societal perpetuation. What are your thoughts? Well, what's the question? The thoughts are, the question is, are we getting dragged into a world in which we can't focus on the fact that the major workhorse of perpetuation is

needs its own care. Like for example, if you and I both opt in to heterosexual, heteronormative, cisgendered, et cetera, ideas, we can't really continue to focus on our subset of people because immediately the point is, well, you just excluded 12,000 other categories. Yeah.

I see you as trying to just excluded 0.01. Yeah. Well, but I see what you're, I see what you're, you're trying to do in some sense. Yeah. As reestablishing feminine mystique. Is that a fair comment? Yeah, absolutely. What do you see the role of mystique being in heterosexuality? The role of mystique? That's a good question. You see, I'm so, I'm so kind of instinctive and,

Non-intellectual on some level that I don't even think about this I think the as the app I would answer in the negative way. I think that the absence of mystique kills libidinal energy Absolutely, you can't be taken seriously as a woman if you disclose everything about yourself if you publish naked photos of yourself at all times

I mean, that's a statement of fact, not a value. - But we used to, for example, teach women to send mixed messages. And we used to teach men and women to play games. And now increasingly there's a sort of Dr. Ruthification of male-female relations, which is like people should learn how to communicate, be direct, say everything that you want. - Safe sex, affirmative consent, all these things that-- - Has anyone ever achieved enthusiastic consent?

Right. I know who like where these people like you pull out an iPad when you can I touch your breast? What's the it's it's so much we should call our lawyers immediately. Yeah And sign an NDA an NDA. It's like every time you Buddha judge has sex with his husband. He signs an NDA But it's maddening because

The whole allure of sex is precisely the unsafe, the unconsensual. I'm not talking obviously about rape or coercion, but women like mixed messages. They like giving them, they like receiving them because it's correct that they on some level don't know what they want. Not because they're stupid or weak, but because it's an evolving process.

communicative process that unfolds. Do you know me well enough to order for me? Yeah, right. Like maybe I would do a slightly better job of choosing my dish, but if you do 90% as good as I would have done ordering my dish and you can show me that you actually grasp me. Yeah, not only do you

uh, get to enjoy the benefit of having a dish that you wanted, but you get to enjoy kind of the meta benefit of knowing that your partner knows you. I got in trouble for a tweet where I said that I like when my boyfriends or order food for me. That's so hot. I know it's so hot. Well,

why would any woman not want that? Well, I think because I can answer that from the guy's perspective, we've all thought we knew somebody well enough and we ordered just exactly the wrong thing, which shows that we have no concept. We think we're on top of it. We were just not. Yeah.

Yeah, okay. There's some baked in disappointment that the potential disappointment. Well, remember the Aziz Ansari thing where he didn't understand which wine she wanted and that was cause for humiliating him. For her to write a meet-to-medium, it was a Times expose, right? Babe.net. That was Babe.net. Oh, God. But the key point would be that in order to handle certain edge cases, we deranged the general case. Mm-hmm.

you know, like the world's most predatory men have to be kept away from the world's least agentic females. So in order to handle that case, we gave nuclear weapons. I think Caitlin Flanagan had a beautiful observation. - I love Caitlin Flanagan, yeah. - I can't get over her. - Yeah, she's great. - She's great. - The one that got away anyway. - Anyway, she said something to me to the effect of what's new is that all sexuality proceeds on exclusively female terms. - Right.

The idea being that men have to be completely non-agentic because whatever the woman says happened or should happen is the law of the land. And this is precisely what women do.

want. It's almost like a prisoner's dilemma type situation where you end up with the most suboptimal outcome. Well, if you're guard against the thing that you fear the most, you'll never get the thing that you want the most. Right. Yeah. And it's a really kind of like bleak thing because no women, no heteronormative women want a man who

who lacks agency. I mean, you said this to me, women want, they don't want a guy who's an asshole. They want somebody who's credible and the easiest, shortest way to display that is by being an asshole. This is a reference to a conversation we were having in which I, I claim that many men learn a terrible lesson, which is women want you to be an asshole. And the real lesson is women do not want to be told how beautiful and brilliant and this and that they are.

Without some of that energy being spent on credibility. Yeah, without some of it accruing into reliable, dependable material action. Well, but sometimes you have to say, you look very nice. It's not my favorite dress. Yeah. And that sounds a little non-positive, but it goes a long way to saying, okay, I'm actually getting real feedback. Are you describing the art of nagging? You have to nag a little. No, I'm saying that that happens naturally. Mm-hmm.

Negging is where you actually create kind of a hole in the person's soul. No, it's exactly not negging. This is the thing. I mean, it's a beautiful example. It's a miscommunication. In the process of giving somebody, you can give somebody very positive, constructive feedback. And the slightest whisper of that wasn't exactly my favorite thing will be heard as a shout. Because that's how we human beings process criticism. And so...

you have to spend some people would much rather that you spend some of your time building credibility so that whatever you do say that's positive is actually a credible indicator of something because you know, traditionally the key question is, is very often what women are asking is, is there something you find in me that is so rare that it would outweigh my

all other temptations and can you please tell me a story in which that's true the answer is no ladies the answer is no run for the hills i'm kidding i'm just being a sarcastic little bitch but um well don't do that man why not i don't know i mean if it's your shtick but i do think that there's some aspect to this where we have to struggle with this for like you're an older millennial yeah i'm an elder millennial you're an elder millennial yeah the guys in the studio are like

Going to get snacks. They're so tired. They're like enough of this. Well, no, I'm an elder millennial. Yeah. Um, I do think that in part, you know, you probably knew more life before the apps. Yeah. That's going to be a big transitional issue. Well, it's going to be a huge issue. I don't, I mean, I don't know.

what's going to happen to the next generation after me. I'm afraid for them. I mourn for them because they have no, I mean, all social relations, it's like, you know, going back to those kind of, uh, empathy templates that I was talking about, uh, all social relations and, you know, on some level, particularly, uh, sexual relations have become very Aspergian,

they've become autistic. People can't read nuance and they are completely incapable then of the art of seduction. And so everything operates according to like templates and consent form. Phone trees. Yeah. And yeah. And it's terrifying because I think like what, it's not just women who desire credibility. What each person,

Sex desires from the other is credibility manifested in different ways. You know, like I made this joke. I started seeing a shrink recently and

You went there. I went there because I guess my Jewish side finally overwhelmed my Russian side that's like profoundly hostile and suspicious of therapy. I did it primarily to appease my boyfriend, but that's another story. And it occurred to me, it dawned on me during the process of seeing the shrink. It's like, you know,

you know the old kind of psychoanalytic concept of transference I mean everybody does right and I think transference for men is saying this was wicked what the tweet you're about to quote oh yeah you know transference for men is telling the shrink I want to fuck you transference for women is asking the shrink do you want to fuck me and semantically it's a slightly different configuration but it

Comes down to the same thing. And it's like that John Berger quote that I quote all the time ad nauseum to the point that it's become annoying and my friends won't speak to me because it's all I do is quote this quote all day. Men watch women watch themselves being watched.

That's the nature, right? The kind of old traditional basis of female or male versus female sexual arousal, right? You said this to me, which I thought was very astute. I've never heard anybody else put it this way. Yeah, we both come to some version of this independently. Of the same thing, yeah. It's men are aroused by the woman, the presence of the woman. Women are aroused by...

the kind of picture of themselves arousing the man. Or that the man in some ways metaphorically acts as a mirror. And the better the man, the better the quality and the more flattering the quality of the reflection. Right. And that's not to say that women are completely indifferent to male looks and the like, but that

To an enormous extent, we've demonized narcissism when in fact we find narcissism to be an extremely beautiful trait in a future spouse as men. And this is a very important point too because I'm very much a critic of like kind of narcissism as a generational pathology. But that's...

that I'm critical specifically of kind of the maladjusted pathological manifestations. Well, the maladaptive version. The maladaptive version. That doesn't attach properly to the partner. Yeah. Not the, not the positive kind of credible. And this was really wonderfully, you know, sometimes I feel so awful about myself because I misjudge the situation. I'm so used to like people and our, and, and,

ideas being kind of low density and low nutrition. And I'm kind of starved for simulation, stimulation in that way. And sometimes I'll read or see something that I find really remarkable. And I always have to ask myself the question like, Hey, like have my standards plummeted so much that,

Or have I grown more tolerant? Which at the end of the day is the same question. But there was a very viral short story on The New Yorker by this woman, Kristen Rupenian, also an Armenian, by the way, who was called Cat Person. And in it she describes kind of a classic Me Too type situation where a young college co-ed gets into a relationship with like a kind of

older, washed up 38-year-old guy and there's... Did you say older than 38? Well, for her because she's like 21. It's okay. I think a man... Okay, look. Don't backpedal. I'm not backpedaling. I think...

kind of the peak manhood is 35 to let's say 55 right that's a good window that's when the male race I'll give you a shovel and you can try to dig your stuff out of the hole yeah I'll dig my own grave that's what I really want I'm like you know

that guy fundamentally identify with the Russian guy in the Sopranos in the Pine Barrens episode. Oh my gosh, don't even get it. It's fantastic. But basically, Rupanian, she crafts this whole sex scene where this girl is like having sex with this guy that she finds profoundly unattractive and undesirable. But what gets her off at the end of the day is her imagining his arousal, her like nubile young body writhing

around for him uh and i thought that that was like a really brilliant glitch that was i'm shocked that like you know a liberal paper of record would publish it's very odd what gets through these things yeah i watched your description of the wasted opportunity of sexualizing stewardesses where everyone has the sense of oh my god you know pan am stewardesses in the 60s and

it's a universal kind of weird beauty norm, but there's now this very strong sense of like, and wasn't that horrible. And so the sort of the two dimensional fantasy of coffee, tea or me versus the abject horror of,

Okay. Well, you weren't allowed to compete on price because of the regulation of the airways. And so people competed on the sexualization of the flight crews. And then some of the flight crews were like actually being oppressed. And some of them were self-sexualizing like people do on Instagram because they wanted the attention and there's no language to pull these things apart. Yeah.

Well, as usual, people missed the point of that tweet, which was not about stewardesses. They made it into a labor issue because increasingly...

The culture has kind of dried up so much that people increasingly see things through the lens of politics that tweet wasn't about labor at all It was actually kind of a very rather subjective indictment of the way that American women behave relative to women elsewhere women in Italy in Thailand in Spain in Brazil in the Middle East understand

that their unofficial power is garnered through indirection, as you say. American women understand no such thing. I mean, Camille Paglia, again, has been beating this drum for decades now. So this had nothing to do with it. It wasn't like a labor... But it is and it isn't. I mean, this is the very difficult thing coming from an American context, which is that very often the cultivation of exclusively womanly power... Mm-hmm.

took place because women did not have alternate options. And sometimes we've gone too far in American culture by giving away power that is, you know, entirely functional. So we, you and I both discussed having economics and mathematics in our background, the brilliance of Sylvia Nassar's book, a beautiful mind. I did not see the film and you haven't seen the film. No, we'll get back to that in a minute. Okay. Yeah. But, but,

and then we talked about Rebecca Goldstein's the mind body problem in both of these books, you see this very strong hand of the community of wives of the mostly male mathematicians and economists directing the field who should collaborate with who, who should make up with who was having a spat, who should be hired, who should be invited to the conference. And that kind of, there's a question about,

When women stopped wanting that role in the United States context, no one took the role over. And so it was like a load-bearing role that was now vacant. There are ways in which I think it's terrible that nobody's fulfilling that role. And there's a ways in which I think it's terrible that women were expected to fulfill that role having now seen fantastic contributions in mathematics. You know, if people...

like Karen Ullenbeck or Lisa Jeffrey, that any one of a number of female mathematicians who've put structural things in our world that I can't live without. Right. And so I think that there's a, there's a really interesting and rich conversation about how much power from the old ways should be retained and how much of it should be seated so that more standard professional accomplishment can occur. And, and,

Because we're having this very simplistic conversation, we're not getting to the really rich conversation, which is what should be the renegotiation of male and female roles around. It shouldn't be that women are trying to be a substitute copy of men. Right. On the other hand, it can't really go back to.

women hold power. Well, I wouldn't say that. No, it's also the terrifying matriarch that the hell that daughters-in-law are put through in many cultures. You know, it's a very... The key issue, and I think this comes through with everything you talk about, the war that we have to wage is the war on simplistic, easy answers as opposed to nuanced richness. Yeah, and this goes back to this question of hyper-normalization where we are grafting...

Angela Nagel talks about this. Angela's a friend of mine, but I think she's also the most brilliant young intellectual around now. And she gets kind of pilloried all the time for also being a reactionary, conservative, whatever. Nagel talks about this idea that we, in her critique of The Handmaid's Tale, that we are kind of left...

fighting the simpler battles of the past that we've grafted this kind of Cold War binaristic analogy, you know, the East versus the West, conservative versus progressive or liberal, that no longer computes because we live in a bizarre nonlinear world with a kind of profusion, a superfluity of information that makes anybody's brain short-circuit.

Well, you know, this is like what our friend Amanda Fielding, the psychedelic countess who extols the virtues of psychedelic chemicals. Her point is that the default mode network is this thing that suppresses our brain from experiencing too much and that sanity and a well-functioning mind

for the most part is attached to not perceiving everything that's going on around you. Yeah. And it's selectively kind of maybe subconsciously cherry pick cherry picking things that are, you know, the, the, the quantum soup that you and I are currently swimming in can't be perceived. We need to perceive a simplified classical world in which, you know, you are a unified person rather than all sorts of subroutines running, you know, simultaneously, some of them conscious, some of them not.

And this is, I think this is the difference between on some level, again, this is all very like improv and stuff, but it all kind of goes back, like folds back on itself. The difference between Russians and Americans is that, uh,

Russians think that they're an intellectual and moral advantage because they perceive all the meta processes. They see the chessboard, but they're actually at a disadvantage fundamentally because they're kind of overly hyper. They see too much, they feel too much. They see too much, they feel too much. And they're overly, not only critical of the outside world, but they're hypercritical. And they're fundamentally a self-defeating law on that level. You know,

I have to say I have a sadness about some of your views on Russia. Oddly, and I didn't think about this, you are the third out of, I don't know, what is this, my 16th interview at this point. I don't know when you'll debut, but of a Russian background. I had Vitalik of Ethereum fame. Yeah.

gary and you this i knew i i made a quip to my boyfriend i was like you know i was like oh i'm gonna do the eric weinstein weinstein podcast and uh it's funny that he chose you know kasparov and buterin it's like a you have also some sort of like a psychic freudian compulsion to draw to

I care about meaning. To be honest, Russia and the Soviet, I mean, there are places that just are pregnant with meaning. And there's a ton that I hate about that world. And I think I talked to you about the barbell society, the lowest of the low and the highest of the high. But I chose to retain this culture. I mean, you know, it was my grandparents on one side and my great grandparents on another side.

who came over. So I'm a little bit deeper in this thing than you are because you were born there. I don't want to give it up. And I work, I work my ass off to retain it even to the point of learning a tiny bit of Russian, just to deal with Russian relatives that who were rediscovered when the Soviet Union came apart. We thought it all been wiped out in the Holocaust. You're going to have to work your ass off to keep that connection. And I intend to have many more, uh,

Russians, many South Asians, many people from very particular places. I have the utmost reverence, for example, for the UK and the genius of Spain and Italy. There are these particular places that are just incredibly pregnant.

Well, Spain and Italy, I mean, are wonderful because they're, you know, every once in a while I'll go to Italy or Spain and you'll be like at a little cafe, like an outdoor cafe, and they'll serve you, they'll give you some free shit with your coffee. They'll give you like a little biscuit or croissant. It's a really weird model because the thing that makes them economically unviable is

that makes them kind of fundamentally obsolete to the neoliberal system is also the thing that makes them morally redeemable. - But it's also an unabashed, look, Russia's a genius-based culture. - In what way? - That you revere the Lev Landau's, you revere

you know, the Rachmaninoffs. Yeah, but this is, I think that this is a thing that is dying now because the last 30 or 40, how long has it been? It's been 40 years now since the Soviet Union collapsed. Yeah.

the last 30 something years, the last several decades of privatization, I think have been much harder on the Russian psyche than the 70 odd years or so. We're all getting worse at this. Yeah. But I think that this is slowly waning. You know, Russia was, was known basically for its educational system for its athletic programs and no more. Right. Yeah. But some of these things were bizarre. Everybody's getting less genius. Yeah.

That's true and also not true. Who's getting more in a really profound way? In a profound way. I mean, that's a good question. I have to, I'll get back to you on that. I'm just saying everybody's taking a huge hit at the moment. It's like we started belching out lead exhaust from leaded gasoline. The IQ of the world functionally is,

is getting dumber and dumber and dumber. - Like since the medieval era, I mean, people frown upon the middle ages as like, you know, they're not called the dark ages for nothing, but people reached a really high pinnacle of achievement. - I mean, I listen to music from back-- - Yeah, I do too, and I don't even like music. I mean, I do, but I have like a very kind of one-dimensional hobbyist's sensibility. I'm not like a musician or composer. - Yeah.

Yeah, I think the whole, but I think this is due kind of to the proliferation of information technologies, the triumph of the internet. And you look at Me Too. Me Too is the nexus of kind of the imperatives, the market imperatives of the internet and the triumph of feminism.

It wouldn't have had feminists are very fond of saying that we live in a patriarchy. If we lived in a patriarchy, there would be no viral online movement called me to the fact is, you know, now in this day and age, women are the cultural brokers and gatekeepers, right?

And they're not doing that great of a job. I mean, I want Hedy Lamarr back. I was going to write this book about Marie Curie called Radium Slut. And it was going to be about the prohibition of her to come to Stockholm for her second Nobel because she was getting stripped by a married guy.

My favorite story in physics is Madame Wu who figured out the asymmetry of the weak force in the cobalt 60 beta decay in an electromagnetic field. I want those amazing, hot, sexy, brilliant chicks back. - Yeah, that they don't exist. That's why there's a cultural fixation on Russian women because only in Russia,

Or like in the Russian amniotic fluid, can you find a woman who has like a PhD in philology or linguistics but looks like a supermodel and is great in the sack and knows the powers of seduction? Well, this is like the super dangerous thing. There's a way of saying that's a little bit less fun than what you say. I love listening to you, but I also like not being nailed to a cross when this debuts to the audience, which is to say...

That the cultures that where women enjoy self-feminizing, but don't see this as competitive with intellectual achievement. Yes, Russia and to some extent Eastern Europe is one, but East Asia is also in this. I think those are the two big ones. Yeah.

Anna, I would love to talk to you about all manners of dangerous, disgusting, horrible, vile and illegal things. Yeah. But I hope you'll accept an invitation to come back through the portal when you're next out in L.A. And thank you for showing up and just bringing a side that maybe not everybody's seen before. That's horrifying. I'm very happy to do it. I'm happy to chat. Anyway, thank you for having me.

- Well, I'm sorry to horrify you. - No, wait, do you get a buzzer that tells you when the time? - No. - Okay. - I'm just sort of thinking that you've got this happening party to go to. - Oh, okay. - And I want to be respectful of your time because otherwise I'd completely monopolize you till the cows come home. - Yeah, yeah, no, it's fine. - Okay. - Yeah. - You've been through the portal. Anna Hatchian. - Hatchian. - Hatchian.

Please check out the Red Scare podcast. Come with an open mind and hopefully don't give her too much grief unless that's good for building her audience. With respect to the portal, please subscribe on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts and also navigate over to our YouTube channel where if you'll subscribe and click the bell, you'll be notified of any upcoming episodes. All the best. Be well.

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