A (11:09)

Well, if you look at the, the New York Times had a little expose, an insider look at what the negotiation actually looked like in terms of deciding to undertake this military assault, I suppose. And it was, you know, it was the same kind of idea that you've probably heard a hundred times that it was all Israel. And Trump was completely taken with a presentation given by Netanyahu. You know, whatever you think of that, I don't, I don't think that the US just decided to go along with it for the fun of it, but it seemed to me that they, that the idea, the underlying idea was something like, well, we can get all the benefits of stability in the region in terms of having some kind of stable partner, but Israel's going to take on the, the heavy lifting in terms of ensuring that happens if there is some kind of regime change, because if you mess around in that region, the end result is not a stable ally, but just utter collapse and calamity. And Trump explicitly said something to the effect of, well, that's their problem. So basically saying, well, that's Israel's problem to deal with. So that might explain some of the gap between, you know, reality and, and expectation. The idea was like, well, fine, we benefit from this as well. We don't want a country that's going to start getting stronger and stronger, developing greater connections to China and Russia. Now is the time to strike. Okay, sure, let's be opportunist about it, but Israel is going to have to deal with the consequences. That seemed to me to be some of the underlying logic. But it seemed to me that Trump was trying to pursue two objectives that were completely contradictory. So on the one hand, you want to pursue long term stability in terms of, you know, obviously oil is the underlying Greece that runs the entire global economy, and you don't want a country like Iran sitting next to The Strait of Hormuz holding the entire world economy to ransom at will, which is basically what they've proved now that actually their greatest chess piece isn't. Their strongest chess piece isn't nuclear weapons, but sitting next to the Strait of Hormuz and being able to grind global flows to a halt. So they were pursuing long term stability in terms of ensuring that Iran doesn't get too powerful. And now's the time, I suppose, or now is as good an opportunity as any. But at the same time, pursuing that long term stability means that you have to tolerate a certain amount of instability in the short term in terms of markets and your population hating you. And Trump is utterly beholden to the short term and any kind of fluctuation in the markets. And so as soon as he sort of pushes in one direction, markets freak out and he freaks out. And so you can't really pursue this kind of long term agenda if as soon as it creates any kind of short term instability, you balk. And I think, you know, for all of the threats, I'm going to destroy an entire civilization. I'm quite sure that Iran knows that any kind of. Well, they've just proven it that any kind of instability in the markets is going to freak Trump out. And so he's always going to back down. And so this is why it doesn't make any sense. It doesn't appear to make any sense because any kind of objective that makes any sense is long term is going to create short term stability, but he's always pursuing short term stability in the market. So I don't know where this could possibly go at this point. It seems to me that Iran will win and the M.O. was supposed to be regime change and Israel is supposed to take that up. I think the end result, if any, is just greater instability in the region and what is actually happening, which is religious fundamentalism filling a power vacuum. So nothing good has actually come of this. I think partially because of this inability to pursue one objective and pursue it fully.

B (15:13)

Certainly seems that the ceasefire will only be a ceasefire, because I think the logic of the confrontation still pushes toward escalation on both sides. Will the Iranian regime really be willing to come to terms that the US and Israel find acceptable? Doubt it. So I expect this is more of a pause and, you know, whose advantage does it work? I don't know, but I'm starting to think that we're in this war for the long haul. So not much Easter rejoicing on that front for me. The Artemis mission, I guess that's what people are a little happier about is the Apollo nostalgia coursing through you all as you see rockets take off. Are we proving that America still has vitality? Proving the multipolarity grows wrong.

C (16:24)

Don't. Don't forget about the Canadian.

B (16:26)

Never. I would never forget about Canada.

C (16:29)

The first Canadian to go around the Moon.

B (16:33)

An important first. An important first. So,

C (16:39)

yeah, in fact, the composition of the mission has, you know, in nationality terms, the same composition as the compact staff. So I feel like we're represented up there, at least in terms of citizenship.

B (16:55)

Yeah, it's stunning and brave.

A (16:56)

Live from the Moon, what we are behind,

C (17:01)

which I'm reminded of the Met operas, you know, struggling to, struggling to finance itself. And there was some expose recently about how the, the artistic director had sent these desperate letters to Elon Musk asking for money and saying that they would love to perform the first opera on Mars, which I thought was actually a pretty awesome idea, but in any case, yeah, I'm pretty into it. I mean, here's my thought. Thought. The thing I would, I, I, I have no idea what the kind of broader public perception of this is. I don't think it's, it's certainly not as, as broadly, you know, captivating of the public imagination as the, the Apollo missions were, where sort of everybody was riveted to their TV screen or radio. And it, it really was this kind of unifying moment for the nation. And in, you know, in an era of mass media and a sort of unified, more or less unified public, it was. And interestingly, you know, one thing I thought was interesting in some of the coverage was that it pointed out, you know, the Apollo missions also occurred during periods that were actually quite dark in other respects. They, they coincided with, obviously, the escalation of the Vietnam War with race riots, with assassinations of, of major public figures. And so, you know, there was similar to what we're seeing now, this kind of counterpoint between the generally positive vibes conveyed by those missions and the much darker mood of the public about many other things, both domestic and foreign. So, yeah, I think there is some kind of interesting repetition in that, that, you know, it seems important to me. Again, I don't have a sense of how broadly this is captivating the public at large, in part because there is no public at large. There's just this very fractured and fragmented public. But it does strike me in one way, which is that we've seen a general rising public mood of disillusionments about technology. And I'm thinking specifically of something I wrote about in the Compact Substack a couple weeks ago, the fact that people generally seem to have a sour mood about the AI revolution, seem to see it as largely negative in its likely impacts, seem not to have very much sense of how it's meaningful or relevant to them. And I do think, you know, two things stand out to me about this Artemis mission. One is, and in the way that, specifically the way that it presents a different picture of what technological progress can look like as a aspect, as a sort of national project or a, you know, a broader sort of human project, which is, first of all, it's a fusion of the human and the machine. It's a kind of collaborative enterprise where the humans are very much in the picture, even though it also involves advanced technology, you know, unbelievably sophisticated and impressive technology. But that technology is partly designed in order to sustain human life in these very inhospitable settings and also to enable human beings to do certain things, you know, engage in research and experimentation and to expand their own knowledge and understanding as well as to have these remarkable experiences. Especially, you know, this famous notion of the Earthrise of you, you know, you pass over the moon, this, this happened with the Apollo mission and you see the Earth rising behind it as, you know, one of these kind of great sublime moments of the. The early space era is being repeated now. And so there is a kind of complementarity between human and machine here that is generally lost in the AI discussions where the, the discourse is all about, I mean, including or especially coming from the people creating the technology is all about replacement. It's all about this kind of rendering humanity obsolete. Rather than expanding or augmenting the capacities of human beings, it's about replacing those capacities and sort of turning human beings into passive, into kind of passive consumers of, of technological abundance in the, in the best case. Right. Or, or just turning human beings into this kind of, you know, this kind of wasteful, you know, and had Sam Altman saying, well, you know, takes a lot of energy to raise a human being too. You might complain about data centers, but, you know, human beings are. Consume a lot of energy and are much less productive or whatever. So it's like the, the human being is basically seen as this kind of inefficient thing that has to be replaced by technology. So that's. Yeah, so that's one thing I think is. Is significant about this, is that it presents a very different picture of technological progress in which the human and the machine can be seen as complimentary to each other, rather than as, as kind of in competition or in some kind of state of rivalry. And then the other thing is that this is ultimately and importantly a public project. It's a publicly funded project. Even though, you know, NASA has, has privatized, has, has sort of offloaded and outsourced and quite a few of its operations to the private sector over the past several decades, it is still essentially a public and national project. And so it is something that, you know, the average citizen has a kind of stake in and is in some sense an extension of the average citizen's power and the way that the average citizen's power and interests are in a very flawed and problematic way today, but nonetheless still kind of represented by these large public projects. And so, to me, that contrasts heavily with the idea of, of machines simply as things that private industry builds and then sort of finds ways to try to entice and, or cajole consumers into adopting. And so that, that's just, again, a very different picture of technology and what it does and what it can be. So, you know, I think overall, the Artemis project does hark back to this earlier era. And I, again, I don't know how much impact it's having on public consciousness, but I do think that's fundamentally good and something that I applaud.

A (24:11)

Yeah, I would fundamentally agree with that and echo a lot of the thoughts that I had, which is why I should have jumped in and spoken first. But it's very much like a welcome disruption to the damp squib that had been space policy for such a long time, or at least what had made its way into the news cycle from space, which was like launching Katy Perry into orbit, like, God, things like that, that weren't really exciting and didn't really seem to have very much of a purpose except to make some kind of statement about DEI or something like that. I have no idea. Although, to be fair, there is that there's some DEI in this one as well. I, I, you know, I had this. I was at a conference last week, and one of the panels, I was watching one of the panels, and I just got deja Vu of 2008, 2010, where they were sitting there talking about how, oh, no, has capitalism lost its morality? Has it lost its sense of being for people, and maybe we should really think about what makes people happy? And I was like, oh, my gosh, are we really rehashing this? And I just, I was talking to one of the panelists afterward, and he was sort of talking about, like, oh, you know, maybe not happiness, maybe we should search for meaning, blah, blah, blah. And it just, I feel like we've had this conversation for like 200 years where we come to this point where it seems like capitalism doesn't really want to advance anymore. There seems to be this kind of stagnation, at least when it comes to profitability. Margins seem to get slimmer and slimmer. We do have technological dynamism, but it seems to be eating people alive and simply geared towards squeezing blood from a stone. And, and people start sort of saying like, well, maybe we can fix this psychologically. Like maybe we could just refocus the purpose of our policies onto happiness or this pursuit of meaning or whatever it might be. And I said to him, no, because the reason why we're having this kind of, this situation is because yes, profit margins do shrink. And this is part of the reason why we introduced a lot of this technology and to push human beings, which are the biggest cost out of the, out of the equation. And as a roundabout, accidental thing, we also create situations that are great for humans if you are not one of the ones that lose your job and get screwed. But it's generally better that you can push a button on a machine and get a coffee than have a human make it for you, right? That's, nobody is. I don't know, maybe some people like being baristas, but I don't think it's anybody's like goal in life to be a barista. So at the end of the day, technology can be really great for humans. But I've noticed exactly what you've said, Jeff, that there's this throwing by the wayside even that even this like, well, you know, as an accidental outcome. We do produce great things for humanity. It's like, no, actually humanity, you suck. You're actually just an unrefined input, you're ineffective. And actually we should be using you to power the machines which are anyway superior. And this really anti human discourse around technology has come up and then people are sort of saying, oh gee, why is there this anti technology sentiment amongst large sectors of the public? And that's, that's the answer. So I, I think the only way out of this situation, if we are, if where we are as a society is we have essentially agreed there is no alternative to capitalism. This is the situation. You know, we, we tried any kind of alternative to capitalism, failed miserably. You can't solve a problem of declining profit margins by hoping that policy can be made to make people happy. Just like, hey guys, maybe like go out of business and don't make a profit because it's bad for people. Like nobody's gonna do that. It's just like it's a pipe dream. Makes you feel good. It might make a nice policy sound bite. I don't know, 20 years ago, but not anymore. Then the only real or, or to like, or, or the other thing is to like just squeeze blood from a stone. Just utterly like ruthlessly exploit people. That's kind of where we are now. Those are our options. There is actually another option which is pursuit of technology and innovation which can get us out of this mess and create booms. And that's why I think things like this are so important and so powerful. Which is instead of just sort of acquiescing to this situation and starting to get into these talks of like, oh, well, maybe this is just the new normal. Maybe we're just going to have low, sluggish growth forever. Maybe this is good for the environment. Perhaps we should have zero growth politics even make it into a political project. Stagnation instead. We need to have these horizons that are the moon and the stars and you know, just our luck, capitalism might push us there anyway. So I've actually really enjoyed listening to some of the pie in the sky kind of ideas of like the moon as a logistics hub, you know, using the water on the moon for resources like rocket fuel. Long term ideas like, you know, speculative ideas around helium, lowering the cost of operating in space, you know, moving beyond our horizons to create another situation of, you know, akin to discovering new continents. And well, lucky for us, we don't know that any of these new horizons are actually populated by anybody. So perhaps it won't even involve the discovery of new populations to enslave. So this is the only kind of thinking that can get us out of our stagnation, which is to think big and think beyond our present impasses. Not how to exploit people even more ruthlessly, but how to discover new resources and new frontiers. Otherwise it's, you know, the other alternatives that we have are not good. Right. So this is the kind of thinking that we need and we need more of it. It's just one small step in the right direction, but one giant leap for mankind.

B (29:56)

Amen. Yeah, I, I really have nothing to add to that other than, yeah, I love the Apollo missions and fully buy into all the nostalgia for that moment in American history. There's some great documentary films on that I love to watch with my kids. So I'm pro space. I gotta say, Ashley, why isn't Kanye allowed into The United Kingdom

A (30:31)

because he's the reincarnation of Hitler. Don't you know? So. So, yeah, over the past week, the artist formerly known as Kanye now, yay, I'm told. Sorry for the very obvious joke. But anyway, he was formally blocked from entering the UK by the Home Office because he. Well, the. The statement was that his entry into the UK is not conducive to the public good. This is one of the very few kinds of powers that can be exercised by the person who runs this, you know, just to make a statement and say, look, we're going to block certain people from coming into the uk. We're going to protect the public good because of Kanye west releasing a track called Heil Hitler, Extraordinary Nazi, like outright Nazi, anti Semitic statement, selling swastikas as merchandise or all of this stuff. And he has since sought to kind of walk all of that back. And he said, look, if I can come into the uk, I will open up conversations with the Jewish community. I'm very much open to doing that. And. But no, none of it was enough. And one of the things that I found interesting was he said that the reason why he did all of this, you know, releasing a song called Heil Hitler, you might have to bleep that. I don't know if that's going to get us banned on YouTube or not. It's, you know, obviously it's one of. It is the most offensive thing pretty much you can possibly say. But he says the reason why is because of his bipolar disorder, that he was experiencing an intense bipolar episode. And Wes Dreading made a very interesting statement where he said that he used it as a bipolar disorder, as an excuse to justify his actions, which he found appalling. He says, does bipolar disorder really justify that? Or is an excuse to justify rotten behavior? Seen this so many times where people are like, oh, you're just using blank serious mental illness as an excuse to justify your behavior. Blank mental illness doesn't cause that. And I'm just sitting there like, well, yeah, it kind of does. That's the whole point. Like, that's why we label it as mental illness, because it is so far outside the acceptable boundaries of human behavior. We need a new category for it. This is why we call it mental illness. So I'm kind of, you know, not at all obviously sympathetic to anything that Carney actually said. I'm sympathetic to his justification that he. That he was mentally ill. Like, yeah, mentally being mentally ill does indeed make you do crazy things. That's why we call it madness. That's kind of the whole point. So I thought it was a bit weird. I've heard this so many times and I think part of it is because we've redefined such, such enormous ways of normal existence as forms of mental ill health that is softening mental illness, not mental illness, but mental ill health. That it's, it's like, no, mental ill health is the normal thing. And, and it's, you know, it's normal people. And we should have, you know, you, you'll have somebody who's like an autism advocate who's, you know, at Yale. So like, oh, well, of course, you know, mental illness doesn't make you do crazy things. Although I should say autism obviously is not a mental illness. But I'm just saying that the people who are crusaders for things are actually very high functioning individuals. So I found that interesting and how it speaks to our kind of our culture's descent into completely losing track of what actual mental illness is after expanding that category to include so much of everyday existence. The other thing that I thought was interesting is the way that being like the what cancel culture has produced in terms of our public discourse. So you kind of like, you know, all, all those years of trying to push people out of polite society. The idea was to sort of blot out their existence entirely. But of course what it created was a parallel ecosystem where people would just be welcomed with open arms and often with a much giddier kind of reception than had been the case even when they were part of mainstream media. And this created a weird situation for public discourse where the more offensive you could be, the more you pissed off the mainstream, the more punk rock you were. And the obvious endpoint of that is like selling swastikas. I mean that like, literally, that's what punk rockers used to do, was to like subvert the idea of the swastika because it pissed off mainstream polite society and, and Kanye west, mad though he may have been, was following a kind of logic. It was just sort of like, oh, are we like saying Heil Hitler now? Guess we are. Guess that's based. And I don't know, you know, I, I, I don't want an excessively restrictive public sphere, but I also don't want a public sphere that creates the Andrew Tates of the world and swastika and merchandise. So I'm not really sure how to walk any of that back. But I've noticed that this is kind of the outcome that, that this kind of catering to the madness of Kanye west and bipolar disorder was somehow like the logical outcome of, of a decade of cancel culture that, yes, I will buy your record. Whereas before we might have been like, oh, this man is actually mad. He needs serious psychological help. And now we actually can't make that distinction or sort it out in our culture, in our public sphere.

B (35:57)

So, Ashley, I had the. That terrible experience. There's a kind of Twitter meme of someone saying, I spent 10 months working on this story and he just tweeted it out because I wrote an article for First Things about this element of rock and Kanye and you just tweeted it. But I mean, I really think it's worth stressing the way in which Kanye's Nazi phase reflects a really long standing element of kind of rock aesthetics and provocation. So Kanye explicitly aspired to be a rock star. He didn't want to just be a rapper, he wanted to be a rock star. And from the beginning, rock stars have been fascinated by Nazi symbols. So in 1964, John Lennon gave a sig heil to adoring fans from a balcony in Liverpool in the United Kingdom. And when he was young, when he was a student at the Liverpool College of Art, he drew these pictures of himself giving a Nazi salute. In 1965, Mick Jagger sigh heil his way around a stage while the Rolling Stones were playing Satisfaction. Jagger's bandmate Brian Jones wore an SS uniform in a magazine photo shoot. You know, just, it goes, it goes on and on. And David Bowie, who had his own pretty extensive flirtation with Nazi symbols and with other kind of versions of kind of right wing esotericism, told Playboy in 1976, Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars. And then, you know, you mentioned punk, which really leans into this, obviously. So Kanye west wore a swastika T shirt famously, but even more famously, Sid Vicious wore a swastika T shirt. So there's this really remarkable thing going on where the United Kingdom is excluding Kanye, but rock very much, including maybe signally including its British exponents, has been fascinated by Hitleriana and has, has embraced it very extensively. So, you know, my read of Kanye is that the, the mental health explanation is convenient. It's convenient for him and it is convenient for us because it kind of puts his admittedly more extensive and explicit and seemingly less ironic embrace of Nazism. It allows us to kind of put that in a box and to not think about why Nazi aesthetics have been so essential to expressing the rebellious spirit of rock and roll for so long. And you know, my own belief is that a lot of what rock gave Rock energy as a kind of rebellious and transgressive cultural expression has been exhausted. So it's no longer really that fresh or striking to make a public display of sexuality or to talk about drugs, or to kind of speak blasphemously or impiously about the divine or the sacred. And really, the only way maybe to engage in that form of blasphemous blasphemy or to really shock the audience is to lean a little harder into the Nazi stuff. Though I would note that Lady Gaga around 10 years ago had a lightly Nazi inflected video. So I think it takes something much more explicit, something more like what Kanye has done to really shock people. So I tend to see this using exactly the term you did as kind of reflecting a certain logic of this cultural form, which maybe that's beginning to play itself out too, a little bit, as we hear more and more that people say, oh, well, Hitler, he wasn't so bad. He was really quite misunderstood. Perhaps as that becomes more prevalent, this will come to seem played out. And, you know, one way to read Kanye's apologies for his kind of Hitler dalliance is just as an admission that he's blown through that and is ready to move on. Because he's always moved on from things before others have throughout his career. You know, he pioneered the use of kind of sped up, high pitched soul samples early in his career, and then he moved on from that as others imitated it. And going on down the line, he's continued to push himself aesthetically. He moved on from the pop of Graduation, that album of his, or the more sort of stadium rock aspirations of Parts of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. He's kept moving on sonically in all kinds of ways. And I guess if you're not crazy about the Hitler stuff, maybe a more reassuring or comforting story is that Kanye has moved on from that because he's realized it's played out. I don't know that that's the case, but I think it's probably getting closer to being played out as more and more people kind of join in the revisionism or join in the provocation.

A (41:56)

You know, I was on the fence with in terms of whether or not I believed his bipolar story, but it bothered me that it was like, oh, bipolar doesn't make you do that. Because nobody could say, oh, you're malingering. Like, you can't say that. You can't deny that. So they had to say, oh, bipolar doesn't make you do that. But I don't know. I honestly, I I, I, I, I'm closer to settling on the idea that, like the schizophrenic niche idea where it's like, you know, in some cultures you have a shaman who's often a person with schizophrenia and they have this niche. Well, I don't doubt that he's mad. Yeah, I believe it. But he, that his madness is part of what puts him ahead of things and allows him to find this kind of niche. He, he, his madness allows him to play into these sorts of things that other people won't touch and to leave them just as quickly. That's, that's kind of where I settle. I don't know, I feel like he is, I've met people like this before and he strikes me as one of these like quintessential bipolar kinds of individuals. Though I'm, you know, I'm skeptical about labeling, but if we're going to go into labeling, that's what I think. I think that he's the perfect kind of person to fill this cultural space.

C (43:02)

I would just recommend people read Emmett Renson's essay for compact, Kanye west and the Persistence of stigma from March 2025 as an interesting commentary on all of this.

B (43:18)

And in order to do so, go to compactameric.com/subscribe.

A (43:46)

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