[teaser] The End of History and the Last Man: Our Pessimism

July 28th, 2022  |  16 mins 13 secs

Emmet and John begin their series on Fukuyama's seminal The End of History and the Last Man. They talk through its context, Fukuyama's background, trouble some of his assumptions, and kick the tires of his liberal triumphalism in the opening 50 pages.

Episode 86: California Uber Alles ft. Robert. Bryce

July 24th, 2022  |  58 mins 50 secs

california, climate change, electricity, energy crisis, gavin newsom, homelessness, nuclear energy

6-time author and host of the Power Hungry Podcast Robert Bryce sits down with Emmet to talk about the downfall of California and its war on the poor, his time covering the Branch Davidian trials, our troubled electric grid, the balkanization of America, and more!

[teaser] The Boys Are Back In Town Bull Sesh

July 1st, 2022  |  22 mins 11 secs

We're back!

This one opens with some housekeeping, then we move on to talk about the energy crisis, regionalism, localism, PMC intermediation, American political tradition, and more!

Episode 85: School Shooters, Nihilism, and Child Sacrifice ft. Geoff Shullenberger and Default Friend

June 29th, 2022  |  1 hr 6 mins

Emmet sits Geoff Shullenberger and Default Friend to talk about their respective articles on the Uvalde shooting, school shootings in general, "zeitgeist killers," the spiritual hole in our society, and more!

[teaser] Don't Say Disney ft. Geoff Shullenberger

April 30th, 2022  |  11 mins 49 secs

chris rufo, disney, don't say gay, family, florida, ideology, lasch

Geoff came onto the pod to talk about what's going on with conservatives and Disney, though it's really a conversation about cultural power, Lasch, the family, ideology, political anemia, and more.

This will also be our last Patreon episode until July. Don't worry, we've paused your payments. You won't be getting charged.

We're going to come back in the summer with gusto.

Episode 84: Why Do Movies Suck Now? ft. Will Tavlin

March 29th, 2022  |  55 mins 11 secs

celluloid, dasha, david fincher, democracy, digital film, film, george lucas, hollywood, marvel, monopoly, movie theaters, netflix, star wars

Will Tavlin joins Emmet to talk about how the democratic promise of digital filmmaking turned into the current top-down Marvel hellscape we all live in. They talk about the insanity of the original multiplex model of screening, why digital is so hard to archive, the deadness of major blockbuster films, the importance of forming aesthetic communities to preserve cultural memory, and more!

Episode 83: The Dying Bird of Authentic Humanness ft. Default Friend

March 23rd, 2022  |  54 mins 46 secs

911, agamben, cancel culture, covid, crisis, energy crisis, gen z, phillip k dick, pkd, posthuman, science fiction, scifi, silicon valley, totalitarianism, tumblr

DF and Emmet take a look at Phillip K Dick's 1972 lecture "The Android and the Human." They dive into his idea that we can learn about our inner lives by looking at the world of machines, the integration of man and machine, empathy, rebellion, totalitarianism, and weirdly hanging out with teenage girls getting late term abortions.

Episode 82: A time to build, but what? And how? (cross-post with the Ryan Research podcast)

March 15th, 2022  |  1 hr 6 mins

america, energy politics, fracking, history, ireland, new left, nuclear, pipelines, standing rock

Recording times got bungled to do travel constraints, but here's an hour-long preview of Emmet's appearance on the Ryan Research podcast. Peter Ryan invited him on to talk about nuclear energy, why nothing feels possible, what happened to the left, financial brain poisoning, and more!

Episode 81: The Religious Cult of Fandom ft. Monia Ali

March 8th, 2022  |  1 hr 5 mins

bts, comicon, cult, cults, fandom, gilmore girls, k-pop, marketing, marvel, mcu, one direction, religion, supernatural, the cw, tumblr

Monia Ali of the Exiled Fan Substack sits down with Emmet to talk about the cultic aspects of fandom, how marketers think about hijacking our need for love, attention, and community, what the world of fandom means for our future and much, much more.

[teaser] Futures Past: On the Relation of Past and Future in Modern History p. I

March 6th, 2022  |  15 mins 36 secs

apocalypse, carl schmitt, christianity, heidegger, history, leo strauss, philosophy, politics, religion

Emmet and John began their reading of Koselleck's Futures Past. They situate his context, layout his questions and method, and then open the first essay. They discuss the transition into modernity, the nature of historical time, the waning of eschaton, the secularization of the political and thus the future, and medieval eschatological tradition, and way more.

Episode 80: Did the Industrial Revolution even happen? ft. John Constable

March 1st, 2022  |  53 mins 41 secs

climate change, economics, energy, freedom, green energy, history, industrial revolution, liberty, marx, solar, wealth, wind

Scholar John Constable joins Emmet to discuss his recent lecture given at the Mont Pelerin Society last year entitled, "Misconceptions of the 'Industrial Revolution': Prospects for Individual Liberty in the Post-Pandemic Era." They discuss the discursive fiction of the "industrial revolution" and its uses, the green energy transition's misguidedness, economics' backwardness, why energy is the key to liberty, and more!

Episode 79: What's Wrong With American Cities? ft. Xander

February 22nd, 2022  |  1 hr 4 mins

america, cars, chicago, cities, los angeles, new york, real estate density, robert moses, transit, urbanism

Xander sits down with Emmet to talk about what's going on with American cities. What happened to them? Why won't congestion die? Do we have to get in the pod and eat the bugs? What makes a city beautiful? Why is it so hard to figure out what's going on in your city? Emmet harasses Xander with these questions and more.

The True And Only Heaven 11: Right-Wing Populism and the Revolt Against Liberalism

February 20th, 2022  |  9 mins 21 secs

Emmet and John finish Lasch's book and reflect on it as a whole. They considered some Roman historians at the top, summarize this final chapter, and weigh Lasch's contribution. What does it mean for us? What has he left us to endeavor that he did or could not?

Episode 78: The Political Biography of a Zoomer ft. James Lynch

February 16th, 2022  |  1 hr 7 mins

bernie, big tech, blm, crt, culture war, dnc, gop, liberalism, new right, populism, trump, woke

James Lynch, a producer at Breaking Points and contributor to Newsweek, sat down with Emmet to talk about what it was like to politically come of age as a zoomer, the deficits and merits of left and right, what the "crisis of masculinity" really means, what to do about Big Tech, and more!

[teaser] The True and Only Heaven 10: The Politics of the Civilized Minority

February 13th, 2022  |  11 mins 5 secs

Canada Mike joins Emmet to talk about the second to last chapter of Lasch's book. They talk about how liberalism went from a political position to an alleged psychological framework and culture. And how HL Mencken was a pioneer of lectureporn.

Episode 77: When You Die Online You Die in Real Life ft. Default Friend

February 8th, 2022  |  1 hr 1 min

cyberpunk, cyberspace, digital life, history, humdog, internet, second life, slaves of gor, the sims

DF and Emmet had such a good time talking about early internet history they decided to do it again. This time, they're looking at humdog's seminal but half-forgotten essay "pandora's vox." DF and Emmet try to work through the internet as a form, it's incredible liquidity, how physical space has transubstantiated into the internet, things like the Slaves of Gor fandom as a substructure of the internet, what it means that humdog seems to have committed suicide over exactly the kind of relationship she warned about and more!