#303 | Michael Vassar; Good vs. Evil, why lying might be good if you live in an evil world

About this episode

A sprawling, philosophically dense conversation with recurring guest Michael Vassar covering AI progress (GPT/DALL-E/Midjourney), media fragmentation and the "authoritarian turn" of mainstream news since the Twitter Files, David Graeber's "bullshit jobs" thesis extended into a theory of deliberate corporate/industry inefficiency as a wealth-capture strategy, a comparative history of 1950s American "soft totalitarianism" (mass psychiatric incarceration, lobotomies), and an extended meditation on linear vs. cyclical conceptions of time as the root divide between Jewish/Christian "legacy" culture and Indo-European/Indian "cyclical" culture. The conversation culminates in Vassar's darkest material: a theory that sexual abuse functions as a systemic mechanism for training people into "bad motives" and aristocratic power structures, using the etymology of "princess" as an illustration, and a closing philosophical debate on whether life/being is fundamentally good or bad. Vance repeatedly signals being intellectually overwhelmed ("mind shattering," "I feel naive") while pushing Vassar to keep elaborating rather than interjecting his own framework.

“The whole professional managerial class and the whole of aesthetic professional aesthetic is about creating barriers to entry, making it impossible for people who are outside of these aesthetics to be received as legitimate sources of information.”

“The way Wall Street in aggregate gets paid... if all the corporations become slowly less efficient in lockstep, they all make money. And so they can all enforce norms whereby they won't basically deal with... the people leading those companies who are trying to make money instead.”

“Having a bullshit job necessarily involves going along with the concealment of the real reasons that you have that job... which benefits from losing your mind in some important respects.”

Key moments

• AI progress framed as "the only narrative left" after 2022's media fragmentation collapsed into a single AI story.
• Midjourney/DALL-E as democratizing tools that lower "barriers to entry" historically created by professional aesthetic gatekeeping.
• The "bullshit jobs" economic theory — corporations, Wall Street, and government collude to keep industries deliberately inefficient to preserve pricing power.
• 1950s America reframed as a "relatively nice totalitarian state" — 50,000 lobotomies, ~1% of population psychiatrically incarcerated.
• Linear (Hebrew/Christian) vs. cyclical (Indo-European/Indian) time as the deep structural divide underlying progressive vs. conservative worldviews, tied back to Malcolm Collins's framework from a prior episode.
• Extended Rome/Judaism/Christianity historical analogy for how "infiltration" transforms institutions from within (paralleled to woke HR capture).
• The "princess as sex-trafficking archetype" claim and its extension to Me Too/Q Anon as failed attempts to expose systemic abuse.
• Closing debate — is being/life fundamentally good or bad? — as the philosophical foundation for how to interpret deception, suffering, and social control.

Notable quotes

“If all the corporations become slowly less efficient in lockstep, they all make money.”

“It's only 50,000 lobotomies, one in 3,000 people, but that's enough to maintain the state of real political terror.”

“Legacy is something that only exists in linear time. In cyclical time there's just position.”

“The idea of a princess is literally the idea of a sex trafficking victim.”