Hey everybody. Welcome to the Muckraig podcast. I'm Jared Yates Sexton. Nick Halsaman, I believe, is out of the country right now. And I'm saying that before he's out of the country, because time is a weird thing. A reminder to everybody, go over to Patreon.com slash Munkreg Podcast, support the show, also gain access to the

weekender, which again is going to be my lonely ass carrying all of that weight.

But guess what?

Today, right now with me, I have Carl Folk, who is the creator of the Institute of Unreality,

a researcher of authoritarianism and radicalism.

I really enjoyed the last time we were able to have a conversation,

although we were talking about just the most absolute dismal threatening shit.

We're here to do it again before the end of 2023, before we enter 2024.

Carl, how the hell are you?

You know, I'm good.

For all intensive purposes, I good it's uh we are definitely

staring down the barrel of a gun so it's always interesting when we're doing that but uh yeah

i'm excited to be back and you know have a nice little light conversation about uh where we are

in the world carl i here's the thing, man. And I got to tell you,

and I say this all the time. Like the people I enjoy talking to the most, unfortunately,

we have to talk about the worst stuff. I'm going to throw something out there. I want,

again, I want to be careful. We can get the weeds. We can move in. We can move out. I want

to make this accessible. I'm going to use a highly, highly technical term here.

And we can start to dissect it.

Carl, the vibes are bad.

The vibes are, in fact, terrible.

The vibes are awful, are they not?

...