 here. So Noah Carl tweets, I'm of course entirely on Scott Alexander's side in his beef of the New York Times. It is disappointing to see him refer to Charles Murray's offensive views on race. And he could have just said views on race. So sex realists love to throw IQ realists and HBD realists overboard. HBD meaning human biodiversity. So it's clear that Scott Alexander is a crypto human biodiversity dude given his writings on Haiti, but he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He wants to have a social life. It's understandable. It's the great chain of respectability. Anyone at the ideological edge has motivation to ostracize anyone more extreme than they are so that they can end up on the safe side of the Everton window where censorship and social risks are much smaller. Now do IQers throw GQs under the bus to avoid cancellation? I can't think of any examples. Obvious disagreements don't equate to throwing people under the bus. So Richard Spencer retweets white peeled will. Rush Limbaugh's death marks the end of talk radio and Reagan conservatism. Podcast destroyed talk radio and this closes the book on it. Reaganism also died with Rush. It was already an untenable message and will finally fade with the passing of his torch bearer. Trumpism had already supplanted Reaganism and Rush's death signifies it. I didn't see conservatism and GOP abandoning free market policies. The ways these issues are discussed would no longer be from the Reagan perspective where free markets and deregulation are sacrosanct. We already saw this shift with Trump's presidency will be carried forward by figures like Tucker Carlson, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton. Reaganism has ended as a brand and a narrative controlling conservative discourse. So Richard Spencer is back tweeting up a storm and he's got a new podcast out the end of America first. And Nathan Kaftner says I'm a big Scott Alexander fan. But people need to stop trying to protect themselves from cancellation by throwing others with slightly more controversial views under the bus. Same strategy is among the heterodox types. So Jonathan Heights, you know, heterodox Academy, they like to talk about sex and only sex differences. So I've been carrying on a conversation with my old friend Godwood podcast. And Godwood has developed a view on life which reminds me of my father's my father was a pretty unhappy man. And he had a view on life of, you know, I don't give a cracker for this world. And if I had to sum up Godwood podcast perspective on life right now, it seemed to be I don't give a cracker for this world. And this this paragraph here by the late philosopher Isaiah Berlin seems spot on talking about the sources of stoicism's popularity. What occurred was a kind of retreat in depth. So when you don't get what you want in the real world, it's very tempting to retreat to mystery called religions like Christianity or stoicism. So in human history, when the natural road towards human fulfillment is blocked, people start to retreat into themselves, come involved in themselves, and they try to create inwardly that world which some evil fate has denied them externally. So this happened with the ancient Greeks when Alexander the Great began to destroy the Greek city states and the Stoics and the Epicureans began to preach the numerality of personal salvation, which led to Christianity. And this took the form of saying that politics was not important, civil life was not important. All the great ideals held up by Pericles and Demosthenes, Plato and Aristotle, these were all trivial, absolutely nothing before the imperative need for personal individual salvation. So there's a very grand form of cell grapes. You cannot obtain from the world what you really desire, then you must teach yourself not to want it. You cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you get. This is spiritual retreat in depth. It's common. It's a kind of inner Citadel, which you try to lock yourself up against all the fearful evils of the world. So Gilbert podcast has taken on the perspective that the working is selling out, that having a job means that you're a phony that indicates that your morals are deficient. And and to me, that's, that's very opposite of my perspective. To me, there is nothing more ennobling than work, meaning work that is legal and work that is upstanding that you wouldn't mind seeing written up in the on the front pages of the New York Times. Like to me, work is the very, very best thing on on that which is noble in life. So God would tweeted to me, look, have you ever read Boethius? So Boethius wrote the constellation of philosophy around the year 524. And it was just right before he was to be executed. So he's serving a one year imprisonment, he's awaiting trial, and eventually gets executed for the crime of treason. So it's a little bit like Thomas Moore, who was Lord Chancellor of England, but then ran afoul of King Henry the eighth and his desire to take charge of the the English Christian Church. And so in the Wolf War trilogy, Thomas Moore is advised when he goes into exile, internal exile to pray a great deal, but but don't write. Well, Thomas Moore did a great deal of writing, ran afoul of the powers that be and got got executed. So Boethius was also staring down execution. And so his experience of looking death in the face inspired this classic work, the constellation of philosophy, it was written in Latin, most important influential work in the West on medieval earlier Renaissance Christianity, last great Western work of the classical period, probably the most interesting example of prison literature, the world has ever seen. So there's that fascist in Romania, the iron cross, wait, was it who is that fascist in Romania during World War Two got imprisoned and produce a classic work of prison literature for the alt right. So the constellation of philosophy, I read it about 15 years ago. And it appealed to me probably for the same reason that air supply appealed to me from what about 1979, until about 2015. Like when you're losing at life, like songs about loss, you know, really speak to you. But when you're winning at life, you no longer is moved by songs about loss. And constellation of philosophy, it's a great read. It's really fun read. So looking at the chat, look, you're simply explaining what cognitive dissonance is, right? You devalue what you don't have. If you're, you're a humanities professor without tech skills, you're forced to indulge in the profundity of medieval or classic wisdom, there's a way to devalue the modern society, which you feel increasingly alienated from. So the constellation of philosophy is a dialogue between himself and Lady philosophy. And philosophy is consoling Boethius, okay, so he's staring death in the face. So the type of constellation that you get or should seek out when you're staring death in the face, I think is very different from the material you should seek out when you're living life. So Lady philosophy tells Boethius who's staring death in the face, the transitory nature of fame and of wealth, and the superiority of things of the mind and the spirit, those are the one true good, true happiness comes from within virtue is all that one truly has because virtue is not imperiled by the vicissitudes of fortune. So Boethius is rather naive, he believes that human beings are essentially good. And so God would set me along one page from the constellation of philosophy. So very early on in this work page seven, and Lady philosophy says, do you imagine this is the first time that philosophy has been assailed by perils in the court of corrupt behavior. So when you're you're failing to get what you want in the real world, it's very, it's very consoling to take the attitude that the real world is corrupt. So when I was growing up as a seventh day Adventist in Australia, I was a miserable kid, like at the haunted look of a Holocaust survivor. So the idea of martyring myself for Christ was incredibly appealing. I wanted to become a Christian missionary. And I was fired up by the ideal of Christian martyrdom. And my favorite movie as a kid was A Man for All Seasons about Thomas Moore and how he essentially deliberately martyred himself to stand up for what was right against King Henry VIII. Henry VIII wanted to essentially split away from the Roman Catholic Church. So my father, my father was dying, he dictated his last testament, which he wanted to assure people that he'd spent his entire adult life pursuing theological truth, and that he'd never wavered or compromise in his pursuit of theological truth. My perspective is that theological truth depends upon such huge subjective leaps of faith. It's really pointless to talk about truth. And so from my perspective, that's a pointless pursuit to spend your life in pursuit of theological truth. So when you're staring death in the face, rather than staring life in the face, then it's comforting to say, oh, philosophy is continually assailed by corrupt behavior. And in Plato's own day, I, Lady Philosophy stood side by side with his mentor Socrates when he triumphed over an unjust death. Like, what kind of triumph is that? I mean, I think Socrates could have escaped from his death, but he chose to stay and die for philosophical reasons. I don't see that as a good role model. The mobs of Epicurians, Stoics, and the other schools each did their best to plunder his inheritance. Well, I think probably the Epicurians and the Stoics had, generally speaking, far better ideas about how to live life than Plato or Socrates. Like, Plato's ideas, Socrates' ideas belong in one place, Plato's books, you know, they're terrible ideas for living. And so Lady Philosophy talks about these various classical characters, they were dragged down to disaster for no other reason than they were schooled in my ways, right, the ways of philosophy. It is a nice coping mechanism for when you're losing at life, when you can't get what you want in reality. But when you're in life with a fighting chance, I don't see this as good guidance. So Lady Philosophy advises, our chief aim is to displease the wicked. And to me, that's just terrible advice for living. Did Lady Philosophy know Lady Marga? Like, if your chief aim in life is to displease the wicked, that is just asking for death. I mean, that's asking for nothing but failure and misery. You go around just trying to displease the wicked. You will develop far more enemies than you can comfortably handle. So not only will you destroy yourself, you will bring down all the innocent people attached to you and connected to you. So Lady Philosophy advises, our chief aim is to displease the wicked. I think that's horrible advice. I remember I had a moderately radical turn with my right wing politics on several occasions, including from 2013 to 2015. And during that time, my therapist said to me, Luke, do you think the reason you're attracted to radical politics is because you are so passive in your real life? And he was right. Like I was working a dead-end job for just barely paying the bills, barely scraping by and carrying over $50,000 in credit card debt for a decade. So it's like Angelo John Gage, he's always talking about willing to die for the cause. He talks, you know, the biggest, toughest, roughest, the most heroic game because he is on permanent disability, right? He got PTSD going to Iraq. He didn't see any combat in Iraq, as I understand it. But he got PTSD. And so he's on he's sat with disability for life. Okay, so in his real life, I don't know the full truth. Okay, of his life. So you can say, look, he's a welfare queen for PTSD when he never saw combat. I don't know the truth of his life. I don't know what what he experienced. But it seems from what he says, that he is completely passive when it comes to reality, meaning his adult responsibilities. And so therefore he's a hero in in his online political world. It's like people who are completely he was a combat engineer, there's never a frontline warrior, right? So people who are completely passive in their real life, but then their keyboard warriors on 4chan. People who are completely passive in their real life, but they are thought leaders in their podcasts, people who are completely passive in their real life. But they're, you know, warriors when it comes to gaming, people who are completely passive in their real life, but they want to run the country. They want to run for governor. It's easy to be a fighter when you have disability and you don't need a job. So I don't know all the details of his situation. So this is not a commentary on Angela John Gage, the real person. This is a commentary on Angela John Gage, the public figure as he presents himself to the world. So when you're completely passive in your real life, then you're going to compensate for that, you know, by being extreme when it comes to your gaming or being a thought leader on podcasts, or in the type of politics you prescribe. I had a girlfriend, Holly Randall, who was a porn photographer, and she wanted to be absolutely dominated in the bedroom. When we're in the bedroom, she'd plead with me to fuck her like a whore. But outside the bedroom, she was in charge. She ran her own business. She was very strong in charge personality. But she wanted to dominate in the bedroom. And so the more passive I've been in my real life, then the more I've wanted to either dominate in the bedroom or dominate with my political fantasies or my religious fantasies. So as a miserable kid, I wanted to be a Christian martyr. I wanted to go be a missionary and go die on a cross for Christ. But as I started to taste the pleasures of this world, and started to have a little more success and make friends, do normal, healthy things, the desire of monitoring myself just largely disappeared. So I see people monitoring themselves online all the time. So that they say and do incendiary things online, which will forever haunt them. And they're doing it because I feel like they have nothing to lose. That's what I felt between 2013 and 2015. I certainly had, you know, a large part of that feeling. I was just sick of carrying over 50k in credit card debt. I was just really passive in my life choices, just barely scraping by. So I spent a great deal of energy investigating dissident right politics. But then in 2016, I was getting my life together, and my life was rapidly improving and my income was doubling and tripling. And then I was no longer quite so eager to throw everything away. So the type of music that you like when you're lovesick, quite different from the type of music you'll probably enjoy when you're happy, or when you're in a secure relationship, when you're perhaps raising kids together, and your chief concerns are paying the bills. You're going to be in a very different headspace than when you're walking around all lovesick. So people like Sir Thomas Moore, and many of the online keyboard warriors of the of the alt-right, they are their own murderers. They're murdering their future possibilities, their future selves, their future income, their future potential for happiness, and normal human connection, and community, right? All these dissidents, they write and they write and they talk and they talk and then they cancel themselves. So yeah, some people get canceled by the outside, but just as often or more often people cancel themselves by their own stupidity. Like people beheading themselves. Yeah, Baked Alaska and Nick Fuentes probably won't be able to go to medical school or law school. Right, even if you pass the bar, you probably won't be admitted to the bar because there are morals clauses to passing a bar, to being admitted to a bar. And your past behavior is going to hold you back. Like I'm thinking about a guy who is quite active in distant right politics. At the same time, he was pursuing a very prestigious career and he caused a great deal of damage to himself when his distant right politics and some of the more outlandish things that he said came out, but he managed to pull himself together and he formed alliances with very powerful mentors, but he formed the alliances and he managed to pull himself together by pledging to walk away from white nationalism. Right, so once he made that pledge, he was able to get all these powerful people in his field to come on onto his side. So how can't they realize this? It's very obvious though. Okay, so people don't see the world as it is. People see the world as they are and so if you're really hungry for affirmation or for being a star, then a little bit of success in the distant right and it can completely intoxicate you. Just like a lot of people can't see clearly when they're drinking steadily, other people can't see clearly when they're getting positive affirmation through their online antics. So they don't think about the consequences. So a girl may feel needy of attention and she just does a couple of blowjob scenes and posts them online and suddenly she has tens of thousands of fans and the attention feels amazing. And she's got hundreds of guys joining her $15 a month fan club and her inbox getting bombarded by admiring emails and guys saying, oh I normally don't look at porn, but your work's not really porn, it's artistic and this and that. And so people feel like, oh I'm not a porn star, I'm a sex educator. Now I'm a real, you know, I'm a social activist. So people get intoxicated, I think, by the attention they get online. Chat says, Nick Fuentes seems very intelligent in some ways, but really stupid when it comes to long-term strategy and his career trajectory. It's insane. How can they not realize this? It's very obvious. Yeah, well people just get intoxicated, some by drugs, some by sex, some by porn, but a lot of people get intoxicated by attention. And so there isn't a great deal of competition to dominate, say, the distant right streaming sphere. So if you're halfway good at it, you'll achieve a disproportionate amount of attention and adulation because your competition is so low because no normal healthy person with with family and with friends and with community is going to want to, you know, dabble in what's regarded as an open sewer. So just as I got to dominate blogging about the porn industry for a decade because there was no competition, so too it's really easy to dominate, you know, distant right blogging or vlogging because there's so little competition because both the pornography industry and the alt-right, they're both regarded by mainstream society as open sewers. I notice these people can't get along with each other and they have constant fights. Now Nick Fuentes is fighting with Patrick Casey. Is this because they are narcissists? I think it's because marginalised people are attracted to marginalised causes. Yes, Luke is the king of the sewer. Yeah, I'm familiar with swimming in open sewers. There's much less competition. Like to win the 100-yard swim, swimming competition through an open sewer. You have to compete against fewer people and less talented people and if you're trying to win a 100-yard swimming race that's just open to, you know, normal healthy people. So I'm not sure that these people is necessarily narcissism. I just think it's antisocial instincts. So they can't seem to maintain bonds and relationships and build community. They're always splitting, splitting, splitting. So I think there was JFKRP and Andy Waskey. Split. There was me and Kevin Michael Grace. Split. I used to do shows with Dennis Dale and Godwood podcast. We all split. So I used to have routinely six to ten people on my show but we pretty much all split up. So JFKRP is not nearly as good on his own. He doesn't even have guests anymore. His show is like 120th as entertaining when he was with Andy Waskey. All right. So I'm not excluding myself from probably these strong antisocial tendencies. Why would Big Delasga go to the Capitol when he was on probation? This guy seems to have zero foresight at all. I think it's the overwhelming power of attention. Like this guy lived for the collects. This guy lived for the superchats. This guy lived for the adulation and the attention and it just completely distorted his understanding of reality. Just like 18, 19 year old girls who start sucking cock on camera becoming porn stars. They're flooded with adulation but they don't think about the long-term consequences. Then once they come to their senses and they leave the industry we rarely hear from them again because the consequences of what they've done is so severe that they never want to identify as a porn star again or an ex-porn star. What happened with Kevin Michael Grace? He's doing a daily show. So we did something like 415 shows together and I just felt like it just wasn't working for me anymore. So that's why I split. And I remember a key thing in that split, Jen, what really provoked me was listening to Elliot Blatt on your show saying, you know, Luke doesn't seem very happy. Like Luke, you know, was really happy to get Kevin Michael Grace and it was a great coup to be able to do shows with him. But then it sees being Luke's show and Luke just looks stuck. And that's exactly how I felt. It just wasn't working. I felt stuck. It's like, ugh, I don't like this. You know, I tried various ways to try to get out of it. And yeah, I was much happier once I split and went my own way. And it's good to see Kevin Michael Grace doing his own thing so successfully. Yeah, it's easy to be a fighter when you have disability and you don't need a job. Half-Polition says, I empathize with Godwood podcast, Alienation from Silicon Valley Wokeness. But as a nihilist, I don't then think people of 1500 years ago got it. And Half-Polition says, just accept that there is no meaning and be free. So when Anne Boleyn was about to be executed, these two mates are having a conversation and one says, well, if Anne Boleyn had reigned any longer as queen, she would have given us to the dogs to eat. So by telling each other there's no need to feel sorry for this woman getting beheaded because if she stayed in power any longer, we would have died. And the other bloke said, yeah, if we had let her reign any longer, we would have deserved it. And the Lord Chancellor says, the truth is so rare and precious that sometimes it must be kept under lock and key. Right? So in every society in all of human history there are all sorts of obvious truths that you cannot say out loud without getting dinged for them. Halsey says, Angelo Gage is a total fraud. He used to be a hardcore white nationalist until they rejected him for not being white enough. And now he's just, for the world, accepts Jews except for the Jews. So when I was miserable, I liked, you know, music that catered to a miserable soul. When I was miserable, I liked the type of politics that catered to a miserable soul. When I was miserable, I felt like I had nothing to lose so I would, you know, often speak and behave in more anti-social ways. But when your life starts to work, you start to make some money and you start to achieve the things that you want to achieve in life, then you have more to lose and you become more protective. It becomes more important to you to protect your your place in society and your new friendships and things are going well. So misery is not nearly as appealing. Whether it's music for the miserable, philosophy for the miserable, movies for the miserable, literature for the miserable. Like you don't need it as much when you're happy. When I was miserable, I wanted to be a martyr. Whether I was going to be a martyr for Christ or a martyr for, you know, right-wing politics. Being a martyr was just quite appealing. I was willing to put it all on the line because I had nothing, nothing to risk. But then when I started developing something, you know, good and holy and precious in my life, I was not nearly as willing to just throw it all away. So when you love a piece of literature or music or a Bible text, it's worth asking, why do I love this, right? Because if you love it, it says something about you, right? Why do you love this particular Bible text? Why do you love this particular book? Why do you love this particular piece of music? Why do you love this movie? And often to create space for good things to come into your life, you have to let go of a lot of things that are dragging you down. Like, I'm thinking of one person I know has a daily, you know, action partner and the daily action partner has been unemployed for three years or four years. Like, why would you want to have the daily action partner when you're trying to move ahead with your goals, right? Why would you want to have a daily action partner who's unemployed for years and years and years and years? And like, why would you want to have action meetings where they come in and they talk about their goals but they never actually make any progress? Like, to have that kind of dead weight in your life, just pulls you down. I remember I met this cute girl at the Los Angeles Press Club in 2008 and she was cute and she was smart and she was funny and she was semi-homeless. Like, she was sleeping on the couch at a sister's place and she was also sleeping in her office at the Los Angeles Press Club where she was a volunteer. So it was easy for me to pick her up and now I never stayed at this Cecil Hotel in LA. So it was easy for me to pick her up and just shower her with a wonderful life. She could move in with me and I can take her to dinner and we can go traveling and she's just willing to fit herself to my life because she's got nothing else going on. So for the first three months we were like honeymooners. It was just ecstatic because she was just basically willing to fit herself to me because she had nothing going on. But then I started to realize how dysfunctional she was that when I brought her around my friend she kept she was even worse reading social cues than I was and so she was a public affairs director at the Loyola Marymount radio station and when we're out with my friends she'd tell them oh you should call in and you know support the radio station during during pledge week and she'd carry her laptop into synagogue on Friday nights because she didn't want to install them from her car and she just kept falling out with people and so what was a wonderful honeymoon right because she had nothing going on so she could just fit in completely with what with my life just she's very quickly started to feel like a millstone around my neck it's like oh my god this woman falls out with everyone she can't she can't handle handle keep a job she's in constant conflict and drama and now she's starting to make drama with me and it's like oh what a millstone so yeah you have to let people go from your life that there's this one depressed guy I'm several depressed people I've met through 12-step meetings and you know normally I return people's calls through 12-step meetings we want to help each other because even though we're all crazy we're not all crazy in the same way but when they're chronically depressed and they're just chronically crying or they're chronically talking about suicide at a certain point I just I just cut them off like I don't want to hear from them anymore if uh if every time you call you're talking about that time you're on that tv show all right and you know 10 years before and every time we talk you've got to got to bring that up you know just living with that level of delusion it's like no I used to have like a daily accountability partner and he was just so filled with resentment and just had such a chip on his shoulder that eventually I just had to cut it off like a lot of people looking for support and I just that support is like it's like all the rage and and support is only what you should look for when you're on your death bed okay when you're staring at your execution like Boethius then yeah reach out for support but other than that support just makes you weaker so you often have to let people go to be able to create space in your in your life for good things to flow in and that may mean that you may have some spaces where you even feel a little bit lonely it's like when the power goes out sometimes you just have to confront yourself without the distractions of the the internet and that's a good thing it's like the Sabbath if your girl starts to succeed in life a little bit of narcissistic abuse will nip it in the bud yeah so like I used to put up with you know abusive bosses in a way that none of my friends would would put up with for 30 seconds like I would put out with it for years but then as I got healthier and healthier I realized hey I don't have to put out with that anymore so I just quit drop drop these people had had no contact with them ever since when people are abusive I'm not a big fan of cutting people completely out of your life but I am a big fan of creating a little more space like when people start abusing you I feel like it's a good idea to take a little bit more space and I understand understand that the people you choose to hang out with they reflect who you are look how different you think your life would be if you had brown eyes I think I think I have hazel eyes but I think my eyes look different depending on the background or depending on the shirt I wear so I believe my eyes are hazel and I haven't thought about it very much a lot of people just want someone to listen to while they blab their ego it's a primordial self-creation instinct unkempt and rendered dysfunctional yeah so the less functional I was less functional the people in my life were and then the more functional I became the less patient I had for the dysfunctional for the chronically unemployed the people who cannot sustain relationships the the drama queens it's like no no no no I want to create some some space from that bye bye