#1090 Michael Millerman On How Colleges Tried To Cancel Him

Michael Millerman is a Philosopher, the Founder of Millerman School, and Author of the book “Inside Putin’s Brain”. In this conversation, we discuss the declining state of education, what Stoicism teaches us, the importance of philosophy, being a free & critical thinker, controversial thinkers like Alexander Dugin, the new world order, and institutional collapse. ======================= Bullish is a powerful new exchange for digital assets that offers deep liquidity, automated market making, and industry-leading security. Combining the innovations of DeFi with the regulated environment of traditional finance, Bullish empowers users to trade with certainty and earn passively at scale across variable market conditions, in an environment backed by multibillion-dollar liquidity contributions from the Bullish Treasury. Visit bullish.com/pomp today to learn more. Note: Bullish is licensed by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission. Virtual assets and related products are high risk. Consult your investment advisor and trade responsibly. Bullish is available in select locations only and not to U. S persons. Visit bullish.com/legal for important information and risk warnings. ======================= The bridge between iGaming, online sports betting, and emerging technology, such as Blockchain, NFTs, fintech, GameFi, metaverse, and AI, is loud and clear. The largest global summit of this kind is heading to Malta from November 15 to 17. Over a thousand exhibitors and 25,000 industry leaders will be there, including top executives from Draft Kings, Bet365, Socios, crypto exchanges, betting software providers, operators, gaming affiliates, and more. Log on to AIBC. WORLD and SiGMA. WORLD to see all our upcoming global summits! See you in Malta, November 15 to 17 for the leading global event in Gaming & Emerging Tech! THIS IS SiGMA! ======================= Valour (formerly DeFi Technologies) represents what’s next in the digital economy -- providing simplified, trusted access to crypto, decentralized finance and Web 3.0 investment opportunities. Institutions and investors can gain diversified, secure, compliant, and easily tradable access to a diversified set of industry-leading equity products and protocols, through a single stock purchase on a regulated exchange. Currently listed on U. S. (OTC: DEFTF) and Canadian (NEO:DEFI) exchanges. For more information or to subscribe to receive company updates and financial information, visit our website at valour.com ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp ======================= Compass Mining is the world's first online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware and hosting. Compass was founded with the goal of making it easy for everyone to mine bitcoin. Visit https://compassmining.io/ to start mining bitcoin today! =======================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Michael Millerman is the founder of Millerman School. He's also the author of many books, including Inside Putin's Brain. He's a philosopher and someone who is not scared to think differently. In this conversation, we talk about the state of education, the importance of philosophy, why you should study the Stoics, how you can learn from history, why credentialism doesn't make a lot of sense, and what exactly he believes around the New World Order, institutional collapse, why he has studied people who are deemed controversial, like Alexander Dugin, and much, much more. I really enjoyed this conversation with Michael, and I hope that

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

  you guys enjoy it as well. I enjoy talking to people who are willing to think differently, think independently, and think critically. Once you get done listening to this episode, please let Michael and I know on Twitter what you thought, what you agreed with, what you disagreed with, and how we could actually make the conversation better the next time that we do it. All right, let's get into this episode with Michael. I hope that you all enjoy this one.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:33Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I'm very excited to talk to Michael here. I feel like the best place to start is just the importance of philosophy. I think a lot of people have probably heard of philosophy, maybe even taken a class in college or in high school, but they kind of threw it out. They don't pay attention to it anymore. You've spent a ton of time studying this and also understanding why maybe some of your thoughts, your ideas, have been blacklisted or kind of blackballed from kind of traditional academia. So why are you so interested in philosophy? And why do you feel like it's so important to really understand this?

• 2:06Speaker 02

  Well, people have whatever impression of philosophy they have from their first year classes, or people they know who are into philosophy. And maybe at times it can seem like hair splitting, or logical exercises that don't really matter very much. But in fact, I believe and will argue that there's a lot at stake in how we think philosophically, especially about politics. So, political philosophy is that part of philosophy that thinks about things like, what is justice? What is the best way of living together? What's the best way of life? What's the relationship between violence and power? And all of those kinds of things. So, we know that we're affected all the time by law, for the better or for the worse,

• 2:49Speaker 02

  depending on whether the laws are good or bad, by power, by domination, and these kinds of things. So, political philosophy raises those issues and gets us to think clearly about them. So, that's one thing. Another is that the classical political philosophers, they thought that philosophy as a way of life is the happiest way you can live. So, some people chase money, not that there's anything wrong with that. Some people chase honor, they want to be recognized, they want to have maybe eternal fame, you know, as a great conqueror, or as a legislator, you know, like a founding father type of status. But, the question, what is a happy life? What is happiness? Is right at the beginning of the philosophical tradition.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  So, Aristotle, Plato, they inquire into philosophy as a way of life, and argue that's where you can feel most fulfilled, and that's sort of the peak of human existence, in a way. So, when we look around at the woke state of affairs today, and at all of the craziness, if you scratch beneath the surface of that, you can find philosophical disputes about, again, who is the human being? What does it mean to live well? And what's possible politically? So, we need to think clearly. We're facing really big challenges, and we don't want to be careless in assessing them. So, a lot of people deal with that at the economic level, at the legal level, and the

• 4:14Speaker 02

  philosophical level just gives us a comprehensive overview of what the big issues are, and as I say, walks us through what the smartest people in our history have had to say about them, in a way that we can resonate with and learn from.

• 4:27Anthony Pompliano?

  As I've learned more and more about philosophy, about Stoics, and many other things that we'll just throw in the bucket of intelligent people throughout history, you learn that many of the problems we face today likely aren't as new as we'd like to think that they are. As you've looked backwards, how does it give you a better understanding of what we're actually facing today? And as you describe some of the insanity of what people are feeling in day-to-day life?

• 4:53Speaker 02

  This point you just brought up is crucial, because it can seem like we live in unprecedented times. Everything is always totally new. There's a new crisis on the horizon, or we're in the middle of one, as though nobody's ever faced anything similar. And it's reasonable why people could think that way. Like, we have all of these new technological developments and advancements. We have nations of such a huge scale, not like small ancient democracies or something. And you might just think, there's no commonality between us and somebody who lived 2,500 years ago. What could we possibly learn from Plato or Aristotle, for example? But one of the beautiful things, you don't even have to read very much. You can read the first few pages of Plato's Republic, the first little bit of Aristotle's Politics, for example, and you'll see that

• 5:38Speaker 02

  this distance in time between us now and them then just collapses. So it's not like everything is the same. But what becomes interesting is, what is constant in political and human life? Because if there are constants, then we may be able to find some guidance, some answers about our current problems when we turn to those older thinkers. Well, that's just the most rewarding thing you can do. So for me personally, it was actually pretty funny. In my first philosophy class, I hadn't had this experience yet, of collapsing the distance between us now. And my professor said something along the lines of the fact that the Romans also had graffiti in their bathroom stalls. Something like that, some

• 6:22Speaker 02

  comment. And it just clicked in my mind that the same types of people we have now, you know, this guy's gonna be a clown, this guy's an oddball, this guy's a genius, this guy's a poet, another person oriented religiously, that all of these types, they can be represented in the old accounts as well. So for me, reading Plato, reading Aristotle, reading those old philosophers...

• 6:45Speaker 02

  It also allows us to get questions clear that today are forbidden. They're off the table in some sense. So you know, and your listeners know, we live in a time where you have all kinds of enforced ideological orthodoxies. What if you want to think about the alternatives? Well, first of all, Socrates thought about some alternatives. I don't know how much people know his backstory. He raised questions about the law, about justice. He eventually was killed. Okay, he was found guilty of corrupting the youth, of not believing in the gods of the city. You could say not believing in the ruling ideology. And he was sentenced to death. So in the very life of Socrates, for example, we don't even have to go to the Stoics.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  And just studying the life of Socrates, we learn about the potential conflict eternally built in to the nature of political life versus people who try to think about it. You know, because political life demands a certain kind of obedience to authority that is incompatible with free thought. It's incompatible with philosophizing. Well, that gives rise to a genuine tension. And some people say, well, you know, just everybody should be able to think openly what they want and say openly what they want. But we learn from Plato's writings and from the life of Socrates that it's not so simple. You need law to live together in a political community.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  But law has its power as a function of our habit of obedience to it. So if you're constantly criticizing the law in public, you are removing that habit of obedience to the law. You see, and so it like the philosophers pose a threat to the political community. And vice versa, the political community poses a threat to the philosophers. The philosophers cast doubt on the orthodoxies and the political city tries to kill the free thinkers. This is a longstanding problem, you know. As relevant today as it was then.

• 8:47Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you think about the balance in what is supposed to be free democratic societies today, where free speech is not only encouraged, but it is protected? We know from the lessons of history that those who critiqued, criticized, or even just pontificated, knew an alternative ideas, they were seen as that threat, they were treated as a threat, and sometimes ended up either being jailed, killed, or other kind of atrocities. How do we see differences or similarities to those pastimes today in these free democratic, kind of free speech-driven societies that we supposedly live in?

• 9:24Speaker 02

  So, our task, in my view, is to focus in on the problem as clearly as we can. So, the problem in a sense is, everything we can think about and say, should it be aired publicly? Like, what are the costs and benefits, in some sense, of free speech? What does it mean to speak freely? Are there times where it's better just to stay silent? Because you have a truth that's dangerous? Now, today, that is considered an offensive idea, that there are some things that are true that should not necessarily be publicized. You know, because there's this notion that, oh, look, the superiors are lying to us, because they think that we're the plebs who can't handle the truth,

• 10:05Speaker 02

  and so they're concealing something from us, and if only, you know, they hadn't done that, then we could have made the decision for ourselves. That's a natural democratic sentiment. It's probably correct, so far as it goes, but the interesting cases are where, you know, there's an argument on the other side. So, I'll give you a classic example here. Again, Plato's Republic, a go-to source for these kinds of issues, and really, we're dealing right with the first part of the book. Socrates is talking to a character about, he's getting, the other character's getting old, he's about to die, Socrates is asking him, you know, what have you learned from getting old? And what are you worried about? That kind of thing. The question comes up about justice being paying back your debts to people, returning what you owe.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  So Socrates asks this character, he says, imagine your friend gave you his weapon, and now he wants it back, but he's out of his mind, and you know that if you give him his weapon, he's gonna go commit some atrocity with it. And he asks you, do you have it? Wouldn't it be just to lie to him and say that you don't? And even though it's his, it's his property, so you might say, like, according to a property rights argument, you should give it to him. Wouldn't it be more just not to? So aren't there limitations on telling the truth and on property rights when it comes to justice, depending on the state of mind of the person who's making the claim? So the other character is like, yeah, you know, that sounds, it sounds right. Like, I probably would lie about it and wouldn't

• 11:34Speaker 02

  give it back. And then he goes off to do something else. But we're left to think about it. Are there times where it's just to lie? Or is it always just to tell the truth? Another way of putting it, if we're committed to free speech and truth telling, are we sacrificing some important political considerations? The important thing is not necessarily what we think about that right away, but the fact that it's such a crucial inquiry, and therefore that we need to look at these sources to get our heads straight around it. I know, again, Democrats, and we're, in this sense, we're all Democrats. I don't mean Democratic Party, I mean, people who grew up in liberal democracies, don't

• 12:14Speaker 02

  like that idea. And yet, if people as brilliant as Plato and Aristotle had a defense of it, we should probably consider their arguments.

• 12:23Anthony Pompliano?

  So when we look at this, what it requires is a level of critical thinking that doesn't seem to be taught in schools. And what I find so fascinating about you is that you appear to be a very serious, critical thinker. You are able to separate out different components and different ideas from a single individual. So you don't seem to label someone as good or bad, or because they are associated with one movement or another, that all of their ideas must be good or bad. And that has led to a very interesting situation where you've essentially been blackballed by traditional academia.

• 13:02Anthony Pompliano?

  University systems and all of that. Can you tell us a little bit about that journey and that path? And kind of how you got to a point where you essentially were forced to either give up the craft that you had been so interested in, or kind of strike it on your own, go direct to students and say, I don't need the university and the credentialism that they provide in order to actually carry out what I'm interested in.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  That's right. I was effectively blacklisted from academia during my PhD program because I worked on a thinker named Alexander Dugin. I don't want to assume that anybody's heard of him. He's been called Putin's brain, Putin's rest Putin, the most dangerous philosopher in the world, and a bunch of other things. And I gave an interview based on my research at the time where I said, look, there's a lot that we can learn from him. There's a lot that's good about him. There's a lot that I like about the substance of his teaching, which in short opposes totalitarian liberal globalism. Okay, it says there's more to being human than being a liberal. And on that premise, he develops this account of politics, geopolitics, international relations, philosophy, and so on. Well, my professors at the time didn't like that.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  They thought it was apologetics for neo fascism, for a genocidal maniac as they see him. And it's no surprise, everybody has heard stories today of cancellations. I went through my version of it. But here's the thing, when you have something that is deeply important and interesting to you, in my case, it was what's the relationship between politics and philosophy? Whether we think man has a soul or not, whether we think the world is created or not, whether you think time is cyclical or linear, let's call that philosophy. How does that relate to our opinions about political things? That's the question I was in effect studying. So if you have a question that's so important to you, you just go to the end of it.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  And there will be obstacles that arise along the way, opposition, and sometimes it could be not opposition, maybe for example, there's fanatical support and that becomes its own kind of temptation. But you need to stick to the straight and narrow path of the question you're pursuing, which is what I tried to do. But yeah, I was blacklisted. It was a pretty brutal experience. As far as academic politics goes. But the great thing is that I was able to open my own school after the fact, go directly to students, as you said. Microphone, camera, lecture notes. And suddenly, you know, the world is your oyster. And I think it's a sign that a lot of the traditional institutions, including university. They're experiencing some hard times because they're enforcing ideology instead of encouraging thinking.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  And so students and their parents and people who are professionals are looking for genuine alternatives. Where do we go if we don't just want to be lectured about race and gender? Where do we go if we don't just want to be told that whites are guilty of oppressing everybody around the world? Where do you want to go if you actually want to read the classics? So in higher education today, there's a kind of war on the classics. Because if they taught that there's beauty, if they taught that there's excellence, and if they taught that there's truth. In some sense, they're all enemies of global liberalism. Because global liberalism wants to tell you, don't think about truth, don't think about beauty, don't think about that kind of thing. So it's been a blessing. It was a blessing in disguise at the time, I only felt the brunt of it.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  But it's proven to be a real blessing because I now have students all over the world. And we just get to discuss the greatest books ever written. And think about them clearly and help them illuminate our understanding of today's world. Uh, but yeah, cancellation is something that students, if you're listening to this. And you are drawn to quote unquote controversial thinkers. You know, some of them you've had on this show. Uh, you have to wait for yourselves, you know, because you could get kicked out of your job, you could get kicked out of your school. And you could be branded, as so many people are being branded today. Semi fascist, a total fascist, the neo fascist. And the biggest concern in my personal opinion. Is that it's a few steps from calling someone a fascist.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  To saying all fascists should be eradicated to, you know, jailing or killing your political opponents. And it's not so far fetched, the guy that I work on, Alexander Dugin, one of many thinkers, but probably the one I'm best known for. His daughter was killed not long ago in Russia in the act of political terrorism. So these things happen. Right now, they don't happen very much in North America, hopefully they never do. But you know, there was an attack on Salman Rushdie and uh. It's a stone's throw from calling someone a fascist to saying that they should be imprisoned or attacked.

• 17:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, one of the most

• 17:39Speaker 02

  The straight and narrow is we need to think, we need to think, we need to think. That's it. There's no threat should snuff out our desire to think about these issues carefully.

• 17:46Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the things that's so fascinating to me, kind of about the line of your work, is these are ideas. This is thinking. This is literally reading books, reading the ideas that other people have put forward and contemplating them, critiquing them, and also figuring out where do you agree, where do you disagree, where do they get things right, where do they get things wrong. And what is fascinating to me about that kind of attrition, if you will, of analysis is that every single student who went to any level of education in a democratic developed nation probably thought about some individual, their ideas, their writings, and kind of their work. And it was put through some degree of critique.

• 18:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, sometimes that was very elementary, sometimes it was very, very kind of sophisticated. But when most people, and maybe most is an exaggeration, maybe it's many people in the Western world first heard of Dugin, especially in recent times, it was around this political act of terror. And so the headlines read, you know, Russian, "Name your descriptor," whatever kind of adjective they wanted to use, or noun, and they said, "His daughter was killed." And a lot of people said, "Wow, that's crazy." They read the headline and they kind of moved on. What I saw on Twitter, which was fascinating, was a heavy degree of controversy between

• 19:14Anthony Pompliano?

  this person is a good person, this person is a bad person. And I didn't know anything about them. And so I started to go and Google a little bit more. I came across some of your work and the book that you wrote. Can you tell us a little bit about this individual and maybe do so calling out along the way? What are the critiques of him? And then what are the things that maybe you've separated away from those critiques and say, "Hey, actually, I think that these are the ideas that are interesting or worth kind of spending more time on?"

• 19:42Speaker 02

  Sure. So Alexander Dugin is a Russian political philosopher, ideologue, and activist. So it's important to understand that he combines several roles in himself that often are parceled out among other people. So you could be very fascinated by him as a philosopher and repelled by some of his activism. That would be consistent because it's all contained in one person. He started his intellectual activity, so far as I can tell, in the 80s in the USSR, where he was looking into figures who we know as traditionalists. That's Rene Guenon, Julius Evola, as well as all kinds of movements of thought that are weird for us, or that we're not used to thinking about, like hermeticism, gnosticism, mysticism,

• 20:25Speaker 02

  occultism, and stuff like that. At the collapse of the Soviet Union, you had the onset of American liberal dominance geopolitically, and ideologically and intellectually. Dugin rebelled entirely with all of his forces, and they're quite powerful with his writing and thinking. He rebelled against the dominance of American liberalism, and he began to develop a political theory that drew on all of the intellectual resources available, past and present, that could oppose global liberalism. It was like a grab bag to a certain extent. Some of the sources, Carl Schmidt, Martin Heidegger, Jung even, you know Jung, sources

• 21:07Speaker 02

  from psychoanalysis, from geopolitics, and he put together a model that reasoned as follows: "In the 20th century, there was a war between liberalism, communism, and fascism. Fascism was defeated. You had the Cold War, a bipolar world, USSR and USA. That came to an end. You had the unipolar world. And if you want to oppose American global dominance, you can no longer do so on the basis of the old political theories." So he opposes the fascist response to liberalism. He opposes the communist response to liberalism. Their time is gone. It's time for something new. And that something new, he declared as the Fourth Political Theory. He said, "People are so used to thinking in terms of liberalism,

• 21:50Speaker 02

  communism, fascism," which I think is true. If you look around, you'll see they still do it. If you're not a liberal and you're not on the left, you're a fascist. Okay? That's the way people think. Well, he said, "Let's declare the space of something called the Fourth Political Theory," and he developed it over a series of books. The reason why he's so toxic, there are a few reasons why. One is that in opposing global liberalism, he met with many of America's enemies, many people who don't like America, many anti-liberals who aren't communists. Therefore, you know, he had in his circle, people who maybe are in their own way neo-Nazis or fascists. So he wanted to have under his umbrella, all kinds of tactical alliances, even if theoretically he was developing something else.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  Pro-Ukrainians don't like him because he has said things against Ukrainian statehood that they can't get on board with. So he doesn't think that Ukraine should continue to exist in its current state form. He's not against Ukrainian ethnicity or Ukrainian people, but he doesn't like the Ukrainian political project, and he thinks that that should be undone. So there are those kinds of reasons why people find him obnoxious. If he's anti-American and you're pro-American, that's one reason. If he's anti-liberal and you're pro-liberal, that's another reason. So all of those kinds of things are in a sense understandable. But now we go to the opposite side and we say, well, look, there are some very pro-American,

• 23:16Speaker 02

  American people in America, who also don't like globalism, who also don't like totalitarian liberalism, who are also tired of woke culture, cancellation, who also don't think that America should be the world's police officer. And so what do they do when they're trying to understand their own situation? Well, in my view, it makes sense to look at intelligent people who have articulated an alternative, and then we can sort of pick and choose, work our way through it, that kind of thing. So the parts about Dugan's thought that I like the most, I would say his use of... Okay. Like philosophical supremacists, people for whom philosophy is the most important

• 23:57Speaker 02

  human activity, they have a special place in my world, okay? He's a philosophical supremacist, so I pay close attention when he talks about the relationship between philosophy and politics. He says we should take seriously the beginning and end of Western philosophy as we try to think through our situation. The beginning, that's Plato, the end, that's Heidegger. So for Dugin, Plato and Heidegger are crucial thinkers for understanding politics. I would say that's indisputable. There's no way you could ignore that kind of argument. I like about Dugin that he's got a comprehensive attitude towards politics and society. He studies many disciplines and he gives us a way of thinking about them without the ideological blinders of liberalism.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  What I don't like, yeah, I don't like some of the cheap propaganda shots. I don't like it when a lot of his arguments, you can almost tell at the outset that they're all going to end up in a certain place, you know? So there are times where he's limited by his own dogma, there are times when he's limited by his own ideology and his geopolitical commitments, like a mirror image of Western thinkers. The only thing is that on balance, in my view, he's freer than most Western thinkers. Western thinkers are totally trapped in their ideological situation and he has some, you know, he's outside of it, crafting it, shaping it, thinking about it. And that's why I think he's valuable for us.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  But yeah, he's not uncontroversial, either on a purely philosophical level or all the more so on a political level.

• 25:30Anthony Pompliano?

  And is this kind of anti-liberalism or anti-American stance the reason why he's considered the most dangerous philosopher in the world? Or are there other things?

• 25:40Speaker 02

  It's not just that he's anti-liberal, it's in a sense that he has the energy of his activism behind his anti-liberalism. So he's not just a thinker, I mean, he is a thinker, but he's not just a thinker. So he, when he's active politically, when he's organizing or doing outreach or something like that, it can seem like, I'll put it this way.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  Russia is a ideological opponent of the United States. And Dugin is the most comprehensive Russian ideologist. So he's dangerous in the sense that he's providing a worldview alternative to the dominant one. And he's not just somebody with no possible political power behind him. He's a thinker in a country that could actually help to shape a multipolar world. You know, so it's a combination of these kinds of factors. Like if he was just a guy on an island somewhere writing these books, it may have been considered

• 26:45Speaker 02

  less dangerous than if he's somebody whose ideas are percolating through the Russian policy establishment directly or indirectly.

• 26:55Anthony Pompliano?

  And is that why he would be considered Putin's brain? Is that many of these ideas get filtered through and potentially end up getting implemented? Or at least helping shape some of the thought processes and actions of the Russian government? Or how do you look at the relationship between maybe Dugin's ideas and then some of the actions taken by that specific kind of government organization?

• 27:15Speaker 02

  I'll tell you how I see it, because there's a dispute among people who watch Dugin and Putin, and they say they've never met, there's no sign of a direct relationship. But here's the way that I would characterize it. Whenever Russia acts as a distinct civilization, not part of the Western world, not part of the European world, but in opposition to them, or at least on their own path, they're going to need a set of ideas to understand themselves and to justify and elaborate their policies. And those will be Dugin's ideas to a large extent, whether they go through directly or indirectly, whether they get mediated through other parties and think tanks, or whatever the case might be.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  Because it's like Dugin has been developing this conceptual system for 30 years, or however many, and he's now seeded the cloud of ideas. So that as soon as you turn on your mind and start to wonder, what is Russia if it's not a European country? What is Russia if it's not part of the West? Dugin's concepts will come raining down. You may not know where they came from, but when they land, that's what's going on. So that's my view. You know, he's sort of like the behind the scenes mastermind of Russia's civilizational path. He's not the only person in Russia thinking about these things. But it kind of follows in a strange way

• 28:41Speaker 02

  from the nature of genuine philosophical thought that you don't have to be in the spotlight to be relevant or influential. In some sense, the more profound a thinker you are as a hidden philosopher, the less easy it is to see the real nature of your influence. But the more that influence is actually operative over time. So I put Dugin kind of in that light. When we try to read, if you read Putin's speeches, February 24th speech and whenever he declares a multipolar world, wherever he's speaking out against American unipolarity, wherever he's talking about Russian values and the degradation of values in the West. And you wanted to know, where is the most fully formed version of that worldview?

• 29:26Speaker 02

  I would suggest it's worthwhile to look to Dugin as that.

• 29:30Anthony Pompliano?

  And when we begin to understand, you mentioned earlier, there's been these kind of three specific categories of political thought. There's liberal, there's communist, and there's fascist. What is this fourth one? Does it have a name to it? Has he gone as far as to kind of completely construct it? Or is it more so just, hey, there's something else and it yet isn't fully formed? This episode is brought to you by Bullish. They've reinvented the digital asset exchange. They give you access to DeFi features like automated market making and liquidity pools in a regulated environment. It's a whole new way to generate alpha. Bullish's total trading volumes have exceeded $25 billion just in the seven months since it launched. And their industry-leading order depth means you can trade confidently when you want,

• 30:14Anthony Pompliano?

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• 30:58Anthony Pompliano?

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• 31:07Speaker 02

  It's experimental still, so it's not fully formed, but it's not merely a rejection of the first three. So he starts his argument that way. He says the fourth political theory is neither liberal, nor communist, nor fascist. And the next step, for example, is as follows. Says, "Well, liberalism thinks in terms of the individual. Communism thinks in terms of the class. Fascism thinks in terms of the state, as a matter of fact, and Nazism thinks in terms of the race." So Nazism and Fascism for him are the two parts of the third political theory. So he says the fourth political theory is going to be neither individualistic, nor class-based, nor racist, nor statist, first and foremost. It's going to be something else. Then we raise the question, what's it going to be?

• 31:51Speaker 02

  And here he has a kind of obscure answer and a kind of clear answer. The obscure answer is that, well, ultimately, the obscure answer is the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, which talks about human existence using a kind of unfamiliar jargon. "Dassein" is a key word for Heidegger. Dugin says, "We're going to construct the fourth political theory on the basis of the view that dassein is the key player, not the individual, not the race, not the state, not the class." So again, that's kind of obscure because it requires some familiarity with Heidegger. But on the other side, he says, "The actor of the fourth political theory is the, in Russian, "narod." The reason I have to say it in Russian before English is because in English, it's the people.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  But people for us usually means it can mean like a collection of individuals, like a lot of people met in the park today. But it can also mean like people in the sense of peoples with the sort of ethnic dimension. And so Dugin says, this idea of people, like peoplehood, is a powerful pillar of our thinking about politics. And so he has a book on that called Ethnosociology, and he's developed that idea in different places. Like, what's the relationship between people and state? People and civilization? People and morality? But again, people in this very specific sense. You should understand as well, he has like 50 or so books. Okay, they're probably not all brilliant, and I haven't read all of them.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  But they develop these intuitions and insights into various directions. So that, you know, geopolitically, the Fourth Political Theory implies a multipolar world of many civilizations. In the realm of education, the Fourth Political Theory implies that there's going to be an alternative to the study of economics and law, which he sees are the two most important disciplines for liberalism, and so on. Different authorities, different approaches, different texts, that kind of thing. What's missing in a sense, there's no, like what we would expect from a political theory could be, well, what's your system of constitutional law? How do you apportion a rights between citizens? And what's your doctrine of economics, for example? That's not where he focuses his attention.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  He focuses it on more, you could say, foundational questions? More of the ideological side? How do you justify an alternative to individualism? For example, you know? What should we be thinking about when we think about destiny? Or history? Or purpose? Or meaning for a political community? You see, it's different there from just economics.

• 34:27Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about Dugin, he seems to be on one very far end of the extreme, based on, let's just call it, kind of the central conversation that's occurring. There's positives and negatives, which I think you've done a great job outlining. On the other end of the extreme, maybe the Western worldview, kind of liberal philosopher or political thinker. What I'm very interested in is, on the surface, they look very different. They look on opposite ends of the extreme, they look at unipolar world versus a multipolar world, they look at US dominance versus a non-US dominant world. But it also appears that there's lots of similarities between these extremes.

• 35:10Anthony Pompliano?

  One, you already mentioned, which is that these thinkers are both at ends of the extreme, but they are held hostage by their ideologies and maybe even their geopolitical alliances or allegiance. Also, they're just pure geography, as to where they live, how they grew up, the society in which they operate in, the need to be accepted in those societies, things like that. How do you look at similarities, right? Other than just being held hostage by the ideology to some degree, are there other similarities that you can point to and say, "Listen, the Western philosopher, the Western political thinker is exactly the same as a Dugin in certain ways"?

• 35:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you could say that people are trying to defend their side. You know, there's a kind of mirror image here. So for Dugin, it's important that he's developing a Russian political theory that helps Russia establish its civilizational sovereignty in a world that is seemingly dedicated to eradicating Russian identity. And, you know, there are similar projects among Western intellectual circles, depending on what identity people have. So we need to defend our gender identity, or our racial identity, or our Republican identity, or whatever the case is.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  The parallelism is, in some sense, the love of one's own and the vigorous defense of one's own. Own, the difference is what you consider your own. So that's the main similarity, I would say. People know in these circles that ideas somehow matter. They legitimize certain policies, they make other policies possible. So one similarity is that, you know, the importance of ideas. And that you want to put the ideas in the service, to a certain extent, of these political loyalties and political identities. Now, that's par for the course in a way, because when it comes to education,

• 37:11Speaker 02

  there's always been the understanding that one way you could educate is by taking a political or theological principle or dogma and saying what kind of education would help this dogma. You know, so Catholic education, conservative, Soviet, liberal, doesn't matter. The point is, in all of these cases, the education is in the service of the ideology. So that's another similarity. When things get really interesting is when you turn it in the opposite direction. You say, well, what if we begin to philosophize about our dogmas, about our identity, about our first principles? Maybe they're not as compelling as we thought they were. You know, so that's the way these things shake out.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  People like to defend their side and they can be very creative in the defense of their side. With all of these authors and thinkers, that's not necessarily the same as critical thinking. That's still just a very elaborate defense of your team.

• 38:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Obviously, on a geopolitical scale, what we've seen over the last couple of months and maybe even two or three years in the immediate analysis is somewhat of a backtracking from the globalism. And so if you think of the pullout in Afghanistan, if you think about Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the US and NATO's refusal to directly participate, if you think about the potential conflict between China and Taiwan, if you think about supply chains and manufacturing trying to be reshored within the United States after the COVID-19 pandemic. Like, there's all these little data points that on the Each individual one doesn't seem super, super important.

• 38:51Anthony Pompliano?

  It definitely is noteworthy. It makes headlines. But it doesn't tell the full story. But when you then add them up, it does feel like there's a shift from a pure globalization is good to now maybe nationalism is good to some degree. How do you think about, through the lens of so many different philosophers and the learning of history about this shift from potentially a globalism kind of pursuit to something that is more nationalistic and maybe not so interested in the integration on a global scale?

• 39:26Speaker 02

  Well, you're right that there are these several events taking place. We'll probably see more of them. And in some way, that's the fault line. The globalists want to make sure that all of those conflicts are resolved in the direction of a stable globalist world. And other people want to exploit them to have the alternative take shape. Well, this too is an old problem. Just think about the Tower of Babel. Can we have a unified humanity? Is that desirable? Is it possible? Or is it necessary to have humankind scattered into multiple communities, speaking multiple languages? So as we're recording this, there's a national conservatism conference taking place, organized by Yoram Hazony, who defends a world order of nations

• 40:10Speaker 02

  and who opposes a globalist agenda. And there is a competition now, I would say, in the intellectual space of alternatives that may not be strictly nationalistic. They could be something else, including Dugin's. Dugin, this is weird for people because we don't have all the distinctions we need to think clearly about this. But Dugin is not a nationalist in a sense. And in fact, Russian nationalists often don't like him. He's more of an imperialist, and he tends to defend large spaces of a multi-ethnic or multinational kind.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  But not all the way to global. So these, we're like in a situation where eras are ending and there's this ferment about what will come next. And it's another reason why it's so important to study creative thinkers, okay? To study people who are articulating alternatives. What will come next? What should come next? What might it look like? So I'll give you an argument, you know? One is that a globalist world is not possible because there's always going to be some spirited desire to have the dignity and honor of your particular community better represented. You know, somehow to become part of the globalist world, there's a lot that you have to give up. And not everybody's so ready to give up things that they hold dear.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  So, you know, if you're going to defend the things you hold dear, that's like trying to puncture the shield or, you know, the front of the globalist world. So that's just a simple psychological fact of the human soul, you know? We're not willing to suppress our desire for honor. And there's a loss of honor somehow in becoming part of a globalist world. This is both an old question, as I say with the Tower of Babel example, and one where we have to find new solutions to it. You know, Dugin's model, many civilizations. Yoram Hazony's model, national traditions, nations, nation-states, that's what we have to stick to. Other people may have some other alternative.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  But what I think everybody can sense is that the order of world affairs is in the process of being renegotiated from a bipolar world to a unipolar world to now we have a question mark. If Russia gets, how could you put it? If Russia's not successful in its war or in its special military operation, if it's not successful in asserting its state sovereignty and civilizational sovereignty, that's a setback from the point of view of opposition to globalism. And that's a big win for the supporters of globalism. So all of the things that are happening geopolitically, they have this ideological, moral, theoretical, philosophical dimension, and it's, it's in the air right now because there's been no decisive blow. You know, you could

• 42:53Speaker 02

  Say that Trump's victory was a kind of anti-globalist moment. Biden's victory was a one, you know, put one back into the globalist side. But now with all of these conflicts that you mentioned, we don't know yet the final state of affairs. But a lot's at stake, more than just, oh, you know, the totalitarian country lost and the democratic country won, or vice versa. The worldview behind the scenes that's at stake in all of these battles is a little bit deeper and more complex than that. From the point of view of the globalist, it's pretty simple. It's totalitarian states versus dictatorships, the open society versus its enemies. But, you know, if we look from the side, we have to consider the alternative.

• 43:37Anthony Pompliano?

  How do other players kind of enter into the fray? So if you take, the United States obviously stands for something very specific and has kind of implemented their view of how societies, democracies, capitalism should operate and done so with great success around the world in many areas. If you look at somebody like Russia and kind of their actions in Ukraine, and then more so just the political philosophy that they seem to be embodying and kind of even openly talking about this multipolar world. It looks like it's a, okay, there's two different sides to this debate, this battle, this conflict, this clash of ideas.

• 44:18Anthony Pompliano?

  But then there's things like China, or India, or the entire continent of Africa, or even South and Central America. And so how does some of those places and ideologies and kind of, you know, billions of people who live there play into what appears to be a simple kind of clash of ideas that maybe isn't so simple?

• 44:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't have a great answer, except to say this. You had the moment of American global domination. And if you're somebody in another country, not Russia, not the United States, let's say not China. If you're in India, or you're in South Africa, or you're wherever you happen to be, you're faced with the question. What do we do? We can sort of merge into the global unipolar world, giving up our interests to a certain extent, giving up some of our values, our traditions, and doing whatever we need to do to protect ourselves under the new circumstances, making friends with the right people and becoming enemies to the right people, that kind of thing. But there needs to be some system of self-understanding.

• 45:23Speaker 02

  America has a system of self-understanding. I've just been mentioning that Russia has one, particularly as elaborated by Dugin, but not only. So the question is, in these other countries, do they have some native traditional resources to draw on that would help them oppose, if they want to, the new situation at the level of ideas? Because again, we have to interpret what we're doing in the world. We need some system of self-understanding. So one of the things that I think is important about Dugin's model, personally, is that it is, in a way, exportable to other countries. So when it is applied specifically to Russia, it takes on a specifically Russian character. But the general idea of a fourth political theory, as he's developed it throughout these books,

• 46:08Speaker 02

  it can take on a specifically Indian character. It can take on a specifically Brazilian character, and Chinese, and so on. So I think that as an ideological export, in a way, Dugin's Fourth Political Theory has proven to be a resource for countries other than Russia, who are looking to find their place in this world separately from what the United States sees for them. So for example, Dugin definitely has interested readers and followers in Iran, where he meets, as he said before, with some of their crucial figures and discusses the application of Heidegger's ideas to Iranian civilizational identity. These aren't things we normally think about, but they're important to see as background processes

• 46:52Speaker 02

  that are helping to build a kind of international, anti-liberal front.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  Not just on the basis of some reactionary anti-Americanism. Like, we used to worry, you know, we just marked September 11th a few days ago. We used to worry about Islamism as a threat. But somehow that was narrowly constrained to certain Islamic radical sects. But now you have a broader theoretical umbrella that's not just pinned to a single religion. And that has these serious philosophical pillars. So it's a, it's a new kind of challenge, I would say. But that's how I think about those other countries. And if you look to see who's supporting Russia, or at least who's not voting against it at the UN General Assembly, that kind of thing, you'll see, you could say roughly, you have the West and the Rest.

• 47:42Speaker 02

  And this Rest category, this Rest, they look to Russia in a way, and they want Russia to be successful in a way. Because under the umbrella of the political victories and under the umbrella of the ideological model, they can start to feel like they are civilisationally sovereign, or at least not just under the thumb of the globalists. It may not work out that way. There's no guarantee, but that's the idea.

• 48:12Anthony Pompliano?

  When you begin to think of these periods of transition, where, you know, we lived in a kind of multipolar world, or whatever you want to call it. We went to this kind of unipolar world, and now there's this question mark that you described. And there's people pulling at two different, you know, kind of outcomes. Institutions seem to be a pretty interesting kind of aspect or a detail here. And institutions can be national institutions. They can be made up specifically for the protection of individuals. If you look somewhere in like the United States. And then there's these global institutions. If you think of the World Bank, or the World Economic Forum, or these types of organizations.

• 48:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Even NATO, to some degree, being a kind of more globalistic institution. There's a lot of folks, I think, in the West who would agree that institutions are degrading, maybe in the most watered-down version, or full-on collapsing in the most extreme version. Sometimes the conversation makes people uneasy. So rather than talk about governments or or kind of collections of countries, they prefer to point to mainstream media organizations or higher education institutions. Those seem to be a little bit less taboo to to kind of discuss as part of this like institutional collapse. How do you see institutions and their role and kind of their ability to survive these transition periods,

• 49:37Anthony Pompliano?

  regardless of whether we end up on either end of the spectrum?

• 49:41Speaker 02

  Institutions have, okay. Classical political philosophers put it like this in a sense. You can't expect the institution to do the work that character building would normally do for you. Now, maybe you have institutions that build character, but you can't just rely on the institution to solve the problems and ignore who's in the institution, how they're formed. It's kind of like, you know, I have a building on the street, but which kind of shop is in the building is going to make a difference, you know? So you have these various institutions, but what's the moral and intellectual training of the people in them? How have they been formed to see the world and to understand themselves? So there was a time where it's kind of like policymakers kicked the can

• 50:26Speaker 02

  from moral training to just relying on the institutions and their rational processes to make sure everything works out smoothly and efficiently. And that sort of, you could say, removal of the question of the education of character. It's, we see it in a way. The institutions that I know best and think about in this relation are the universities and the regime type, you could say. So classically, a regime was the set of institutions that you could say are responsible for the ruling of the country. But here's the key thing. Each of those looks up to some ideal. So for example, you might look up to the ideal of freedom. You might look up to the ideal of honor.

• 51:11Speaker 02

  You might look up to the ideal of wisdom. And depending on where you look, the institutions will operate differently. They'll place their emphasis differently. So I think that some of our institutions of education are looking up to equity, diversity and inclusion. And in doing so, they're looking away from beauty, wisdom, truth, insight, and those kinds of things. So when you ask about institutions, that's always where my mind goes. You have to see what are they aiming at? Where are they looking to? And wherever we see a sort of malfunction or dysfunction, it could be in the institutional design. But sort of the more interesting place to look from my point of view

• 51:54Speaker 02

  is the intentions and aims. Educationally, you know, this is a big question. Why should every discipline in the university be first and foremost concerned with diversity, inclusion and equity? That seems strange. Are there no other goals of an education than that? That just shows you the ideologization of the university. So that's always, and again, this is really what the political philosophers teach us. They teach us, look to the ends, look to the principles, whether they're the first principles of our thinking or the ends of our action. That's sort of what determines where we're going, why we see something and don't see something else.

• 52:38Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the ideas that I find interesting and worth considering is this idea of diversity, inclusion, equity, or kind of in a more simplistic manner, that the conversation around race and how that impacts various things in our society. Is it possible to analyze race without being racist? And what I mean by that is, is the introduction of the idea inherently now you are putting people into Buckets. And once you put people into buckets, it's kind of human nature. Like, we aren't as smart as we think we are.

• 53:18Anthony Pompliano?

  And as we meddle in things, sometimes we actually create worse problems than what the original problem was. And what that would hold constant is if that is true, then the people who are attempting to address a problem that they have identified, they're well-intentioned, they're good natured, they're trying to do the right thing. And it's less about these individuals are wrong, or that they are doing something that is nefarious. And more so just, it is human nature. It's a story as old as time, where when humans meddle into free markets, they end up actually causing issues with that intervention.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  We can't help but think. And so, it's not, in a sense, a question. If you're gonna think from the point of view of race, or think from the point of view of class, or look at the latest speeches from the Democratic Party, thinking in terms of fascism and labeling all of their opponents fascists, also putting them in a bucket. What's worse, to label half the country fascist, or to think carefully about these other controversial issues? So, in some sense, if you're in the political arena, or you're outside of it but thinking about politics, no matter what concepts you're employing, there's going to be controversy. Politics is not something that you can just think about without there being some dividing lines, without it feeling like someone's getting characterized and cataloged and put into a bucket.

• 54:46Speaker 02

  What we need to do when we practice our thinking is be cognizant of that fact, and make sure that we are not having a slippage from trying to solve a problem to creating new problems. Just like you said with market intervention. So that is a challenge. Like, you don't want either extreme there. What, are you gonna just stop thinking about how to solve problems in politics because it can create new problems? No, that's not feasible. Are you gonna leave everything exactly the way it is? That's not feasible. So, it's a process of feedback and modification. In other words, no, you're not a racist if you include... Racial considerations in your thinking unless those racial considerations are like, you know, white people shouldn't do this, black people shouldn't do this and other races shouldn't

• 55:30Speaker 02

  do or should do something else. The task is to think carefully, similarly with the semi fascism, alt right and stuff like that. Are there no domestic terrorists in the United States? You know, that's probably too extreme. Are there no like actual neo fascist? No, there probably are some. Does that mean we should label everybody who supports Trump's agenda or everybody who opposes Biden's agenda a fascist or a neo Nazi or something like that? No. So the whole task, whether we're thinking about politics or something else, is to learn to fine tune our thinking. There are so many pitfalls, just like we said, ideologically, you know, one pitfall is to come to hate your own country. You fall so in love with some other country that you like turn your back on your own.

• 56:13Speaker 02

  Another one is to love your country so much that you don't see its flaws or you can't think about its limitations. So these are exercises and that's one of the things our philosophy helps us to do. It's one of the reasons why we study old books like Plato's and Aristotle's and new books, you know, like Nietzsche and Heidegger, Leo Strauss, Carl Schmidt. It's one of the reasons we need to train our thinking. Like, you know, people go and they do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or they do whatever they do. And in your first class, you're probably getting completely wrecked and maybe 20 years later, you're still getting wrecked, but you have to practice. Why should it be any different in drawing political distinctions and in thinking carefully? Our mind also needs to go through a training program. It's also not going to get it right on the first try.

• 56:56Speaker 02

  But, you know, then when you get into a street fight, so to speak, okay, intellectual street fight here, things go wrong quickly. So I hate, I just have to say this to be super clear. If a person has the genuine intention of understanding a problem and in pursuit of that genuine intention, they think in terms of whatever it happens to be, race, state, nation, class, okay, destiny, individual, religion, God, Satan, whatever. If you are trying to think a problem through and that's your intention, then under the right circumstances, you should completely be able to go with that. And anytime we shut it down, we're just snuffing out the human soul. We're snuffing out the human spark. What's the point?

• 57:38Speaker 02

  If you're going to do that, what's the point of even having a republic, a country, a political community? If you're taking what's essential to the human being and just Destroy it.

• 57:50Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the other distinctions that I think gets lost is the difference between thinking and talking. Now, usually, people today don't spend as much time face-to-face talking as maybe you would do in other countries even, but definitely in history. A lot of the talking gets done on Twitter or via email, maybe even on a YouTube video or some other social media platform. And what's fascinating to me is when you're thinking, and again, you're coming at it from a genuine perspective of trying to understand, of trying to learn, of trying to critique, and trying to advance your own thought process and kind of mental models. Nuance is a core component to that.

• 58:32Anthony Pompliano?

  And in some ways, the nuance is incentivized. You have to understand the nuance, or therefore, you cannot be successful in your pursuit. Where nuance is discouraged is pretty much on every social media platform. And so if we use Twitter as kind of an extreme example, you and I can sit here and we can talk for hours and have a nuanced conversation, and I think a lot of folks will say, okay, there's things I agree with, there's things I disagree with, there's open questions that I still have, and there's new viewpoints or new mental models that I take away from the conversation. But if they go and they simply read a single tweet of less than 280 characters, they may walk away and say, I hate that person, or that person is a moron, or that person is

• 59:17Anthony Pompliano?

  a genius. And so talk a little bit about kind of the medium being the message, if we borrow that terminology, and how the nuance gets lost in today's conversation and this idea of a republic and a free democratic conversation is being influenced, maybe for better, maybe for worse, by the actual products that we use to communicate these ideas with each other.

• 59:43Speaker 02

  It's a crucial matter. Andrew Tate, when he did his video, I think it was on Rumble, he explained his side of the story after the mass cancellations. He said exactly what you just did, that he can talk for two, three hours, overcome objections, explain his position and express it. But if someone wants to take a 20-second clip, especially if it's something that they believe they can build their audience on, or that they can monetize, or that they can take all of the hate and direct it in a way that helps them, you know, sell their product, or do whatever they want to do, then it's impossible in a way to stop today, because that's what people are consuming. TikTok clips, and YouTube, and Facebook, and all the rest of it. So that is getting in

• 1:00:24Speaker 02

  the way, obviously, of long, carefully reasoned discourse. But look, it's not only today's problem. So, again, classical political philosophy, I like to use it as an example, because we might see there what has stayed constant. The fact that there's a gap between what we think and how it's taken when we express it, isn't just because of TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. The thing is, you never know whether your audience has the background that they would need to understand, has the intention of understanding, is hostile at the outset, wants to learn. So people who are looking for enemies, they can find them very quickly. And people who are looking for insight, it's a different,

• 1:01:08Speaker 02

  you know, they may be listening to the same thing, but deriving something completely different from it. So in some sense, it's a question of the motivations of the listeners. Why do people listen to these conversations? They're looking for a cheap shot. Twitter has made it easier, but you could do it before Twitter. You could do it in a pamphlet. You could do it with a loudspeaker. You could circulate rumors to get somebody killed. That's not something that has started recently. That's an old part of the human story. So, as somebody who's in education, yeah, an online education, as someone who works on philosophy, my appeal in some sense is always to people's intention. Why are you listening to something? What are you trying to get out of it? You know there are always going

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  to be people who are just looking for the attack. And they have to be, as it were, treated separately, or dealt with separately. And we need to understand when we're giving them red meat. And when not, but even so, you could stitch together a person's speech, as you well know, and make it say anything you want it to say. So we just need to keep our eyes on the prize. We need to be focused. Education, learning, understanding, understanding the alternatives. When it comes to people who are super hostile, I don't know, maybe that's an example where you would say, look, should hostile listeners, whose whole modus operandi

• 1:02:33Speaker 02

  is to take little clips or to take falsely constructed clips and use them to direct hate mobs, maybe those people shouldn't be on those platforms. Maybe there are basic rules of engagement, and if you don't follow them, you should be off. I know people don't like it when someone they follow gets kicked off Twitter. I'm not a big fan either. I hope it doesn't happen to me and to the people I follow. But, you know, is it so bad that a account solely existing for that purpose gets pulled off the platform? You know, then you have to say, so it's all, there are all of these considerations, truly. In some sense, the technology is making it much harder to reach the sweet spot of like, listening. How do you listen when everything is going so quickly, when everything is so polarized,

• 1:03:18Speaker 02

  and when everything is so heated? Well, it's never been a mass occupation. Learning has never been a mass occupation. Critical thinking has never been a mass occupation. What has been is instant reaction to red meat that just riles you up. So you're gonna have to deal with it with or without Twitter, with or without TikTok. But I wouldn't say they're helping.

• 1:03:39Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:04:23Anthony Pompliano?

  They offer clients the deepest pool of liquidity and they have 100% uptime track record through all the volatility spikes. LMAX Group's liquidity relationships and ultra-low latency technology means that LMAX Digital is the market-leading solution for institutions across crypto trading and custodial services. LMAX Digital, secure, liquid, and trusted. Go learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp. Again, that's LMAXdigital.com/pomp. This brings me to a conversation around the Stoics, and I think that many people in today's society look to the Stoics and they say, wow, it is amazing how they could be so thoughtful, how they could control their emotions, how they could be a version of a human that I wish to aspire to.

• 1:05:08Anthony Pompliano?

  As you've studied history, you've studied philosophy, and I'm assuming the Stoics as well. What are some of the lessons that you've taken away that you feel are most applicable to today's modern society? Are there certain things that stick out in your mind as things that folks could spend a little bit of time, learn, and have a outsized impact in a positive direction today?

• 1:05:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, at a most simple level, that the philosophical life is the happiest life. That's sort of a basic claim for Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, the Stoics. The philosophical life is the happiest life. Everybody is after some form of happiness. You might think more money will make you happier, more power, more lovers, more fame and popularity, whatever the case might be. But you also have some sense that, you know, there are people with a lot of money who aren't happy, people who are very famous who seem miserable, people who have as many lovers as you could ever dream of, and you know, they don't seem quite satisfied fully. So philosophy raises the claim that the examined life is not only worth living,

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  but is in some sense the pleasant, the most pleasant, the most just and the happiest life. So that is, I would say, philosophy's major claim. And it's the one that if you are trying to find happiness, you should take seriously. And they defend it, they present it. And I think for myself and for so many people who have fallen in love with philosophy over the course of our lives, it has proven itself to be accurate. You know, you're happy when you think about the fundamental questions. You find yourself less desirous of things that don't bring you satisfaction. It's, I'll put it to you, uh, put it to you this way.

• 1:06:55Speaker 02

  My first philosophy professor, who I, I credit him a lot with giving me this path forward. When he was introducing philosophy to us, he said that philosophy gives you a well-ordered soul, so that your reason, your will and your desire are working together. You reason about what is it good for me to desire? You desire the things that your reason has shown you are good. And your will is acting in consonance with your reason and desire. It's like a harmonious life, a kind of symphonic life as well in that sense. That is the main takeaway. And another one I would add is that questions that I think everybody raises from time to

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  time about the meaning of life or about why good people suffer or why bad people seemingly seem to do well in the world, you know, those kinds of elementary questions, whether they're moral or existential, philosophers can, it's not like those questions have no answers. It's not like nobody has given us a step forward into thinking about them.

• 1:08:00Speaker 02

  Philosophy of all disciplines, you can learn from religion, needless to say, from literature, obviously, but philosophy, I think, is underappreciated as an inquiry that takes us into the heart of human life. And in doing so, brings us, as I say, pleasure, joy, decency, and insight.

• 1:08:20Anthony Pompliano?

  When you say that a philosopher's life is kind of the happiest life, one of the things it begs is the fundamental questions that I think philosophy ultimately tries to spend time contemplating, analyzing, and getting answers to. Are there right answers? Are there individual, single answers? Or is there an ever, you know, kind of constant pursuit, and the pursuit in some way is the answer itself? Like, you can never get to, what is the purpose of life? There is no right or wrong answer. There is no, you know, multiple choice, make sure you get it right, pass, go, and move on to the next question. But in some ways, the whole idea is that there isn't one single answer? Or do I have that wrong?

• 1:09:04Speaker 02

  Well, there's progress in understanding. So you could develop your understanding of a question, of an issue, but it's not the same as a clearly correct answer in some other discipline. You know, if somebody asks you the answer to a mathematical equation, that's pretty straightforward. If they ask you, is it raining outside, or isn't it here and now, there's a pretty straightforward answer to that. But if someone begins to ask you, ask you, what is the nature of human thought? What is time? How does time affect our categories of understanding? Was the world created, or has it always existed? What does it even mean to raise questions like that? They don't have the same kind

• 1:09:45Speaker 02

  of correct answer as an inquiry in these other places does. But as I say, there is a sort of progress in philosophy, where you step further and further into understanding the issue that you care about, and that you're talking about and thinking about. It may not culminate in a correct answer that you could just distribute to everybody in the same way. But somehow, all of the philosophers are thinking at this level that the first task for people new to philosophy is to just enter into that world.

• 1:10:24Speaker 02

  You know, you could say at the outset, why do we even want a correct answer about some of these questions? In other words, what would a correct answer look like about the relationship of time and morality? Whether time is circular or linear, say, okay, time is linear. Okay, you have a correct answer on the nature of time. Have you even understood what time is? There's always some further question. So it's hard to convey for people who aren't doing it. But one of the beautiful things about progress in philosophy is in other disciplines, it's kind of like progress goes forward. Progress in philosophy, it's like it goes backwards. It goes to a more fundamental level.

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  You're always getting closer and closer to some basis point as opposed to going further and further along the development of a set of answers. Now, in some sense, to just paraphrase that very prosaically, no, there aren't correct answers. But people can have the completely wrong impression of that. Be like, why would I want to study something that doesn't give me any answers? I'm looking for certainty. Why do I just want to be around people who are raising questions? Isn't that just like some sort of mental masturbation? It isn't. It isn't. There's a realm that you can enter into more and more completely in the process of asking these questions. The questions don't keep reality away from you.

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  The question drives you further into the heart of the matter. But you sort of have to do it to, um, to experience it. Uh, that's one thing I would say. And then another pretty amazing, it's kind of like this. Think about the five best movies you've ever seen, or your five favorite songs, or something where each of them has a claim to be particularly outstanding. And now if someone were to ask you, well, you know, which is, which is the best one? Or rank them, or, you know, compare them amongst themselves. They may each have a total right to their claim of greatness in a way that's not commensurable with the other ones and in a way that can't be ranked. Philosophical inquiry is also like that.

• 1:12:33Speaker 02

  It's not always the case that Plato has refuted Parmenides, or that Aristotle has refuted Plato. Refutation is not always the name of the game in philosophy. At times, it's just these great thinkers who have staked the claim to our attention. And it's like, you know, a beautiful song that you can't compare to another one, or five beautiful artistic expressions that aren't reducible.

• 1:12:58Anthony Pompliano?

  When we think about the work that you do on a daily basis, the art of learning immediately jumps to mind. Talk to me a little bit about how you actually learned so much. When you're reading a book, what does that look like? Are you just reading through it? Are you highlighting? Are you taking notes? How do you then explore some of these ideas? Do you just get on Google and kind of Google around and have 200 open tabs? Do you go and you seek out one specific source of information? Like, how do you actually learn so much about topics that frankly are pretty ill-defined and can take you in so many different directions all at once?

• 1:13:37Speaker 02

  I was lucky early on in my development because I was taught the way that I now practice, which is read primary sources and read them carefully. If you rely on Google, if you rely on a secondary source, if somebody's telling you what you should think, or what Plato thought, then there's a big risk that something could go wrong. So I learned, my teachers taught me, if you want to know what Plato thought, you have to read Plato. If you want to know what Aristotle thought, you have to read Aristotle. Now, that's only one step because it's, you know, why would I have a school if that's the case? I would just tell all my students, "Go read Plato, go read Aristotle." The second piece of the puzzle that is so helpful is to have a guide who has also read

• 1:14:22Speaker 02

  that work for a long enough time to understand how it relates to the big conversation among the other thinkers, and who can walk you through it, help you see things that you wouldn't necessarily see on your own. So the study of primary source materials, together with guidance, is...

• 1:14:41Speaker 02

  For me, at any rate, everything that I've learned, I've learned that way. I don't usually rely on Google to learn something fundamental about these thinkers. Although, don't get me wrong, there are good sources. Stanford Encyclopedia Philosophy. There are good articles. People do publish in academic journals and in other kinds of journals. So you can learn in different ways. But the lesson that I was taught early that stuck with me was that, imagine you go to an intro philosophy class and they tell you Plato's Republic is a book about the ideal state. Which some people think Plato's Republic is a book about the ideal state. And then you later learn, well, ideal is not a Platonic concept. Plato doesn't have a notion of an ideal.

• 1:15:26Speaker 02

  That's something different from what he's talking about. And he definitely doesn't have a notion of the state. Because what he calls the polis is not what we call the state. So if I'm relying on a secondary interpretation, a short form, and someone tells me, yeah, Plato's Republic is about the ideal state. I actually haven't learned anything about what Plato thinks, really. So there's a challenge because what do we do when it comes to translations? For example, now the school of thought that I follow, they paid a lot of attention to this. They're like a translation of a Greek or a Latin or Arabic or Hebrew book. It should be as literal as possible. So that if Plato uses one word in the Greek, it should always be translated as much as possible. One word in the English, you know?

• 1:16:10Speaker 02

  So the translator could also be getting in the way of your understanding of the original book. So these kinds of ideas here, you know, we don't want to take shortcuts. We want to understand Plato or whoever it is that we're reading as much as possible on their own terms. That's what informs my study of these books. And I think that's one of the reasons I have had a kind of unique experience reading Dugin compared to a lot of people who work on him. You know, they will just Google him, read a Wikipedia, quick throwaway. You know that he said something crazy once or whatever the case might be. And on that basis, they'll dismiss him. But because of my training, you can't really make a judgment until you. You've read as much as possible of the original, ideally in the original language,

• 1:16:55Speaker 02

  thoughtfully, carefully and precisely. In doing so, that's when all of the riches open up because you see there's more going on there than could be dismissed. I do take, there was a time where I wouldn't write in my books because I thought it was sacrilegious. That time has passed, so I do now, I underline, I dog ear, I don't do any highlighting, but it's, it's very helpful. Whatever works for you, whatever works when you're working through a book, but you want to see like, what's the argument? How is this key term operating? How does something he said here relate to something he said 20 pages ago? It's not easy, but it's worth, you know, what that's worth doing is so easy. Everything that's worth doing takes a little bit of practice and comes with a lot of frustration along the way, but the reward is worth it. That's why we do it. Same, I think, with reading,

• 1:17:40Speaker 02

  especially reading the great books.

• 1:17:43Anthony Pompliano?

  So, reading is obviously a core component of this kind of art of learning. But one of the things that I personally find incredibly valuable is the conversation around the reading as well. So I can go and I can read the primary sources. I can go and I can even read maybe other people's critiques or support for those pieces. But then having the ability to converse and to challenge ideas, to have my ideas challenged, somewhat this like war of ideas ends up actually forging much more powerful, much more well thought out, better articulated ideas. How do you think about conversation and the intersection, if you will, of like the art of learning? Like what, where does that fit into your process?

• 1:18:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, conversation is crucial. Plato's dialogues, after all, are conversations. Plato doesn't write under his own name. He just gives us conversations, usually Socrates and some other people, but sometimes without Socrates. And then the great books themselves are a conversation. So Plato is responding to his predecessors, Aristotle's responding to Plato, Heidegger, you know, they're all talking to each other across the ages in their books. So even just the reading is still a conversation across the books. But yeah, so I have a lot of people that I have private Zoom calls with. I do private tutoring. I have seminars that I lead. When I was in graduate school and undergraduate school, I had close friends that we would discuss these topics with. It's nice because you have to be able to restate at least the basic arguments.

• 1:19:10Speaker 02

  So that takes a little bit of practice. And then other people may have seen things that you didn't see, which is beautiful. And it's that back and forth that helps bring things to light. I mean, that's what Socrates calls dialectic. Dialectic means through speech, through logos, through conversation. Sometimes it's a conversation we have with ourselves. That's somehow thinking, right? We raise objections in our own silent mind, in our soul, so to speak. But when you can do it with somebody else, another beautiful thing about conversing, especially around, in my view, philosophy, but other topics as well with other people is it's a basis for a genuine friendship. Because the community of people who are assessing arguments about what's good, what's just, what's beautiful, what's important, how should we think about this?

• 1:19:55Speaker 02

  We're all directed towards truth together. And so there is a community of inquiring minds that gets formed in those conversations and in those discussions, which is really satisfying. I should say that this is going to differ for different people. Like, I'm pretty introverted and not particularly social as a rule. So my first inclination is not to put together like a big study circle or a lot of people to be talking. Others will find that, you know, they need to have that in order to be getting into the ideas, to remember them and to understand them. But I personally am like, you know, the text, the teacher, also a book, the conversation among the books, and then my students that I work with and my friends that I talk to in small circles.

• 1:20:41Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about the school that you created, some of it, or many would see that this was done out of necessity. After being blacklisted from kind of the traditional university system, talk a little bit about that process. How did you think to just go direct to people? How did you initially get it started? And where did you find the first students?

• 1:21:04Speaker 02

  After I graduated with my PhD, I went to work as a financial services copywriter. And I was doing private freelance tutoring. So I don't know if you could tell, I really love this topic. I love to talk about it. I love to teach it. And I had students who were working with me privately. Then I had somebody named Justin Murphy, he runs Otherlife.co, invite me to teach under his rubric. So he was also bringing some exiled academics under his umbrella to have them teach courses, for example, on Rene Girard and on other thinkers. He invited me to teach a class on Leo Strauss. Leo Strauss is for me the gold standard teacher of the history of political philosophy. He's a big part of what I do and why I do it.

• 1:21:45Speaker 02

  So I accepted, I taught this class on Strauss, and what I noticed was that teaching scales. When I was doing the private tutoring, I was putting a lot of time into preparing for a single hour of one-on-one. I mean, I might do five or six hours of prep for $50 of one-on-one time, which is what I was charging when I started, okay, $50 an hour. But I couldn't do an hour of tutoring without really immersing myself in everything. I wanted to feel like I could be extremely valuable, and it just wasn't sustainable. So doing the course with Justin showed me, oh, I could put in the same amount of work, the same amount of time, have 40, 50 people in a seminar,

• 1:22:24Speaker 02

  record it, sell the recording, scale the teaching, reach more people, and make better use of my time. So that was such a success that I turned my existing notes on other courses that I had been teaching privately into video courses like this, and it proved to be a success. People are really happy with the materials, and I'm glad to have them. It's been economically viable, and that was really how it all started. You know, I had to continue teaching after the blacklisting because I just can't stop. And it wasn't sustainable to do it. It scaled well, and it's proven to be better than I thought in a way, because this was during COVID in a way that I started to scale, and the universities are taking a step in the wrong direction as a rule.

• 1:23:10Speaker 02

  A lot of professionals have come to be my students, people in tech, people in law, people maybe close to retirement who want to reconnect with an original love for philosophy, as well as students who just aren't satisfied with what's going on at the universities and colleges. So I think the timing was right, and I just consider it to be such a fortunate opportunity to teach that way outside of university, because, you know, it could have been like blacklisted, therefore no more opportunity to teach. Thankfully, I have more now than I ever would have hoped for before.

• 1:23:39Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about what you are teaching now, how is it different than if you were a professor at a university? Like, we talked a little bit earlier how some of these universities are held hostage kind of by woke culture, by censorship, by the online mobs. Are there specific differences in things that you're able to teach now that maybe wouldn't be possible if you were inside of the legacy institutions?

• 1:24:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not just the subject matter. It's everything about what I teach and how I want to teach it. So I don't have to finish something in any allotted time. You know, I don't have just two hours a week or just four months a year or whatever the case is. If there's a book that requires a deep dive, then I can do a deep dive. Whether it's video lectures supplemented with seminars or some other format, there's no limitation. You could say the market is a limitation, but people who really want to learn, they're already willing to go to whatever it is here that's required. Another thing is that I have a couple of courses on Dugin. I have a course on Carl Schmidt, who was an actual Nazi,

• 1:24:46Speaker 02

  but a great legal thinker. On Leo Strauss, who in some circles is considered to be too reactionary. On Heidegger, you know, and on other figures who may be considered in many departments just too right wing. That's a simplification, but that's how they would be seen in many departments. And here, it's not an issue. If somebody has something important to say and I want to teach it, I can do so. That's on the left as well, by the way. I think Jacques Derrida is an author and a teacher worth studying. So that freedom, pick my subjects, pick the way that I want to teach them, what I want to say about them. Nobody hanging over my head telling me or my students

• 1:25:29Speaker 02

  what they are obligated to do or to hear or to see or, you know, not to see and not to hear. We decide.

• 1:25:38Speaker 02

  It's just liberating. It's brilliant. It's a breath of fresh air, not only for me as an instructor, but the students who take the courses, they tell me, this is what we would have wanted from a university, or this is what the universities once were, or you know, we've been looking for this type of thing everywhere, but we couldn't find it. Incidentally, too, in a department of political science, let's say, I may not have been able to just propose a course on Bitcoin and art. But if I want to have a course on Bitcoin and art in the Millerman School, I can do that. If I want to have guest lecturers, I can do that. So it's like, you know, you're the master of the house. You decide. And I'm always trying to provide value for the students. I'm always trying to make sure that I'm meeting

• 1:26:18Speaker 02

  a need that's there. But otherwise, it's total freedom. Now, I hope it doesn't come to the point, and I certainly am not doing anything to hasten this, that the platform I'm on tries to kick me off, or you know, that I can no longer reach students or receive payments. Everything is very decent. There's no sort of ideological indoctrination in this school, and we're not trying to be just controversial for the sake of controversy. As you can see, important thinkers, important books, important questions, that's the name of the game. So I don't see cancellation in the cards here. But you know, there are people who can no longer receive PayPal payments and who are kicked off other kinds of processors. And here maybe is something where, you know, Bitcoin and other kinds

• 1:27:00Speaker 02

  of technologies like that can also serve a place in the educational, on new educational institutions moving forward.

• 1:27:08Anthony Pompliano?

  What's fascinating to me about you and your work is that you can look at an individual, take somebody on the left and somebody on the right. You just described an individual who you said was a literal Nazi, yet you can separate out the disqualification of some of their ideas, the distaste and the, in many ways, just malice or nefariousness of their ideas.

• 1:27:38Anthony Pompliano?

  But not yet disqualify all of their ideas. And so it's in many cases in society, we try to put people in these buckets. Good person, bad person, good ideas, bad ideas. But what it seems like you're able to do is you're able to study an individual, their writings, their teachings, their thoughts, all of the content they've created, the conversations and interviews they've done, whatever, and then separate out and almost go idea by idea or thought by thought. And then say, I like these ideas. These are ones I agree with. These are ones I find interesting and I want to spend more time on. And then these other ideas are things that are classified in your view as negative or something you don't agree with or that you don't want to spend more time on. Why do you think you're able to do this?

• 1:28:23Anthony Pompliano?

  When so much of society just labels at the surface level, at the individual or at the kind of collection of ideas? They don't have the ability to actually break down the individual ideas and be able to agree with some of the ideas of one individual, but also disagree with other extreme ideas they may have?

• 1:28:42Speaker 02

  I'm not sure what the reason is for most people. But in my case, my family is from the former Soviet Union. I think there's a kind of autobiographical element to this. My dad's family is Jewish. My mom's family is German. So have like Germans, Jews, former Soviets. You know, there's on one hand, the German intellectual tradition is full of brilliant thinkers who are also, you know, kind of like antisemitic or not very favorably disposed toward the Jews. And the Jewish tradition has many brilliant thinkers who maybe aren't favorably predisposed to other figures. And then there's the Russian and I was born in Canada. So there's like a sort of politeness that allows me to be with all of these different positions in the first place.

• 1:29:26Speaker 02

  And my training, you know? So all of these factors and influences together, they just produce this result, I guess, that I don't find it necessary to shut down a thinker when you can see that there's something there. Like, I'm not saying that you have to go out and, you know, hug a Nazi or something like that. We're not just talking about anybody with a controversial opinion here. There are all kinds of knuckleheads and much worse. But what do you do when it comes to someone who's obviously brilliant? What do you do when it comes to someone you can clearly learn from? You know, we all know the proverb of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. So you have to decide in each case, do you want to do that? Or, you know, do you want to raise the baby and see what comes of it?

• 1:30:09Speaker 02

  So to speak, you just learn with enough experience that there are people who would like you to throw out a thinker entirely, not because that thinker was a Nazi, but because in studying them, you will learn something that's dangerous for these people's control over your mind. They want to control what you think. They want to control how you feel, and they don't want to give you any outlet, any escape. And so it's very convenient to raise this guilt by association charge against people. Oh, the only reason you're reading Heidegger is because he was a Nazi. You must be one.

• 1:30:50Speaker 02

  The only reason you're reading Schmidt is because you're a neo-Nazi or a semi fascist. That's bogus. That's manipulation. That's gaslighting in a big way. So separating it out helps us to be free. Now, I know people listening to this care about their freedom. Well, if everything is getting collapsed, you know, the roof is falling in on us. And everywhere these accusations of guilt by association and fascist and Nazi are affecting our ability to move, we're just trapped under the rubble. There's no freedom in that. We need to separate things out. We need to make these distinctions and just find our point of orientation. So in that sense, it's a little bit of the autobiography. It's a little bit of the experience.

• 1:31:33Speaker 02

  It's I see, I think it's seeing through the way that these accusations are being used to blind us and to control us. And, you know, it's philosophy. Philosophy teaches you that you just have to be patient with great ideas. Doesn't necessarily mean you follow them everywhere they lead, but you don't even know where they're going to lead until you start looking at them carefully.

• 1:31:55Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:32:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Again, if you want to get into Bitcoin mining, go check out compassmining.io today. I thought that we could wrap up with a couple of rapid fire questions that I'd be fascinated to hear your perspective on or your answers. The first one is, when you talk to individuals, are there one or two questions that you ask them that help you get at how they think, what their worldview is, or who they are as a person?

• 1:33:07Speaker 02

  Usually if I'm working with a student who's just come to me, I'll ask them, what's, what are you thinking about right now? Like, what thoughts are on your mind, right? What questions are concerning you? What have you been reading lately? Because everybody has something present to them. You know, they're worried about, I have one student who's really worried about where things are going in education. Somebody else is really worried about masculinity, the attack on masculinity, traditional masculinity. What does it mean to be a man? Somebody else, their primary concern is with, how do I be a believer? How can I be a believer today in a world that seems to be attacking faith? So I like to ask people, you know, what, what's there for you now? What are your concerns? And then that's where we start.

• 1:33:50Anthony Pompliano?

  What about your favorite book? If you had to answer the question, you know, I want to learn more about philosophy. Where should I start? What would that answer be?

• 1:34:00Speaker 02

  So the two major philosophers for me are Plato and Heidegger. They're difficult to approach if you're just starting, but I would recommend Plato's Republic, or something by Plato, just to get your feet wet, even if you don't understand it, even if you feel lost. It could be Plato's Apology, which is where Socrates is speaking before the Athenians in defense of his life, after they have found him guilty of corrupting the youth and sentenced him to death. Plato and Heidegger, the beginning and end of philosophy. Those are my sweet spots. Although, like I say, you're not going to get it at first glance. So here's where I mention all the credit, everything I've ever learned in philosophy. I want to give like 99% of the credit

• 1:34:43Speaker 02

  to this guy named Leo Strauss. So one of the best ways to get an introduction to the history of political philosophy is by reading Leo Strauss. He's the one who taught a generation of students that you should read the whole book carefully. He's the one who taught a generation of students not to rely on bad translations. And he's the one who showed that it's possible to think about the old questions. They're not irrelevant anymore. We don't just learn about Plato, we learn from Plato. All of those kinds of insights I owe to Strauss. And so that's what I would recommend. Plato, Heidegger, and Leo Strauss.

• 1:35:16Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about your daily schedule, somebody who studies philosophy, someone who is familiar with the Stoics, people may think that you just sit in the dark all day and just think to yourself and you're meditating and so calm. What does your daily schedule look like in reality?

• 1:35:34Speaker 02

  It doesn't look like that. I have three kids, okay? I have two boys and a girl. I work from home. My kids just are in the other room right now, home from lunch. So it's always hectic, it's always crazy. Married 10 years in two days. So life is full, it's very full. It's not empty. I'm not on a mountain, I'm not all by myself, and I'm not in the deserts, okay? Students, business, business partners, family, friends, kids. It's everything, it's a full life. But you just learn to navigate that life in a different sort of way. I read in the evenings. Read in the mornings, I read in the day. I made my work, obviously my study as well. So when I'm doing work tutoring or teaching or recording, I'm also

• 1:36:18Speaker 02

  that's just lucky in my case. Not everybody's going to be able to do that. Take your desire to read philosophy and merge it with your work. But uh, but that's what it looks like. It looks like a full life, family, friends, kids, the whole shebang. And finding some time to read, to write, to take classes, to listen to people and to uh, to think.

• 1:36:37Anthony Pompliano?

  What about diet and sleep? Do you do anything special there?

• 1:36:41Speaker 02

  No, I, I don't think I would be a good role model here in any way. I've sometimes I sleep too much, sometimes too little. I was a vegan for a long time. Now I'm not so sure that's particularly healthy. So I have no advice about that. Everybody's got to find what works for them. I'm surprised anybody could just eat steak all day like Jordan Peterson does, but I guess that's good for some people. Um. What can I say?

• 1:37:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:04Speaker 02

  I wouldn't take myself as a role model here in any case.

• 1:37:07Anthony Pompliano?

  We gotta get you a eight sleep mattress. We've got uh, these uh, these mattresses, uh, a company that I invested in. And as a sponsor of the podcast, they uh, have like a thermo regulated mattress. So you can make it super cold. And uh, hence the name eight sleep, get eight hours. It's uh, the one thing I'm religious about now. Yeah. Um, my, my last question for you is kind of a fun one. Do you believe in aliens? You think that there's life off of earth? And is there anything in history or via the study of philosophy that would suggest uh, kind of non-human life uh, that, that we should consider?

• 1:37:44Speaker 02

  There's nothing in the philosophers that I study and that I teach on this topic, although in my opinion, that shouldn't stop us from thinking about it. Because if we're trying to consider the meaning of human history, human life and the cosmos, obviously aliens are a relevant consideration. So except for that, which is that I think they have a place in our thinking. I don't really have a position on whether there's evidence, whether they do or don't exist. I only think that uh, it would be a relevant piece of information. You know, because let's say somebody argues that human nature is fixed. And then when humans and aliens first mix or meet, some sort of weird transformation happens by osmosis. Well, okay, that kind of thing would have to be taken into consideration, but otherwise I'm agnostic about it. I don't know enough about it.

• 1:38:30Speaker 02

  I used to be pretty sure. Well, okay. Who's this guy's name is like uh, Stephen Drer or something like that? Anyways. Aliens probably do exist, but I don't really know the details.

• 1:38:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it is. It is one of the questions that fascinates me because if we discovered aliens tomorrow, it would be absolutely mind bending for billions of people here on Earth, and it would have an impact on so many different things. Yet, when you think about the importance of it, so few people actually care to think or investigate it. And so there's just this dichotomy between wow, that would be pretty crazy, but nobody really cares too much. So I don't know. I just find it very fascinating.

• 1:39:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, thinking through what would it be like? What if they were this? What if they were that? Right? What would we have to change in our own self-understanding if there were aliens? That's not my primary area, but for sure, there's a lot to think about there. And in general, you know, there's so much worth thinking about.

• 1:39:35Speaker 02

  We need all the help we can get from the old books, up to date with our new situation, our new science, our new technology, our new insights. It's brilliant. You'll never be bored. It's an amazing world, and it's there for us to consider.

• 1:39:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Michael, where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about the school or any of the books that you've written?

• 1:39:53Speaker 02

  So the shortest link is DuganBook.com. You'll see my two books, my school, my newsletter, my social media and all of that. I have a lot of free videos on YouTube on political philosophy. And that's where I would go, DuganBook.com. That'll take you everywhere else you need to go.

• 1:40:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. Well, Michael, thank you so much for your time today. I've learned a ton, and I've really enjoyed looking into not only the work that you've done, but also just kind of your worldview and understanding how you think about investigating these individuals, your ability to separate a number of their different ideas, and really the commendable ability that you have to hold various ideas that may conflict with each other, kind of in your head at once, and not necessarily go in either direction, but just contemplate, you know, where have we been? What have people in the past thought about and spoken about? And then what is the impact on today's society? And what does that mean for where we're going? It's a task that I don't think ever ends. But watching you do it and kind of learning more about your work has been pretty cool for me.

• 1:40:52Anthony Pompliano?

  So I appreciate you taking the time to talk today.

• 1:40:54Speaker 02

  Thanks. It's been my pleasure.

• 1:40:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive three-week training program with over 50 live events. We teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the world's best Bitcoin and crypto companies. Go to thecryptoacademy.io to learn more. Again, that's thecryptoacademy.io. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with your friends, and I'll see you all for the next episode.