Tag: interviews

Interview with Owen Benjamin

The Big Bear was interviewed about his new bestselling book by Fandom Pulse:

Owen Benjamin may be one of the funniest men alive. His comedy is so poignant that it seemed at one point nothing could stop his career trajectory. Some even allege that Dave Chappelle steals his jokes. However, like many who ran afoul of The Narrative, one day Benjamin was canceled and found his life forever changed. In recent years, he’s built an incredible community and focused on family in an inspirational journey that he’s partially laid out in his new book, How To Slay A Wizard, in context with his philosophy he’s been developing along the way. The book has become a #1 bestseller and keeps staying at the top of the charts with fans loving his first outing as an author, giving it a 4.8-star rating on Amazon.

You draw a sharp line between the wizard and the alchemist. Most people reading this will recognize wizards in politics and media, but where do people most often fail to recognize the wizard operating in their own personal relationships that causes them problems?

Yeah, I made that distinction because I think people who can do amazing things with transforming compounds or natural extracts can get lumped in with the wizards. Baking great bread is alchemy. It’s just applying heat and pressure to transform something. Wizards are always deceiving and manipulating people for their “transformations” to occur. That’s an important distinction. The sneaky hidden versus just the “if I boil this thing, it gets sweeter.”

Wizards typically start thinking they can separate their “craft” from their personal and home life, but it doesn’t work that way. If someone can intentionally misrepresent themselves, change the meaning of words, and induce destructive emotions in complete strangers for money, what’s stopping them from doing that to anyone?

A way to tell if someone is a wizard in your life is, a wizard just pays attention to how something is perceived versus what it actually is. They also never answer questions directly, and constantly diagnose others’ intentions and speculate on their emotions.

You argue that nonsensical rules produce more compliance than logical ones. That’s counterintuitive. Walk us through the psychology. Why does absurdity work better than coherent authority?

Because if a logical rule is followed, the target may be following the overall order and logic of the situation. He could be complying with the external and objective truth of a situation that will lead to success and production. When a target follows rules that clearly are counterintuitive, destructive, and constantly changing, that means they are following the will of the wizard. The more absurd, the clearer to the Wizard that he has created an obedient servant.

It all starts with “Simon says.” I was never good at that game I would respond that Simon should “go fuck himself.”

Read the whole thing there.

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The Tree of Woe Interview

Contemplations on the Tree of Woe interviewed me about Probability Zero yesterday:

TOW: You know, I’ve been reading your work since the early 2000s, since back when you were the “Internet Superintelligence” at WorldNetDaily (WND), writing alongside Pat Buchanan, Thomas Sowell, and (gasp) Ben Shapiro. Over the last two decades I’ve watched you essentially make a “speedrun” from an Enlightenment-adjacent libertarian to your current Post-Enlightenment worldview. Maybe in the future they’ll have to talk about the “Early Vox” and “Late Vox” like they do with Wittgenstein.

In any case, your book on New Atheism dismantled its ideology back when people were still taking it really seriously, and your writing on Free Trade essentially completed the demolition that Ian Fletcher began. There’s been other contributions, too, but I signal those two out because they were really influential on me personally; I literally was an atheist free trader in the early 2000s. And of course, I was also a committed Darwinist; my paper for Robert Nozick’s Law & Philosophy seminar at Harvard Law in 2000 was about applying Darwin to Aristotle. Now you’ve turned your evil eye on the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection to demolish that, too.

But before you were the Internet Superintelligence, you were also a Billboard-topping music producer and a game designer. There’s polymaths and then there’s… whatever you are when you dismantle the Enlightenment project after making the soundtrack for Mortal Kombat while running a classic leather book bindery and red-pilled dating blog. If I didn’t know you actually existed, I would think your bio was a prank, like the Sokal Hoax but for a biography.

The title is provocative. “Probability Zero.” But you’re not actually claiming the probability is zero in the mathematical sense. What does that phrase mean to you?

VD: Actually, it’s pretty damn close. The 5 Sigma standard is utilized by particle physicists to confirm their findings; the Higgs Boson was announced on the basis of a 4.9 Sigma finding by one particle accelerator and a 5.0 Sigma finding by another. This is considered “certainty” by the physicists. If we put the percentages of the observed speed of mutational fixation versus the genetic ground it has to cover in those terms, using not-unreasonable assumptions well within the scientific consensus, we’re talking about a 5.3 Sigma negative probability. The probability is as close to absolute zero as it can be and still be calculated.

It’s a rather long interview. Read the whole thing there.

UPDATE: I don’t know if there are shenanigans at Amazon or what, but all four of the book’s customer reviews have, for some reason, disappeared from the listing. Perhaps it’s just a technical glitch, but given our past experiences there, perhaps not. Either way, if you have finished the book, I encourage you to post a review of it there, particularly if you are a Verified Buyer.

UPDATE: Just a glitch, apparently. They’re back and they brought a friend.

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The Carlson-Dugin Interview

A selection from the complete transcript of the interview:

Tucker Carlson: So what you’re describing is clearly happening and it’s horrifying. But it’s not the definition of liberalism I have in mind when I describe myself, as what we say the United States is a classical liberal. So you think of liberalism as individual freedom and choice from slavery. Right? So the options as we conceive them, as I was growing up, were the individual who can follow his conscience, say what he thinks, defend himself against the state versus the statism, the totalitarianism embodied in the government that you fought against: the Soviet government. And I think most Americans think of it that way. What’s the difference?

Aleksandr Dugin: Very interesting question. I think that the problem is in two definitions of liberalism. There is old liberalism, classical liberalism. And new liberalism. So classical liberalism was in favor of democracy. Democracy understood as the power of majority of consensus, of individual freedom. That should be combined somehow with the freedom of other. And now we have totally the next station already. Next phase: new liberalism. Now it is not about the rule of majority, but it is about the rule of minorities. It is not about individual freedom, but it is about wokism. So you should be so individualistic that you should criticize not only the state, but individual, the old understanding of individual. So you need now – you are invited to liberate yourself from individuality to go further in that direction. I have spoken once with Fukuyama, Francis Fukuyama on TV. And he has said, before, democracy has meant the rule of majority. And now it is about the rule of minorities against majority, because majority could choose Hitler or Putin. So we need to be very careful with majority, and majority should be taken under control and minorities should rule over majority. It is not democracy, it is already totalitarianism. And now we are not about defense of the individual of freedom, but about prescription to be woke, to be modern, to be progressive. It is not your right to be or not to be progressive. It is your duty to be progressive, to follow this agenda. So you are free to be a left liberal. You are no more free enough to be a right liberal. You should be a left liberal. And that is a kind of duty. It is prescription. So liberalism fought during its history against any kind of prescription. And now it at its turn became totalitarian, prescriptive, not free as it was.

Tucker Carlson: And do you believe that was inevitable, that process? That was always going to happen?

Aleksandr Dugin: I perceive here a kind of logic. So a kind of logic that is not just a reversion or deviation. You start with one thing. You want to liberate individual. When you arrive at the point when it is possible, it is realized. So you need to go further. And you start to liberate ourselves from this time from old understanding of individual in favor of more progressive concepts. So you could not stop here. That is my vision. So if you say “Oh, I prefer old liberalism,” they would say, the progressives, they would say, it is not about old liberalism. It is about fascism. You are defender of traditionalism, conservatism, fascism. So stop here. Either be progressive liberal or you are done, or we will cancel you. That is what we observe, I would say.

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