Billionaire Wants Beauty
on Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen’s call for new aesthetics
“I would probably not have recognized Shakespeare,” says Tyler Cowen, who runs an experimental art fund on billionaire tech money. He calls this realisation humbling, then does nothing about it. A crucial problem in his practice. If he can’t recognise great art, what’s the point of running the fund? A fund that claims to be searching for new aesthetics and the new great art.
Together with Patrick Collison, the founder of Stripe, Tyler has recently announced a call and financial reward for artists and architects to propose a new aesthetics. In this talk we also propose to Patrick and Tyler an adequate way of converting money into great art.
25 minutes, Thursday, January 8, 2025, 4 p.m.
Sepeli Saeculum!
“Well, you could say you want to make it the most masculine century, because that is what the females would like.”
This conversation starts in Los Angeles where Isa, surrounded by artists and technologists, get’s a Nietzsche tramp stamp, to celebrate her dedication to art and philosophy.
We meditate on a few things.
– The twenty first century is going to be a great century for women.
– Techné returns, the ancient Greek unity of art and technology that was broken apart by the Enlightenment.
– Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, sees himself as an artist who uses post Holocaust dialectics learned under Jürgen Habermas to build an Apollonian art and war machine.
Special Credits:
All our Patrons
Michal Connor, host, friend, musician
Brant Teunis, music
28 minutes on Tuesday, December 23, 2025
Holy Lies and the Normal Elite
Kate and Stefan look at some people who are competing to replace the crumbling normal elite. Aspirations to replace the NYT (Bari Weiss), the Holocaust narrative (historian Tom Holland), and suicidal universities (UATX). And we propose a DEEP ART STRATEGY.
Runtime 31 minutes, November 30, 2025
The Antisemitism of Nick Fuentes
Vibrating between total indifference and fear, the KIRAC people try to understand this new version of American Antisemitism, the latest version after religious and German Antisemitism. Nick Fuentes is its star.
Nick Fuentes turns America First into a new antisemitism, using a Luther style revolt against universalism. Kate and Stefan connect his rhetoric to Kant’s categorical imperative, the Declaration of Independence, Hannah Arendt’s The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition, female resentment from the Victorian age and the collapse of sexual imagination in liberal democracy.
“Liberalism keeps the women in the dark about their sexuality, because it teaches her that her worth as a human being, which for a woman cannot be separated from her sexual value, exists independently of the male experience of it. This prevents her from fathoming the male gaze. The young liberal woman who becomes involved in a relationship with a man for the first time will be confronted with the mystery of the man, his desire, his gaze. And will feel that in yielding to his masculinity, she betrays or degrades herself, unless she shakes off her upbringing and forgives her parents for having lied to her.”
Some additional thoughts on democracy and art, in response to Groypers, the Nick Fuentes fans, who got a bit angry about our Nick Fuentes episode. They say: “You claim there is a lack of an elite and that this is the problem. But that is not true. Democracy does have a (corrupt, Jewish) elite that controls politics but hides itself, and Nick points it out. You don’t understand him!”
Indeed our position is that a democratic elite hides itself because its exceptional status contradicts the democratic principle of equality, especially in an advanced stage of democracy where, through the succession mechanism, the idea of democracy is interpreted more and more purely, moving ever closer to a pure universalism, in other words becoming increasingly left wing. It is because of this increasingly universalist democracy that Nick can play his Lutheran game on universalism. I presume Nick would follow us in this analysis halfway.
Contemporary elites do not produce elite culture but seek connection with mass and celebrity culture, and that so called elite culture, contemporary art, serves the elite with universalist sycophancy that does not distinguish itself from mass culture by greater complexity, refinement or depth, but by the dullness and ponderousness with which it “criticises” the elite.
A democratic elite cannot display its power openly because it understands that this will be used against it. It looks for ways to camouflage itself, to present itself as less powerful than it is, and it will try to expand its power in a way that is covert and hidden from public view. Through the ever lurking accusation of hypocrisy, the elite becomes hypocritical.
From a democratic perspective, displaying power is a form of bad taste. From an undemocratic perspective, displaying power in the form of art or architecture is a form of politeness by which a ruler presents himself visibly and therefore vulnerably. Elite culture expresses something about the actual reality of the elite, not only the projected reality of the people from whom the elite tries to hide. This is a thesis we developed in our talk Art and Tyranny.
In its current stage, democracy’s succession mechanism depends almost entirely on exposing the hypocrisy of your opponents. Each generation succeeds the previous one by unmasking them, until the system produces someone like Trump, and after him someone like Nick Fuentes.
As Nick attacks his opponents he grows and grows. No one can respond without becoming a hypocrite. All their hypocrisy becomes his. He becomes the most hypocritical of all, and at the same time the one who unmasks everyone else. He is the synthesis. The final figure exposes the final hypocrisy, and then you see how the erotic charge of hypocrisy works, and how it was the driving force of democracy all along.
It’s delightful when the mask of this final figure falls away. He is cheerful, constantly becoming a new kind of hypocrite. He can now make use of all the hypocritical masks that have been cast off.
And that is also why Nick likes Stalin. He says it is about Stalin’s statesmanship, but what really draws him is the dialectic itself. It is the marxist pattern that feeds him.
19 minutes, November 13, 2025
Crisis of Passion — Bronze Age Pervert, Erika Kirk, Roger Scruton, Bernini
Art, weirdness, and the crisis of passion. The Bronze Age Pervert on the Christian takeover of Trump’s movement. These Christians blame postmodern culture and memes for Charlie Kirk’s murder. How pointing at postmodernism and irony becomes a veiled form of censorship—and how there’s artistic opportunity in reconciling Christians with the rotting corpse, the stink, the body on the cross. Mel Gibson, Brechtian theater, the Counter-Reformation, Bernini’s Theresia trembling in delicious pain. 14 minutes.
A Wayward Feel – JD Vance, Anna Khachiyan, Milo Yiannopoulos, Nick Land
A conversation on authenticity in the Liberal vs Christian debate amongst prominent Politicians, Pundits, and Philosophers, some of whom display signs of shame for their evident lack of authenticity, while others can do without it altogether, and in doing so inform a different understanding of the very concept itself.
The film (KIRAC episode 27 and 29) is coming soon. In the meantime, I’ll try to post updates once every two weeks tied loosely to our process, to make you part of the machine we’re building.
We’ve received interesting responses to our talk on the billionaires’ metaphysical quest and have already recorded the next release exploring it further. YouTube / Spotify
Runtime 14 minutes. Release date 2025 september 30 6pm (CEST)
The Metaphysical Fight of the Billionaires – Elon Musk vs Peter Thiel
KIRAC analyzes this metaphysical struggle: Mars versus the Cross. where billionaires compete over truth and power.
René Girard
Girard’s scapegoat theory says societies preserve order by directing violence onto a victim. Christianity is decisive because it reveals this mechanism, taking the side of the victim. This revelation is apocalyptic. Thiel uses this to make Christianity the final framework for meaning and power.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche distinguished ruler morality — strength, creation, affirmation — from slave morality built on guilt and obedience. He saw Christianity as the victory of slave morality. In this conversation, Musk represents the Apollonian, ruler path of technology and Mars, while Thiel embodies the priestly, ascetic path that demands belief as the condition of rule.
The conversation turns on these frames: Girard’s Christianity-as-apocalypse and Nietzsche’s morality split, showing how Musk and Thiel fight over metaphysical territory — Mars versus the Cross.
Runtime 18 minutes. Release date 2025 september 18 6pm (CEST)