 turn to deep left jokal. And this is a little bit like pulling, pulling wings off a butterfly. It's just so easy. In many ways, deep left jokal is just the epitome of a guru. I mean, he literally wants to start a cult. His streams tend to be just stream of consciousness, pseudo profound BS. It's a word salad of ideas and concepts he frequently does not understand. But he does have a tremendous gift of the gap. He can just extemporize and flow freely without obnoxious verbal ticks in a way that only one person in a thousand can do. He reminds me a lot of Ben Shapiro and that he just pours out a torrent of torrent of words. And you quickly see he doesn't really understand much about what he's talking about. But he has both these pre to natural levels of self confidence. Right? He has unbelievable levels of self confidence at the same time combined. And this is so typical with gurus of this kind of wounded bird attitude. I need you to look after me. I need you to protect me. I need you to host me. I need you to just take care of me. What I give him credit for he doesn't obsess about his enemies. And he doesn't seem to be a particularly mean person. But he just pours out the words he seems frequently completely disconnected from reality doesn't seem to have real life friends. All right. It doesn't seem to really want friends doesn't seem to be capable of friendship seems, you know, quite neuro divergent. He wants followers. He doesn't want friends. He wants to start a court. And he seems pretty disconnected from reality because he seems so disconnected from the normal concerns of people such as friends and family and community. And so he's ranting into the void in a way that I recognize in myself. Has has this huge need for attention that I also recognize in myself feels unconstrained by normal human concerns of trying to know what you're talking about before you say things. And here he goes just off the hook. I have redirected retool rediscovered. I should probably turn off my white noise here. So where is he redirected retool rediscovered. Right. He started out as all right in 2018. Then he was really firm against the Jews. He not only did he have no interest in talking to any Jews, he wouldn't go on any channels that hosted Jews. So this is not someone who live streams much with other people. You can see that there's this lack of reality lack of connections lack of feedback and pushback. If he was streaming frequently with with somebody where you know Robert Wright, Mickey Kals, right, they get each other challenging them. And so if you do a live stream, right, you should be after bring, you know, well argued points to your stream, but then you should be open to the defeaters, right, to the comments that defeat you. So when someone brings in the chat something that defeats me, ideally I should welcome that because one may stimulate me to try to defeat their defeater. Two, if I can't defeat their defeater, it should stimulate me to ask for help or to do further research. And three, if after seeking help and doing further research, I can't defeat the defeater, then if I'm at all healthy, I should recognize that I've been wrong and change my mind. So deep left jerk call seems to be about age 25, right? He was far right, retort himself as far left, which is fraudulent. But he has that pretty natural, you know, level of confidence of people in their 20s haven't been beaten down and humbled by life. I've really tried to become much more empirical in what I do. And the less heuristical people know me as the tripartite class system guy. Really? Is that is that what people know deep left jerk call as the tripartite class system guy? I don't think many people think of deep left jerk call as that. They think of this young man with incredible verbal gift for just being able to spin phrases and concepts and ideas and throw words together and amazing word salad and go on for hours just speaking away fluidly and fluidly for the camera. So did deep left jerk call under the moniker Kenneth Brown, did he really say that he did not want to talk to Jews, he didn't want to talk to anyone, the platform Jews. Yeah, that's what he said. I can't send you a link to it was just fairly well known in 2018. But I can't send you a link. Everyone's asking me for a link for that. But he's kind of buried that aspect of his hatred of Jews. He's not far left. No. Everyone's on their own little big man ego trips. I realize that some don't. Yeah, and there are healthy and adaptive ways to understand yourself as a center of the universe. And then there are maladaptive ways that I think is the point that I've hammered the most thoroughly and simply communicated to people as there are these three class the merchant, the priest, the warrior, and I view their relationship through. So you notice with young people that they they seize on a handful of ideas and just pursue them to absurd lengths. And this is characteristic you see with Kenneth Brown, he discovers a few ideas and then just privileges them over all others and pursues them to absurd lengths. So it lacks the sense of proportion that comes with growing older, having a family, having friends, living life in a community, economic terms, materialist terms. I get called a Marxist for this because I'm creating this historical materialism. But the problem with Marxism is that Marxism is a moralization. It's a teleology of deontological, you know, proletariat. So this guy is genuinely highly intelligent. He is genuinely learned. He does bring genuine gifts to the table. And that's a decent that there's something to that critique he just offered a Marxism. He's not an idiot. And he's not a mean, cruel guy just hell bent on hurting his enemies. So he is in many ways superior to most gurus. Very good. Victims are good. Poor people are good. Workers are good. Labor has inherent value, which we know from Sisyphus is not true. But Marxism axiomatically asserts this religious dogma that, you know, if a bunch of slaves labor away at the pyramids or whatever, that this is an evil system, whereas a system where the slaves are in control and determine everything, that's a good system. You know, Marxism has this fundamentally democratic quality, even if it ends up being autocracy or a dictatorship. The religion of Marxism ostensibly says all power to the slaves, all power to the workers and the manual laborers and so on. And I don't think that gives us an accurate picture of how the world works. I don't think that's a scientific view of the world. I mean, they claim to be scientific, but I don't think that is scientific. I think we have to completely divorce ourselves from wishful thinking if we want to correctly see the world. So I don't ascribe to that the other thing. So can you divorce yourself from wishful thinking if you don't have friends, if you don't have family, if you're not part of a community? I don't think you can just divorce yourself from wishful thinking by power of the will. So Kenneth Brown is a much bigger believer in the power of reason than I am to me. Reason is a very weak instrument compared to the power of genes and the power of imprinting that you receive in childhood. The thing that I think people associate with me is this concept of the deep left, which I purposefully chose that concept when I first came upon it in 2017 is when I started using the term deep right and deep left. And I came upon that concept because I was trying to understand why is art left wing? And, you know, some people can agree or disagree with that assessment, but I just looked around and I said, why is all art left wing? And I came to this conclusion that there was some kind of deep metaphysical underpinning that made something left wing or right wing. Now I'm not going to get into all of that, that art criticism that is out there that could be rehashed and refurbished, but I've made a lot of videos on that. And over time, I guess I would say, you know, one of the ways, there's many ways you can split left versus right, but one of the ways is you can say that the left is Eros and the right is Thanatos from Freud. So Eros is the attractive element. Thanatos is the deathly element. So Eros would. Yeah, that's just what salad. I don't think there's any value add there. Art criticism where we've decided for the first time in history that we're okay with having 10, 20, 30, 40, 50% of our population retired and nursing homes receiving Medicare and Medicaid, which accounts for 90%. Well, it's not like we've decided that we're okay with that. That is the reality for many countries. And then he just makes up statistics. He just makes a whole lot of stuff up. Now he's going to say that taking care of people in the last six months of life counts for 90% of our healthcare spending or Medicare spending. Simply not true. So on average, medical care costs about $80,000 for the last six months of life, which is substantial, but nowhere near the number that he just throws out. Percent of all medical expenses are in the last year of life. Right. So 90% of all medical expenses are in the last year of life. He's shameless at just making up statistics. Art criticism where we've decided for the first time in history that we're okay with having 10, 20, 30, 40, 50% of our population retired and nursing homes receiving Medicare and Medicaid, which accounts for 90% of all medical expenses are in the last. So look at the absolute confidence in which he pronounces something that is just completely bogus. You know, year of life or even six months of life is the 90% of medical expenses. And we're okay with spending, you know, 30% of GDP, 40%, 50% of GDP on the last six months of people's lives. Right. That's absolute nonsense that we spend 30, 40, 50% of GDP on the last six months of people's lives. We may be spending like 1% of GDP on the last six months of people's lives. So he's wrong by a factor of 30, 40, 50. I don't think that's sustainable. I think this is kind of empty moralization that in the past, if you had to try it, it's not to say that people didn't respect their elders and try to heal their elders and try to take care of their sick elders. Yeah. So he's right that it's not sustainable, even though it's 1% of GDP. So there's going to have to be some reconfiguring of the system. But he looks forward to some cataclysmic, eschatological end times where him and his followers will then take take power. He reminds me very much of like a young David Koresh. Right. He has that charm, that, that, you know, pseudo profundity. Like it sounds very profound when he makes these sweeping declarations and pronouncements. But if you think of a tribal economy in caloric terms, each man has approximately 2,000 calories that he can burn a day on average, because that's how many he's taken in on average. So with 20,000, excuse me, 2,000 calories a day, you have to say what percentage of that goes toward sleeping? What percentage of that goes? Okay. So he doesn't really know what he's talking about. That probably be closer to 2,500 to 3,000 calories a day for men. So let's get a little bit more insight into how gurus work. The way people like Kenneth Brown are very different from public intellectuals. This is decoding the gurus. Chris Cavanaugh here speaking with Matthew Brown. Where they reference a particular expertise, it is usually used as simply the justification that allows them to go with like spread the right. So Kenneth Brown doesn't have any particular accomplishments or expertise and neither do I. So that doesn't mean that Ken shouldn't speak or I shouldn't speak. But substantial figures in public discourse, public intellectuals, usually coming from a background of substantial accomplishment. Ideas widely. So they're not constrained in the way that most public intellectuals are by saying, well, I don't know enough to comment about that, right? Yeah, that's right. They don't stand on the shoulders of giants. They are the giants. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So that's the divide that Kenneth Brown puts out. It's not that he's standing on the shoulders of giants. He is the giant. And this is where you get from gurus from John Peterson, to Bronze Age pervert, to Dennis Prager, to Ben Shapiro. We are the giants. So, you know, the Galileo gambit is a relevant thing to reference here because that is the kind of character that we're talking about. Not somebody that seems themselves as making an incremental contribution to a discipline. Somebody who believes that they've revolutionized the field, but they just haven't been recognized as such. And the tricky thing is, of course, is that, I mean, certain of our gurus would honestly believe that they are like an Einstein figure or a Charles Star. Yeah. So the Galileo fallacy, right? This is the claim that an idea that is forbidden, prosecuted, detested, or mocked, or if you get suspended, say, from social media for articulating it, then that idea must be true. So Dennis Prager makes this argument. He says, like, how do you know which side is right? Which side is wrong in an argument? Well, it's the side that supports more censorship that is the side that is obviously wrong. But it sounds profound, but it doesn't work out that way. So just because an idea is detested or mocked, it doesn't make it true or more true or more credible, right? So just because Galileo was persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church for his defense of heliocentrism, when many people believe that the universe was eccentric, right? That doesn't mean that someone who gets suspended from social media is likely speaking the truth. I wouldn't figure. And a little bit like conspiracy theories. Sometimes those figures do exist. They do come along from time to time. Right. But, you know, so what am I trying to say? I can't help you. We don't believe them. That's not it. Hello, that's true. We don't. But so the amount of people claiming to have revolutionary insight that is going to completely transform a field dramatically outstrips the amount of people who actually do that. And the way that you can spot the difference is when somebody revolutionizes a field, they don't need to tell you that they've done that because history records it, that they were vindicated, that everybody else was proven wrong, right? And that's very rare. So yeah, it's usually distasteful when people exaggerate their accomplishments, right? You really accomplish something great, then let other people praise you. You don't need to self-praise. That's the problem in America. And I believe our empathy is running out as a culture we no longer have an organic, moral, religious system. We're experiencing a religious revolution. Christianity is dying. You know, people call it wokeism, but I... Yeah, so we haven't really had an organic country since probably the 1960s, since civil rights legislation. And yes, Christianity is dying in part because so many non-Christians are being imported into the US, and in part because we have this vast civil rights complex which encourages litigation and agitation from the minority sections of America against the European Christian majority. I think wokeism is not a stable religion. I don't think wokeism is going to last for a thousand years. I think wokeism is here today, gone tomorrow, but ultimately we're going to have to go through that. That's going to be part of the transformation. But I think you're going to see a point with wokeism where these people value... I don't know, it's a very volatile situation. So you compare what is politically correct today to what... So there is one part of wokeism which I see extending for decades, even centuries, and that is the desire of those according to courtier morality, to the elite morality that we should be very careful of everything that we say and do, how it might affect anyone who encounters us or encounters our words, that we should constantly calibrate everything we're saying that we should speak in the carefully edited fashion that these two academics, Chris Cavadour and Matthew Brown speak. And so this is the desire. It's the secular transformation of Protestantism that the heart should be remade so that people are constantly trying to see themselves in a reflexive sense. So they're noticing everything they say and do, how it affects other people. It's the idea that we can be autonomous rather than leading lives that are heavily influenced by the people and communities around us. It's the idea that we can operate lives based on reason and on a particular value system and we can overcome our ancient prejudices. We can overcome our genetic predispositions. We can overcome our imprinting and make ourselves into these highly disciplined, highly regulated, highly self-censoring persons as embodied by the two academics that I was just playing. And this predisposition leads people who hold this as the ideal to then want to badger, bully, and educate everyone else who doesn't hold to that ideal. So that desire to litigate, to educate, to bully, to change people, to refine them, to make them more self-disciplined, more refined, more careful with everything they say and do, that impulse is not going to go away for many, many decades. What was politically correct 10 years ago? And it's extremely different. I mean, culture and religion are changing at a very fast pace. So the idea that in 100 years we're still going to have a system where... Well, Africa carry the torch of Christendom. No, it won't. It may have the numbers, but numbers aren't determinative. What's determinative is intelligence, cohesion, the ability to work in a group strategy, and the effective personality. Not all personality types are equally effective. Those who have a high verbal IQ are far more effective, far more affluent, far more prestigious. They have much more of the high ground and the good things in life than those who are simply blessed with a high visual spatial IQ as opposed to the verbal IQ. So verbal IQ gifts tend to be rewarded in life much more than visual spatial gifts. Someone who is more outgoing than shy is going to have a much more socially effective personality. Someone who is more conscientious than less conscientious is going to be more socially effective. Someone who is more open to new experiences rather than close to new experiences is going to be more open. Someone who's somewhat to largely agreeable with others will generally speaking be much more effective in life. So more outgoing than introverted, more conscientious than lacking conscientiousness. Someone who's lower in neuroticism will be much more effective in life than someone who's higher in neuroticism. So IQ is a huge part of success in life, but that's primarily verbal IQ, not visual spatial IQ. Also, they're much more effective personality traits than other personality traits. The ability to work and get along with others, right? Group strategies usually out compete individual strategies. 50% of GDP is spent, you know, keeping the elderly alive for no reason other than to be nice. I don't think that's how history works. I think history is cruel and responds to material incentives and that people ultimately, if you have an unsustainable system, there are barbarians at the gates who will smash that system. So I think that every elderly person who is not rich, who is not able to privately pay for their own care outside of Medicare and Medicaid, which most elderly people are utilizing, and eventually they run out of money, even if you are a millionaire, you can easily spend millions of dollars in medical expenses and then have to go on Medicare. So my prediction is in 100 years, all these people will go the way of the same high TED Talk. Well, everyone in the United States as a citizen does go on Medicare at age 65, you can spend above and beyond. I don't think we're quite headed for the cataclysm that Ken Brown talks about, but we're headed for about 25% of what he's talking about here. You know, they're just going to not receive care. And if you don't receive care, you die. That's just as simple as it is. Okay, the primary factor that he terms whether you live and die is rarely medical care, right? Medical care accounts for perhaps six months of average Western life expectancy, right? Your genetics, your lifestyle, which comes from your genetics, the number of friends and family that you're close to, right? These things are far more influential generally speaking than medical care for most people, most of the time. Cruel, that's immoral. It's, you know, you can hate on me, you can say I'm a grandpa, I'm a grandma, I hate her, and I want people to die. But the truth is that people die. And we've reached a point in our culture where we no longer accept that we're against the death penalty. We're against any form of death. Even abortion seems to be losing. That's not really, we've just reached a point in our culture where we don't accept death. There's still a substantial portion of the population. There's very pro death penalty. Not entirely, but individuals, the difference with abortion is that individuals are sacrificing future generations for the sake of vampirically maintaining themselves. And that's all it is. It's vampirism run wild. Everyone wants to be a vampire. Everyone wants to destroy the future for the sake of the present. Really, everyone wants to be a vampire. Everyone that wants to destroy the future for the sake of the present. This is just one salad. It's just pseudo profound BS. It's just absolute nonsense. But it sounds profound. Unsustainable in my opinion. And eventually, if you want to get care, emergency care, you're gonna have to show proof of insurance. And if you don't have it, they will let you die. They will provide minimal care. They might give you drugs. They might give you heroin, essentially opioids, all these opioids on the market are just heroin lights, basically. So he's gonna wonder here why his audience isn't doing better in life. And he's probably wondering why aren't I doing better in life? I'm so smart. I'm so gifted. I'm so talented. Why haven't I been accorded the recognition, the status that I deserve? I deserve my own court. I deserve to be worshiped like a God, aka Bronze Age pervert, right? I deserve to be at least as influential as David Koresh. What the heck, guys? What the heck? All these people dying to opioid overdoses, that might be what they do. So these are my predictions for the future. These are harsh. But I think they're as much as they're pessimistic, they're also realistic. And we have to prepare for that. So, you know, my idea is that people should get together and gain confidence. And one of the things that I've really focused on the last two years is looking at, okay, I have this intelligence. So yeah, in some ways, gaining confidence is a good thing. But in plenty ways, gaining confidence is a bad thing. Ken Brown would probably be better off. No, he would definitely be better off with less confidence. And I think people like Ken Brown and myself, we would probably turn into monsters if we had any level of success, right? It's probably very good for us and very good for the world that we toil in obscurity. Because like, give us any success. And I'm not sure it'd be good for us. I'm all audience. And my question is, why aren't we all doing crazy, fantastic things? Why aren't we all being, you know, amazing and starting businesses? Because anyone who's doing fantastic things around the verge of doing fantastic things is not watching Ken Brown. Ken Brown provides a certain type of solace for people who are losing at life. And he can spin elaborate reasons for why they're losing at life and why it's not their fault. This isn't starting cults and starting colleges and just doing crazy things because we know he literally wants to start a cult. This is his mission. I mean, this is a future David Koresh. This is a future Jim Jones. That the way things are done maybe isn't sufficient or if it is being done well by someone, we should join up. You know, if there is a great college, we should be going to that great college. We should be pooling our money. We should be helping each other. We should be, if there's a business opportunity, let's start businesses. Let's buy land. Can you imagine going into business with a Ken Brown devotee? Can you imagine starting a business with someone who is a big fan of this guy and tunes into all his videos? I mean, this is going to be an anti-social group of people who are overwhelmingly feeling at life. I just can't imagine them building anything substantial together. Christianity includes Kim Kardashian or whoever, Bianchi Venturi or whoever his new wife is and all of that ridiculousness. Then it's a totally wasted critique. There's no point in making a critique if your positive vision is totally hypocritical in House of Cards. Now there are these Nietzscheans out there who, you know, those damn Bronze Age pervert followers. It's a kind of a, it's not necessarily an institutional thing like you could point to Christianity and say this is a collective group of people who are well-believed in Christ. But there are these Nietzscheans, amoralists who basically try to do away with the hypocrisy of Christianity. And so instead of saying we're going to pretend to be Christians, we're going to be trad cats, we're going to be these ridiculous parodies of our grandparents. I mean, can you imagine what a village filled with Bronze Age pervert devotees would be like? Or a village filled with Nick Fuentes fans? Or a village filled with Richard Spencer fans? Don't think you'd be a happy, harmonious, prosperous place. We are instead going to accept that this is a time of degradation and degeneration and destruction. Yeah, this is a time where some degradation and degeneration and destruction and a time of the opposite of all that of elevation, ability and growth. There's never been a time that's only degenerate and disgusting and going downhill. There are plenty of positive trends in the world today. There are plenty of negative ones. But to really get his coat going, you can see he's yearning for the apocalypse. He's yearning for the total destruction of the current system. Yeah, millions of people would die. But then there's a chance that I might become emperor. Civilizational collapse and it's the Bronze Age collapse. And we should become the new barbarians. So there have been Nichians. Right. I mean, that's that's pretty funny and pretty accurate. Who have been saying this for quite a while. You know, going back to Nietzsche himself, Ragnar Redbeard, Spangler, of course, following Nietzsche, you know, you had these movements in Europe that were pointing toward the civilizational degenerate degeneration, this over civilization, or what Kaczynski calls over socialization. So we're saying, you know, we need to become Ubermensch. We need to transcend. We need to have a transvaluation of values, a new religion, get away from. So I'm highly skeptical of people who spin philosophical systems, such as myself, right, who aren't married or who aren't, you know, strongly connected into a particular community. Because it's just so easy to spin absolute nonsense when you're primarily living on your own and in your own head. And that's kind of what I sense from people like Nietzsche and from people like Ken Brown and people like Bronze Age pervert. It is rare and often when you look at the like the popularized the popularized version of the story, it's not as simple as presented. But if somebody is declaring themselves as a revolutionary figure, how is that different from waiting for for Mashiach? So in the Jewish tradition, no, as Judaism is practice, I've never had a serious discussion with any Jew about when the Messiah will come. It's a teaching that's there in the tradition, but it really has almost no effect on people's lives, except that God will bring paradise. So there's a joke, classic joke that a man has a job sitting on the walls of the town waiting for the Messiah, looking for the Messiah. And the job doesn't pay much, but the good thing is that it's a job for life. And there's another Talmudic teaching that if you're sewing in your field, and you hear that the Messiah has come finished sewing, like finished doing your job. And then when you're all finished, you know, go go to the town and check out what people are saying. So Judaism overwhelmingly is not an apocalyptic yearning for destruction and flames that will consume the earth type of religion, right? There are tiny strands of that, but it is overwhelmingly against the majority trend in Judaism for thousands of years. Back to decoding the Gurus, Christopher Cavanaugh here speaking with Matthew Brown. Somebody who's new approach to evolution is going to upend the field, but they haven't actually had any impact on the field. And the primary output is a podcast where they talk about culture war topics and anti-vaccine issues weekend and week out. Yes, they may in the future try not to be completely... Yeah, in someone's primary output, if people's only intellectual output, a long form podcast, it's probably not very serious. I mean, I devote hours a week to my blog, look for .net, like working on essays, reworking essays, going through the archives, you know, cleaning them up, reworking, developing essays. And to whatever extent, I may want to bring some clarity to my live streams is because I spent so much time on my writing. I think they've indicated on the Bill and Ted future where their statues of them as a great man output my money, that that is not what happens. And they enter the annals as a, you know, a pundit, a guru, wannabe guru online that is not remembered in the annals of history except as notable conspiracy theorists or delusional gurus or that kind of thing. So yeah, that's, if you're a real revolutionary guru, you don't need to tell people that. Other people will introduce you as such. So I probably spent 50, 60 hours on one post, which I keep, you know, going back to editing, improving. I've got a highlight section, which I'll post in the chat right now. It's where I put my best work, but I've probably spent over 60 hours just on one blog post, decoding Dennis Prager, right? Just working through the work of Dennis Prager, comparing it with the grometer, compiling the most absurd things that he says and does, right? And, you know, just keep coming back to it as I get new material or new ways of framing and phrasing things, just one blog post, probably 50, 60 hours plus of work. Also, not all hours of the day count equally, right? I do my best work by sharpest, clearest thinking, I believe, between 3am and 6am. And that's where I go into usually my writing. And then out of the writing sometimes will come ideas for doing the videos. But I've got highlights of what I think my best blog posts, my rules for life, decoding Dennis Prager, Pittsburgh Jews praise for faith as they doubled down on left-wing activism, analyzing Prager's statement, the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen. News is a stress test. My first impressions of LA after three months down under and working on revising, clarifying, editing, improving, adding more empirical evidence to my Dennis Prager online, unofficial biography back to decoding the gurus. Okay. All right. So let's, that's enough, I guess, summarizing overview stuff. Yeah, let's get into the grometer itself. And we're going to talk about a few different things, the different facets of the grometer. And one thing to say at the beginning, I don't know how much time we'll have to actually talk about the interrelationships between these things. But what I'd just like to say to people is that they are there. These things tend to be correlated with each other. So what are the various parts of the grometer developed by these two center-left academics? So one is galaxy brainness. This is the word salad. People who present themselves as fonts of wisdom, like Kenneth Brown, he talks about all sorts of things that he doesn't know much about. And the gurus will often just link together completely disparate concepts. And I do that myself. So I have, you know, all these tendencies towards being a guru. I hope I have some self-awareness. So gurus such as Kenneth Brown or Dennis Prager or Bronze Age Pervert, they present themselves as, you know, polymathic geniuses who can offer novel insights with reference to many different fields. Now, Bronze Age Pervert, Constan Alamarius, his real name, he is a genuine scholar. He is genuinely brilliant, right? Neither Dennis Prager nor myself are scholars. Gurus will tend to exaggerate their accomplishments to a shameless degree. They'll confidently offer hot takes on all sorts of topics that they know nothing about. And that would apply to Kenneth Brown. That would often apply to me, to Dennis Prager, to Ben Shapiro. From the priest class, go away from this bureaucracy, which is parasitic and vampiric. We need to do something new. You know, part of the reason or the way that I view those people right now is they're very dependent on anonymity. By its nature, anonymity allows for the gesture. Some people do have galaxy brains. All right. Yeah, there are some. And you can recognize them by they have genuine accomplishments in one field. And then when they develop insights into another field, they usually do it in some sort of collaboration with experts in that new field. And their insights are generally recognized by people who have expertise in the new field. So you can't just do a long form podcast on disparate topics and be convinced that you're some kind of genius, right? People who do that, like me, right? Be very skeptical of them. Occasionally, I have a sponsor who says, oh, I trust you. And I'd like to think I usually say, don't trust me. Trust the process of talking to me, doing homework, homework assignments, usually developed by other people. Trust the process of going to meetings. Trust the process of talking to a lot of different people. Trust the process of not trusting anything I say unless it comes from the big book. Don't trust me. Trust the process of reasoning things out socially. Trust the process of bouncing possible big decisions in your life off other people. So if you have a problem with overspending, right, and you've got a gratuitous, like $200, $500, $1,000 expense that you're thinking of racking up, then trust the process of talking to other people who struggle with the same problem that you do. Definitely don't trust me. Or the Nietzschean or whatever that archetype is, it allows that person to act with impunity. So just because someone has not received academic attention, that does not always mean that they're not a galaxy brain. Well, give me an example of someone who is a galaxy brain who has not received academic attention. You may be right. I just can't think of any examples. So for example, Dennis Prager receives no academic attention. Ben Shapiro receives no academic attention. To the best of my knowledge, Mark Levin receives no academic attention. Sean Hannity receives no academic attention. And I don't think any of these characters are galaxy brains. I receive no next to no academic attention also. I was a large part of some woman's master's thesis, as I recall. But I'm probably exaggerating my own. I'm probably exaggerating. Oh, I have not been in that mode. And I've watched this dialectic between collectivism, communalism. There's a desire on my part and a part of others for community. And I understand the criticism of that, which is basically saying that the desire for community is a Mark's... No, Rachel Durkin. So the best of my knowledge, but I'm probably exaggerating. She did a paper for her master's thesis. She did a paper for her master's program in substantial part on me. But it may have just been a paper among, say, six papers towards her master's degree. She was studying anthropology at Stanford University. Now, I have probably in professions, most of my friends are probably academics. And so I have a lot of conversations with academics. I have a lot of interactions with academics. I trade email with academics. I have access to academics. I come from an academic world. I feel very comfortable in that world. But no, there's not much academic attention in my lifetimes in the work. It's just desire. And it's group narcissism. It's group narcissism. We all get together and we do our therapeutic group narcissism and we hug each other and kiss each other and say, oh, we're victims and we're martyrs. And, you know, we're gonna... Okay. Well, I see the criticism of that. And I understand the pitfalls of that and why that's bad. But for my own sake, for my own position, when I was more invested in that kind of amoral, just anonymous posting online. And that started even before I had any notion of politics. I mean, I was 12 years old and I had a blog and everything. So I've been a long time poster and I was being this anonymous poster and making people think I was much older than 12 because I was precocious. Okay. I'm going to give in to my narcissism here. Lukeford.com, public sex, celebrity, and the internet. Rachel Durkitz, first year paper, Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for a PhD May 19, 2004. Oh, that's not a good link that I just gave there. Damn. It's hard to... Okay. Here we go. I'll post it both in the video description and in the chat. So 5130. So I had a big vocabulary and people assumed I was much older. But I started my posting career and at some point I saw posting forms rise and fall and I just felt that I wanted something that was more accountable and more stable. As you go through life, you decide that friendship is important. You decide that emotional connections are important. So there probably is some kind of healthy balance because I even think that the total Nietzschean amoral kind of man is strongest when he's alone philosophy. I think even there there's some kind of space for the love of friendship and camaraderie. So I think that needs to be included. But there's a class analysis where you say the warrior class has a particular form of camaraderie that the priest class, the merchant class cannot emulate, all they can have is this fake community. And having a community on the basis of mutual pain, mutual hurt, mutual victimhood could be very unproductive. That said, the United States military. Okay, I'll give in to a little naval gazing here. All right. The top of this master's thesis quote from me in a 1999 interview with the French magazine. I like sex. I like looking at naked women. I like beauty. I'm confused about myself and sexuality. By sitting porn, I get to know myself better. I gain clarity. I see clearly that the porn lifestyle does not work and that calms my wild desires. Yeah, it didn't really come up very effectively. Then it quotes Michel Foucault. Right. And then another interview from me from 2004, May 1. Oh, yeah. This is my interview with Rachel Durkitz. If Michel Foucault was alive today, I'd like to kill him because of what he did in those San Francisco bath houses in knowingly transmitting a deadly disease. You can quote that if you like. I loathe the man, Foucault's nonchalance about infecting others with HIV reminded me of Mark Wallace's attitude just Foucault had more jargon. So Mark Wallace is likely patient zero in an HIV spread in the San Fernando Valley of a dozen or more female porn stars. So this is the story of Luke Ford and his website, LukeFord.com, a gossip column about pornography and religion. I used this site to explore three phenomena of contemporary public culture in the United States, a moral panic and ambivalence of a public displays of sexuality, celebrity culture, and the advent of the internet. Ford attained a celebrity status at the intersection of these phenomena. Ford's internet web blog, LukeFord.com, shared much in common with two mainstream American media forums, televangelist TV and the TV talk show, Terry Fourwell and Oprah Winfrey, two charismatic celebrity personalities who've captured moments of moral quandary. Luke Ford has taken advantage of a similar moment, existing cultural narratives about sex and morality of work to bring in notoriety and giving him a position of authority where none existed before. The internet allowed him to attain this authority without traditional social capital, no prior notoriety, name, recognition, or even a college degree. He's created two extremely popular blogs since 1997. LukeFord.com has started as a gossip column about the United States pornography industry based in Los Angeles. Ford, who has raised as an evangelical Christian and converted to Orthodox Judaism as a young adult, also used the site as a pulpit for his thoughts and observations on the Talmud religion and morality. Due to the popularity of LukeFord.com, Ford became a well-known expert on the pornography industry and has been quoted in prominent mainstream media sources. In 2001, after being evicted from his second synagogue because his writings on pornography is sold at LukeFord.com, then started a second blog called LukeFord.net, which focuses on Hollywood gossip, Jewish life, and world news. Part of LukeFord's appeal was that he was in the unique position of representing, indeed embodying for his audience a moral quandary regarding public displays of sexuality. During the years, Ford wrote LukeFord.com. He embodied the state of moral confusion in his own online persona. His readers recognized that, were drawn to it. He was somebody who clearly enjoyed pornography and hated himself for it. He was a complex and charismatic amalgam of desire and censorship accessible to a broad audience through the permeable medium of the Internet. Those who read Ford's website probably identify it with his story. Ford is part of the confessional American culture that Michelle Foucault described in the history of sexuality. Ford is at once hard to read and hard to ignore, in large part because the poignancy of his pain in his moral struggle is familiar. Today, Ford is vehemently anti-porn and works against pornography. Ford was part of the process that taught mainstream journalists about meta-journalistic sources on pornography. And in a sense, the current negative publicity on the porn industry owes something to Ford. He considers part of his legacy to be the public attention toward the current AIDS crisis in the U.S. pornography industry with government regulating bodies taking an interest in the filmmakers putting themselves on hold in an act of litigious self-preservation. Many news stories such as these are first published on the Internet by meta-journalists like Luke Ford. Then it goes into the story of Luke Ford. Started doing research in the mid-1990s on the history of pornography, conducting interviews. Started posting online on the news group RAIM, records, movies, erotica. Then started lukeford.com. Prior to starting Luke Ford, Luke had a little professional experience in journalism. Well, I had high school and college classes in journalism. I was the editor of my high school newspaper, had two and a half years experience on my high school newspaper, a year experience as editor on my college newspaper. I worked at the Orvin Journal. I freelance for the Sacramento Bee. I contributed news items and was paid for them to the Associated Press. I worked for K.I.K. Hill Radio throughout high school and for two and a half years afterwards. I had about near five years experience at K.I.K. Hill news radio, but I did never graduate from college. I've shared my voice with thousands of people. One might surmise that Luke Ford.com became a popular website merely because of building an existing structural hole in a system comprised of foreign people. There's a strategic site where information could be exchanged among three groups that formed Ford's online audience. Ford's being compared to the blogger at Matt Drudge. This purely structural, functional approach cannot explain why Ford maintained this position as a single most popular online source of information on the field of pornography. Even after numerous competing sites arose, it fails to explain why Ford's current blog, LukeFord.net, continues to attract approximately 20% of the audience that LukeFord.com had cannot explain why Luke was recently approached by a producer from the Showtime cable network who is interested in turning his life story into a TV movie, fails to demonstrate why no other porn blogger has been solicited as an interpreter of the pornography industry for the mainstream media. Ford's audience was primed by a culture trained to assume seemingly intimate engagement with celebrities. Then it talks about the interactions I have with my audience, close reactions with my audience. Ford belongs to the growing canon of individuals who attain fame through the internet and eventually move from new media to mainstream media by mediating and carefully crafting his online persona. Ford captivated a following when Ford began appearing in mainstream print and TV media as well as new media, he reached a complete celebrity status. Americans are in a state of moral panic which Ford embodies for his audience. Since posting to LukeFord.com, Ford has been beset with beset with violent criticism and threats from people in the pornography industry. I asked Ford why the pornography industry has been so threatened by LukeFord.com, his opinion was the porn industry is more precarious than it is perceived as being and that any media attention drawn to a health scandal such as HIV spread could need to increase surveillance from the government and suspension of movie production. So the week after my interview with Ford, news of two new AIDS cases in the US porn industry broke in the mainstream national and international news, provoking the center on disease control to consider an investigation and voluntary cessation of filming by the porn industry for two months. This is an example evidence that when Ford began writing LukeFord.com in 1997 he presented real danger to an industry with a tenuous legal position and a tenuous hold on his audience. Ford embodies this tenuousness and confusion in his writings. Ford had a moral message. Ford filled the space of both the purveyor of intimate information on celebrities and the moral leader working through his perception of the moral panic from a religious perspective. He had a moral and religious mission for both his research and for his writings to begin his research into the porn industry with ambivalence. The more I learned of the industry, the more I grew to despise it says Ford. He coordinated personal vandetta against the industry, although he did not explicitly call upon his readers to take up arms God forbid against the pornography industry. His mission based in religious belief was to reveal the evils of the industry to his audience. As an Orthodox Jew, Ford can be placed in the same category fundamentalist as evangelical Christians. That's not my understanding what I was doing. I did certainly have emotional detestation of the industry a substantial amount of the time, but I also really liked a lot of the people in it. They're frequently much more open and in many ways they were more honest and more fun and more funny. There were many wonderful parts of people, parts of the industry, many wonderful people that I met there and I genuinely enjoyed. Ford is borrowed from evangelical Christian strategies of discourse on his blogs. He continuously expresses and highlights his internal conflict. The media styles far too complacent towards the different powers and I say in an interview in 1999, fame corrupts, power corrupts, money corrupts, the human being and consequently journalists corrupt easily unless he is grounded to eternal values of truth, ethics, decency and God. For the end of his tenure, Luke Ford.com Ford moved in a highly morally conservative direction when he was asked to appear by 60 minutes as an expert on the porn industry. His intent was to expose the industry as base and vile. That's not my understanding of what I did. I was quoted as saying pornography reduces the performers and the makers and the consumers of the product to the absolute lowest level. Its socially redeeming value is ejaculation. I think that's fair. Ford's audience existed in a state of moral panic. Ford self-consciously embodied this as self-flagellation and conflict about the morality and pleasure of pornography reflected a generalized state of moral panic among his followers. Large proportion of the information on Luke Ford.com was contributed by Ford's readers. According to Ford, he is often being accused of being one of the world's fastest cutters and pastors. Luke Ford.com has been called a self-writing site. Much of the material came from a team that he acquired through his blog. That's how familiar to you. He had six best friends whom he met when they wrote emails to him after reading LukeFord.com and none of them contributing much to either my website, LukeFord.net or my online videos anymore. Okay. Be a diary. This is something one of my audience team members sent me the following quote via email which I cut and pasted into the site as though it was at my own voice. Be a diary. July 1, 2000. I find myself 10,000 miles away from the Porn Valley and yet still I am haunted by my morally wretched profession. Even in the peaceful serenity and spiritual solitude of the Israeli desert where Moses once walked, I find myself continually reminded of the vulgarity and filth that compromises my pornographic world. When will this torture cease? God, I wish I had my God. This passage leads to a photograph of a cactus with a protruding branch that resembles an erection. Statement above is obviously intended to be ironic. However, it betrays the underlying dilemma that Ford and his audience members inevitably find themselves in. They are stuck in the conflict between their interest in pornographic material and their higher moral calling. LukeFord.com is a place where readers could engage in this type of confessional talk first by reading Ford's words, second by writing to him via email and then seeing their own words appear on LukeFord.com. Putting to Ford while writing LukeFord.com, he receives approximately 10 to 15 thoughtful and well written emails from audience members each day, not including personal acquaintances and team members. So LukeFord.com is at the intersection of sex and dialogue and confession. LukeFord.com is a highly confessional website. It's its own form of striptease. Ford is continuously exercising this confessional practice and encourages his audience members to do the same. LukeFord.com is also a site for the production of subjectivities. Before his interest in pornography as a matter of learning and self-discovery, he even wore his yarmulke to early interviews with people in the porn industry because he wanted to bring his religion with him into the research. Through the dialogue between Ford and his readers, sexual and moral subjectivities were mutually reshaped. What are the implications of a site like LukeFord.com for changing standard tropes on sexual behavior? LukeFord.com is not a site of exploration of diverse sexualities. It is a place where familiar gendered sexual tropes of the woman as the object of desire were reenacted. The main question in the context of LukeFord.com is the morality of watching and producing heteronormative pornography. However, through detailed interviews with female porn stars, Ford did give these women the opportunity to express themselves. But whether these women spoke from an empowered position varies from interview to interview. Just notice whether they were always forced to speak through LukeFord the writer. So why does the sex talk at LukeFord.com take on a tone of irony, sarcasm and vulgarity? Why is there so much humor, ironic, sarcastic and vulgar? My God. Through LukeFord.com, Ford and his contributors conspired to work out whether there is a place for public sexuality in moral life and what the proper nature and place for that sexuality should be. It's the tradition of confession. Understanding the tradition and the bizarre. And we get a long section on Freud. Ford's image appears on the side. He's dressed in a gray suit over his face as a bullseye, which resembles the laser sight of a sniper rifle seen in action genre movies. His image calls to mind James Bond with Ford as a man high-minded mission in mortal danger. Ford is a secret agent or an action hero endangering himself to reveal the evil truths of pornography. However, Ford's image appears among numerous better advertisements for online photographic webpages. Ford the hero is bizarrely surrounded by animated images of naked breasts flashing and moving about his body. Ford's image becomes the focal point in a carnival of sex acts. My God. And then you get Walter Benjamin and theories about the internet. Richard Schickl's commentary. Voice-like pause would be unable to write as they wished in any institutionalized setting. Logs are a site where the marginalizing contemporary society finally have a place to voice their ideas. Definitions of social capital are now measured in the sheer amount of attention that any single person can draw. Ford emerged as an authority on pornography spontaneously. He did no market research, used no publicity when he started lukeford.com. So I compelled to write the site because of the people he encountered. Quoting to Ford, I don't play nicely with others. I need independence and I need to control my own show. That's why I don't even like comments to go straight up on my website. The internet allowed me to approach a broad audience without the fortress of the mainstream media. The internet allowed me to express myself unmediated by influences that would otherwise literally take what's unique about what I do away. I would go on a story for 20 pages on lukeford.com. No editor would have allowed me to do that. I would get 900 words or 2,000 words. If I wanted to write about Judaism in the midst of an article on gangbangs, I could do it. So I think the internet was the key. The internet allowed Ford to escape the constraints of mainstream media and to cultivate a level of popularity that led him to be accepted and used by the mainstream media even without pre-existing social capital. Sharing various cults do use pain as part of their initiation rituals to create a sense of community, to create a sense of, look, I'm in the mirror, okay, to create a sense of comradeshaft, comradeship. So these are the kind of questions I'm struggling with as I've been traveling across the country trying to meet people, some success, some failure, but always trying to learn from it, trying to get better. I realize that I don't have the cult leader archetype or personality. That's not to say that I don't enjoy leadership in one capacity or another, but I've met people who truly, you know, I was part of a group called Poetry Night and for like three years people would get together and they would sing and re-poetry and perform and getting together people like that, which was, you know, I want to praise everyone in that group, but it was a very diverse group. Even getting people together like that, it requires a certain personality and there were really two people who did the heavy lifting. There were two people who, out of the 40-some-on people who ended up coming in at some point, and there were like 28 stable members at this point. There were really two people who were responsible for a majority of that recruitment and they have the cult leader personality, you know, and it's okay, you never guess who is backstage. Elliot Blatt, blessings to you. Elliot Blatt, blessings to you. Oh, blessings, bro. I thought you were winding down, but all right, yeah. No, bro, I'm just getting started. Okay, we've only just begun. We've only just begun. Sorry. So, you know, my boy, my homeboy, can you? You're going after my boy, bro. We're tight, you know? We're piezing apart. Oh, that's right. That's right. I forgot how bonded you guys are. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I don't know. I'll just give you a few more insights into Ken, just, you know, for what it's worth. You know, he's actually a very funny guy, you know? He's, I'll give you, I don't know if I told this story last time when I was on, where I was speaking about Ken, but we came across this stage. So there's this little state park, and in the state park, there's like a mountain theater. It's very cool. You know, it's this theater with rock step, you know, rock seating, sort of like a Roman Coliseum type of thing, or a Greek Coliseum, and there's a stage. And immediately, so Ken sort of waltzes up onto stage and starts delivering this over-the-top oration. And I wish I'd recorded, I was trying to, I thought I was recording it, but I never pressed record on my phone, you know? But he went on for like 10 solid minutes, just sort of delting out these like Shakespearean platitudes one after the other, completely extemporaneous. And it was, it was very funny, you know? So he, you know, as you point out, he does have really great verbal gifts. And he's very much in the moment. You know, he's very, he's very playful with his environment, you know? And it's actually very fun to be around. So, you know, I realize, you know, we sort of are knocking him here and there, but, you know, I think you'd enjoy Ken's company more than you realize. I absolutely agree with everything you're saying, just from what I detect that you're just speaking truthfully. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, it's not like I don't disagree with what you have to say either, because, you know, and I think that largely, as you point out, it's a function of being young. And you have to realize, you know, I give anybody who's under 30 a complete pass, you know, like you can make as many mistakes as you want before you're 30. And I'm just going to forget, forget anything, because that's how you learn, you know, you have to make a certain set of mistakes. And I think Ken's mistakes were pretty innocuous at the end of the day. Yes, so far. But do you think he has the potential to be a David Koresh or a Jim Jones? No, and I think he's far too intelligent. I think he's far more emotionally balanced than your characterization suggests. You know, he's in the domain of, you know, he's kind of like a Richard Spencer in that he probably went to graduate school, and he wants all of these high ideals and ideas that you learn in graduate school. He wants them to be directly applicable in mundane life. And he's just rubbing up the fact that most people's lives of quiet desperation has thrown once it. How do you think success would change him? Let's say he got 1000 times the audience that he gets right now. Yeah, there's risk there for sure. It wouldn't be good. I think he would probably travel a very similar arc to Richard Spencer, who experienced a bunch of success, and then paid a certain price for his hubris. And I think he's learned, I think Richard has learned from his mistakes and has become, you know, a lot more sober, literally and figuratively. And I think Ken would probably travel the same arc, because he's fundamentally high IQ is Ken Brown. And I think if you do have a certain amount of intelligence, I think you're able to be objective about yourself and about your mistakes, and of course, correct. And I think he would probably travel that same arc. Yeah. So anyway, I just thought I would throw in my two cents, because I do have first hand experience. He does literally want to start his own cult, which is not a good. I don't know about that. I think there's a certain amount of play acting going on there. I don't believe that's the case at the end of the day. I think he may say that, you know, and I think he may believe that. But I think he's, I think he's acting out of idealism. I think he's youthful and, you know, with youth is idealism. I think he's just kind of acting from that place. I don't think he's a maniacal cult leader in the making, in any sense of the word. Do you think he's looking for friends or do you think he's only looking for followers? I think he wants both. But I think he wants to live on his terms. He wants everything to be on his terms for sure. He doesn't want, I don't know, he doesn't want to be challenged, or he doesn't want to be challenged too strongly. I mean, he definitely wants to be at the head of the line, you know, he wants to be the alpha. And, you know, he's probably in a position where he can, doesn't feel like he needs to compromise on that. So I don't know what his financial position is, but I doubt he needs to work. You know, I don't think he's accountable to people in the way that people that have to work are accountable to other people. But again, like I said, you know, so young. Yeah, I think, you know, I think he gets, I prepared to give him a lot of latitude. Did he realize that you're Jewish or half Jewish? I don't know. I don't know. And to tell you the truth, I thought he was at least half Jewish. Did he use any Jewish expressions? He didn't use Jewish expressions, but his gift of gab and his humor did remind me of Jewish gab and humor. And so no, I mean, if, you know, if, if he's Jewish, he certainly wasn't culturally Jewish, but you know, you sort of get the sense, you know, you know, there's certain like, there's certain, it's very hard to put your finger on, but there's a certain style of humor that you can identify as being Jewish. And does he have that? Does he have that? I believe so. I did pick up on some of that. I felt I was picking up on some of that. Did he talk to you if we just all do one more mitzvah? Mashiach will come? No, no, he's no Jewish. No, I'm quite sure whatsoever. And what's your read on his Christianity? Is this not really identifiable with any, like, particular community? No, I think he's, you know, he probably studied philosophy in college and probably did a lot of literature and probably took it really seriously in ways that a lot of people probably don't. So I think he's, you know, I've had friends like this who read stuff and really like, really internalize and feel what they're reading, you know, they sort of take it on. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yes. Like it's some of the really like, if they don't have friends. Yeah, I don't know about that. But yeah, I guess when I think about it, yeah, there's probably a certain monorism there, sure. But there's people that really get into the process of education and enjoy it and take it seriously. And I think Ken is one of those people. Yeah. Yeah. So and with that, you know, you're sort of prone to I think Richard Spence is one of those people as well. There's a certain, you know, there's a certain like mathematical purity that goes like with some of these sort of ancient ideas and some of this great literature, there's a certain idealism that comes with it. I think you know, there's people that just read for the test and are able to regurgitate, you know, the necessary facts for a test. But there's other people that sort of just completely imbibe the spirit of what they're reading and it moves them and it changes them. And for better or worse, even someone we know from your show, bro, just kind of read a text and maybe taking a bit too far. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I mean, they quit their job and drive for Uber because of cultural critique changed their life. Exactly right. You know where I'm going. So anyway, but I do want to point out you know, a fact about my interaction with deep left. And it's such a small point, but I think it's a much larger point that may seem and it does seem it's going to seem very petty. But in the old days, Luke, if I invited you somewhere, right, and you were the one inconvenienced, and we were to discuss something, some business or something. And I said, Luke, come out to lunch with me and let's have lunch and let's discuss this idea. Right. Who pays the check, Luke? The person who initiates and invites. That's right. That's right, Luke. And I was invited to sort of chaperone and be a tour guide for deep left and his posse. And as part of that, we ended up going out for dinner. And deep left didn't offer to pick up the check, bro. I paid my own free. And it was like, I don't know, it was a little irritating. It was off-putting. It was like, wow, you know, that particular custom has seemed to have disappeared from the later, you know, the current generation. No, I think someone with friends in their life would not have missed that. Like you couldn't, you couldn't get away with that if you got friends. I mean, people, people, if you live in a community, if you've got friends, if you connected to people, you couldn't get away with that barbarism. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe it has gone with other people. It's a tale. It was sort of like, you know, something doesn't smell right. And what is it in Sweden or Denmark? Yeah, Denmark. It's also a neurodivergent thing. Does that strike you as right? He's not neurotypical. Yeah, that's probably fair. He's definitely an oddball. But I think he's a mild eccentric, you know. Mild autistic. Perhaps, if I even know it. I mean, autistic means that you don't... No, I can give you a very clear definition. It's someone who doesn't read other people's emotions very well. So someone who is the opposite, what's schizophrenic, they read way too much into other people's emotions. But someone who's autistic doesn't read other people's emotions very well. Obviously, there are levels. Yeah, I suppose that's a possibility. But if it's there, it's very slight. I mean, you know, it's like, high IQ is high IQ. And if you're high IQ, you do pick up on cues. And I really didn't get the sense he wasn't picking up on cues. I just didn't get the sense that he was privy to that particular custom that I was mentioning about picking up the check. Right, because he seems so isolated from reality. What about the idea that he combines these two traits of pre-natural levels of self-confidence, along with the trait, you know, I'm a wounded bird, I need you to look after me and protect me? Possibly, but I really didn't get that wounded bird energy. I got a very confident bird energy. But yes, the confidence was there. So that's sort of what you're saying. But Buddy, I need you to pay your own freight and squire him around. Yeah, I suppose. And I would tack that up to some sort of generational obliviousness. More so, more so than the wounded bird. But it's certainly up for debate. So he's been doing his thing for five years. And he, you know, his viewership like my viewership is down substantially in that time. So he gets his viewership when he does, you know, funny takes on the alt-right. When he does the more philosophical stuff as with me, he gets much lower viewership. So any, any thoughts, any predictions for the future trajectory of Ken Brown? Well, I'll give you how I fell into his orbit was with that, you know, he was criticizing HBD, you know, he was, he's very much anti-HBD, and he associates any HBD ideas with Wignettes, right? That's just a one-to-one correlation with him. And in the, in, I was in watching on the streams and one of his live streams, and I was in the chat, you know, sort of trying to make a more nuanced case about HBD, similar to the case that you might make, had you'd been in the, in the, in the chat, and he simply couldn't hear it. But it was through those interactions that, you know, we came to know each other. So I think, you know, the HBD question is going to kind of keep reasserting itself, and he's going to need a more nuanced take if he's going to remain credible among, you know, people vaguely on the right, it seems. Yeah, it's just such a denial of reality, and it's just the building block for any kind of understanding of how the world works is to recognize that different people have different gifts. Yeah, yeah, like I don't even know how I got to life, not even understanding this, like, you know, it was truly a revelation, you know, like it was, it was the undoing of so much, like, social programming to keep me from understanding this. Now, once that I've seen it, I just can't unsee it anymore. And with the internet, and with the, you know, sharing of videos, and the ease of communication, I just think it's going to, there's not going to be a particular moment. It's just going to sort of seep its way into people's consciousness. And before you know it, I think there's just going to be a critical mass of people that suddenly acknowledge this is true, and things will change. So how long have you been paying attention to it? 2018, 2017. Oh, okay, five years then. So have you noticed any trajectory? Well, you know, I was in downtown San Francisco today, and I don't understand the cognitive dissonance that people in the city are carrying right now, like blocks, entire blocks of boarded up storefronts, you know, just needs to provoke some questions. And, you know, you can't even, you can't even pretend it's not happening. I mean, a certain number of people just want to pretend it's not happening. But when you go downtown in the city now, and you just see so many boarded up storefronts, and this is ostensibly like one of the most, you know, avant-garde leading cities in America, and that the downtown looks the way it does, it needs to provoke some questions. So I forgot the original question, but yes, there is, I think people are going to be more open. The question was what was Ken Brown's trajectory? He seems to be even more, he seems to be further from reality than he was even five years ago. That's true. He will, he will force crossroads. I think if he's going to engage with people, he's, he either has, he's going to force, he forced with the choice of either engaging with his critics or just, you know, satirizing them and ignoring them. And the more he satirizes and ignores people that tell the truth, the smaller his audience is going to be and the less relevant he's going to become. That's how I see it unfolding. So I do think he's smart enough to recognize that he will have to come to terms with, I mean, he's heard the term 15, you know, 1350, et cetera. So he knows it's out there, but he's able to compartmentalize it away because he doesn't like the people who advance these arguments. So a reality is going to come calling, I think, pretty soon. And I think he will be smart enough to engage with it. So, but he's going to, he has several more evolutions to take place. Yeah. He's at war with reality, not just on diversity, but also on nationalism, which is the most powerful political force in the world for 200 years. And he loaths nationalism, which is one of the most elemental and strong things that drives politics. True. And so the thing is, is like, so people that are in his fold are going to have to start compunching him. And the extent that I'm in his fold, I mean, it would be hard for me to imagine that I'm not at least some, I don't think he can ignore me. I mean, of course he can ignore me, but I think it's a difficult for him to ignore me because he has, for his having met me, he has to at least, you know, give me the time of day if I make an argument around HPD. So, but yeah, his trajectory can go either way. But yeah, I mean, he saw his, his reach does seem to be declining, if I can tell, you know, by gauging from audience numbers. Now, he says that he deletes his many of his videos because he thinks he can do it better. I'm skeptical of that. I think he doesn't want to stand behind things that he said. But I mean, I know for sure that I can't, you know, if I delete videos from 2018, I have no assurance of doing them better. A lot of the videos I made in 2018, pass a period to what I turn out now. What do you think about his justification for deleting his videos that, oh, I can do it better? Yeah, I realize, I mean, I think you're now correct. He's, he doesn't feel like he can defend them. So he deletes them. I mean, that's a true answer. Sure. I agree with you. I mean, when a lot of live streamers, they do a live stream, they go on the attack against various people, then they delete the stream. And it just seems to me you should, you know, attack people publicly. You should stand behind your words, either leave the stream up or you should publicly. Oh, here's my rule. Yeah. After age 30, you have to leave your streams up. Yeah. But before age 30, I think you have, you can have license to delete them. I think your worldview, I don't like this idea that you said something four years ago and that you're, you need to be accountable to it for it for the rest of your life. I think there does be, there does need to be some statute of limitations on ideas. And if you change your mind, I feel like, I mean, yeah, I feel like you're entitled to a fresh start. I don't think we can live like this if it's not a way to live to be, you know, held accountable for shit that I said when I was 18 years old. There's just not, that's just not a fair way to conduct the society. Yeah. But there does come a day. There does come a day. If you do attack a person, you know, if you attack a person directly and then delete the stream, that is kind of a low blow. You need to either, you know, make an apology or, you know, provide contacts. Make amends. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right there. Absolutely. But I think your worldview does, I think, I think older people need to give younger people a much longer leash to allow them to sort themselves out. So 25 is the age when you can usually start to rent a car that seems to be a pretty good dividing line. I think car rental companies know something about human nature. Yeah. But I asked, yeah, it's true. But I still think that's too young. I'm more of a 30 camp, 28, 30, 30 is probably better. I just think there's so much. I think, you know, young people today are confronted with the world. People aren't involved to deal with the internet yet. You know, the internet is such a potent, you know, complicating force in the world that I think people need some time to sort it out. And the problems of, you know, establishing a career and, you know, making your way in the world and becoming, you know, a solid grand citizen in the face of a complicated internet. I'm willing to give people a pass for a much longer time. I don't, 18 years old is just way too young. And what do you think of that new song by Jason Aldean? Try that in a small town? I haven't listened to it all the way through because I, you know, obviously I just don't like country, but, you know, any pushback to woke I'm behind. So yeah, whatever. I'm for it, I guess. It's true. Like, you know, there's gonna be a snapback, right? You know, I'm hoping there's a snapback. I'm hoping there's some pushback on all of this sort of woke nonsense. And if Jason, what's the thing? Waldeen, Jason Aldean. If he's part of it, yeah, more power to him. So I have nothing, nothing to say. I don't, I don't, I don't need to antagonize my allies, bro. I, someone's broadly on my team. I'm cool with it. I don't care if we, for like, you know, there's nuances of difference between us. I'm just, I'm a Californian, bro. I'm just living my life. Welcome. Oh, whatever happened to Jennifer, I like to talk about quantum stuff. I don't know. She seems to have paused her, her streaming career. Online persona. Yeah. I don't know if there's anything going on. I'm not in any communication with her. So when you do it, we better position to answer that. Yes. Yeah. So I think it'll be a good question to do it. Okay. Anything else you wanted to add? No, that's it, bro. Just a quick one, bro. Sorry. No, excellent. Thanks, Brad. Blessings. All right. Sure. All right. Blessings. Not just pure narcissism. There's, there's kind of an unbridled positivity and optimism, but also it's not saccharine. So there's a particular personality, a charisma, a kind of handsomeness, a kind of fearlessness, a lack of the self doubt internal monologue, a lack of inhibition where you go up to someone and you say, Hey, join my cult. And then in the way that dogs can smell fear, if you have doubts, if you're not certain about yourself, if you're self hating, if you have guilt, if you have shame, people smell that instantly and they know that you're not really a hundred percent. And if you're not a hundred percent, they're not going to join you. But if you're a hundred percent, as these two individuals were, if you're 100%, you can recruit people and you can get them to join cults. And I have never been that guy. I always have a very critical eye toward others, toward myself. I try to be optimistic. And I think in many ways and situations, I am the most optimistic person in a certain situation. But there are some people who, whereas I can be a little bit too self critical in order to be that, but that's, you know, it's okay. Not everyone has to be a cult leader, right? Not everyone should be a cult leader. But I've met these people and I've seen that they have the capacity for it. They might not have the desire to do it though, because they're interested in other things. They're not interested in starting an organized cult. They don't see the payoff. They would rather travel the world or do something like that. And that's also okay. But that's a little bit of self knowledge. That's something that I've kind of learned. Going forward, I want to expand on these themes and deepen and get more empirical, get more historical, have more research, have more sources and links. I want to read more books. I started reading again. I used to say I don't read books. People would ask me book recommendations. I didn't read books for a long time, years and years. And I've started reading books. I've read Bhagavad Gita, Ramayana, Machiavelli's The Prince. I want to take more notes. I want to get back to pen and paper. I'm considering like the next 30 days, just going out in the woods and taking pen to the paper here. So we'll see what happens. We'll see what happens. But yeah, I wanted to make this video because every day is an opportunity for a transition, for renewal, for transformation. I am feeling good. I am feeling optimistic about the future. I do want to be critical because I don't want to keep doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. I don't want to have this channel ever be boring. If it is boring, I want to delete it. When people tell me, oh, you have to save your old videos and where's this old video? And I say, well, what about a new video? I should always be improving. If the old videos are better than the new videos, then I should just stop making videos, right? And if that's the case, if someone comes to me and says, oh, this old video was so good, it's like, well, maybe I should remake it better, right? If the old video was so good, let's make it better. Let's always get better. If the video was wrong, then throw it away. Is there any such thing as a perfect video? No, I just refuse to believe that I've created the perfect video. I believe there's a better video, which is yet to be created, and that through research and thought and energy, primarily emotional energy, through connections, through intellectual comradeshaft, through working together with people being inspired, having conversations, I have a weekly meeting group now. You have to email me about it. But it's currently Wednesday, 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern. That time is subject to change. Last time we had two people show up and it was a great session. It's 15 minutes. You know, you just say what you've accomplished in the week, what you can improve and what you're looking forward to. Very simple. But I found it's a proven model with the poetry group. I found it an enjoyable thing to do online. I think it's motivating. So I'm ready to do it. I'm ready to move forward. I have struggled because there are people who are starting or want to start cults, but I feel that people are too big. People are stuck in this whiteness, Americanism, patriotism, Christianity. They're stuck in that. And while I can appreciate the history of empire and how those things came about. Okay. Great question in the chat. What transitions have you made today, 40? The most important parts of my life, I don't talk about usually online until they are safe, until they are set. So lots of transitions going on in my life. Nothing I want to talk about. I feel that they are outmoded. That's why I promoted minoritarianism as my, I guess, third big pillar of the channel that we were bringing up here is to say that you can't save these big things, these big whiteness America. People say, the white race is dying, America is dying, Christianity is dying. It's like, let them die. Not just a Nietzschean way, but Christ said that. He said, let the dead bury the dead. Don't put new wine in old wineskins. So that's what I'm saying. Yeah. Well, the idea that anyone individual can save America. I mean, that's kind of a grandiose conception, a grandiose conception of one's own abilities, grandiose conception of what any individual can do. None of us can individually save America. We can save some individuals. We can have a transforming effect on some individuals. And those individuals can then have a transforming effect on other individuals. So we can make a ripple in America in the world. I'm not going to go back to those imperial ideologies, which each of those three things, Americanism, whiteness and Christianity, were in their time imperial ideologies. So it was funny listening, reading aloud that Rachel Durkett's article. I mean, so much of Luke4.com was driven by about six close friends, any one of whom remains a close friend, but he really contributes to this this channel on my blog anymore. On the other hand, I've got four, four friends, four or five friends who do contribute to this channel to my life. So being part of a group is really important to me that I couldn't do shows like this alone for our time. And if that happens to overlap with Christianity, if that gets the label Christian, then great and fine. But if I walk into a Christian church and it's lame and it's low IQ and it's dumb and it's unsustainable and it's filled with old people and the young people are leaving and the young people are liberalizing and they're not adhering to the traditions and it's not sustainable and it's not progressive and it's not equipped and it's not voracious and it's not powerful and it's not vigorous and it's not vital, then I don't want it. Then I say throw it in the trash and discard it, you know, make the church into a shopping mall. I don't care. It's worthless to me. And I can't be sad. I can't shed. Well, what's worthy or worthless to you is not the ultimate way of measuring value, but he's little too glib and easy with letting all sorts of powerful institutions around him go into the dust. Tears for that. I think you have to be ruthless to an extent. If you love God and you love the truth and you love life and you want to move forward, you have to be willing to discard things that are weak and ugly and decrepit and decaying and dying. I don't want it. So I'm just completely. Luke Croft says 40 is wrong. Nationalism is over. I still maintain that nationalism is the most powerful political force in the world today. At least stepping over the dead corpse of the Christian church as it is. Now, that should be a challenge to people. If you hate what you're hearing and you think this is evil and satanic, then that should motivate you to prove me wrong. Prove me wrong. Go to church because most of the people that I talk to don't have an active Christian community. They go on Sundays. Maybe. Maybe they go once a week. Yeah. Why is it that most people you talk to don't have an active Christian community? Most people you talk to don't have any community. You are talking to anti-social people because type of people we talk to reflect who we are. You don't seem to be part of any recognizable Christian community yourself. You don't seem to have friends. You don't seem to have normal human ties that seem to be tied to community place church. And so obviously you're going to attract people who are similarly anti-social to yourself. Week on Sundays. Are they involved in missionary work? Are they involved in church construction? Are they growing their church? And is there a holistic because are they involved in education? Here's the thing is like public school is not Christian. So if you're a Christian, why are you sending your kids to public school? And if you're not, why aren't you teaching? There are plenty of public schools where the overwhelming majority of people who go there are Christian. And Christianity does have a substantial effect on their lives. And the public school will in many ways bend to that. And kids, everyone can teach kids how to read and write. So when I came to the United States, came to the Napa Valley, came to Anguain, California, came to the community of Pacific Union College. My parents struggle whether or not to send me to the public school or to the private Seventh-day Adventist school. Well, the public school was dominated by Seventh-day Adventists. It was very Seventh-day Adventist friendly. And if your public school is dominated by Christians, they will have a pretty profound effect on how your public school operates. You know, if you really want to do that, if you really want to push that model, there's a way to actually do it. And I don't see people doing that for the most part. And if they are doing it, I mean the Amish are doing it. So I don't consider the Amish, I mean the Amish are Christian. But when I criticize Christianity. There are vibrant communities all around us. You have the choice whether or not to partake, right? There are vibrant yoga communities. There are vibrant writer communities. For many years of my life, pretty much every night, I would go to some social gathering of writers. There are vibrant religious communities. There are vibrant 12-step communities. There are many vibrant, filled with life and love communities all around us. We have the option of going to join something bigger than ourselves. But that requires swallowing the self. It requires putting other people's needs ahead of our own. Often it requires some degree of self-censorship. Can't join any community without giving up some freedom. I'm criticizing this kind of mere Christianity. It's not sufficient. And I have problems with the Amish as well, otherwise I would have just become Amish. I think the world is bigger than being Amish. I think the world is bigger than just having kids. Yeah, the world is bigger than being Amish. The world is bigger than being just Jewish. The world is bigger than being Christian. Yeah, we live in a big, complicated world. There's more than any one religion. Yes, it's just wonderful and awesome. And on a personal level, it's great. But it's not a political solution. It's not a religious solution. You know, Jesus didn't come into the world. There are no solutions, as Tom Sol said. Or there are a trade-offs. That's one of the things you learn as you get older. And have 14 kids, and that's how he started a new religion. No, he made disciples. He made children of men. It's actually very important to look at the way Jesus talks about children. So if you want to change the world... Yeah, one thing that's stunning is as a Jew looking at the way Jesus talks about children, is that how much his ethos and the ethos of Christianity is that you should come to God as a little child. Or the ethos of Judaism is that you should very much come to God with your brain as an adult. So you can grasp the essence of Christianity. Someone with a 70 IQ can grasp the essence of Christianity that God came to earth and died on a cross to save you from your sins. You can't intuit Judaism. So Christianity is a mass religion, because anyone even at a retarded level of IQ can grasp the essentials of it. On the other hand, you cannot grasp and intuit the essentials of Judaism. If you want to politically or religiously or both, then just popping out kids Amish style, I don't think, is a solution. It might feel personally great. It might be biologically, reproductively, materially successful for you. But mimetically, in the world, that's not going to create the new identity necessary. That's not a solution. So I don't believe in that strategy, because I think the Amish could be wiped out very easily. They don't have a means of defending themselves. They don't have technology. They don't have intellectual capital. They don't have a lot of diversity, frankly. They don't have... Well, the best way to survive in a difficult and challenging and constantly changing world is to have friends and family and community. The best way to survive an earthquake is to have friends, family, and community and to be bonded to them. The best way to survive higher inflation is to have friends, family, and community. Best way to survive high unemployment, friends, family, community. Best way to survive illness, friends, family, community. Best way to survive an attack of mental illness to have friends, family, and community. Best way to survive having your heart broken in love is their friends family community friends in high places I mean the Amish are pretty are pretty stuck you know if someone comes down hard on the Amish look at what happened to the Mormons in Missouri I mean that sort of thing that happened to the Amish there would be no recourse for them but this happened to them by the way the Mennonites during the Bolshevik Revolution had to flee so who's to say we won't have a Bolshevik Revolution in America where we kill all the racist people and the Amish will of course be one of the first groups to be eliminated I'm not saying that yeah I don't think we're going to have a revolution in America where we just kill all the racist sexist people because that would essentially mean killing everybody because everybody you know is substantially sexist and racist right let's put this all into some perspective what is a secular guru Chris Kavanaugh talking here with Matthew Brown from the excellent podcast decoding the gurus the reasons why are kind of interesting still a matter of psychological anthropological inquiry even things like for instance that the personality facet of narcissism is a strong correlate of belief and conspiracy theories this is just one example of these interrelationships so so this is not just a random grab bag of stuff these these different facets tend to be correlated with each other and there are probably good reasons why they tend to co-occur in gurus and to some degree in the kind of people that are attracted to them yeah and so we've identified 10 characteristics that we like the tongue in cheek refer to as a grometer right and after every episode on the patreon feed in addition to the episode we release we ranked the gurus from 1 to 5 or score them sorry on a scale from 1 to 5 for each of these 10 attributes or characteristics that we have noticed as being recurrent amongst the secular guru set and it's also true to say that if you score highly on this it is not good you because the the secular guru concept is not a very positive concept overall it is technically possible that you could be a secular guru who is doing no harm in the world and is just advocating for people to be better but because of the personality characteristics like the narcissism and grievance mongering and so on it would be hard for that to be the case and so it is this so it's going higher on our like 10 characteristics if you're at the tip top it generally wouldn't be a good thing and if you're low down it generally would be a good thing but as previously noted this does not mean that us liking you okay that's enough for tonight take care bye bye