The Walt Right
Walt Right Perspectives
Mythmaking, Dopamine Traps, and Marshall McLuhan
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Mythmaking, Dopamine Traps, and Marshall McLuhan

with Dr. Monzo (WRP #77)

On today’s episode of Walt Right Perspectives I speak with

, who writes about politics, history, and the philosophy of technology at .

Topics include:

  • How Dr. Monzo came into this space through libertarian Politigram and the Dark Enlightenment / NRx

  • Substack rewards substantive content in a way other platforms don’t

  • Hot takes can actually change someone’s mind

  • Marshall McLuhan’s idea of “hot media” vs. “cool media”

  • Is it socially acceptable among Zoomers to scroll your phone during a movie?

  • Netflix is made to watch with another person (or while using your phone) while Youtube is algorithmically hyper-optimized for individual consumption

  • Wagner’s operas were considered overstimulating at the time

  • Industrialism temporarily killed oral culture and the electric age brought it back

  • Millennials and Zoomers have developed a lot of distinctive communicative heuristics due to rapidly shifting communication / media tech

  • Is the mass adoption of smartphones in adolescence responsible for Zoomers being more neurotic / safetyist / puritanical?

  • Porn addiction is such a social problem that researchers can’t even establish a control group

  • Jordan Peterson was the first modern figure to sell responsible behavior to young men in a way that appealed directly to their self-interest

  • How Jordan Peterson made religion intellectually palatable to secular young guys

  • The importance of religion / myth as a narrative heuristic for structuring behavior

  • Monzo’s article on Plato’s Euthyphro Socrates was being an obnoxious fedora

  • The Sapient Paradox

  • The Secret of Our Success, Chesterton’s Fence, and the Manioc Root

  • Does understanding religion as social technology degrade it?

  • Walt’s infamous article defending slutty women, which suggested that piety often comes from a place of sanctimony / status-seeking and that slutty women are necessary to absorb the excess libidinal energy of high status men

  • The advantages and disadvantages of being high in trait openness

  • Does it make sense to divorce morality from relational proximity?

  • The appeal of metamodernism—one can accept the intractable performativity of life and operate earnestly within that context

  • Walt stole Dr. Monzo’s election prediction

  • The liberal tears weren’t as delicious this year because Trump’s victory was somewhat expected, but his much cleaner victory is also forcing liberals to reckon with their cultural overreach

  • It’s much safer to resist politically correct orthodoxy than a lot of people realize

  • Trump has been unifying insofar as he racially depolarized America compared to the Before Times under the Romney-era GOP

  • Second and third generation Hispanics (esp. in TX/FL) don’t identify with or feel racial loyalty toward Guatemalan and Honduran new arrivals

  • French indirect colonialism in West Africa—is this sustainable if they need to also become the new defender of Europe?

  • How the Dutch took over global trade networks by exploiting inefficiencies

  • The autistic utilitarian impulse to deny the existence of special obligations to one’s family / friends / countrymen

  • r vs k selection in politics

  • Liberals have shrunken amygdalas, which makes them less wary of outsiders and better at creating sophisticated art

  • WALL-E is by far the scariest dystopia because nobody will ever vote to restrict their own dopamines

  • In some sense we already live in WALL-E

  • JD Vance has definitely been exposed to Dark Enlightenment / NRx - style ideas

  • Was Vance’s pivot on MAGA genuine or calculated?

  • Vance has advanced through so many different circles in his life that it’s inevitable he’ll come across as a little “weird”

  • Gavin Newsom could easily take back masculinity for the Left in the same way Clinton was able to in the 1990s

  • Conservatives in the 90s hated Clinton so much and freaked out about his blowjob because he got their wives to vote for him out of thirst

  • Vance has to play up being a softboi to not alienate women whereas Gavin can lean into his predator nature because he’s coming from the Left

  • Can Trump get anything interesting done without 60 senators?

  • Is civil service reform on the table? Can Elon help Trump clean up the deep state?

  • Elon has experience outmaneuvering an obstructive bureaucracy

Discussion about this podcast

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