Red Scare - The Agony of the Podcast w/ Logo Daedalus

Episode Date: November 8, 2022

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I'm on top of it. I'm on the zeroes and ones, ones and two, so I'm on top of it. I'm on the ones and two. We're back. We're back. I really want to smoke a cig, but I feel like it's bad to blast cigs in the apartment. I'm not going to do it. I'm going to exercise self-control. He'll be mad. Yeah, he'll be mad. I did it before when I was preparing for my Wellbeck costume because I had to get really method, so I just smoked one out of the window and then immediately put a candle on. Yeah.

Anyway, we're back. We have a special guest. All the way from Twitter, a logo datalist. Hello. Did I say that right? Yeah, sure. You can call me whatever you want, but I'm down to blast cigs inside. Yeah, I know. There's nothing better than blasting cigs inside in New York. Yeah, it does. I smoke cigs in my apartment in it. It smells like shit.

This is a very long apartment. Yeah, we could do it, but we should wait. We'll wait, yeah. I think maybe second half. I literally went on Google today and did the pronunciation tool to pronounce your name because I learned all of my words from reading books. Yeah, yeah. That's why she talks so well.

There's some words I did that were like I pronounced them wrong for so long. I'm trying to remember one from like reading it just only having read it and never heard anyone say it before. Yeah. Did you get ruthlessly mocked and ridiculed? No, because no one reads and no one uses words. You just get ruthlessly mocked and ridiculed. Well, not even that, just using words that people don't generally use. They just get offended.

Word salad. Yeah, word salad, copesy, ratio. I recently learned that logo Daedalus is like a real thing. Yeah. It's a word I just got from reading the Albuquerque when I was like, it's like logo Daedalus. It's just the art of word smithing and that's it. I just learned that. It's really simple.

He didn't come up with that? Yeah. Yeah. It's also like, it was like purposefully like supposed to be like self deprecating because like it's like a word that was used to describe like hack poets. Like they're like using a hyphaloon word to describe them. So you wanted to get ahead of any potential critiques by self deprecating in advance? Yeah.

I mean, I didn't really put that much thought into it in the first place when I chose it because when I chose that it was like what it was like 10 years ago actually. Yeah. And I had no followers at all. I was just tweeting and to write down my thoughts when I was like walking around. Yeah. And that was it. How long have you been posting?

10 years. Same. Yeah. About time. Well, even longer but on Twitter. A little bit longer. On Twitter 10 years. Yeah.

I've been, I was on nefarious on very niche forums like as a child or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Same. Are you, are you in on technically or have you been doxxed? I've been doxxed for years. Okay. I've been doxxed so many.

Oh, I just actually took down an account this morning that was pretending to be me and my wife. Just like that was like, you know, like. We're looking for a third with like swastikas on my head and shit. Yeah. Yeah. I've got some of those. I just, I don't even bother reporting them because I like oversaturating sort of the

information sphere with fake doshes. So then there's plausible, you know, like that's not me. I didn't say that. There was one that kept replying to me and it was like, nobody stopped me but with a dash at the end. So I like, it also didn't sound like it was like a nice try. There's just room for where there's no point anymore. Like I got doxxed years ago.

Someone compiled like a dossier of my tweets, like, like straight up just like a dossier, like a long PDF file and they tracked down my wife's like friends on Instagram and like sent it out to like all of them. It was pretty wild. Wow. Did anybody? Why? No, literally no one gave a shit.

That's like the funniest thing. Like no one cared. Everyone was like, what kind of, what's up with that? I just described shit that happens to me online to normal people all the time and they're just like, what the fuck? They're like, that's nice. That's so insane. I have to pay taxes.

I'm like, Eli, no, you don't understand. There's this guy. He's called Garbage Abe and he's like DNC foot soldier and he's like, what are you talking about? You schizophrenic bitch. I thought he worked there like a market. I have no idea. I have no idea.

He allegedly got doxed though I haven't been keeping abreast of the Twitter beef lately and the picture going, I don't know if the picture going around is like accurate, but it looked like Heidi Klum's Halloween costume. Oh, okay. I see. Why did people dox you? I don't know. I inspire.

I inspire. I was talking to KB the other day because I met up with him when I was here. Are you still friends? Yeah, yeah. We're like friends. I haven't seen him since I left the city, so we haven't seen him in person until like the other day for years because I was like all over the place. But yeah, I mean, like he was a hugely influential to me when I was like in college.

We were friends then when we were both like sub a thousand accounts and where'd you go to college? NYU. Oh, cool. Me too. Unfortunately. I'm not that proud of my alma mater. Yeah, nothing to be proud of, but you shouldn't be too ashamed.

There's no point in being proud of a school at all unless it's a one where like it's like a passport anywhere. I don't know. I feel like my life would have been way better if I went to NYU. Why? You would have gotten some more STDs. Yeah, I just say I would have been a little more well socialized, well adjusted or something. Why do you think that people that couldn't NYU are well adjusted or well socialized?

Yeah, they're not. They're not. They're all insane. Some of them are. No, not really. Not in my experience. Like I was the well adjusted one, but most people think I'm insane, so. Right.

Well, what do you mean most people? Like people on the internet, not people who know you personally. Yeah, but people on the internet are just NYU students. Yeah, that's true. That's true. It's kind of like a little miniature. But with like the additional wedge of like this like fake reality inserted, which you know, lets them dehumanize you and do what they will with your effigy.

It was, well, I mean, that's kind of how it was then. I got in a lot of trouble at NYU, like in classes, I don't know, just for like arguing with professors and stuff like that. Were you that guy? All the time. I've been that guy since I was born. Like I was been that guy, I was that guy in elementary school. Because you're in Aries.

Yeah, I don't know. It's like my family is all teachers too. So it's like I've never seen teachers as like some distinct authority beyond like anything I could understand because everyone in my family is teachers basically. So it's kind of just like, yeah, I know, like, you know, you integrated the shadow early on in life. Sure. Sure.

We can put it that way. I'm a teacher's pet myself. I would do anything for their validation like a dog. Oh, I was the opposite. Like there were teachers looking for my validation because they needed me to like help control the class or whatever. I remember I led like an uprising once against an English teacher in like high school and then he quit his job.

What did you study? I studied Russian. Oh, okay. My Russian is terrible now because I've been used it in forever. But yeah, I wanted to be like a Russian, like a professor of like Russian literature. Like I wanted to go full academia was like who among us didn't. Yeah, I know. It would have been nice.

But that's like what like my family is like we're all very much value education. And that was like, you know, I was very much pushed to do that. And then it was like, this is not what people say it is. You can't really get there anymore. The ladder's gone to make your way up in that way. Oh, for sure. Totally. Yeah.

It's not a viable. One of my professors took me aside once and he was like, he knew I was a big fan of Nabokov and he was like, when Nabokov wanted to teach at Harvard, they said, well, this would be sort of like having an elephant elephant teaches zoology course because it's like I wanted to move right literature. I didn't really want to be a professor. I want to be a professor so that could have a cozy time writing, but like that's it. Yeah.

Yeah. But that dream is dead. Right. Yeah. Now you get. Now I'm doing that, but it just means you humiliate yourself on Twitter and you have a podcast and that's the being a professor now. Exactly.

That's the children of academics, the failed children of academics. Well, like I've been cited in grad papers now. So yeah. Or do you have an academia.com? I don't think so. No, but I know I've been cited. It's like a LinkedIn for academics. I signed up for it back in the day when I was in grad school.

So you get notifications almost like Google alerts every time your name is cited in a paper, which happens quite often, which is horrifying. That means that they're like students unpacking the politics of Red Scare, I assume. That's all that you go to school for. Write comments like straight up. That's the whole skill set is like a professional networking site. Yeah. I get the DM occasionally.

It's like, I'm writing a paper about podcast for my cultural studies. I'm writing a paper about podcast fandoms. Exactly. That's that's kind of what I did. I did a lot of like sociology of the internet. The new aristocratic houses or, you know, is a podcast. What is the people are talking about? Or is it really about the discourse it generates?

What is a podcast about what we're talking about? Or is this really about the discourse that will generate audience response theory? We can have what we need to assign some NYU kids to write a paper about this. About this particular episode. Yeah. Yeah. They'll be citing this one for you. So you met Kompott on the internet.

Yeah. We were just like in the same circle of like kind of people, I guess interacting with like what was called NERIA NRX or whatever back in the day, like people who read Curtis Yardvin basically and then this like the people talking about and around those topics, which was kind of like a bigger community or scene or whatever. Then I guess it's retrospectively considered. It's considered to have like this orthodoxy to it, but it was really just like a place where a bunch of people who read old books, no one gave a shit about were talking about

old books, no one gave a shit about a question. Has Kompott actually read all those books that he sites on Twitter? Yeah. He's like, I read a lot and he reads like he's the only person I met who has more rigor in reading than I do. He sends me like papers all the time on things that I'm interested in and like he's like deep in the research zone. Deep in the Walter Lippman cut.

Another question. Why did he turn on us? Yeah. What did we ever do to him? Honestly, I don't know. I think that the leading up to like 2020 and things like that, the internet's just like kind of driven everyone a bit in the sense that you can't tell, especially if you haven't met people in real life, how if anyone's trying to manipulate you or like cynically

use you for something or whatever, I don't know. People got really paranoid. What are you using for? I don't know. Sucks. Well, it's like people were like, be careful that I'm going on your podcast. Like I don't know. A lot of people are like more afraid as people in general.

Told us. Yeah. I mean, I'm always shocked by, I had a little minor bitch war with some guy today on Twitter because he was complaining about post-left, new right dissidents quote, serving the regime that they claim to protest. And I thought this is all, yes, he's, well, he's the final boss of the dissidents like Freddie DeBauer is the final boss of the leftist. It's all final bossism.

But I was like, you know, setting aside all considerations about like art or money, we're just a bunch of loser posters who are involved in a social network, not a professional network, a social network. Could it be less professional? Yeah. A network, honestly. Yeah. Like it's so, it's so kind of like mundane and underwhelming in reality.

Yeah. That's like the thing. Like literally everything though, like pretty much everything that has a mystique to it is really just at the end of the day, pretty mundane. Like I felt that way about every, you know, I felt that way about this city, right? When I was a kid growing up in the countryside of Western Mass, I was like, visit New York City and I was like, wow, New York City is amazing. City of dream.

Like, you know, I was like, wanted to go there, set my whole life on like being able to live in New York and then after living there for like a year, you're like, oh, yep, the magic's gone. And then another night at Boss Tweed Bar drinking a whiskey sour. But yeah, I don't know. It's like, it's like that with everything, you know, you meet a celebrity and like they're really just want to get lunch or something, you know, everyone's concerns are ultimately the same.

Yeah. But that's, but I still enchanted with New York City myself, but yeah, I love New York for just like the human interest element. Right. Right. It's been demystified. Yeah. But I think the mundane and underwhelming is actually kind of like beautiful or at least

comical. Well, it should be, people, people really fail to elevate the mundane and they dishonor it every day. That's by like spinning these like wild conspiracy theories about how someone is like a Straussian or a Zionist. What was the term that was like popular like three or four years ago, like red brown or stressor. Oh, they're still going around.

I haven't seen it. No one's called me a Strauss, right? I guess they just call me a straight up Nazi. I mean, it's, it's the whole like the euphemism treadmill and all that or whatever, like where those terms all come from people's relation to, it's just, it's just people are uncharitable readers, I think is what it really comes down to. That's right. But they wouldn't be if they could meet you in the flesh.

No. Like sometimes that's, it's interesting because I've met some like haters before IRL and it's like they're often way night, they like kind of fall apart. I was doing this with my spaces a lot recently, just like trying to actively get people who like really hate me to like talk to me because like they're so disarmed, like, I don't know what people expect of me, but I'm a very mundane and normal person. Yeah. You're, you're, you're probably like the second most well adjusted internet person we've had

on this pod, the first being Paul Scalas, who was like just shocking and normal. Hey, I must be more, more well adjusted. Okay. Yeah. I don't have a kid on the way. I'm like a very wholesome person. Yeah. Paul Scalas.

Yeah. Well, no, but I think. Arbitral Arbitrary of barometer. I think don't take this the wrong way, but I think when a lot of people encounter you on Twitter, they think that you're some kind of like pompous and pretentious incel and you know, clearly that couldn't be further from the truth. I'm definitely pompous and pretentious. I'll take that.

Yeah. But you own it. I don't care. You own it. Like that's fun for me. Do you identify as a no at all? I mean, I guess other people. I don't think so.

Yeah. Would you call yourself a contrarian? I'm definitely a contrarian. Like, I think being a contrarian is good. Like if you're not a contrarian, then like, what are you, you're just getting pushed around. Well, I've always felt very like, um, wounded and hurt, um, when I was called a contrarian because I, I'm just like, no, you don't understand guys.

It's authentic. It's inclusive and it's implied that I'm guilty by association too. I'm implicated in this too. And then I read that perfectly imperfect interview with Peter Vac, where he was like, you should lean into being a contrarian because it'll like stir the discourse and it might win you some friends. And guess what? It has.

Windham Lewis called himself the enemy. And that's like what I like to be. Like I want to, I'm on Twitter to have ruined everyone's time, destroy the discourse. Yeah. I want, no, I want everyone to stop. Have you ever psycho analyzed yourself and asked yourself what compels you to, to like shitpost and irritate people? Yeah.

I don't really, like my goal isn't really to irritate people, like just to do so. Cause if I all I cared about was irritating people, I could just stand on the street and yell at people and like throw rocks or something like, it's really that just like, I've always been like this. I like, um, I want to know the truth that's really like been, I want to know what's real, what's correct, what's true, what's good. And I've always created problems for myself by like trying to vigorously figure that out in like discourse and debate.

I guess. Yeah. That's relatable. By being insubordinate. Yeah. Yeah. I'm very, yeah. Definitely.

Like I liked arguing with politics with like adults when I was a kid and stuff like that. Like that's what I was on about. Yeah. I always liked more. I always wanted to be older and like mature or whatever, but why do you think you're like that? I don't know. Do you find when I do real psycho analysis, I guess it's like, no, I've, no, I've got

an older sister and a younger brother. So I'm the middle child. That might help you. Middle child. Yeah. Lack of recognition. You need to find it elsewhere. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know. It could be that. I could psychoanalyze myself. I think it's ultimately just that I always wanted to be a writer and, you know, if you want to be a writer, you have to have something to write about, you have to care about it and think that it's like true and meaningful and good so that you have to know what is true and meaningful and good so that you can describe that.

Yeah. And you have to be prepared to put yourself out there, which is a nice way of saying you have to be prepared to humiliate yourself. Oh yeah. No, I think humbling yourself at all times. Humbling yourself at all times. It's good to humiliate yourself. Yeah.

It's only been good for me. I definitely had a lot of pride and stuff when I was younger and thinking, oh, I deserve success or something. I should be recognized before I've even done anything or whatever. That's normal. Yeah. It's very normal. Yeah.

And that's how you learn anyways by making a fool of yourself. So yeah, I always tell people to do that. That's what being yourself means. Embracing being yourself means being actually yourself and not the self that would be most marketable or something. Yeah. Can you tell us about Starbucks? I know that you're uncomfortable.

Oh, you want to do barista discourse? I'm just one, because you've been talking about Starbucks a lot. You have this idea that baristas, correct me if I'm wrong, are not... They just facilitate rent extractions, but that's what retail does. I mean, if you look at... That retail workers are not proletariat. No, no. Of course not.

They don't produce any value. Like, just in a political... It's not like I'm not saying these people are bad people or like their jobs are worthless or that they deserve suffering or something like that. Everyone reads so much into what I'm saying, but what I'm saying is very simply that their interests are not aligned with the interests of people who actually do produce surplus value like in the economy, because their jobs, their payout comes from that value, which is taken from the entire supply chain leading up to them.

Their job is just to facilitate rent extractions on the Starbucks intellectual property through the performance of assembling the Starbucks experience, as they call it. Which they're not even good at anymore. Let's be real. Let's be real. I'm a dunk. I'm a dunk. The quality is to coin.

Me too. You're a mask. I'm a mask. I'm a Starbucks girl. Dasha's outnumbered. She's a Starbucks girl. I'm green straw mafia all the way. You are a fascist.

I'm sorry. But I just thought this was a basic point that people would understand, but I think it's important like clarifying for the American economy, because we're mostly a service economy at this point, which means most people aren't actually producing anything valuable like in the sense of economic value. They're just servicing capital that already exists. Do podcasts have economic value? Oh, of course not.

We're not producing any value right now. This is pure speculative value. What's the value of this? What other people think of it? Think, yeah. Yeah. It's not actually, well, I guess you're producing value for our Patreon. All right.

Why? Okay. Because you're facilitating rent extractions. On what? On your IP that's serviced by them. So you're giving them opportunities to extract the rent through the patrons when they get a cut. Right.

Yeah. That's very simple. We're working for the man. Like it's just describing like just how things work. Way harsh. Yeah. Yeah. It's very telling the way that people read into things and the assumptions they make.

I think that speaks volumes and that's the part of like social media that I enjoy the most. The head cannon. People really do chimp. You said this. I've said it too, that like, you know, when you make a tweet that it's like a Rorschach or something and people really hate it because they think that you're being so like pretentious and such a windbag, but really how you read into a generally neutral tweet says a lot about

where your head is at. Yeah. I want to create those moments too because then it's like, they're just revealing like the more truth of what I'm saying, like the reaction, if anything, is like, I'm just like, this is perfect. Like this, you can see by the way that people are reacting to it, that this thought like is actually like something that needs to be said because people misread it. The biggest thing to me is people being like, like that I'm calling people not workers or

whatever. Workers. Everyone's like, oh, who's a real worker. As a worker. I mean, it's like everyone's a fucking worker, like everyone all the time. Amen. Like it's just, it's a nebulous category. Not me.

I'm a stay-at-home mom. I guess you could technically say that's a form of labor. You're doing some labor. I mean, it's a valuable women's work. Women's work. A new tax farm, you know, but that kid will be paying taxes someday. Yeah. Women's work famously.

Sure. Divided value. Let's get into the feminist critique of Marx. Yeah. Have you ever been a barista? I've worked in service. I've worked like retail, customer service, things like that before I've been a bartender. But I've also worked in a factory.

Like I know I've also done work that is actually, I worked in a factory that was packaging cookies and things. Actually in Brooklyn. Actually it was one of the best jobs I ever had. Why? I've heard that. Straight up. Straight up.

I was making like 15 an hour, like which was good for me. And they paid our lunch and catered it. And did you engage in physical labor? Yeah. Like I was like, you know, like I love Lucy, like the fucking like production line. I worked on an assembly line, like different assembly lines at different parts of the day of like all day. And it was great because if you just, you stand across from someone, you get to know

them very well. And I don't know, we like sang songs and like told stories about our lives or whatever. It's mostly like grad students and then people from like the Marcy projects basically. Because it was out in that part of Brooklyn when I was in college, I did that on weekends. What's that bad though? Like I don't know. I've done proletarian labor in that sense. It's funny that Eli has a similar experience because it's like the rite of passage of all

mass holes that they have to do some form of like a manual labor factory setting. My dad, my dad, like he's a teacher his whole life and he was just looking forward to retiring and doing what he does now, which is just like, you know, like quarrying rocks in our backyard and like turning them into like, you know, like the big fireplace and things like that. Like, I don't know. I was chopping wood grown up and stuff like that. I used to stack wood.

Are your parents proud of you? They don't know what I do, but they're proud of it. Like, you know, they like don't really get it. Like, like they don't listen to my podcast. Like they're like, why would I listen to you talk like I hear you all the time. But they like, I've always wanted to be a writer. I wrote a book. I've written a couple of books that they're like proud of me for that, I guess.

We read Selfie Suicide. Yeah. What'd you think? Hated it. Oh, no. Um, no, have you, have you read, have you read the Christian Lorenzen review of this book? Probably a long time.

Honestly, I feel like a different person wrote that book. So like, when did you write it? I wrote, well, the whole idea for it, like it was really written in my head when I was living in New York, but I like finally wrote it when I had first moved to Texas because I just like quit my job and then I just wrote that. Yeah. But it was kind of like, you know, I'd come up with the idea in like, what, like 2015, 2016 or something by the time it came out, I forget even when, but it's like my New

York book and it's really about like New York. Yeah. Well, it's funny cause somebody said to me, cause I told somebody that you were going to be on the pod and they were like, well, it's cool that he tried to write a book and I was like, well, he didn't try, you like succeeded in doing it. I find that admirable. Well, I'm like proud of you that you wrote this book. Well, thanks.

I'm writing another one right now, which is going to be way better, but yeah, I mean, well, one would hope, right? Yeah, I know. But like that's the whole point. Like, it's like, you know, it's not the most polished book or whatever, but it's like, this is my first thing. Like I was putting that out there to see how it went. I found it very like charming and endearing that it was clearly the work of a person who

was just starting out, which is, I think, redeemable. Yeah, and it's like, you know, never going to be like perfect or polished. It's what I wanted it to be. Like I'm, I'm like pretty happy with it. I don't think I would change it. But well, I was going to ask you if you people never write a first novel or subsequent novels because they are so obsessed with perfect or never make a movie or obsessed with making sure they just care more about their, their persona or like, you know, they want to like,

you know, have people making statues out of them or something that honors their narcissistic fantasy of like the scope of artistic height they would like. Yeah, but it's also like, the real thing to me is that like, it's hard for me to justify writing a book in an age where like the book is like, you know, it's like being a, a experimental like symphony writer or something where it's like your audience is already like very small. So I'm like trying to get people, I'm trying to create an audience for myself and that's what I did. So by being annoying on the internet.

Sure. Sure. By being. Yeah. Yeah, I guess. But that's like the, that's the real art now is like, I just think that we just, I don't know, no one cares about people who write fiction really. There's like very few people who matter when it comes to like writing novels anymore.

Yeah. They're mostly from like the generation before even. Yeah. I think like there's actually probably maybe with the exception of France, I just started reading this book by this guy, Emmanuel Carrere called Yoga. Yeah, I saw you just came cap of that. Have you, have you read this book? I barely, I like don't read any contemporary literature.

You should read this book because it's like one of those perfect dovetail moments, which always happens when we have a guest on the pod where like I encounter something that is like relevant, it's like completely like arbitrary and narcissistic and I'm like editorializing backward, but it's basically your book, but from the point of view of an established mature writer who's entering old age. Okay. That makes sense. I get it.

Yeah. It's kind of like, this is like a, it's like a Kuhnsteller Ramon like right like the coming of age of an artist is like the genre and it's like very established genre. So yeah. The cool thing about your book was that basically one would think that it was a dystopian novel, but there's actually nothing dystopian about it because the reality that you describe is actually our reality only like slightly exaggerated. It's not even exaggerated anymore.

Yeah. Like that. I was talking to my wife about this. I think it's a very 2010s book like and nowadays it's like not saying anything about like, I don't know, even like the world we're in now because all of the things that I wrote about are just real now, like it all just already happened. Yeah. Yeah.

Full passing around a tweet from that online court is on Ayala about how many times she's poops a day. What? Yeah. Who? Who is that? She's, she's like some online escort type woman who, who is she's like a rationalist. So she, she appeals to like an SF person.

Yeah. Yeah. And she appeals to like a former NRX and current libertarian men because she asks like questions like if you could murder your dog and nobody was there to see it and the dog was suffering. Yeah. Like is this immoral? If your dog looked happy, but you had a meter which told you how many utils it was experiencing. Yeah.

So it came up negative even though it appeared to you that they were happy dog, you take it as your ethical imperative to kill the dog. Yeah. Yeah. It's like these kind of questions and she does a lot of polls and she, well, she, I don't, I don't remember. I don't remember a lot. Because it actually threw me into too many or not enough.

Yeah. Um, I think it was normal, but it threw me into a tailspin kind of like you were thrown into a tailspin when we had Jordan Castro and he had that 22 page interlude about like taking a shitting and wiping it was, I was like, this men pay, you know, somebody published her prostitution price list and she, her prices are high, frankly. And I was, you know, it really gave a new, a new gloss to the Charlie Sheen quote. I don't pay them for sex. I pay them to leave because can you imagine paying, I don't know, like $20,000 to spend

24 hours with this girl and, you know, you, you bang her out within the first hour. And then you, you were like gripped with existential terror because you have to spend the next 23 hours with her. I, I'm like, so I'm like, Trad as hell because I never dated like, I've never dated like done the whole thing because like my wife and I have been together for so long and like, I'm not envious of that at all. I feels like everyone else is like, it's not really that. It's like, I'm more finding it like pitiable.

Like I'm just more feel bad for everyone. Like I'm just like this, yeah, we don't have to even assign like moral value to it. But yeah, it's, it really is like a dog and pony show when you think about what like modern day dating on digital like, I don't want to like just be like, oh, be ashamed of yourself and like, oh, you've got to go will yourself into somehow making something happen that isn't happening for you or something. Yeah. Which is what they're trying to do by dating, right?

Or like doing all this. How else are you gonna do that? I know. I've just got lucky. So I'm just like thankful for that. So now you're sitting on your morally superior perch preaching to me. I'm just saying what I think is true. I like your phrase, I'm feminine junk food describing Abigail slash Helen the date of

Carrie who's sort of like algorithmically matched with him through some slightly dystopian as Anna said, but basically not. It's not really, I was just talking to these girls the other day about like hinge or something and they were talking about how all that works and I was like, oh, it's basically, yeah, I get it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's like, what was that? There was that line in the book where Carrie suspects that the ladies are getting kickbacks from the ride shares. So they have less if there's more incentive for them to go on these dates because they have less expenditures. Yeah. Yeah. And actually, you know, the other thing I really liked about the book is that it was

mercifully short in spite of the fact that it was packed with pros and the classic logo way that we've come to know and love. Yeah. It's like a novella. Why was it so short? Was that your intention going into it or did it just happen organically? No, I want it. I'm writing a much longer thing now, but I kind of want to have like, I have like a trilogy

in mind kind of for at least the logo name on novels and then I want to probably write a different cycle under my own name when I'm like an adult, I guess, a real adult, a real boy. Yeah. A real man. A real man. Yeah. So that's like book one.

I'm working on the second one. It's like going to be like a thematic trilogy, so it's not like direct continuity or anything. Is it going to be the same characters? No, but it'll be like the same world kind of like things will ripple out from that. Cool. Yeah. It's just like the idea, like really like the idea all at once came to me for the book, like the whole character, the whole thing, like one day when I was a...

Your new panic attack in the restroom, yeah. And it was just when I was sitting in an Ikea really hungover and being really pissed off. I was like, the whole idea came to me. Yeah. The protagonist is very pissed. He's very negative. Yeah. I mean, he's based mostly off of these kids I grew up with, like one specifically and

then just like kind of people I've observed online a lot, I guess. I mean, I tried to like kind of, I tried really hard to identify with the character. So like... He was hard to spend time with. Yeah. That's the whole point. Yeah. He's like...

He's kind of a downer and a drag. Yeah. Yeah. He's given all these options, but he just keeps fucking it up because of his own pride, but he doesn't even... But he's like the most... It's like, there's a type of pridefulness and like complete dejection too, where like people are like, you seem like, oh, wow, this is like such a pitiable circumstance and things,

but those people can sometimes be like so prideful of like their position. Mm-hmm. Well, that's the shadow side of narcissism. Well, if we're going to do UVM and also... This is covert narcissism? Well, no, just where you have grandiose ideas that are paired with feelings of very low self-worth. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I saw... Of course, I went on Amazon and read the reviews and there were some really good ones. Yeah. Whenever we have like an author on, I love to go on Amazon and read the reviews because they're also... Yeah, there are some good ones.

They're really like also interesting and revealing and a lot of people seemed to think that he was kind of a Holden Caulfield type character, which wasn't necessarily... They say that about like any American coming of age novel because everyone reads that book. Yeah. But I think like what you did... It wasn't Caulfield as sexy, don't you think? He's your type. He's my type, I haven't read it in a long time and when I remember reading it, I think

like, this guy is hot. He should play in a band. When he lost those fencing foils on the subway. But what's... Can I be annoying and read a quote? Because, okay, my overall, because you can't do it yourself and you have to plug your book. Yeah. Yeah, I need more sales on this.

It's been a while. It's on Amazon, y'all. I think we'll create some surplus value for you. Yeah. You're helping me extract rent. Yeah. Beautiful. But you...

Solidary. That's called worker-solidarity. This is real service worker-solidarity. We need a union. The service worker-circle jerk. We need to unionize, guys. How are we going to do that? Well, I went on a tirade on one of the recent episodes because I was probably like literally

in Massachusetts or something, no, in Rhode Island and there were some Starbucks workers unionizing and I wanted to like go full Ben Shapiro on their asses and be like, no, you don't understand. It was unreasonable and immoral because they were like literally the worst people ever. They had a full blown chas outside of the Starbucks. We're making it hard for like customers to enter and exit, which is like, I guess, the point. Starbucks treats them good.

It's marketing. It's marketing. The Dunkin' Donuts workers aren't doing that. No. No. They're not because it's for the brand. Well, Dunkin' Donuts workers are literally like alienated, franchised Bengali people. They're not like...

Yeah. They're actually... Different class people. They're not people who didn't get into grad school yet. Starbucks treats them too well, maybe, honestly. Yeah. They need to dial it back. They need to rein those people in because mommy needs her holiday spice flat wife, Pronto.

In the middle of like, I could do this the rest of my life because it's such a misunderstanding of political economy that is so rife in America because no one understands like that we don't actually produce anything in this country. You don't think people understand that? No. No, I don't. Because people metaphorize... There's emotional labor now, right?

People are like, well, therapists are like the proletariat too now. Everyone's the proletariat now or whatever. So I give this example all the time. I was at a hotel and I was staying there with my dad when I was doing a road trip across the country this summer and usually hotels will have like complimentary coffee in the morning, right? So I go down there and I just want to get my free coffee. They're like, no, you have to go get it at our in-house Starbucks.

I'm like, whatever. So I go to the in-house Starbucks and I pay for a coffee. What do they do? They have one of those crafts with the pump they usually just use for free and they just pump it in front of me and then hand it to me. I was like, does your job need to exist? Yeah, it makes you like falling down. It's like they looked so miserable too.

Like they did not want to be there. I get it. Like who wants to do that? Sure. But like would they be happier if they had a 401K? Maybe I don't know. Well, they don't. They definitely don't know a 401K.

No, but I don't even know. That's all they're going to get. Starbucks has a great app. It's a bank. You get it. You get it. You use the Starbucks bank for their. Yeah.

They mail me a card. It's gold. It says Starbucks has my name on it. If you go like fight. They give you little challenges. Like if you go to Starbucks five days in a row, you get some. Wow. It's like it's like playing Fortnite.

They're like, yeah, you get a board and it's more Starbucks. They're like, great, I can keep going to Starbucks like the Candy Crush. They like game of fight. Remember that website for square where you could like check in and like earn points or so. I never used it. So I don't even know. But it's hard to show for Starbucks.

They just partnered with Delta. So you can link your Delta accounts with your Starbucks account and you can just get generate points. Can you get lounge access from your Starbucks card? You should be able to for the credit card to go to their lines or banks to but the lines are banks to their mostly banks. They don't make money. They don't make a profit from flying people.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, that's why the Arab ones are so nice. Yeah. Because they don't care. Yeah. Yeah.

Lounge access is overrated because they be letting everyone in. Wrong. Meaning us. They were awesome. United Polaris Lounge, very nice. Delta Sky Club has some really nice locations. It's worth it not to be amongst the riffraff at the airport. Come on.

Yeah. You can get some riffraff in the lounge but. More and more lately and they're all wearing Balenciaga. You can take a shower. You can take a shower at an airport. You can. You can get a massage. Yeah.

Okay. I don't care about this. You know. You know it's not this. That's another thing. Not to bring it back to this woman but she also made a tweet about how she showers every 11 days and I was like bitch you're a prostitute and you don't wash yourself. That's insane.

That's 11 days. That probably knocks out the price over there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. It reminded me of that passage and I don't remember if it was the Tropic of Cancer or the Tropic of Capricorn where like he has the prostitute in his room and she demures

and won't wash herself in front of him and he's like bitch I paid for the full experience. Henry Miller though. Amazing. I love Henry Miller. Great God. He's like underrated I think these days now for his other stuff not just the tropics but he read a lot. Well he's yeah he's a very contemporary writer actually.

When the Miller said that he was like the model of like the future of literature and he is. Yeah. And he was. Yeah. He really was. He was like a rock star. Well you know what's interesting is that you did not use the first person but it feels

that way. It feels like you did. Yeah. I tried to write in like I mean I love Russian literature I like like talking narrators or like a kind of that sort of thing so I'm trying to do that in that one. The next one I'm writing is in first person though. Okay. Do you think that do you ever see yourself writing something that exceeds the first person

or confessional tone like maybe like a modern day history or a modern day legend and is that even possible. No I don't think that's desirable. I don't think that's like the arrow we're in. I think we're past that. Like I think I don't know I feel like literature is kind of complete as a medium even so like even writing another book is kind of just like putting like dust on top of the monument that has already been completed because it's like you can't be at Finnegan's Wake or like

something like that. Or like you know that's like really it was like the end of literature in that sense and then it becomes like lyrical in the sense of it being about the writer themselves very explicitly like Henry Miller you know like that's and that's why we have this whole like romantic idea of like well before I'm a writer I have to live as a writer you know like the Kerouacian like beat poetry and Hunter S. Thompson being obviously. I have to do weird ambiguous gay sex. I have to go through all those.

I have to go through fucked up. It's like yeah you're certain on Pornhub and you're like this is because I'm a writer. Yeah I let guys suck my dick but I've never sucked a dick myself therefore I'm a writer. Research. I'm watching stupid shit though like when I'm watching like I'm like this is research I have to expose myself to the culture. No I mean I don't know my boyfriend hates when I talk about how I work every day. I say I'm always working I'm always on the clock.

It's genius doesn't keep banking out. It's all part of my process. Exactly. That's why everything we attacked right off. Yeah yeah. Everything is a tax right. Everything is a tax right off. So true.

Please keep telling me that make me feel better. I dropped so much money at M&Z yesterday. It's a business expense. I feel so guilty. It is a business expense. Put it down as a business expense. If we talk about it on the podcast. Yeah yeah.

Now it's a business expense. I was yes. Yeah yeah yeah. You did it so you could talk about it. Yes. I was spiraling. I went up in there. Dropped some dough.

Sample sale was good. No regular store. Couldn't do the sample sale. I went to the sample sale and there was nothing for me there. It was a bit vultured. Yeah. And yeah I've been spiraling more ever since trying to rationalize justify my decision. Sometimes a bitch just has to shop Anna.

Yeah. A woman be shopping. Yeah. A woman be shopping. We can't help it. But okay so I'm going to read the quote and then you guys are going to try to convert me to Christianity. Oh yeah.

Yeah. Great. Here we go. So this is you describing Kerry's state. So he's drowsy and out of sorts but he's been that way for years. This thought is itself routine and if you are honest it doesn't come to him without a hint of a vertiginous thrill. He's addicted to the sensation of being on the brink and he's enchanted with the visions

of ego squashing ecstasy that accompany it and then later on he often wishes for such a cinematic ending to his life and barring that he'd accept a mid-series cancellation ordered by a power beyond his station or at least an indefinite hiatus without the possibility of a fan clamored reboot. I mean I thought it was just like a very like compassionate and like knowing description of everyone's state at the moment. Like everyone feels drowsy and out of sorts hence I'm tired and I'm at capacity. But it also made me think that people have like a very inflated sense of like how mentally

ill they are to the extent that if everyone else around you is also mentally ill then you're kind of normal. It's a question of context, right? Yeah. If everyone's vitamin B deficient, is anyone vitamin B deficient? So but you I guess you portray, you portray his like hubris and pride in a very sympathetic light. That's what I tried to do.

He's wrong headed but. Yeah. Well I feel that way about like you have to feel that way about people in general I think you know like that's everyone is a kind of yeah as you said like people overestimate how fucked up they are compared to everyone else because literally everyone's fucked up now especially more than ever and yeah so but like you can't also like lie you know and be like that's fine like you know like the way you think it like just do self care and like affirm all of your own thoughts or whatever like yeah that's like the danger

at the same time. You're like obesity and BPD. It's because everyone recognizes everyone's fucked up but they're like what do we do about it? It's like well just talk about it and affirm each other's like horrible feelings. Which actually I'm not too worried about because people talk about like whatever wokeness and I guess what we're describing is like wokeness but in spite of no matter how much social engineering you do everything comes back to its intended state and people can

generally read between the lines. You know what I'm saying? Well like there's like everything where it ends up for the good in the end. I don't know if it's for the good but it ends up like as it should be because generally even if we have like this kind of superstructure of like whatever political correctness people can like they can acknowledge the truth to themselves more or less maybe not when it comes to themselves but when it comes to like other people. Some people might not.

I mean that's the power of ideology. It just comes with a price tag yeah like no matter what. Yeah. In any time period it's not like we're living in a uniquely unique time of persecution or something. I don't know I've been reading this. What do you mean price tag? In the sense that like you can't like if you want to actually like stand by anything like

it's going to cost you something like this I ask people all the time when they're like oh I'm like very spiritual or whatever it's like well what does it cost you like like if it doesn't cost you anything it doesn't like you've never like there's nothing then what is it the point of it like it just makes you feel good. Yeah. I mean all honor and profit are mutually exclusive. Exactly. One of my yeah my agents told me once he said your principles might have a cost and I was

like they do that's why they're called principles. Yeah. Yeah that's that's kind of the idea unfortunately there's a priceless thing so those are the things that are actually valuable or is like having principles. Yeah. Yeah negotiable but I'm just kidding. I just mean in the long term like you know there's a lot of there's a lot to be gained from you know squashing your principles for immediate gain or something but then in the

long term like you know you're dead well it doesn't work yeah you're gonna you'll be miserable it doesn't matter yeah yeah I think it's good to not be miserable. What's that Karamazov quote that's like you betrayed yourself for nothing oh yeah you've betrayed and humiliated for nothing you've like sold yourself out and what was the point on that note do you think God is a plan for for everyone. Yeah of course. Are you your Catholic also no he's very much I was very much no no are you an Anglo. I mean I'm like I'm like New English so I'm like I'm like a bastard mix of English and

Irish and Cornish and Scottish and I'm just the dials. Okay I figured when you brought the the soul modello and refused any wine or or other. I'll have some wine when I'm done with the modello if it's available but no I I don't know if you talk to brewers and stuff modello modello is amazing yeah but you have but you have like the opposite of like the kind of like clannish nepotistic longhouse mindset which is like kill other people with like kindness and gifts and like coerce them into accepting your terms by uh applying them with wine. No that's not me yeah that's not you yeah I just I'm like I don't know I'm just I'm

very I've been called stubborn and obstinate my whole life but I just like I'm just like being myself. Well you have the unfortunate combination of like being Anglo and an Aries it's like individualism on overdrive. Yeah no that's really like that's really was like the big thing for me I think individualism is all just pride though like at the end of the day like everyone who's calls themselves an individualist or whatever is like that's not like an end that's not an ending of itself like your own good is not the good in and of itself.

So it's like I used to be like identify as an individualist or whatever like metaphysically like you know reading sterner as a teenager or whatever but I've realized how little that matters like I'm most happy now and I'm no longer even the protagonist of my own life you know what I mean like it's so much better to not live for your own good but for the good of others and things like that it's actually just get ready cuz oh I know I'm so excited I'm honestly hyped where that came from yeah I'm sick don't get too hyped now I know what I know how it is I know how it is like you know but it's like what else is there to do like you know you just live for yourself your whole life yeah no I agree I agree with you

it's nice to like procreate yeah it's nice to not be the main character in your the biopic of your life yeah it's like that's never anyone who's actually got an interesting biography considered themselves that way anyway hardly like most people who are like actually matter to the world or like have had a huge impact or something they weren't like individualists or something yeah maybe I don't know I think some people are yeah don't act I'm like kind of tips now don't ask me to name names okay fine Edie's Edie Sedgwick who's that she's like a any reference yeah did she have kids no I don't think she would have considered herself an individualist I believe she made films for the Reich yeah she made films for

the American right but all in you know in a way that's served served her interests ultimately well you could say okay so then you can end the argument where selflessness is fundamentally impossible because everything is self-directed and that's sort of like a premise that now you sound like Ayala well that's what that's the premise that these people accept there's like a base part of reality is that like everything is a zero-sum game over a limited set of resources and so the only like rational game theoretical thing to do is to be self-directed and to like only secure your own interests right and like that has a very like delimited reasonable sense to it but it's a it's like worldly reason like very worldly like if there's as if nothing

exists beyond like individual perspectives yeah it's very earthbound and quote materialist right it also materialist though because like materially your perspective is just produced by the everything around you which you don't have volitional control over which is why you get these psychotic like you know like totalitarian anarchists who are like I can't control everything in the whole world like I need to be able to control everything in the whole world right well communists yeah what does that mean yeah unpack that for us I believe in the commons I guess and like I believe in the commonwealth and like collective interests and the good of all being good for all I guess I like I honestly just believe that there is a good

that is transcends individual goods or like summated individual goods that is knowable and can be understood and grasped by people okay but okay so practically in America if there aren't really any proletarian there are there are we have tons of we have tons of proletarian laborers they're just often not considered such because we have like so for instance think about like the truckers who protest or like the people who are most against like COVID lockdowns and stuff a lot of them are people who actually produce value they actually produce surplus value in the economic scheme these people are the enemies of all the service truckers are proletarian yeah absolutely don't they just but they

don't create yeah they do they do because the value but the value of those goods here is different from the value of those goods there where does that differential and value come it comes from the movement of their transportation okay yeah yeah okay like really thought this through yeah I haven't thought it through no like the thing is that these things bothered me you know what I mean like that like why I didn't like not understanding how things worked like really bothered me so I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how things worked you know like I really wanted to know like do you think you figured out how things work mostly I mean it's not that complicated at the end of the day like it's like people

like if you just follow like the development of things like everything is reasonable everything is rational everything that happens happens for perfectly rational reasonable and understandable purposes like that's what I think so if you do a real investigation of it you can figure out why things happen hmm what well why things function economically the way they do I mean I would just say this metaphysically yeah like metaphysically okay what is your religion I would just say I'm a Christian or at least I try to be you know like I really live your life in imitation of Christ I try to right I really do it's hard but I think it's like I didn't like I was such an atheist when I was younger like it's very funny to me to

like say that and it was like hard for me even to say that openly to people for a long time because it's like so you used to be an atheist no no no that I'm like a Christian that like I actually like believe in this you know like why is it humiliating to be a Christian people treat you like complete garbage you say this in mixed company are you kidding me Christians are cringe a little bit people will immediately you can see an about face shift in people's faces like when you even talk about it like it's company it's like it's considered like way too determinative because like then people realize that you actually like believe in something beyond this like something you know ever that's just

agreeable like it's very disagreeable to be a Christian well you believe in hell yeah I mean I mean we're in hell no we're just in downtown New York baby this is just the other lower east side we're not in hell well I just mean well I do think there's like there's like a there's a hell on multiple levels like there's you know people live in hell their whole lives people choose to go to hell it's really hard to really grasp Christian metaphysics though because you feel like it shouldn't be the way it is you're like well people don't really choose to go to hell but then it's like no people straight up choose like just really want to go like put themselves what does that mean like you're talking about like

personal neuroses yeah yeah on that level but like that level expanded means like a societal level where it's like we're creating hell for ourselves because all the time I read can I read one more quote not from your book but from Emmanuel Carrera's book that I think is so on point I want to hear your thoughts on this I'm going to see if I can pull it up okay on my likes obviously like took a photo of it no I'm straight up you guys watch the chosen no oh you gotta watch the chosen it's amazing this is a mercifully I think this one is like pretty mercifully short nostalgia is foreign to me one could see that as a mark of a confident optimistic forward-looking person but I fear that with me it's more the mark

of an obsessive because while everyone knows you can't change the past you can always hold on to the illusion that you can control the future and he talks about you know being a guy who's really never experienced any spiritual or material want or deprivation in his life who's had a pretty like blissful existence but who exists in like a neurotic hell of his own making yeah it's like the Buddha yeah wait what about the story of the Buddha right is he was a rich well then you know that doesn't make you happy like that sucks yeah a lot of really like I meet rich kids and they're all miserable like people who grew up rich are generally like have a very hard time appreciating things that people like normatively just

like appreciate because it's like I think I think this is true but yesterday I met like the most beautiful and smart trio of siblings who I think grew up in like clearly materially good circumstances and they were I don't know they were so notable and remarkable to me they said maybe they were like the exception that proves the rule yeah I mean obviously there's there's like circumstances where people do a better job of like you know managing that situation like but it's I just mean like in my own experience there's tons of people I know who from college etc. who went off to like make way more money etc. and they're all envious of me and I'm like why you know like why because you're doing what I want

you're a true artist I'm just do what I want but everybody but don't you don't you think that could be a little unsatisfying oh it's absolutely unsatisfying like it's everybody's envious of everyone else exactly yeah and there's like a big envy circle jerk and it's totally needless because when you really actually look at things for what they are things are mundane and unremarkable and underwhelming and I don't mean that in a pejorative way and if you could acknowledge those are all the best things yes if you could get over your vanity and acknowledge that which I think you say literally almost verbatim in this book yeah there's literally no grounds no cause for envy yeah no there's no point you

know I've said this on the pod before like when people are jealous of one another especially when women are jealous of one another it's very sad because they do the subject of their jealousy a disservice but also themselves you know yeah and it's hard I'm not I'm not like also moralizing like a big cell phone from yeah I'm not like trying to say like I'm never I never been I've never been I've never been I've experienced a droplet of jealousy of course everybody experiences like jealousy habitually and routinely but it's what you do with it that counts or being able to recognize that such I think a lot of people feel things without knowing what it is that they're feeling like they just like are overwhelmed by this

thing that they don't even recognize that yeah that's always been scary to me and it's and it is like very chilling and upsetting to be like in proximity of that well resentment I think in particular really yeah years yeah those like cognitive function and self rationalization yeah causes them to think all these things that they might not even really feel deep down so circling back to Christian yeah so you're like a Protestant I'm like I'm like a Puritan like straight up like I like no the church is everywhere we're all the church I'll call it like I call it in Blake all the way I'm you like what you like the rituals and the pump not just no not just I know not just but I'm I know I get it well I

I I don't know I think that there is something significant in in ritual I think like the divine liturgy written by Saint John Chrysostom who we've talked about before is you know a sort of it's a work of art yeah it's a work of art that we all that I as a Byzantine Catholic practice because I please yeah but also I was baptized Catholic me too I'm attached to Catholicism I think it is the one true faith I mean you're from like a different Catholic background than me I'm like Irish Roman Catholic so you're originally Catholic yeah it's not my parent it's literally like just like a fluke of yeah genealogy really because it's like my on like one side of my family they're like not Catholic at all the other side they're all like nominally

Catholic like you know going to like Catholic schools and things like that but none of them are actually Catholic I don't think most like most I don't know Irish Catholics are not really Catholic I would agree with that I don't believe in any of it like you know American Catholicism is a disaster American Catholicism is a real but I think it's hard for people to believe in anything given oh definitely circumstances of that's always been true though like it was always been like it's actually challenging like it's actually harder than to not well I think you know Catholics prior to this century maybe they did believe in the real presence of the Eucharist which is the basic you want to like rehash like all the Reformation arguments

but it was easier than we can do it I'm down it was easier to believe for the same reasons why now because I don't want to bore in no no I'm really interested in this I'm like happy to be a fly in the wall because I have a lot of questions and it's it's hard to believe now for the same reason that like a modern-day legend or modern-day history couldn't be written right so I guess my question also is like if you're born into faith and you choose to accept it and believe in it like the way that I frame that in my like earthbound like materialist mind is like as a positive narcissism I don't use that term at all pejoratively you choose to arbitrarily buy into something which I think is like more constructive than like

not believing in anything and being like bitter and miserable and whatever and I guess like my question is like where I don't this is a rhetorical question I don't think anybody can really answer it like where is the boundary point between like a positive narcissistic disposition and a negative narcissistic disposition that people seem to have increasingly these days I mean I don't really I mean I just think like if I were to describe my own experience of like faith it's not really one that was felt like voluntary yeah like it felt more like epiphanies and things like things that like I just recognized is true and then like applying that in life like only further like kind of like like testing the waters like

okay maybe I don't really believe but like like you know trying it out and things like that it just like confer it's you could I don't know probably cast this as like positive narcissism as you're saying or whatever but it like it really did help me like in my personal relations with people my own personal psychology just like understanding how things are how people are okay that's really more it's like more like at a certain point I was like well I guess this is just what I am like I can't go back like I couldn't go back to the way I thought about things beforehand like it's just an experiential thing really like Marshall McLuhan I said like faith is a percept like it's something you perceive like it's something

that you experience it's not like this volunteeristic like I'm going shopping and you know I'll buy this product I'm a fan of this or something it's like overwhelming like it takes like you can't go back what you said about Catholicism is isn't as as arbitrary as some of the product more Protestant denominations because it at least claims and I believe to have apostolic succession that it is the church that Christ founded okay when he gave the keys to the church to Peter do you think that you have the keys to unbind sin me yeah no that's why I go to confession okay I disagree I think you can do that he thinks you can unbind your own sin what does that mean through faith that's the whole point what does it mean to

quote unbind your sin to be forgiven for your own sins by being forgiving to others for their sins yeah okay that's like the justice that exists is the fact that like if you were a merciful person even if people are unmerciful to you that won't affect you in the same way then if you're an unmerciful person yeah unmerciful towards you that's where resentment well that's where the negative narcissism comes in because you project all of your kind of fantasies of omnipotence onto others and you assume that they're scheming and manipulating try to pull one over on you and that actually may be true in certain but even if so but even if so yeah right in the greater sense but I feel like that's also just like a natural

process or I don't know if it's the natural process of aging because there are certainly people who become more insulated and bitter with age I feel like we just have like people like when people talk about adults it's kind of like a mythical species in at least our society where it's like what are adults like who's mature now like there's like 50 year adults who just like watch cartoons and you know like whatever like I don't know if that process of maturity actually occurs anymore I think perfect contrition is possible I think that you're not you know exempt from salvation if you don't make it to confession before you die okay yeah you know I mean there's there's a million little little loopholes

but you just get into but I think that the mindset of being able to unbind your own sin will inevitably you know be subject to your like human frailty no it's not you doing it it's that this is the whole point right it's the like the fact that you have faith that you by being forget like you will be judged according to the judgment that you observe on the world so it's like that's that's what justice is in the kingdom of heaven right is that you get the justice that you administer in the world so it's like if you are a forgiving person then God will be forgiving to you in the last judgment but if you're an unforgiving person then you will not be forgiven in the last right so like the idea is like you receive

that forgiveness by being forgiving it's not just like by having someone tell you that you're forgiven are you a pacifist um probably yeah definitely I mean in the sense of like that like I believe in spiritual warfare 24 seven like a full armor of Christ on at all times but like you know you got to turn the other cheek there's no point in getting through a physical tussle over things because of anything when it gets at least amongst men in my opinion when it comes to fisticuffs the person who initiates that is already lost like that's the that's like them saving face from having lost the actual engagement well I think it depends on the situation yeah I think that's just brawl I think that I don't know the same

way you said that people can you know choose to be in hell or go to hell I think uh evil is also a personal choice and resistance to it is not necessarily unchristian well how are you supposed to well Christ says in the Sermon on the Mount resist not evil he says a lot of stuff I mean it's pretty explicit like like you're like what's what's resistance going to do like what does it mean to do that but also does anybody set out to be actively evil yeah absolutely Mohammed Auta yeah but he thought he was on the righteous path yeah there's people there's people who straight up like self identify as like yeah I'm like a Luciferian Satanist like I'm a sociopath I'm an evil self what you call evil I call

good like yeah but those but those people I would say are like the marginal fringe of the bell curve they're like the 1% yeah they're not like over represented in a society where that those traits are actually actively cultivated in people and like selected that's true they are promoted and encouraged for those behaviors especially yeah I mean give the example of like a liberal feminism where it's like you know get your bad girl and oh my god did you see the Mila Kunis movie on Netflix I forget what it's called no yes girl in the world yeah did you see that no oh my god that's like the exact example of that it's like the most satanic film I've ever seen it was like girl American Psycho it's like she's rewarded for

just being like a complete psychopath it has like no moral to it at all which is about like the daughter or something of Patrick Bateman it's like a really bad like straight to DVD movie that came out where she is she's literally in American Psycho too but I haven't seen but here's my other question also like when you have a child the thing that you learn very quickly is that you don't necessarily become more mature but you do become less judgmental and more forgiving yeah you have to you have to but how much of that also right it's mostly because you have to it's like not really your own choice sure but there's people who choose not to and because you stop caring so much about things yeah yeah like

who don't make that noise and they're just like fuck this thing that's loud and annoying like there are people who don't make that choice you don't become more forgiving or often times they become worse yeah but I've always thought of it as like a natural organic process that I don't think any natural organic about that okay like it's like you don't think there's a biological thing that happens once you have offspring that you know I'm not into these like biological explanations of things I think they're all just so stories where like like when you hear like evolutionary psychology and things like that these were originally called just so stories like Kipling used to write a bunch of them like why does the elephant

have a trunk oh it's because it needed to get the things that were higher up like it just becomes this circular explanation where it's like oh like that's because it's biologically necessary to care about your kids but you see people who don't care about their kids all the time yeah for sure yeah it's like what's the biological purpose behind that that I can't so then it's like that's the supernatural invading but like the good things are all natural and this is its faith also a question of habit like you know yoga or meditation where you if you keep at it and a friend of mine once said to me that I should say a prayer for all the people that I hate and resent yeah because gradually and just saying that

kind of wrote prayer I will change your consciousness yeah yeah absolutely you think that's true yeah anything you do routinely even he basically even if you don't mean it or believe it in the moment of course it doesn't matter pray for your enemies yeah but isn't that also kind of pompous and presumptuous to say a prayer for your enemies no no because you're not like I pray I'm praying for them because I'm going to banquish them no it's like human capacity ideally so it's like look at like you know a big billionaire big powerful person or something be your enemy or something you would want them to actually come around to the good because they could affect a lot of good if they came around to the good like

you don't like the idea that there are people who are irredeemable is what the problem is like if you're like truly hate your enemies then you believe that they're irredeemable yeah yeah but like everyone's redeemable it's because you haven't met them off of the internet what do you think about Mary which one the Blessed Virgin Mary what do you what do I mean mother of Christ you think I'm a fan I think she's cool you don't think she's divine he has I think I so so my vision my understanding of the Trinity and the Godhead is that there is the father there is the Holy Spirit of wisdom who is the feminine aspect of the Godhead is with God from the beginning and then there's also the son so every time

you see wisdom described in God's wisdom with him at the beginning this is the feminine aspect of the Trinity so what about what about Mary so Mary is represented is represented of that but I would say that the Catholic Church adopted a lot of the cult of like a lot of the imperial cults that existed in imperial Rome at the same time like the cult of Sebel the great mother of Isis etc these were all tied to the imperial cult at the same time and that this developed into like the Mariola tree that exists in that I do believe in like a lot of the arguments that reformers made during the Protestant Reformation like hermeneutically Sebel the daughter of Jarvan who is actually his his slice of feminine

wisdom and his anchor yeah yeah well it's like I just think that there's been a lot of like there's a there's geopolitical reasons for the the confusion over like Christian metaphysics it has a lot of it has a big impact right like what people believe these texts actually say has like a huge influence over the world right yeah and how they spin them to suit their like a low and base and vulgar materialist narratives which I like I mean I think that's kind of beside the point if you have any like grip on faith I guess even a faint grip as I do I just mean like a lot of like well tons of Christians call me a heretic like why you are a heretic see exactly yeah exactly but why why why because I don't agree with all

way over my head because I don't agree I don't agree with them you think we're in how you think we can unbind our own sin you don't think Mary is well I'm not in hell I'm saying the New York is full of people who are in hell sure right and they like you walk around you can see it you know I don't know there's a lot of people are not like the lady who asked us for cigarettes earlier yeah do you think she's thriving like her internal world is a is not full of demons I think she's could I think she's capable of redeeming herself yeah she showed her self don't you mean when she goes and gets her confessional that she will be redeemed through the vicar of Christ as had passed down through apostolic succession

the keys of unbinding her own sin we're not in her own hands at all or is can she redeem herself or does she need to be redeemed she can make the choice to be redeemed yeah yeah but it has to be her choice right because anything less is us doing like social engineering on her behalf which is like fake and gross and I think the main issue that people have with like religion as such and specifically like the new iterations of Catholicism that present themselves on social media yeah which are basically Protestantism well I would say they're just basically pagan how so are you kidding me is there's so many people who are like oh I like Catholicism because it's more pagan who says that that tons of trad cath

converts come on explicitly say this I wouldn't say that I would not know I wouldn't you wouldn't say that because you actually are closer to believing in it than they are they're cynically thinking that it's a useful like imperial technology to control like you know that whatever what it like people call it like biopolitical power or something they're like oh this would be a very useful institution but I don't even think they're at the point of acknowledging that about themselves I think if you grill them on it yeah but that's what it amounts to like how did they get there in the first place it's not like they're reading the bible you know so do you think Christ had two natures no oh her hair heretic I know I'm like I'm gonna wait explain

the two natures so Christ's Catholics believe that um Christ was fully divine and fully human and both at the same time he wasn't oh I believe he wasn't like god walking around oh that's what I know I agree with that okay okay so he was a divinated individual or he's like the point where man and god touch it's the it's the uh the point at which that's like why like the example you're supposed to set him as an example because it's like well who's the best person that ever existed like who's the closest to god well it this this reminds me of Jesus and Mary Mary was sinless Mary was not divine she was a human being when Jesus was at the synagogue as a child and Mary came to snatch him he said woman what have I to do with thee that wasn't

at the synagogue that was at the wedding at canna no that was in the temple of Jerusalem no I just watched this on the chosen no dude no dude absolutely not that was the wedding canna when Christ performs his first miracle he turns the water into wine Mary says she says very few things in the gospel I like Christ because he turns the water into wine yeah he's like my kind of dude and his mom him and his mom are this wedding and she's like there's no wine and he says woman what is that to do with me and then he says it's not my time yet and then later when everyone's good and drunk he makes the water into wine it's the best wine they ever had well I just mean like so what I would say is that Christ's mother is the Holy Spirit

Mary well that's what the Catholics would say is that these are the same figure but I would say the Holy Spirit is not a incarnate and a specific individual okay Mary and devotionals are very important to me because I think that it's through Mary that Christ got his human nature which is to me central to my understanding of him as a as a he was civilized by the long house you know he was humanized by a woman who was very obedient to God well she wasn't considered very obedient in her time like this is like Jesus is from a backwater sticks town that everyone hated yeah and people were savaging this woman for having for over her body count because it was unclear how she came to immaculately conceive immaculate child of God actually isn't um doesn't

refer to to Christ or refers to Mary okay yeah they came up with a lot of uh they come the Catholics came up with a lot of uh extra content Mary was conceived somehow without well extra biblical context they need for their metaphysics but you know I'm a prophet I'm sorry I'm sorry I like hot mather like I'm like I'm like a I think the problem with the the Protestants of America is that they're not literalist and fundamentalist enough mm-hmm like they don't actually go to the text enough they don't read the book anymore that's the main problem no one reads but no one reads the the quote metaphoric book anymore I mean like but I feel like a Christian you haven't read the Bible it's like what are you that even taught how do you even know that's my my do you okay my

question is also do you think like all the trad cats on twitter have actually read the text no of course not they know I mean I haven't read it I haven't read the whole Bible come on that's what I'm saying it's like the only book I read these days I do read the Bible but I have not like you've read passages consistently see that's the thing is like I think it's actually an experiential thing to like actually read the whole thing like it's there's nothing that can replace the actual experience of it I disagree I know I get it I get it no I get it I have a lot of a very devout Catholics around me and I think that like I don't think that you're not Christian or something it's just that I'm not a subscriber to any a corporeal institution like that it's not

just it's not merely corporeal it's a mystical you know the Catholic Church isn't I'm a also happened to be a set of a can'tas so I don't yeah so what so I don't even learn Luther I'm not more and you should go staple your go to the Vatican put up your complaints nail them on the door that's what I'm about no way put them right up there nail your same Francis the same Francis and you go give them a list of your complaints that's what I think you should do and you mean anti-pop Francis I and I will not but so okay you guys are gonna convert me yeah tell Anna why Christ is this can you do I get a baptism are you gonna dunk my head in the tub we could no I don't think that's the bat that baptism doesn't matter as much as what they call the baptism by fire which is the

baptism of the spirit which is when you understand it and you grasp it doesn't it's no you need to be baptized with water that's the first baptism there's two baptisms oh you think that one doesn't matter that's that's to be that's the entrance into the community but that doesn't mean you grasp like the understanding the nice thing is Anna when you do get baptized remission of sins okay so everything you done do you hear this do you hear this magic that the papist is trying to give away just dunk your head into this pool you don't have to read anything she knows she has to make a profession of faith just say this word say these words dunk your head in the pool your set it's fine don't worry about it too much I can't I I can do it I can do it I don't know

you can baptize me you can do it we should we should televise this I'm buying sin again how did this happen wait a second we need to live stream my baptism it's not you can perform sacraments just baptism just baptism yeah by virtue of being a catholic no anyone okay total Jew total atheist about that homeless woman who asked us to say what she could baptize me wouldn't she love to do she might use the incorrect form so she wouldn't she doesn't say and the holy spirit it's all that's a watch but okay but I like I like this thing that you said that like the first baptism is merely like an entry it's kind of like that's like the humiliation of it it's kind of a humiliating thing right you ever seen like the like like I get baptized every day on

twitter hey like children baptisms is kind of like a different thing because literally they're not know what they're doing yeah well the orthodox Christians and the Byzantines they dunk they dunk the the baby I got dunked you got a whole dunk I got dunked I went I went to a dunking ceremony at st vartons Armenian church not my baby it was somebody else's baby and he was doing the growl like exorcist like back speak and the priest really dunked him they dunk yeah gotta put him all the way under yeah yeah three times yeah yeah they he he was kicking and screaming it's funny because when I got born again but my godfather wasn't allowed to be my godfather because he wasn't confirmed so we then did another baptism in my backyard like a mock baptism so that

we could have him do it what does it mean to be confirmed I don't even know that I'm not confirmed I got kicked out it's an additional sacrament that you can receive there are seven right you're asking me I'm a bad Catholic I got kicked out it's uh it's something usually that's what I did that's your next book it's like Roxanne gay bad feminist bad cat it's a it's a men's anger song it's a very good song okay a confirmation it's usually people undergo it when they're like children I I wasn't confirmed until this year on pentecost money about in the eastern right they call it chrismation and it's when you're sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit and the priest anoints you with um in the eastern right at least with oils I don't know how they do it in the Roman right but

it's just an additional it's just in America for for us I want to get them all for us Irish Catholics it's just what was the rap song where there was like a vocal like a speaking track where they were like anoint my hair with oils a rap song yeah there is a rap song honey we don't know there's tons of like I mean maybe noz but I'm not a hundred percent sure the thing is that the by reading the Bible will just inform a biggy so much more because it's used in everything all the time all culture is like derivative of it or quoting parts of it yeah things like that so it's like it's like if you want to understand it's like that's why it's like I don't get why no one reads it anymore it used to be the most important book like the only book people would read but it's like how can you

understand like art and like things happening without like everyone making direct reference to these things you know sure but you don't believe in apostolic succession um I I believe in that in like a spiritual sense I guess like I don't like I'm not interested in the flow chart that of the the apostles because Christ gave the keys to Peter which means rock and he said on this rock I will build this church uh and that the that is the what is known as the catholic church and the catholic church is the legitimate true one holy catholic apostolic church and the orthodox they're all going to hell they did a schism okay uh what year 1054 1054 they got in a beef about uh whether or not the holy spirit proceeded from the father of the son it was mostly over the uh who who whether

or not there was a bishop above the other bishops and the bishop of Rome said yes and made the argument that you're making that the catholic church has made ever since yeah and then they excommunicated everyone in the orthodox church and then at the same time the bishops of the of the east excommunicated everyone in the west okay and that's why there's so this is like a political squabble yeah absolutely basically is there any way for the easterns to get redeemed again yeah they can become Byzantine catholics they can they can join up on they can enter into community with Rome as the Slovak Ruthenians did in like the 1400s to start there like kind of like eastern right of the of the the catholic church i think the other thing that was just like religion and

politics are the same thing i disagree i see what you mean it's all the same like it's like people's people's religious views are their political views the political views are their religious views everything's all the same because it's about your world view it's about your cosmology it's about your hermeneutic of like how you're interpreting things and in general and like all of those are determined by the general picture you have of the world like the world picture like you're how you're framing everything yeah so it's like how could those frames which is framed by your bitch mom and shitty dad that's true but a very formative cliny and they only have you for so long yeah and then you you know you're subject to everything else that's true i think the whole

like you know the Freudian like mom and dad obsession is like so adolescent like you can do that up until a certain point but then afterwards you have to like deal with it well yeah i think i think okay like even the way that you deal with it is going to be in reactionary exactly there's no dealing with it i don't know i think you have to accept it you have to integrate your shadow yeah no matter what your parents do i put it this way it's like it's like the point in my life i experienced this is when i started to feel more like my dad was like my brother than like that he was like you became parentalized well it's like i'm a dad now so it's like my dad just like you know he's like of my older brother yeah he's another guy who went through it a little earlier

than you yeah yeah and it's like i you know i my parent like everyone's parents are flawed and like you sort of come to understand that but then you also have to understand that like i think i mean everyone's fucking good i think i know i should be christian well well i think the Freudian obsession with linking everything to like parental trauma would you get an overdrive if you do any sort of like traditional therapy okay has like valid and rational roots but at some point you have to just you know forgive yeah exactly and get you have to get over it you have to get over it yeah yeah you know you look at somebody like Wellbeck who was like so deeply traumatized by his like communist vagabond mother and yeah he really made something of it i mean okay he took

he took all the sin of the world upon himself and became a profoundly ugly person which he like wears on his sleeve but he's been kind of like successful and reasonably well adjusted in spite of it all yeah and he hasn't let it overshadow well it's like he processed it through those novels like i'm trying to think which one specifically that's just basically about his mom atomized there's a subatomic particles i forget what there was one yeah i don't remember yet but okay but he he did he became in a way like a faithful christian because he learned to forgive the people that you have the hardest time forgiving which is like your parents inevitably yeah yeah yeah i mean i think that's why like his novels have taken like that theme the theme of faith etc

like this of taking him up and actually in in the lawrenson review he he had a very favorable view of your book which he was like comparing and contrasting with bronze age mindset but he made some comment that was you know a relatively throwaway comment about how you you take you sound a lot like a kind of a Wellbeckian figure who's depressive and bitter and cynical and i i kind of took umbrage with that because Wellbeck may be depressive but he's not he's never struck me as bitter or cynical he's a person who's like basically forgiving and almost kind of sentimentalist i think that's like that comes off when it's like people are like to like he wants to he doesn't want to like lie Wellbeck right yeah he's like devoted to depicting the truth of things

and if you're devoted to picking the truth of things then people are going to call you a cynic right but it's like that's actually you don't strike me as a bitter or cynical person either i don't i actually don't know whether or not you're depressive i like but you don't but it's like but it's like because i'm a pessimist like it's because i don't expect that much like i don't pessimism in a weird way is the ultimate form of faith because i think it actually like opens up an aperture to like great optimism you want to have like a worldly pessimism and the supernatural optimism yeah yeah and and kind of like a worldly um optimism is actually jaded and cynical yeah yeah absolutely it's the most um man i saw this movie recently where they did this explicitly

where it was like a fashion show god was it called oh the triangle zoo lander oh yeah triangle sadness yeah you go see that it's so funny and that girl who was like the main the lead died yeah fortunately and i found that out after i saw it and i think she was based on emirata that's my that's my hot take from watching the trailer yeah no i could see that yeah it's really good it's one of the funniest things i've seen recently but they have that where it's like where it's like uh cynicism masquerading is optimism and it's like people walking down like a runway like with this like slogan being chanted over and over yeah and it's like yeah that's really what it is like all these people are fake optimists like they're like yeah well and one of my like

stock lines on this podcast has been like russians are um optimists masquerading is cynics and americans are cynics masquerading is optimists yeah absolutely i feel that and this was like in reference to like an afghani morozov fellow bell russian legend much like dasha but i saw him like give a talk and where he was facing off with some like silicon valley american guy who was like no actually the new tech dystopia is great and here's a great like a belogy type uh argument i don't remember where i was going with this but i that's also why russian literature is probably so like redeeming yeah why so many like american people are like literally acolytes of russian literature i mean it's like like that's the reason why i became a christian really i think is like

from reading a lot of russian literature because it's like it took um the the struggle of like modernity with um these things like very seriously in a way it actually existed a lot in american literature but it's american literature that like we don't appreciate anymore like a lot of 19th century american like melville melville is like a deeply christian writer and that's totally lost what about like steinbeck and falkner those are like the second rate okay so i have a girlfriend who um has has another hot take which i tend to agree with monica who says that um actually uh american literature is superior to british literature yes for sure easily hundred percent i just yeah intuitive like based on my limited experience could agree with that it's like because

american literature is founded on three books it's the king james bible the collective works of shakespeare and the pilgrims progress by bunion those are the three books that everyone had here especially in new england the most literary part like the most well-read educated part of the entire world at the time that it exists in its existence the center of civilization as we said massachusetts the third row but it's actually not moscow it's uh boston well originally it was supposed to be the new jerusalem but now we're in rome what happened you know what do you think of um the bulgak of revisionist history of the life of christ um i think all of those like so i think that like those attempts at like trying to like ground it in a more uh modernistic context or

trying to like show like the the historical christ things like that like i think those are ultimately good yeah i think it's like a way of like understanding now because like we just have in our um the way that people thought then like the way that people took like under interpreted things is so different and like we can't go back to that we can't just like recreate that consciousness immediately because we're like through all of the through live through so much history so i think that that act of like trying to like recontextualize it um is really important that's why i'm gonna plug the chosen again but the chosen is this uh prestige tv show about the apostles made by fan funding like crowdfunding it's distributed for free online what now it's just online yeah it's like

solely funded by america it's not tied to the network nope not at all it's literally for free it's really well done though i've been watching it and it's like that's exactly what they do they try to show like the exact context of it of like the the new testament and it's like following the apostles mostly and it's like it shows like the political economy of it you've got like you know the tax collector like matthew like and like what that relation was actually like in that time period and i think that's all like necessary because it's so far removed from people now but what's crazier is how similar it is still like the relate like our society is very much like roam in that time period yeah what's the the famous quote that's like attributed to

mark twain uh history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes it rhymes yeah i was thinking of philip k dicks saying the empire never ended that's what i think all the time but i read master and margarita like in high school and i remember my my faint and in articulate takeaway from that was that the figure of jesus comes off as looking like a kind of uh burning man like know it all well this would be me if i was contrarian frankly jewish if i got pulled in if i got pulled in if i got pulled in by like to be questioned by the police i don't think i would do anything that differently or i try not to but like that's like what it takes like in the other cheek yeah you like you get you get fucked up by this like you know poncho's pilot is like such a great character too yeah he's like

a migraine he's an he's an he's an he's a hero because he goes what is truth like who fucking cares like truth is whatever people say it is you know and it's like it's like it like that's that's the modus operandi these days right where it's like pulled in and you're like well what's actually happening here and it's like yeah it's difficult it's impossible to explain what's happening now oh yeah like what i mean like you know people getting uh do you know many people i know like internet people get like the knock on the door from like the fbi and things like that it's like well what do you do we've never gotten that online no one does that job well it's like people like well what do you do online like what are you doing like why are we dying to this it's like i'm just just

writing just posting like posting what it's like so what do they do when the when the fbi reads your residence they just like go through your filing cabinet looking at you know i guess they just like they just question i don't know it's i've heard people have different experience i have never had this happen to me but i know people who've had this happen to them and it's like i don't know most of the time like the police are just like annoyed because they're confused as to why they have to be there yeah and they're like why am i here same thing with paunch's pilot he had no idea what he's like who the fuck is this guy yeah what am i trying to do with all this like yeah and i always found that that part of the book like very like comically redeeming because he was

trying to give jesus now and jesus wouldn't take it no he didn't want it like annoyingly insisting on what was foretold that was the goal that's like the thing is like he had to do it that's like the thing at the time they wanted him to be an armed revolutionary like they wanted him like this a lot to start a challenge they want because they do the revolt like not that long after he dies and bark hakva revolt or another one they had a bunch and they all failed through like arms but then christianity takes over the whole like you know the message gets out like it's amazing i agree with you that christianity will triumph but yeah i think it's i think it's you know we're living in a very interesting time i think it will be you didn't you just recently say that christian

like literally like today or yesterday on twitter that christianity would try it's going to i think it's inevitable because there's no other way what does that mean though what does that look like it means that like i'm seeing like i think that like my generate like my generation people younger etc they they like we grew up in a time where like christianity represented like a hegemonic power in america bush george bush's god etc well that's why the leftists are so they're so atheistic outdated yeah and anachronistic because they they still like people who are like elder millennials or whatever still operate within this frame that like bush and evangelicals are the enemy i worship satan and eat pizza yeah and getting an abortion yeah and christianity is like lame and it's cringe it's

cringe yeah that's why it has a bit of more of a future now is like now that it's being abandoned by the powers that be like now it can actually be authentic uh yeah that's what i think like i think it's good like it's good when christians are persecuted for christianity that's how it grows but do you think this is kind of like a return to the middle ages because like my my whole beef with the way as an art historian my whole beef with the way that people view and classify by people in the middle ages is that they were like uh hide bound and dogmatic and lived in a literal dark age when like the more likely reality is that they probably saw and understood much of what we see and understand now but yeah left things up to god because they were still plugged into

a uh system where faith was possible i mean i'm i think it's always possible no i agree with you but but it seems less possible now in any like authentic no because i think it seems more possible than ever well because i i think to be like truly kind of like to have like any true grasp of faith or tradition you can't be doing it in a reactionary way right you have to you yeah no you can't but you can't be aware of any kind of like uh enemy or adversary even you have to live in almost like your own enclosed like fishbowl i don't think that's true but once you become aware of like modernity or something you've already lost in a way i don't think i disagree okay i just don't like i think that um like maybe you could say it's more challenging

or something there's more challenges to these things but it's like you know you have time and i don't think modernity is like a stagnant sort of no it's a dynamic thing i think it's something that is evolving lecon but that's an essay called the triumph of of religion where he talks about yeah sort of in the fullness of time science is going to introduce you know rationalism whatever we got to this very recently did you see the thread on the guy talking about how like agi like general ai like an ai that is like fundamentally impossible like on a physical level and they were saying like well actually um when the stars in their orbits the stars in their orbits aren't calculating their own orbits they're not performing mathematical calculations to determine their next

move so it's like where are all these calculations governing the laws of physics happening they're like scientists today are just constantly running into the necessity of like a metaphysical like godhead in order to make sense of literally anything if you don't have that if there's nothing that everything subsists within and is like then there then you have nihilism so those are like the real choice explain that again if there's not a god then there's no meaning to anything yeah then there's just nothing there's yeah and then the whole world literally becomes a chas yeah or like a free for all and that's literally the choice and it's becoming more and more obvious like yeah but what i'm saying i guess what i'm saying in like very concrete terms is like when

you introduce intentionality into something yeah then people start to implicitly or explicitly react in a way that negates the whole kind of premise of faith i i don't know what you mean honestly like or or tradition or anything that you know is worth like holding on to and it starts it starts to feel like a lark right which is why people you know like dunk on the tradcats for larping well i mean that's what jesus was crucified for they said he was larping they're like they're like oh you think you're the messiah you think you're that like that's heresy that's why like that's the that's the whole thing this idea like oh you're so you believe like you believe there's a god like the world the good lark you know like no one if you're

ultimately cynical if you're a nihilist if you're an ultimate nihilist then everything's a lark there is no such thing as anything that's authentic in the first place right because everything is just you pretending that's uh it's a compensatory mechanism for your dopamine production or something yeah i think i think what's interesting is a few corner a person who appears to be a nihilist on the surface they're actually quite dogmatic and oh yeah because jev said because jev said right that only not the nihilist who doesn't kill himself is interesting yeah like it's like why don't you just kill yourself yeah and that's that's what's interesting sure well right because they're all fanatics because like they well it's like it's pride yeah which is like they live solely

for pride at that point yeah which is like i guess the most fanatical it's almost like when you live in a society where like that would be have a whole month devoted to it or something it is weird yeah well it's like i straight up like it's literally the worst sin yeah yeah it's like the first the origin of all well that's what all my favorite gay heroes said when they were like cornered and asked why they don't serve as like ambassadors to the lgbtq plus whatever quality cause and the paul cadmus one of my favorite artists said well because you should neither be proud nor ashamed yeah of your true nature and and quentin crisp said i can barely represent myself how am i going to represent all these other people yeah okay so how do i become

a christian yeah can you guys convert me just have faith that's it that's a simple but i feel like i already have faith in in the small granular i think a lot of people are christians without like being conscious of that or they act in a manner that would be like you know we're not the we're not when it's not up to us here to decide who is saved and who is not someone called me a subversive jew on twitter today so like like christ like yeah we all know you're you might not be getting nailed to the cross but you're definitely having some agony in the garden i mean i don't know like it's it's like jesus or a lot of people think that i'm like i think i am jesus or something i've gotten that complaint a lot oh no you don't think you think that i think

that i'm that yeah but i'm like right but that i think that as much as i hate your twitter spaces and you're very you know well i punishing i hate to use this word because people use it so like fast and loose but that that seems to me like a clear quick case of projection oh they secretly think they're jesus and they resent that you would take that role upon yourself or presumptuously yeah they they think that that's their projected like they're saying i'm being prideful right yeah there's a great uh the everlasting gospel by william blake it's a great poem about how people misunderstand jesus yeah you're kind of a blakehead ah yeah huge huge huge love william blake i think he was a legitimate prophet like some of the things he wrote were like so far ahead of time and nobody

read them at the time like these are like things he just wrote and like put in a drawer and like never published and then they just like get come out much later and it's just like so far-sighted into like the development of like the collective psyche you could say there's there's a bookstore like a couple blocks down i don't want to dox my location called a on books and they have a beautiful like first edition monograph of blake's like drawings oh really it's 20 dollars okay and i might go up in there and scoop it up tomorrow and send it to you as a baby gift which will not be useful at all later useful for me yeah that would be very nice i only know blake like from the like visual art history perspective because we were made to study him but i not like it there's

a lot of there's a great tradition in english poetry of like painters who were great poets at the same time yeah like windham lewis was like that too um where like those two parts are like kind of the same like i don't think you can understand blake's art without the poetry and you can't understand the poetry without the art because they're like to him it was the same thing yeah yeah but i think like what people don't realize about you is that one of the reasons that you're willing to show up and do the work and humiliate yourself on a daily level on a daily basis on twitter.com is because you've already practiced the act of forgiveness yeah i try to yeah i mean it's hard yeah it's really fucking hard like honestly i'm a very like i'm a very

like vengeful person especially when i was younger what like yeah what do you do like what what do you how do you take your walk yourself off the ledge when you're gripped by vengeful fantasies straight up not even a lot like started out as a lark like being like oh i'm just gonna start praying because i want to be christian but now i just do it because it actually helps but you obviously you don't pray the rosary or you don't have any no i just do the do the one that jesus told us to do lords prayer all you need lords prayer yeah that's true so you need explains everything too it's such a beautiful prayer it's like everything i agree i i um i i do the same i definitely do that one more than i do the the rosary i used to have to do rosary i mean i

went through the whole training you know i was sure like the catholic yeah i mean did you go to catholic school no no no no did you go to public school yeah yeah yeah but you seem like a public school man oh yeah i was definitely i definitely was subjected to the penal institution of american public education but okay i have i have a very like um faintly gauzy like nostalgic view of my education and it's overwhelmingly positive i can't say that i had a overwhelmingly happy childhood i would probably say that it was mostly unhappy in retrospect but my education at least i uh love and cherish because i remember it in a positive light even even all the conflicts and jostles and whatever i just think from having like i was just like very self-directed and

like wanting to read and stuff as a kid um because i don't know i grew up like my my dad's like a poet and an english teacher so like this was like always very important to us and our family like i've been reading a lot forever so school to me was always like in my way of being able to do what i wanted like i would get to try to get things done do you wish you had been homeschooled i don't know if it would have really made much of a difference like i'm glad i went to school to me like because i met my wife i guess yeah but that's also like another thing about when people beat up on catholic school um like i had an ex boyfriend who was very polemical against catholic school because he was raised and it's calling catholic and i remember saying to him at some point

like don't don't you realize that catholic school gave you all the tools that you needed to like rebel and think for yourself and in that sense it was an overwhelmingly like positive thing and also you were the one of the lucky ones who didn't get molested so one of the thank your lucky stars here yeah i think it's a great it lays a great foundation or groundwork even if someone lapses eventually you're trying to get me back many such cases you know the real thing it's between you and all my muslim friends who want me to convert to islam come on you've been asked to convert to islam all the time that is twisted all the time i'm sick and wrong i like my muslim friends i'm i'm a fan of them i think i think the

future of america is like the pan-abrahamic alliance that will huh yeah chris law the what to what come on no no i'm not saying it's going to be a merge into one thing but i mean politically these people all have the same interest like you see this in dearborn right now where yeah they don't they don't want like gender and race stuff in schools yeah they're gonna it's yeah so yeah and i think i think people were like banking on the fact that like muslims would be like awoken and would go along with it psychotic yeah that was i think like the actually optimistic sub-arc of submission right yeah this like pan-islamic alliance well sufi sufism sufi globalism but i guess my fear was always like in reality that would never come to pass

even if it did because muslims like any other people are easily corrupted by liberalism um yeah especially they're the second third gen yeah etc because they're because what they don't like is they don't like being kept out of the marketplace of this like you're sad it was sad to see wellbeck denounced as an islamophobe because actually in spite of that he has a begrudging respect i don't know if he doesn't think it's good but he thinks it's better yeah yeah i agree then which alternative then uh then uh nihilism then like yeah like free market liberal nihilism yeah yeah definitely something yeah it's something like you know i have a respect for the Mormons for that reason because it's like they have their own thing going on you

know they they're gonna be here a long after they have their own thing going on they're gonna be here a long after long after anything that's trendy right now the Mormons will still be around that's true that's not that definitely won't be a trend uh though maybe who know i i could see like there being like a almost like trad cath the revival of Mormonism yeah there's a part of that in the right back in the day in like the late 2010s like there's kind of like it kind of splits along i mean this kind of exists in like you know fbi Mormons cia catholics um yeah there's like a kind of thought of it that way yeah it's actually real though it's true so they recruit tons at byu etc for that but they don't want them for intelligence work at that level because

they're not capable of like actually compromising themselves for these other things um what what is the right currently uh i mean i don't know whatever whatever what the so-called right the nominative right these days is um i don't even know i don't really keep in contact with it anymore they kind of a they kind of a threw me out they were like oh he's a jew yeah a long time ago are you a jew no no no they just think nobody could pass yeah yeah yeah yeah like yeah i mean the haseeds here definitely think i am i mean i get a cost every time i walk by they say are you jewish yeah you should say i i would be like yes since we since you're here like temporarily you're visiting i would say next time somebody asks you you should just say yes and see what

they flog you in a van you don't know you don't know because like i used to one of the odd jobs i had in college was a one summer i was just collecting signatures for some candidate i don't even remember and i had to go to my district was borough park so i spent all day every day knocking on doors in borough park only talking to his seeds and i pretended to be jewish the whole time cunning yeah because they wouldn't let me in otherwise have you gotten a dna test yeah i'm like a hundred percent northwestern irish cornish english etc i have like a bit of scandinavian rape like somewhere in there yeah and uh yeah that's about it well we're almost we've done two hours almost wow so we could wrap it up do you have anything

um else that you would like to plug my books um selfie suicide and ampersand my poetry collection those are available on amazon.com my podcast is read books read books vlt.com uh i think that's all i have to plug what's up with all the ampersands and selfie suicide i just love ampersands i love that um like it's uh i don't know i love like ecomings and like blake wrote a lot with those i think it's just like useful i started doing it on twitter just to get around character counts you can get rid of two letters just by using an ampersand but i kind of like it so kind of quality you know the history of the ampersand yeah it's and uh uh it's just like et cetera but it's mushed together basically wow cool well thanks so much for coming yeah thanks for having

me guys see see you in hell