 It's the author of a new novel, Dragon Day. Matthew, why'd you write this novel? Hey, Luke, it's good to be here. Thank you for having me on. Obviously, we've known each other online for some time, so great to be on your show. Your question is, why did I write this novel? Well, I'm trying to avoid answers that sound too artsy and gay, but it's something that I had been working on for a long while. And I've wanted to write nonfiction. I've written essays and blog posts, but for really as long as I can remember, I also have had aspirations to write fiction. I've been writing fiction a while, and this is my first novel. It's the first sort of long-form thing I've completed. Why did I write this novel? I felt driven to. And the drive to write a novel predates any of my involvement on the sort of online sphere that we're both in, and it predates any of the particular subject matter in this particular novel. I've just always had a drive to write and to ultimately write a novel. So you've been pretty energetic in the two or three years. I've known you. So you've sent your energy in various directions. So why don't you sketch a little bit about your life in Los Angeles to the extent you want to disclose it? Oh, yeah, it's an interesting question. In my case, I would say, because, yes, I've been energetic in terms of a lot of my activity online and in the sort of dissident sphere of which we're both apart. However, I don't consider myself any kind of ring leader or super public figure. I'm kind of Robert Stark's co-host. And I got into this sphere of the internet that we're on in 2018. And I think of it as something more that I've sort of learned from, exposed myself to different points of view, more so than taking any kind of lead role in any one project or the other. Up until this point, I would say this novel is my first really independent project that I put forward that encapsulates a lot of my interests and a lot of my perspectives and such. But in the meantime, yeah, again, doing a lot of work with Robert Stark, obviously, we did that great, very low key. But I'm proud of the work we did. Documentary or docu-podcast, video podcast with you back in 2018, that was one of my first projects. And then I've been consistently a co-host on Robert Stark, whom you had on last night. I've been a consistent co-host on his podcast and writing this novel. And those would be my main activities. And what's going on with David Kohlstein? You've been doing some stuff with him. Have you not? Yeah, David's a friend. I have not been due to a busyness with, you know, the way I'm living, as opposed to the stuff I do online. I haven't really been that involved in the project. That's kind of more him and Robert at this point. But yeah, David's a friend. I think he's a very funny guy. But those currently, the Hutton Gibson documentary is not currently one of my main projects. OK. And where did you write this novel? Where? Sorry. Again, and I've gone into this on some other podcasts, it is not that it's seven years of consistent work, because that wouldn't be something I'd brag about. It's only about a 150-page novel. But it's something that I worked on and off. It's something I worked on and off on for years, for a total of seven years, in fact. So it has been written in quite a few places. I started it when I was in college. So I wrote it on my college campus. And it's set on a college campus, of course. And that's where I did a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of outlining it. But I didn't complete the novel until after I moved to LA, sort of got interested in Robert Stark's podcast and the sphere of the internet. And that's really what pushed me over the edge. There's certain themes in the novel about the main character is a sort of lost and confused freshman in college. Obviously, that was very much, well, to a limited degree, thankfully, influenced by my own experience, an exaggerated version on my college campus. And then it was more exposure to some of these dissident right ideas and other dissident ideas online that kind of pushed me over the edge into where I both had a character with a circumstance and also, I guess, more of a philosophical political backdrop that I'd explored more thoroughly to sort of complete the picture. So you asked, where did I write this? About half on a college campus and about half in Los Angeles, post-college and influenced by the online sphere. Ack, I mean, what the hell? Oh, say that again, sir. I think my reception cut out. Yeah, I said this novel seems a bit dark. Oh, what the hell? Do you think? I mean, yeah, certainly it is dark. I would hope that there's a degree of, that one could recognize the humor in it. And it's definitely, I am one of those writers who probably channels the darker stuff into writing and in particular into fiction because obviously fiction is fiction. A lot of the sort of darker realms of thought that I've explored in different ways over the years, I wanted to channel into a work of fiction as opposed to letting it come out in my real life. Not to be a total Freudian about it. I'm not buying into the whole package of sublimation as a way of getting rid of antisocial instincts or something like that. But I think there is an extent to which that way of thinking has often informed the way I think about art. I find a certain degree of inspiration in some of these darker, more frightening corners of things that I observed in the real world. And I try to channel them into art and in this case into a novel in hopes, and actually I think this is explicitly stated in the book, not ironically, in hopes that maybe some good can come out of naming the bad, sort of naming the demon in order to slay it perhaps. I don't know if that, you did read the novel, which I appreciate, I don't know if it was your take on it or if you thought maybe it was a little bit more in the realm of something pornographic and terrible. Whatever your honest opinion on that is. But my intention wasn't to write some dark thing and say, to present my own darkness to the world or something as much as I am a believer in exploring the taboo, exploring the dark can have a positive benefit for the writer, for me, but also hopefully for readers and even for society, not that my sites are that large at this point because I'm realistic about the number of readers I actually have. But I do think that exploring things like the alt-right as explored in my novel, like the excesses of Antifa as explored in my novel and quite a few other subjects which I'm sure we'll get into, I think that putting these out as best as clearly as I understand them could have some kind of, promote some more clear understanding of things. And did writing this novel provide your own clear understanding of some things? Yes. For starters, it's just a sense of getting this stuff off of my chest, so to speak, whether it's a dark corner of the internet I've explored politically, there's obviously quite a bit of sexual content in the book as well. And for me personally, writing about these things helps me to sort of put them in their place, recognize what they are, recognize the power that they have, not have them be these unconscious things in my life sneaking up on me, but rather externalize them in a therapeutic manner and then move beyond them. To get more specific about that, I think that the villain in my book, the professor character, Thomas Wallingford, for me he represents all of the most sort of decadent and pagan and dark elements that I found in the dissident right at the alt-right at a certain desire to, yeah, again externalize those, recognize the degree to which they have a propensity for destruction, both personal and societal, place that in its place and then kind of see what's left. Like what, after delineating certain dark themes, it's like, what do I believe? Because it's not that, I don't subscribe to the actions and words of the villain in the book, but these are ideas I've been exposed to, been very intrigued by, I'll be honest about that. But then with them externalized, it's easier for me to, they have less power, if that makes sense. Yeah, so for example, I used to write about the pornography industry and when I wrote about the pornography industry, pornography ceased to have power over me. So when I left the pornography industry, then pornography would reassert its power. So for me, writing about the dark side was a way of taking back power from something that had way too much power over me. Yeah, that's fascinating. I mean, I think that, yeah, I think that's probably a good comparison in that, yeah, no, I think that's exactly what I mean. But you're saying once you stopped writing about the pornography industry for a period of time, obviously you've stopped writing about it now for a long period of time, is that power reasserts itself or was there a sense of moving on like once you'd exhausted the topic? No, the power reasserted itself. So whatever power that writing about the pornography industry gave me over this dark side, that power dissipated as soon as I stopped writing about it. I stopped writing this book over a year ago. It was obvious, it takes a little bit for, because I did publish with a publisher, not self-publisher, I published with Terrahouse Press, Matt Forney's Press. I've been done with this book about a year on, I still have a sense of having, you know, moved on from some of these darker topics, but I guess that may depend on the topic and depend on the person to a large extent. So in what specific ways, if you could aim them, did writing this book help you to clarify how you understood life? Yeah, I'll be describing here my own sort of personal states of mind. So hopefully I'll be able to communicate that effectively. Basically, if a certain political topic or a certain way of thinking about politics, I've considered writing, just to touch on this from another angle, I haven't read the work of Eric Voglund extensively, you know, one of the great conservative thinkers of the great American conservative thinkers of the 20th century. I haven't read his work extensively, but I would like to read more of it. And he had an interesting way of viewing the world or reviewing political thought, especially of the 20th century, in terms of Gnostic politics versus not Gnostic politics. And his argument being that Nazism and communism and even extreme rhetoric on the more democratic, liberal democratic side had a certain Gnostic flavor relating to a view of the world. You know, the famous Voglund catchphrases don't immunitize the eschaton. A view of the world which views it in very apocalyptic terms, very absolute terms, like we need to do, the select few need to do this and now in order to make things right, a sort of notion of immunitizing the eschaton that Voglund saw parallel to the sort of Gnostic theologies you know, of ancient Christianity and Judaism, that Gnostic heresies. Voglund draws a parallel between those and certain realms of extreme left and right political thought of the 20th century. I suppose the more intellectual end of my exploration of extreme, and as you know, having read the book, the book explores both far right and far left ideas. And I'm not necessarily a full on subscriber to horseshoe theory, but the commonality that the book draws that I found between certain flavors of far right view and certain flavors of far left view is that they do kind of fit into this Gnostic paradigm of a sort of radical, fiery, chaotic politics. I think there's also significant crossover and the idea of accelerationism of promoting chaos for the chaos sake with the hope of renewal. You get that in certain trends of Marxist thought as well and anyone in the far right sphere online knows there's certainly acceleration of their right as well. And I think what writing this book, what I did was look at these most extreme sorts of political ideology, follow their logic to its conclusion, but again, in the realm of fiction and sort of see where that leads as a sort of experiment for myself. And I found that to be extremely psychologically chaotic, extremely destructive to, well, thankfully, again, because I was writing as fiction, it didn't have a negative effect on my personal life, but it's the sort of thing that would have a negative, these sorts of extreme politics are the sorts of things that would have a very negative effect on your personal life. That would convince you to lose your job, burn bridges because the most important thing is this political truth and knowledge that you've stumbled upon. And you need to be a fighter for that, even if it's accelerationist tipping modernity over. Basically, and I explore those ideas in fiction and therefore kept them at an arm's length from my personal life. And having done so, I don't necessarily find that I'm tempted towards sort of strange accelerationists frames of thought, even having stopped writing on the topic. I find that I'm satisfied with the degree to which I explored all that, again, in a fictional setting and I'm able to focus on a much more sober sorts of politics that don't tap into that chaotic head space, so to speak. And again, this is all me describe my own psychological state in the process of exploring somewhat esoteric realms of philosophical and political thoughts. So hopefully I don't sound like I'm just rambling about nonsense, but that was my experience of writing it. Hey there Luke, sorry, my reception day have pinged out. Can you hear me? Yeah, sorry, problem was on my end. So how did you get to play with dangerous ideas and not get burned? So, how did I get to play with dangerous ideas? You know, they hold a certain intrigue for me as for many other people. It's tempting to, I guess I'll admit this, I've always been attracted to extreme ideas and very dark ideas. How did I not get burned? Yeah, I don't know where I might have cut out before, but I think that for me, the process of making art, of writing, especially in the fictional form, although writing essays too to some extent is a very effective way of channeling the energy, so to speak, of taking the enthusiasm I might have for something potentially destructive and put it into place where I feel that I am satisfying that part of myself in a healthy way that doesn't, there's a healthy boundary to it. It's confined to the walls of my Word document and I don't go around talking about it with my girlfriend's family or something like that. And what were the most challenging parts of writing and publishing this book? The most challenging thing was patience. As a younger person and younger writer, I really just wanted to, I wanted to have written a novel. I mean, I really had this notion, like I got to get a novel under my belt, I have to have it done. And again, it took seven years, not because there's work, but seven years of personal development to garner the perspective to make this thing happen. And that took a lot of patience. And when I was younger, there was frustration, like why can't I finish this? There's something wrong with me, it's my work ethic. But in retrospect, it just, time is the most important ingredient for so many projects, especially deeply personal projects. And I guess just getting used to that was the most challenging thing for me. And did you have an editor or did 40 edit it? And if you had an editor, what was the feedback and direction that you got? So by the time, again, given the timeline of this thing, a lot of different people from different walks of life read parts of this thing and gave me feedback. By the time I was real, by the time I had a complete draft, so going back about two or so years ago, I had done so much editing on my own, I'd really pared it down to a pretty straightforward, effective and entertaining story. So a lot of the feedback I got from the people that I got help from, Robert Stark was someone who helped me with this, various other people in my life. By the time I got into their hands, it was pretty small stuff that they were helping me with. Yeah, ultimately Matt Forney did give it the final proof read, but it was mostly like a little bit of grammar and things like that. Not a lot of wholesale movements of anything in the story happened or not a lot of major cuts happened. And could a happy man have written this book? Yes, I'm a happy man. I think that in the seven years that I wrote the book, was I happy every day? Absolutely not. And maybe some of the bad days are inflected a bit more in the book, but writing it always was a major source of my own happiness. I mean, it's like this, as a person, I have my basic needs and I have a good social life, et cetera, and a good job, et cetera. And those needs are met. And then beyond that, I just need a creative outlet. And that's what makes me happy. So I would say, yes, a happy man could have written the book and did write the book. And that also the book made me a happy man. Then why so dark? I mean, if you're happy, then I don't understand how you could produce something so dark. Because my unhappiness, or put differently, the world's unhappiness I see in the world, suffering I see in the world, problems I see in the world is, I think that's the essence of, I won't say all art, but of literature. Literature is about dealing with problems. So, you know, and look, it's my first novel. And I think sometimes younger people, maybe I'll look back in 10 years and say, I was pushing too hard in the dark direction. That's possible. But I would say that I made darkness, my friend while writing this, and I didn't let it have a power over me. And instead tried to transmogrify it into art. And even if that darkness, yeah, there were dark nights. And there's obviously unhappiness behind some of the novel. But I've always been confident in my ability to spin that into something positive. So, yeah, no, I think that there's a chance that, you know, whatever I write next won't be this dark. But I mean, I think that you can look out into the world and see a lot of happy, satisfied artists who are drawn towards fairly dark and unhappy themes. And what's the most interesting feedback you've received on this book? That's a great question. It's been mostly positive up to this point. I am, you know, to whatever degree you may have negative criticism, I'm open to it. I think that, but since it has mostly been positive, I, that's been a lot of the most interesting stuff. One of the first reviews I got was a English PhD who has a blog on literature. The blog's called Precursor Poets. And he wrote one of the first reviews. He actually wrote one of the blurbs for the novel. And I loved his feedback. It was probably still the high point of my whole process of releasing it because he, you know, he's an English PhD, higher level of education than me. And he was able to articulate themes in a way that sort of reminded me of inspirations I'd had to write the novel that I'd almost forgotten in the years since I'd originally written it, writing about the main character. There's a, the novel satirizes critical theory. And this PhD student, Timothy Wilcox pointed out that the main character is someone who has this deep seated anxiety about being read, quote unquote, both literally. And that captured my sort of anxiety as a writer writing this book, a very personal book. But also, of course we're talking in metaphor here, the main character is scared about how he comes across in any social situation. So I've been very happy with the feedback that I've gotten. I think that people understand what I was trying to accomplish with the novel and understand the themes that underlie, you know, the basic plot. Okay, so my question was, what did you find interesting? And you told me that there are a lot of people who appreciated it, but what did you find actually interesting? And can you be more specific? What's the feedback? Because we can all produce something and offer it to the world, but the way people experience it is often going to be very different from how we experienced and what we expect people to experience it. So beyond the generality that a lot of people liked it, what was the feedback that you found interesting? Hmm, well, I mean, again, a lot of it's been, it hasn't achieved as much of a readership as, you know, obviously I knew it wasn't going to be read by everyone. So again, a lot of it has been positive. I mean, not to get too meta and weird, but I value hearing this from you that it struck you as excessively dark. I guess that's the most, and I'm not saying this to like cover up, you know, a negative feedback that I'm not telling you. I just, a lot of the people who have read it thus far, it only came out a couple of months ago, a lot of people have read it thus far, you know, some were friends or fellow travelers, so to speak. And a lot of it has been positive and basically in line with my understanding of the book. But hearing that you find it to be excessively dark is more of a wrinkle, I suppose, in the feedback. You're the first person who's really highlighted that. I mean, a relative of mine actually read it and said it was dark, but also, you know, that it was interesting or what have you. So yeah, that would be my answer. Why don't you sketch, say, the three main characters in this book? Yes. So the book is narrated by a sort of quiet PhD student named Charles, a PhD student in English who's writing on an absurd PhD topic which claims that the penis size of any male writer can be deduced for his work. This satirizing certain realm of sort of Doridian or Jacques Lacanian realm of critical theory I was exposed to in college, which kind of boils everything down to psychoanalytic sexuality. So he's writing this absurd thesis sort of half committed to it. His advisor is one of the other main characters who is a professor, a young and handsome professor named Thomas Wallingford, who is ostensibly a professor of the sort of far critical theory left. You know, someone who would be very into someone like Jacques Derrida, you know, Deleuze, the list goes on, who commands a hold of the active, like the left-wing activist faction of campus which has anyone who's been on a college campus in the last 10, 15, 20, I don't know, maybe since the 60s, years knows is a significant, significant part of modern college campus life is sort of extreme left fringes. So Professor Thomas Wallingford ostensibly or does have a hold of this, he's a figurehead to this faction of campus. But as we learn as the novel goes on, he has more esoteric views of a much more elitist, a cultist tinged and ultimately fascist or far-right flavor that he keeps esoteric and hidden. So that was to sketch the two of the main characters, but by no, not necessarily on purpose, I left the truly the main character for last, which is the protagonist, Toby. The novel is, again, narrated by Charles, but told from a kind of close third person on Toby's perspective. And he is the sort of naive, buildings-Roman type protagonist. I do consider the novel to be a sort of very, very dark coming-of-age novel. And Toby is a 19-year-old college freshman, isolated, not, some people have called him an incel. I didn't necessarily think of it in those terms. I think of him as being somewhat better socially adjusted than that and not terrible-looking, but just someone who's very quiet and troubled and impressionable. And he's definitely the mainst of main characters because the action of the book happens and ultimately is perpetrated by him. And he's also a fairly disconnected character. He's not, doesn't have many strong attachments to other people. That's right. He doesn't. He has a mother who we see him talk to once or twice. He had someone that he met. So the novel is set in his second semester of his freshman year of college. There's a girl named Zoe that he met in a film class this first semester that he sort of had developed a little bit of an attachment, a little bit of a connection with and she seemed to maybe be interested romantically, but ultimately that doesn't pan out. He's sort of passively friendly with his roommates, but no, no strong friendship at all in his life. Certainly no girlfriend. And he's got a relationship with his mother, but he doesn't really let her in on anything. I don't think I ever mentioned his father. I think in the back of my mind, he's probably from a single mother, though that's never explicitly stated. And because he's so much without attachments he falls under the wing of this Professor Thomas Wallingford character I described who takes him, who manipulates him into some very dark actions and paths. And how was your experience of university compared to what you anticipated? So again, this is, I'm thinking about this in light of what we were talking about earlier. I loved college and I had a great experience with it. Now there was a lots of politically, again, so a very far left milieu on college campuses that I ultimately can to be at odds with. I could complain about it. And well, obviously this book encapsulates a lot of the darkest aspects. However, in my personal life, I liked college quite a bit. I learned a lot. I had plenty of friends. So I'm thinking about it in light of what you said earlier. I am not, this character Toby is based on who I may have felt in certain dark moments of despair like that first year. And then I took that and ran with it in the realm of fiction. But in terms of my own experience of college and how it compared to what I thought. Yeah, I was kind of a happy camper. So I guess that then begs the question, why did I write this novel? And I guess I'll have to think about that more. I mean, I can appreciate sort of what, again, in terms of interesting feedback, it's like, yeah, why did I go in this dark direction? Maybe I overvalued the value of darkness a bit while writing this novel. And I sent you some video of what it looked like walking around the UCLA campus in 1988 when I was there. Anything that struck you about, say, video of university life at, say, UCLA in 1988 compared to your experience of university life? What was it, 2013 to 2017? Yeah, that's right. I was struck by the similarity much more than the difference. People were dressed differently, but college campuses, they have this same look. On most college campuses, the buildings are gonna be 50 to 100 or more years old anyway. So it has the same general look. In that video you sent me, I saw students going about their business, I saw them studying. The most dramatic thing in the video that I recall was a sort of street preacher preaching on the campus of UCLA, that evolution is a lie and things like that. And we got a little bit of that where I went to school. I was struck by the similarity much more than the difference. I think there's something a little bit, I won't say timeless, because obviously our certain experience of college is rooted to the last, I don't know, 100 or so years. But yeah, I could imagine myself walking on that campus and I think that the emotions that were sort of going around, people going to class, people going to study, people's preoccupations with academics and presumably their social lives, all struck me as very similar. I read one professor say that in their first year, freshmen believe everything you say in their second year, they believe nothing you say. And by their third and fourth year, they're able to start putting things in context. What was your experience with believing or not believing what your professor said? Well, I have the same process. It didn't necessarily break down to freshman year, sophomore year, junior year like that. But perhaps for me more so, maybe the first couple of years, or maybe even all through all of college actually for me, I sort of took for granted what I was learning. By the end, yes, I was certainly putting in a lot more context and I certainly was pushing back where I disagreed. But I kind of carried that mindset with me throughout college as a learner and just sort of trusting my professors, not that I took everything they said as God's truth, but just almost like if I was in a class writing and thinking as if these premises were the case. And for me it was more doing that through college and then after college is when I came to believe none of it. And maybe now is when I'm putting things the most into context, if that makes sense. I guess maybe I'm victim to this protracted adolescence we have in contemporary United States where your 20s are kind of an extended teens almost. I wouldn't like to think that, but maybe there's an extent to which I'm still still contextualizing everything, still working through the dialectic of like, taking a certain, the sort of mainstream perspective I garnered in college and then the dissident perspectives I've delved into since and sort of figuring out which of them seem best to me, which make the most sense in contextualizing them. And did you make any important changes? Did your life change in any important way in college? I mean, yeah, in every conceivable way really, I went into it, obviously growth and the growth in maturation is a process. As I've learned heading into the later part of my 20s that's something that just continues and probably kind of continues for your entire life in a way, but in college, it was a lot more stark in terms of what I was learning. I was having a lot of, there were a lot of firsts not to get into all of it, but I had a pretty typical college experience in terms of what I was exposed to. And sorry, what did you ask if there was significant growth? I mean, yeah, I think you have three years. What were the important changes, if any, from in your college experience? Okay, well, I'm thinking this in a three-pronged way. One, academically developing as a thinker, which I kind of answered regarding in your last question. And then, yeah, I did have a girlfriend throughout college, which was my first serious girlfriend. That did end my senior year. And that, the whole process of that, oh, I could go, I could get into that. So, okay, here's a way to answer retroactively one of your other questions in a way that might be interesting. My parents met in college and got married immediately after. And I kind of always wanted that for myself. Not to get weepy and stupid about this, but I always sort of thought that would be my trajectory. And it ended up not happening. And one could point the finger at a cultural climate that is a lot more possible than that. I don't know, obviously there's any number of reasons why a relationship might not work out. But that was an important part of my growth in college was going through that, the ups of that, and then ultimately the downs and sort of realizing that, no, I wasn't my, at least romantically, and in terms of having a family and things like that, my path was not gonna be. Exactly that that my parents took. Realizing that was a major coming of age thing for me. And it was a major inspiration behind the novel, I would say. So if you wanna talk about where some of the unhappiness might have come from at a certain point, well, some of it may have been. So that process was a tremendously important process of growth to me. Sort of, yeah, again, realizing, okay, I'm not gonna follow this exact path that my mom and dad followed, but rather it's, I'm gonna have to go back into the dating world and make my way in the world. And that's still something that I'm going to be doing. That that was, I won't say a trauma, but that was a sort of unexpected growth step I ended up taking and certainly something that is thematically related to the novel. And then also related to that, I think I really developed a lot politically in college in terms of my understanding of society. I wrote this piece called Addendum to Dragon Day, which gets into a lot of the fact behind the fiction, so to speak. I don't know if you had a chance to read it. Yes, yes, I read it twice, yeah. Well, great, well, thank you. That encapsulates a lot of these, I don't talk about the relationship so much, but in terms of my developing political views, I was, I guess what you'd call sort of like an un-normie in college, I was center left presenting because I wanted to fit in and I wanted people around me to like me and they were all sort of left to far left, but then sort of in my mind, I knew I was kind of more center right. You know, I grew up somewhat conservative Catholic and I just, and sort of naturally, whether by nature or nurture or both, disposed to, you know, right wing conservative ideas. So kind of trying to reconcile those two things within myself was a major thing I was dealing with throughout college. And then come to Trump's victory, which happened, what was it? 2016. Yeah, of course 2016, but it was, I was just trying to, yeah, it was my senior year. That was a major breaking point for me where I realized that my worldview was very sugar-coated, very, very naive that there were dynamics affecting the country politically that I didn't understand and that I hadn't understood and that I wanted to understand, you know, and that sort of set me off on the trajectory which I guess I still am, which is again, explore, you know, take, you know, I went to a pretty good college and as with any pretty good college, it's gonna be the certain sort of elite mainstream view of the world and, you know, I espoused that and I would say, you know, I was a little bit of a neocon in my way and that whole view of the world, again, Trump's election, you know, coming out of a long-term relationship at the same time for me sort of creatively destroyed my worldview and sort of set me on a path of figuring it back out and, you know, searching more for, you know, what I believe and, you know, what I want to do in life and all that. I say creatively destroyed because I didn't let it like, you know, obliterate my life or anything. It just, I view it as almost a, you know, coming of age thing, you know, becoming a man, so to speak. And did your girlfriend break up with you after reading your novel? No, she doesn't know it exists. What do you mean? The girlfriend I broke up with in college? Yeah, yeah, did she break up with you after reading your novel on your computer? Sorry, the one I have now or the one I had then? The one you had then. No, no, no. She read and liked parts of it, actually. By the way, I was unrelated to that. It was just a sort of phase of life thing. I mean, when you're dating someone in college and you come to the end of college, you're either going to pretty much either get married or break up. So it was kind of just that. But the girlfriend I had now liked the novel quite a lot, actually, so that was good. And what was your peer group in high school? Okay, so how to talk about this without doxing myself or whatever. I mean, I'm not that worried about that, but like, I feel people online this before and they're like, that explains a lot, but I was basically, for all intents and purposes, homeschooled. So I would say that maybe one of the central issues of my pre-college years was never feeling like I had a satisfying social life. I had some friends, I did theater. I took classes at a local college. I was a very good student. But heck, I mean, look, maybe some of that loneliness, maybe that loneliness is actually what's inflected more in the novel than what I experienced in college because I definitely, it's not that I was a loser. It's not like it felt like, well, it is that I felt like a loser. It's not that I was like actively bullied by anyone or felt denigrated, just that I simply did not have the social life I wanted and wasn't doing the sorts of things I thought a lot of other teenagers were doing and should be doing and that was a struggle for me. So you definitely hit on something there. And was homeschooling your choice? No, and I have such a mixed relationship with it because it was my parents' choice because they thought I'd get a better education that way. And I'm very, very, very positive that that is in fact the case and that I did get a better education and I'm way more of an independent thinker because of it. The price I paid was social up until I was 18. But yeah, I was homeschooled through preschool elementary school. That was my parents' choice. And come middle school, I wanted very badly to go to school. I was in a Boy Scout troop and I had friends that I would have been going to school with but the school district just wasn't very good, shall we say. And my parents couldn't afford private schools. So I just stuck with homeschooling despite not wanting to personally. And yeah, so short answer, no, it wasn't my choice. I mean, that, that sucks. I mean, I didn't know. I mean, that sounds like a total nightmare to me. I mean, there's no way I would have enjoyed being homeschooled. I mean, I hated my home. Yeah, I didn't hate my home and I come from a great family, but just I felt I was, you know, the fear of missing out thing was pretty much to find the first 18 years of my life in a way. Well, I shouldn't say that. Childhood was great. As a teenager, that big issue I was dealing with as a teenager was just feeling like the whole experience of it was passing me by. And what sort of transition was it to college? Well, by the end of, man, I'm really telling you my life story here, but that's okay. I don't mind. By the end of high school, things had improved somewhat in the sense that I was, again, I was taking classes in a college. I was doing theater. I had sort of, by the end of high school, I had forged a bit of a peer group. They were sort of fellow, creatively interested people like me, people in theater, people who wrote, people who played music, things like that. So by the end, I was doing a lot better. And with that, I thankfully wasn't like totally socially retarded or anything. So college was kind of a dream come true when it came around. And I was finally able to be around. I finally felt, I'm trying to think of who the psychologist is, but you see these, and you see them online a lot too, these sort of psychological theories of the necessary steps to take in life, like what's the guy's name? Eric Erickson or whatever, if you're familiar. I think when I first went to college, it was like for the first time in my life, I felt like I was doing the normal steps, like a normal person. So it was a pretty great transition. Well, ironically, given the novel and everything, but again, I mean, maybe you've touched on something, maybe I'm, it was inflicting more high school stuff into some of this, I don't know. And did you come to Los Angeles because there was the furthest you could get away from your family and still be in the United States? No, although it regrettably is. I realized, yeah, no, no, no, not at all. I came here because of the entertainment industry, like so many other people. And I hate that it's so far, I mean, I have a good relationship with my family. I hate that it's so far away from them. Thankfully, there's a lot of cheap airlines nowadays. So I see my family a few times a year, but no, that was a hard transition being so far away. It's not why I came out. And it's my least favorite thing about living here. How many people guessed that you'd been homeschooled? Anyone? I don't pretty much. Well, I don't know. I'm curious if that would have been your perception. But basically, the the reception I get when I tell people is usually first one of surprise, because again, I think I am somewhat socially skilled. I mean, for someone who's someone involved on the dissident right online, I think I'm highly socially skilled. Well, that's a big deal to anyone. But so I think people are surprised. But then it's often like after a couple of beats, the reactions like, oh, but that makes sense. For whatever reason, whether it's just because I'm a little bit off in the way I do certain things or a little bit just strange in the way I approach certain issues and think about things. Basically, it's usually one of a degree of surprise and then give it a few beats and then people kind of connect the dots. Like, oh, that kind of makes sense. So is there still like a core of wholesomeness about you or is that being totally destroyed by now? I, look, it's hard to say that kind of thing about yourself. I think that, yeah, I think that at the end of the day, people probably wouldn't guess it reading the novel, but I think at the end of the day, I don't even mean this to like toot my own horn morally because I think that there's drawbacks to being the quote unquote nice guy. But I think I'm basically a pretty caring and principled person. So and I think that, yeah, definitely growing up and through college, everyone, I only say this because it's like straight what people said, you know, there's always like this sense of me as like this wholesome optimistic person. And I don't think that's been totally destroyed. I think it's been, you know, battered a little bit. I'm a lot more jaded than I once was, but I still kind of identify with that personality trait. And how has your experience of Los Angeles been different from your expectations of Los Angeles? Yeah, in contrast to college, I would say my experience here has been a little bit, I mean, look, I'm moving out here. I knew that it wasn't always gonna be easy, but my first year out here, moving alone to a large city far away where I didn't know anybody, definitely, I was definitely disappointed and surprised at how kind of lonely and isolated I felt that first chunk of time out here because, you know, I had roommates that I met on appartments.com. I was just kind of exploring the world on my own for the first time. I didn't know what to expect from me out here. So I don't know if it contrasted my expectations, but definitely the reality of it was maybe tougher than I'd imagined, but I'm pretty happy now, I'm pretty well rooted and connected now. And would you like to live in Los Angeles? I think so, yeah, I always say every year that I'm out here, I like it more and more. I think California is the most beautiful state in the union, no offense to Texas, which I also love just in terms of physical beauty, but in no offense to any of the other states, I've obviously traveled through a lot of them, but I think California is pretty much top in terms of natural beauty and weather. And every year I'm out here, it's easier for me to, it feels more and more like home. The hard parts again, being so far away from my family, although that's mitigated by the degree to which, you know, can travel back. This is a strange one, but I honestly miss the weather of like the Northeast, the four seasons and rain. That kind of thing took a while to get used to, but at this point, fairly rooted in like my career here, I've got close friends here, I'm very importantly, I also have a long-term girlfriend here who would like me to stay. And yeah, you know, it's not something that's like, it wasn't something that was immediately obvious when I moved here, it wasn't something it's not something that's even immediately obvious to me now, but I tend to see myself staying out here long-term. And I think that, I think that being out here has also been good for me in many ways. And why the homosexual rape? Why the homosexual rape? I mean, this had to come up at some point. The novel, for people who haven't read the novel, it's basically the homosexual rape is the inciting incident happened on page like eight. And I think that the psychosexual under, again, I don't wanna sound too Freudian about any of this, but the psychosexual undercurrent of the novel has to do with male to male competition, male against male aggression. And the sort of potentially sexual element of that just started to feel, it just became the sort of obvious choice for, again, the darkest realm that this story was gonna go. So that's how it became the inciting incident. But there's a theme, you know, male homosexuality and male rape even is kind of a predominant metaphor throughout the novel. Again, this character of Professor Thomas Wallingford has this view, which he calls sexual dialectics, that sort of everything boils down to sex, everything boils down to domination and submission, men over women, but men over other men as well, that's integral to his worldview. First as a leftist sort of delineating in a Marxist way, like, you know, Hegelian master versus servant stuff and we need to overcome that's sort of his exoteric, progressive teaching, but then esoterically, he is this strange occultist sort of crypto fascist expositor of a sort of political philosophy of, it's almost like a political philosophy of male rape. So why the homosexual rape? Well, it was to me a very vivid metaphor for understanding the kind of extreme politics of domination that Wallingford espouses. And how invested are you in the status quo? How, oh, that's a fascinating question. I would count myself as someone who is tepidly invested in the status quo. I think that there's a lot of issues with the status quo and that's obviously why I'm interested in dissident politics. I think that rates of happiness are going down, suicide rates going up. We could talk about all the sort of Tucker Carlson tonight talking points of what's wrong with United States and I recognize those, but also I'm someone who made the conscious choice to be somewhat of a normie. I have a day job and I have a life and I have a lot of friends who are on the left or just apolitical and I don't wanna mess any of that up. So with regard to that, I'm sort of, I take the status quo seriously. I'm not someone who, again, going back to the whole notion of Gnosticism, I'm not someone who has views at like the world as it is has to be destroyed. That's ultimately what Professor Thomas Wallingford in my book preaches is that the world that is has to be destroyed. That's obviously not my opinion. And so therefore what is my opinion? Well, it's not a wholehearted celebration of the status quo. I simply try to, again, going back to that addendum to Dragon Day that I wrote, I'm somewhat influenced politically by Leo Strauss, although I'm not a neocon per se, but I'm investing this idea of exploring anti-civilized and civilizational ideas while trying to do so in a way that doesn't necessarily negatively affect civilize, or just trying to find that balance of, that sort of moderate balance between analyzing issues of the status quo while also preserving the status quo and protecting elements of the status quo that aren't deserving of ridicule, if that makes sense. Sure. And how was your experience of the COVID pandemic? So I have been working from home for the past year and a half, which I actually like. I enjoy not having a commute anymore. So on a lot of personal levels, it really hasn't been that bad. I moved in, well, I don't want to get too much in personal details, but I'm not alone, thankfully. I'm kind of with a community of people. So that part I've sort of mitigated what would have been the worst. I mean, if it worked for that, if I didn't have enough connections in LA, I would just would have moved home. I would have left because I wasn't gonna go through this alone, but I've managed to have people around me. So I think that's the most important thing. That part's been fine. In terms of the mechanics of working from home, it's been preferred. But that being said, I obviously don't. So basically I've had a fine experience about being said, I'm not glad that COVID happened or anything, it's terrible. But you know. Okay, and what has been your experience of the entertainment industry in Los Angeles compared to what you expected and what you hoped? I don't want to get too much into that, but... You can talk about the general culture. I mean, you've been to parties, you've been to gatherings, you've met people, you've probably met waiters who were actors on the side. So obviously I don't want you to destroy your life. So when you talk about things that are safe. I just, yeah, yeah. I'll talk about things that are safe. I mean, it has been in one breath pretty disheartening, but you've obviously been around entertainment people in industry too, but also it's like I'm not, I'm not Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive. If you've seen that movie, I didn't come here being it was somewhere over the rainbow or anything. I knew it would be, you know, the types of people I would interact with. I knew that it wasn't exactly a hotbed of open creativity for all or anything like that. But even within that, I mean, the most disheartening thing you learn is that about 99, all the creative decisions in Hollywood are made by 1% or less of the people. And the rest of the people in the industry, even people with very good jobs just have absolutely no power. And actually this is going to get name-droppy in a stupid way, but I'm going to do it anyway because I think it's interesting. I'm a big fan of the author, Brett Easton Ellis who wrote American Psycho. I get another writer who basically a happy guy but writes about dark things. I mean, that's the type of stuff that influences me. But I listened to his podcast and he interacts with fans a bit and I once asked him who, I asked Brett online who are the most happy people in Hollywood? And what he said was, whoever has the least at stake he was probably an agent or a producer or like someone who controls the money. Like the most happy people in Hollywood are the people who have the least at stake creatively. And he said that to me over a personal correspondence online and that has also been my experience if I'm being honest, looking around. It's the people who have the least at stake creatively who are the happiest. It's kind of a rough world for the creative side. And so even though I knew Hollywood wasn't going to be a picnic, I guess just realizing the extent to that has been disheartening. That being said, I still believe that that sort of hard work is ultimately or can be not always but it can ultimately be rewarded here and that there are a lot of great people who manage to do great things but it's definitely a pretty hard environment. And have the gay mafia try to get their claws into you? Not yet. I don't know what they'd make of this novel. I think you can read it in different ways. I think that you could read it as being homophobic. That's not my own reading of it. I think that you could read it as just an honest exploration of sort of different elements of that lifestyle. They haven't got, it's sort of answered the no, they have not tried to get their claws into me. I don't know what they'd make of me. Whether they'd see me as a fellow traveler on any level or whether they'd try to stuff me, I don't know. And the 1% in Hollywood you have all the power, I assume it's not so easy being a Goy in Hollywood. No comment. No, just kidding. It's not that bad. I get along pretty well. I mean, you're okay with second class citizenship. No comment. And what role does God play in your life? God plays a significant role in my life. That being said, I, how do I answer this? I pray, I try to pray every day. I grew up Catholic, I'm currently practicing that. I cannot say that I'm a very good Catholic or very committed to a lot of it on a philosophical level. But it was the way I was brought up. It is my family connection. So I still attend Mass. And in terms of God, yeah, I am a monotheist and I do pray and it's important to me. That's another element of my life that there's been some sort of back and forth and confusion on as I've developed. But I guess I've always remained rooted in monotheism. And what do you think of the current Pope? Not a big fan. I think, again, not being the best, I'm not like, I'm not a trad Catholic and I'm not like a liberal Catholic. I'm just like a guy who goes to church. I don't get, I mean, maybe I should, but at this up to this point, at a certain point I'm not like out there pontificating, no pun intended on like my views of the Catholic doctrine. But that being said, no, I'm not. I don't think that Pope Francis is not compelling of a figure. I remember when he first became Pope, I was a fan of him then. A lot of the priests I knew at that time, sort of late high school or college were Jesuits as well. They're charismatic in their own right. But this whole notion, like, I don't think people have started going back to church more because of Pope Francis. And ironically, one of the most clever things I ever heard said about Pope Francis was, was on a podcast and of all people was the basis from the band The Vandals who's apparently, it was just this punk band from the 70s, but there's apparently a Catholic now. The most smart thing I've ever heard about Pope Francis is that everyone, you know, everyone who basically, that everyone who liked Pope Francis is not Catholic. Like I worded that wrong, but I'm... Yeah, I get it. Yeah, like the people, like everyone's like, oh, how could you not like this Pope? He's so popular. He's just charismatic figure. It's like the people who praise him the most are like the least likely to be Catholic. The more not Catholic they are, the more they like him. So it's like this false thing where it's like, oh, Pope Francis is this charismatic head of church. It's like, he appeals to exactly the people who aren't Catholic. Now there's an exception to that, which is like some younger Catholics. I know there's exceptions, but just the world as a whole, people like him because he weakens the Catholic church. And how much anti-Catholicism have you encountered? You mean like an ally or in my life? In your life. Very little. The areas I grew up in, it was the East Coast. It was the Northeast. So it was like, if not majority Catholic, then at least that was like the most significant sect of Christianity. Yeah, not really much of any anti-Catholicism. Obviously in Hollywood and in movies, a lot of stuff is sort of portrayed incorrectly, but I don't get hung up about that too much. I mean, people just don't know the significance of all the different things and may have weird interpretations of it. I think that obviously the church does have a huge problem with the pedophile priest. And that was actually one of the things that turned me away a bit for a while. But even with that problem being very real, I still feel like people, some non-Catholics harp on that a bit too much because it does happen in other religions and in other institutions too. But yeah, anti-Catholicism hasn't been that significant I think. I think the most intellectual anti-Catholicism I've come across is ironically perhaps been in my philosophical political explorations of dissident right stuff. I mean, there's no better source on like why Catholics aren't really American than Ann Coulter. And I don't mean this negatively. Genuinely, I've heard some interesting things from sort of make America Protestant again, types. Not to mention the sort of secular right in the Nietzsche. The Nietzscheans of the Nietzsche, the Nietzsche of it all, obviously there's a certain amount of anti-Catholicism there but that's intellectual stuff. Yeah. Okay. I think we're coming towards the end. Is there anything that I should ask you that I have not asked you? Nothing comes to mind. Appreciate you bringing me on. I imagine you've linked to where people can buy the book if they're interested. It's not for everyone. It's dark as Luke said. It deals with some pretty degenerate type subjects but I'm of the opinion that there is value to this sort of thing exploring the very darkest realms of politics and psychology. And I think it's especially relevant in our chaotic times. Okay, Matt, thanks a lot. Good to talk to you again, man. Thanks.