 G'day mate 40 here, so I started blogging July 3rd 1997 that's the time I first bought it like a real PC computer and Within within an hour of unpacking it. I was setting up my own pages on AOL with my AOL account and I started blogging and I enjoyed the freedom of blogging and so that allowed me towards the end of 1997 to do something that I'd wanted to do for about eight years and that is I wanted to engage with Dennis Prager's thought By writing my own thoughts often in reaction to his thoughts So so much of what I do on YouTube is you know reacting to somebody else and that's true of intellectual discourse in general Knowledge is really a conversation and so the the socially acceptable means of effectively participating in Knowledge is to acknowledge what someone else has said on topic a and then add in a wrinkle or add in a disagreement or Take take topic a and move it forward in some way So I would listen to Dennis Prager on the radio sometimes for two three hours a day And I had thoughts that I wanted to share on what Dennis Prager was was saying and so I thought now I've got a blog I'm into blogging Let me go forward. Let me start writing my reactions to Dennis Prager's radio shows and When I started articulating this out loud to my closest friends at the time in Los Angeles So by this time I'd been in Los Angeles for about three and a half years These were all friends that I shared in common with Dennis Prager. They were friends in large part that I Would would dobbin with that I would attend CNS wise temple with and they all said look if you do this We will never speak to you again because until this time I'd just been Another acolyte of Dennis Prager. I had taught him how much I enjoyed his his books and his lectures and his writings and There was no like public, you know challenging of anything he said I was just a fan and I wanted to weigh in and share my own thoughts on what he was talking about So then I would move from from fan to to critic Okay, not critic in the sense that I was criticizing everything he was saying but critic in that I wanted to place What he was saying in some kind of context so just like a Bible critic is not someone who is Trashing the Bible the Bible critic is someone who asked When was this document written for whom was it written? What was what was going on at that time? Right who wrote it? When was it written for whom was it written that those are the basic questions of literary analysis and so I was was planning for years and years to move from just you know Dennis Prager fan to Engaging with with his thought and integrating it into my own writing. So when I did that I lost you know virtually all the the friends that I had in Los Angeles, which was incredibly painful and Brought me low and and I was in a you know pretty desperate, you know pathetic place for many months after that into into May-June of 1998 so from December 1997 to May-June of 1998 I was in a pretty low desperate place because I didn't know what your experience is like but for me life with community and friends is Five times more enjoyable five times more intense five times more exciting five times more fulfilling than life with you know very little community and friends and Life with community and friends is also about 20% as desperate right you know tough times come for everyone when you have community and friends Tough times are about halved or they're about you know one-fifth the power that they bring One-fifth the challenge that they bring when you're largely on your own So I was just reading in New York Times article on Francis Fukuyama. He's most famous for coming out with an essay on the end of history in 1989 So he essentially argued that there was no alternative to liberal democracy This came out in the National Interest magazine Summer of 1989 now. I think that's just an absurd point. I Don't find Francis Fukuyama particularly useful powerful Influential you know, I don't find him an important thinker He's not someone you know really want to wrestle with but he did say one interesting thing in this article that that struck me Oh, yeah, that's That's true That is a really good point so He found that fame Made him quote less reliant on the good opinion of a circle of friends. So I think the normal healthy response to life is Particularly for intellectuals is that you limit what you say To those things that won't damage your friendships and won't damage your Standing in the community and won't damage your career So for most of the people my peers that I know well For them their their career comes first probably for most of them and if it's not their career Then it's their family and friends. So most normal healthy people they circumcise what they say they circumscribe What they say they limit what they say to that which it will be acceptable within their community within their their friendship circles I Have generally gone through my life saying what I wanted to say and then dealing with the repercussions So Dennis Prager said on the radio. He's never lost a friend. I can't say that I've gone through life like ticking off friends all the time I remember when I was in high school just entering a new high school and I wanted to investigate Bad behavior by the football team and and my past best friend at the high school at the time said He was initially Enthusied about what I was doing and then he just completely cut me off and said look you can't can't investigate and humiliate your own school and and his own programs and So that that was like a really painful break and we didn't speak for for about a year after that. So I've had that experience again and again and again I would speak out on something or I'd write something and then lose friendship. I remember when I was converting to Judaism 1992 to 1994 I Had a good friend a woman who was also interested in converting to Judaism but she was a public school teacher and because I was volunteering with a referendum to encourage school choice to encourage people to That would allow people send their kids to private schools to get a voucher from the state She cut off that friendship because I went to work on this Pro-school choice advocacy. So I've experienced this again and again and again. I take some position. I Participate in some social political cause that My friends disagree with passionately and then boom there goes the friendship now the advantage of My approach of like saying and doing what you believe and pursuing truth as you see it is that you you do make new Friendships you meet you meet up with people With whom you having you have things in common But it's really hard to go through life without friends and I have had many, you know dark times desperate times because I've ticked off all my friends and so one of the advantages of fame is that it makes you less reliant on the good opinion of A particular circle of friends. So starting in May May and June of 1998 I started becoming famous. There were all these articles written about me. I appeared on entertainment tonight. I appeared on 60 minutes I appeared on on Fox I Was written up in New York Times LA Times, you know, I was written up in Rolling Stone all these publications And so I was lesser, you know less needy for friends because one all sorts of people that I used to know Like came out of the woodwork and got in contact with me. It's like, oh, look, I just saw you on TV I just read about you in Rolling Stone So someone who I went to UCLA with like contacted me Ten years later say hey, I just read about you in Rolling Stone magazine So that's one of the great things that I found about fame is that I've been able to replenish The friends that I've lost from the controversial things that I was saying I mean have to replenish them through through becoming famous. Now the downside is starting in late 2007 I Realized I'd no longer be after make a living as a writer and so I Stopped putting as much effort into my writing and my my social circle moved away from primarily being with writers so between between about 2002 and 2007 almost all my socializing was with fellow writers. I get a writer groups Los Angeles Press Club functions book readings and that was my community because I was famous as a writer and I Was connecting with people as a writer and You know people who write for the New York Times right Adam Davidson. He's isn't he an Economic correspondent for the for the New York Times, right? You know, he hit me up as like wanted to meet me You know I had lunch with him he's a contributing writer for the New Yorker So I got to know all these people from the New York Times LA Times and that for my social circle but once I started seeing I was hitting the wall that I could no longer financially support myself as a writer and I Downgraded the importance of writing in my life then that whole social circle and the friends that came with it just Largely started dropping away and so I had to remake my life again. So I became Alexander Technique teacher. I developed friends in the Alexander Technique community But there was there was a lull and there was a drop-off. So I lost one one set of friends. I lost my social circle I lost my writing community in large part and It took you know took a few years to start building up these alternative communities Which was painful. I remember I was dating a woman in 2009 said you know, you have no friends Well, I was in that lull because most of my friends had been writers Now that I was no longer primarily diverting myself to writing I couldn't keep up with that friendship circle that I had and friendships take a lot more maintenance than Family right you can see a sibling or an uncle or an aunt or a niece Right for the first time in ten years, which I've experienced Okay, I think I went ten years without seeing my brother and then boom you just start right off where you where you were And you can't really do that with friends friends. We require a lot more maintenance So the normal thing is that people devote themselves to their family Now almost all my family all my family is in Australia and has been for the last pretty much the last 20 years so people who are not absorbed by their family will then naturally become absorbed By their their relatives they're their extended family like that's the natural human condition first of all You prioritize your kids So if you've got a good friend, but he's now married with kids You may not want to see him, you know very much because his kids are so demanding. They're so annoying You know, they take up so much of his attention that you may make plans to go see a movie with him You make plans to go have coffee with him may make plans to Play tennis with him and half the time he'll have to cancel or leave early Or he'll be running really late because family comes first, right? That's the natural normal thing family comes first Job comes first career comes first and Then after that your extended family comes first and then if you have any room after taking care of your job your career Your family your extended family if you have any energy and time After that any need for human connection above and beyond that then you fill it with friends So people who are actively involved with their family and extended family They don't tend to have it nearly as many friends people like me who live on another continent from my family Then my life is primarily about friends and and community because there are no There's no one, you know within 3,000 miles of me with whom I share any blood relation of which I'm aware so then You can experience the downsides of the loss of fame because when you you lose the fame and you lose the stature that goes with it within particularly highly competitive industry such as writing then That substitute community those substitute friends that you develop through your friendship well They they won't largely go away Right if if your friends are primarily in the writing community as mine were and I ceased to primarily be a writer and Wasn't putting my energy into writing then all the those friends all that community is just kind of disappears so I Love that that little bit in this Francis Fukuyama article But what one advantage of fame is you're less reliant on the good opinion of a circle of friends now Also, I think there are certain strong individuals For whom ideas are so compelling that they're willing to risk social isolation and that they can they can deal with it I think I'm a little bit that way Certainly, I'm not happy when I'm socially isolated But ideas are often so important to me that I'm I'm willing to pay the price for the social isolation that will come For saying unpopular things Now in 2004 Fukuyama broke with his fellow near conservatives over what he saw as their Delusionally sunny assessment of the Iraq war. So all those people who supported the 2003 Iraq war who were pundits and writers they paid virtually no price and Almost all the people who are right about what folly it would be to invade Iraq in 2003 they received no benefit Right, so Nick Fuentes is a millionaire off of superchats, but far more profound thinkers than Nick Fuentes All right, they've got bupkus right so so fame and fortune don't always go to the wise and and to people Who are putting out ideas and insights with great merit? So in 2004 Francis Fukuyama blasted people like columnist Charles Krauthammer for promoting a reckless nation-building project Untethered to reality and betraying at neoconservatism's traditional warriness of grand social experiments and When he did that he lost a lot of his friends Right probably most of the friends that he gained through being famous Were fellow neoconservatists and then he lost them all by taking an unpopular position So you found the schism difficult but liberating and I found the same thing with say when I I fell out with the Dennis Prager crowd very painful very difficult But but liberating to be after go my own way. He said I could think on my own so Ties are wonderful ties make life, you know far more exciting Far more pleasurable far more comforting but ties Ties bind you to others obviously But they also blind you I'm just quoting Jonathan Hyde, you know when you're connected to a community when you connected to friends, right? You become blind and sometimes when you fall out with friends and community that the veil is removed from your eyes And you start seeing things more clearly now often seeing things more clearly will cost you friendships will cost you a social circle So to try to maintain both One has to be in the dance of connection, but also be able to step outside of it and See things how an outsider would see what's going on. You cannot join any group any community without participating in Essentially a cult right that that's just the nature of community all communities have Characteristics of the cult that you don't see once you're inside the dance But if you're smart enough you can step outside of the dance and and put yourself in The the minds of other people who are outsiders who are looking at what your group is saying and doing I remember I Was with some orthodox Jews and you know one of them started yelling out like death of the Palestinians You know who knows how many non-Jews around us heard that I Don't think that was like a really savvy thing to say that when you're so intoxicated by your in-group identity You know yelling out things like you know death to the out group just just becomes normal so Jacob Heilbrunn is the author of they knew they were right the rise of the neocons and You know, it's Jacob the Francis Fukuyama had a more reality-based perspective than his ex friends like Charles Krauthammer So he knows intellectuals have a predilection for extremism. Yeah and Francis Fukuyama came out of an extreme movement meaning neoconservatism, but I think he managed to keep his bearings Let's have a look at the chat Luke's priorities crystal light recaller Beef organ pills now my priorities are ideas and people Sometimes I'm more excited about ideas than my connections most of the time I'm more excited about my friends and community than I have about ideas Friends family community these things are fleeting the glory your gain has never of the all right. It's eternal Those who don't send you super chats aren't your real friends. I Wouldn't have sex with every woman that I see is that normal? Yes, that is normal But it also reflects You know, where is that coming from? It reflects a certain emptiness inside of you like our basic addictions are for love Right, that's our basic addiction for the one-third of the population that's susceptible to addiction the basic addiction is love But you can distract your yearning for that kind of connection with You know sexual fantasies with with drugs with alcohol with gaming with gambling etc But the basic thing that the third of the population susceptible to addiction are yearning for is connection And so by walking around thinking about how you desperately what you know, how much you want to have sex with every woman You see that's distracting you from your core pain and your core pain is that you're not feeling loved and you're not loving and you're not connected to other people and so when you're living a life That's disconnected from others. You will do anything to distract yourself from that pain. And so your sexual obsessions are Adaptive in the sense that they are distracting you from your core pain of feeling unloved and disconnected, but This this obsession and distraction will quickly become maladaptive and lead you into ways of thinking and behaving and speaking That will limit your ability to create love and connection in your life Look I'm playing tennis with someone who's definitely better than me. What do I need to do to defeat him? I always found when I played tennis with someone better That always lifted my game. I mean that was fantastic I couldn't believe like I was able to stay on the court with someone who's on the Nevada Union High School tennis team I was never on any official tennis team, but the thrill of You know taking on someone who is so much better than me like all my senses became heightened Hit to his back end bro. No, maybe you have to approach the net more often Not many people can win at the net My game is a big serve and I'm an endurance based baseliner Keep your unforced errors to a minimum Ultimately Luke has the final word on the subject because Luke is the decider Intellectuals tend to stay in an abstract space They're able to be intellectuals. They're much more likely to be she ordered from consequences than normies Yeah, the smarter someone is the more they live in an abstract world All right, the more they live in the world of ideas and in abstractions And so probably the better suited they are For dealing with things like covert and dealing with things like being alone Even the idea of distinguishing normies from oneself is a red flag. Yeah Generally speaking the most effective way to go through life is to see what you have in common with other people but if you've got something important some something burning inside of you even if it makes you unpopular and If you if you're producing something of significance then that significance will keep you warm Even when the things that you're saying and writing socially isolate you How does Donald Trump win if he is banned on socials and on YouTube? Because apparently YouTube won't allow any extended speeches by Donald Trump great question Recall a situational suites now that everything is situational with the look forward empire Lemon honey sugar-free recall it definitely the way to go. Bye. Bye