The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1311: In Memoriam - Christopher 'ZMAN' Zander w/ J. Burden and Karl Dahl

Episode Date: December 30, 2025

69 MinutesPG-13Pete invited Jay and Karl to remember a life we lost this year: Christopher 'ZMAN' Zander.Z BlogJ's SubstackJ's PatreonJ's YouTube ChannelJ's Find My Frens PageFaction: With the CrusadersKarl's SubstackKarl's MerchOld Glory Club YouTube ChannelOld Glory Club SubstackOld Glory Club WebsitePete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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Jay Burden's here. How you doing, Jay? Doing great, Pete. Thanks for having me back on. Of course. Carl Dahl's here, Carl. Hello, sir. Well, I guess with the end of the year here,

we're going to remember somebody and maybe maybe we can think of other people that, you know, we've lost this year, but Zeman was somebody who was quickly becoming, you know, a part of, you know, I mean, he's always been, he's been at the forefront of this thing. But, I mean, he came to the OGC conference this year.

I've seen him at American Renaissance, and, you know, a bunch of us got to spend, have spent time with him. And he tragically passed this year. And I know Carl has been in a group chat with him for, like, years and has known him a lot longer than I have, at least digitally. So, you know, I just thought we'd, you know, talk about, you know, what. Yeah, his life and his work, which is prolific. And, yeah, just try to remember a good guy, a guy that we all like. So, Carl, why don't you go first? You knew him the best out of all of us.

Yeah, it's really interesting because when he and I met in person at the OGC National Conference in Tennessee, I went up to him. And I was trying, I was orbiting around him every time I saw him because, you know, I knew what he looked like, et cetera. I didn't get to talk to him until after I gave my presentation on Saturday morning. And I just walked up to him, like he's mid-conversation with someone else. And I was like, if I don't just interrupt this conversation to introduce myself, we'll never get a chance to actually talk because you know how it was with him is people swooped down on him. anytime there was a break to just talk to him and pick his brain. And so I rudely interrupted a conversation, which I find appalling to do,

by making a reference to like an inside joke. Our joke was that now that he lived up in the hills of West Virginia, he was drinking spider juice all day because he was talking about how he had all these spiders all over this house that he was cleaning out and everything like that. um and he would be tipping one back after a long day of working in the fields and stuff um like the slave that he was and uh we just hit it off and we spent that whole night i mean you we talked to you pete he and i were standing there and jay also we were standing there for like four or five hours just talking and and it was like we and we had never met each other in person before but we had both been on gab since the very beginning of it and we were We had been in a group chat for, I did the math, and it was like eight years, eight and a half years, something like that with this small group of people. And the thing with Chris is that, like, he was very giving of his time. He would, he would talk to anyone who would listen, but as you also know, that, like, he was pretty easy to interview because you ask him a couple questions and then he'll just talk for 15 minutes.

and he'll string together this long series of complex thoughts and we'll wrap everything up really nicely tied with a bow. And so he was just an incredible guy to talk to, a great resource, read all the time. He knew all the basics and he would spend a lot of time talking with people saying, I've been in this thing for a really long time. I understand why your position is X, but what you have to understand is also why.

But at the same time, like this year, he was blown away by how much memetic progress had taken place in the past year. You know, like politically, he wasn't, he didn't have a lot of hopes for the Trump administration, but he was amazed by how much they actually did do and was actually being done. But most importantly, the mindset that had shifted among people. He couldn't believe how much progress had been made in such a short time. So it was one of those things where he spent at least as much time talking about how like he felt almost like he didn't know how to, what was going to happen next because kind of the perspective that he developed after decades in this thing was like being turned on his head instantly. So very interesting conversation that we had there. yeah so i did not know zeman for as long as you did carl i found him fairly late i think off of an interview that he did with pete if i'm not mistaken and for me it was incredibly refreshing

because zeman was at all points a realist he was very reasonable and we very quickly hit off. As you've said earlier, he was very giving of his time. And so when, you know, my tiny little Twitter account just reached out and basically said, hey, man, I'd love to talk sometime. He was very accommodating to me. And it was really interesting going back into his backlog, which, you know, once I, you know, we, I'd heard him on Pete's show and once I'd made contact, I just voraciously went back through. I mean, years and years of podcasts and, you know, years of essays. Several things struck me, which is one, he had a lot of life experience, both in and outside of right-wing circles. And that led to a very, very helpful perspective.

And I mean, even now, there are many of my ideas that aren't mine. There's e-mans. You know, I took them from him. And there's a great, and this was fairly recent, you know, it was maybe six or nine months before he died, a really great podcast he did, basically applying the same, you know, kind of framing of Sam Francis's beautiful losers, not to the conservative movement, but to the radical right. Because he was saying you do the same things. You want to be, you know, the purest guy on an island of one, but that's not how it works. You live in the real world. And so his, his, you know, radical politics, if we want to take that framing, was ironclad, right? You couldn't say he doesn't believe it or, you know, he's ignoring X, Y, Z thing. But it was always tempered in a realism that

lend his criticism a lot of weight. I got to know him much better over the course of, honestly, I used to do these kind of long Twitter spaces. I'd drive a lot for work. So I'd be on the road for three or four hours and I just have an open mic, talk to people, right, to keep myself from falling asleep. And very often Z-Men would come in for just an hour or two and just talk. And he gave me very, very good career advice. He was a small business owner. He did very well for himself there. And it was sort of the advice that someone who has passed through the corporate world gave to someone who was, albeit in the process of crashing out of it. And it was incredibly helpful because he would follow up afterwards. Be like, hey man, I remember you saying,

this, like, how did that go? Which he didn't need to do. This was just a random Twitter space with a guy he had a few conversations with. And to your point, Carl, about, you know, his kind of dim view of the future, but mixed with a sort of unexpected hope in the kind of rising, I guess, memetic relevance of the right wing. He and I talked a lot at the OGC conference shortly before he passed. Don't have the best attention. expansion span. And so during a lot of the talks, I would end up at the bar. And there was Z-Man. And we talked for hours, just, you know, kind of bullshitting just about life, you know, and also, you know, more explicitly political things. And two things. One, I want to say he was

incredibly generous with his money as well, because I did not pay for a drink the entire weekend. It started as like, oh, hey, man, I'll pick it up. And then every time I'd go to the bar, he would, like, with a sixth sense, look back over to the bartender, make eye contact and can't put it on my tap, which I appreciate. You know, I'm not above simple bribery. But also, one of the things he said that was really interesting is he was talking about, you know, this kind of radically increased relevance of right-wing ideas, you know, things that were relegated to kind of the shady underbelly of the internet. Now he's, you know, in a room surrounded by 200 people plus or minus who are, you know, capable, competent, are not freaks by,

large who have imbibed this fully it's sort of a given and it was interesting because he was incredibly optimistic about that he was and he said this to me and i believe he was well carl very impressed with you know the caliber of guys at the o gc and it was honestly it was really encouraging to see someone who'd spent so much time in the movement saying like oh like this is positive this is a huge development and you know unfortunately he didn't get to see you know where that led but I think it was sort of an interesting interesting conversation to have especially because and I don't remember if this was in my final episode with him or was in the conversation afterwards but he and I had this conversation which sort of had increased weight after his death

where he was basically talking about the fact that like you know he he did not have children and he realized that he probably wasn't going to get to see the next thing. Now, who knows if he meant in 30 years or in five, right? I'm not trying to speculate there. But he was saying the conversation sort of turned into this thing about being sort of like a prophet out in the wilderness, right? Ahead of the curve, someone who saw where things were going. But, you know, sort of like Moses doesn't actually get to go into the promised land. And I don't know. I thought it was very poignant, you know, after like many of us, I was suddenly, you know, notified of his death. Yeah, I have really nothing to say bad about Z-Man. He was very generous to me personally, and his work

as far as I'm concerned, superlative. Well, it was 2020 for me. I was coming back from Ron Paul's conference in Texas, which happened in November of 2020. And Jeff Dice and I were both on the same flight from we connected out of new orleans and we were sitting there and the flight was delayed and we're just talking and i just looked at him and i said this libertarian stuff just if this year has taught us anything it's just theory it's just wishful thinking it's you know unless you're going to force it upon people it's not going to happen and you know he just like as jeff diced is does he just gets a stern look on his face and he goes i don't know maybe you should listen there's this guy charles heywood and there's this guy zeman and maybe you should start listening to

um you know listen to their shows and see what you get out of out of that and i remember you know z man was way more of a writer than a podcaster although he was a phenomenal podcaster i mean how anyone can do 60 minutes exactly every week on his own is on the dot yeah on the dot um so i read a couple things while i was sitting there and then i started listening to his podcast when i went back a couple years and yeah i just realized that this guy had a sense of humor that was familiar to me because i mean we were a couple years we're a couple years apart And he, one thing about him was he, I really wish he was here now because we all realized that foreign policy is, seems to be what the regime and even Trump's regime is most focused on.

But he was not a foreign policy guy. He wasn't ignorant of foreign policy and he could riff on foreign policy better than, And 99% of the comments were out there. But he was a domestic guy. He was talking about what the hell was happening here. He had raced down Pat. He, contrary to popular belief, he, you know, there was a tribe out there that he was very well aware of. And after October 7th, he started talking more about them publicly.

You know, I've, I've had people, like if I bring up Z-Men, And when I brought up Zeman on Twitter, there'd be like one or two people who would come in there and go, you know, he was Russian and he was Jewish. And I can encourage those people that Canada isn't such a nice country anymore because of all the Jets, but their health care is amazing and you should probably seek it out. But Zeman was when it came to domestic, when it came to race relations, when it came to nobody understood. con ink better than him there is an episode from like year ago where he goes through all of like the con ink um think tanks and just shreds them tells you how much money they have in their coffers how much money they get a year ask questions like these guys don't get any money how are they so powerful and i mean he just he was a fountain of knowledge and he was a great he he was a good person

that if you had somebody who was just starting to think like we do to point to 100% there was no anger in the man he often did episodes on purpose where he would have a guinness before and have a guinness during and those were the funniest one of some of the funniest things you've ever heard in your life because he was obviously getting buzzed and obviously just was you know of course every episode there was going to be a belly laugh for something he said but those episodes there were more than one and you know i mean i just after i met him at amran the first time and then the second time got to hang out with him and then the third time at ogc this year i mean he just he became like a member of the family i mean my wife was with me every time that we met and they always talked

you know he was personable and um you know just i mean it really hurt when he um when the news came no there was another interior point on you know his his ability to sort of skewer con ink there was a great episode uh he did i think he was talking about jona goldberg if not it's someone who's basically the same person and he was going through you're kind of talking about like you know what is this guy's actual track record like what is he advocated for how has that turned out and then saying like look like you know if you if you were a you know, a stock analyst or whatever, who had this kind of track record. You know, if you had, if you were some actually important job, you'd been fired decades ago. And then went into,

as you've said, the kind of financial compensation where he's like, oh, like, yeah, sure, you know, this job, you know, pays 200 grand a year, which in Northern Virginia or New York isn't all that much. But he would go in and say, well, he's not just working there. He's also got this seat there. He sits on this. He sits on that and say like, look, like these guys are basically getting, you know, millions of dollars to lie, you know, to deliberately advocate for, you know, destructive policy. There's another great one, and this I think was almost exactly a year ago. It was just when the whole conversation about USAID kicked off, where he was basically going through the kind of web of corruption, you know, where these grants are handed out and there's kickbacks. And as in

many things, he was incredibly ahead of the curve, right? We're kind of in the midst. of this Somali scandal and I mean, it's been a month and a half. There are more developments every day. But you see that, you know, his analysis even, you know, I think it was technically early 2025, but still, you know, a year ago was incredibly predictive. He could call shots, you know, a year out. And I think that his work holds up even out of the immediate time because he would mention, you know, the current affairs. He would mention, you know, what has happened this week, but it was always with mind to kind of greater, more notable trends. So it wasn't just the kind of daily grind. And that's what one kind of propelled me to keep digging through

his backlog. You know, like, oh, this stuff still holds up. It's not just, you know, kind of summary of the day sort of stuff. But you start to pick out, you know, certain trends over time. And you can see like, oh, like, you know, he was on something two, three years ahead. And, you know, to the listeners that's why i'd encourage going back and listening to his old stuff because like it doesn't feel like you know when you know whatever social media algorithm picks up a post six months out of date you're like okay well who cares about this you know who cares about signal gate anymore or something similarly stupid it there's actually like genuine there's a shelf life to it and that's very difficult to do pete as i'm sure you're aware right you're taking

a conversation about something relevant and also making it transcendent i mean that's an art for And you and I get to cheat because we get to bring other people in and sort of bounce our ideas off them or just let them talk for, you know, an hour and five minutes and read a plug at the end. But Zeman was just effectively just going, you know, by himself. And yeah, it's incredibly impressive that he was able to, in a format which is difficult to do, produce as much as he did and produce as much of a, you know, high quality output. But one of his favorite, and this is kind of enduring, it's worked its way into the way I talk, even outside of the internet, is referring to, and he loved excoriating kind of what we call now, like the PMC or the laptop class, you know, the very, you know, entitled sort of, you know, progressive upper middle class people.

I think he referred to them as cloud people and everyone else as dirt people. And it's such a simple, dry way to say. it, but I not only find it really funny, but it's a very insightful term for that dynamic. Yeah, it's interesting, you know, Pete, you pointed out, he was a great person that you could share his content with anyone on any given topic. Like during COVID, he was one of the people that I was directing people to. They would listen to his podcast because the average person doesn't read anymore. like there there are people that will read blogs but like we we must be honest with ourselves that's a small fraction of of people but they'll listen to a podcast and the number of people from all over the kind of right leaning world that i you know directed to his content and just totally lapped it up and be like hey i went back you know he said this interesting thing so i listened to this you know this great podcast like you could if you want to

to read for a couple weeks, all you have to do is go to his archive and look up James Burnham. And you will read such incredible summaries of, you know, all of his thought and, you know, what he was really getting at, whether it's, you know, regarding the managerial revolution or the Machiavellians, defenders of freedom, et cetera, like, in a way that he's like, he's like, re-digests it for you so that when you go back and you read those books, they're an easier read because he's helping make connections because you didn't read necessarily like five source books on political theory that Zeman did that James Burnham also read. And he's like, Burnham came out of this school and da-da-da-da-da-da, which is why these pieces influence this. And so if you don't know this, you're not going to get it automatically. Well, do you want to read those five books?

You know, you can, and it'll be enriching to do so. It also might be kind of a waste of time other than what you get out of, you know, then reading Burnham. And so he was great for that where he could, you could just ask him, hey, what are some books that I need to read about Burnham? And he'll tell you. and so that you couldn't understand them and then you go back and he talked about it

all throughout his catalog there was this other thing that he would do and he would talk about this sometimes in the podcast sometimes you know in group chats and he was in a lot of group chats

but he would talk about the process of writing and the discipline and Jay you and I were just talking about this a couple days ago where everyone who takes their writing seriously, you want to be a really good representative of your work and you want to really nail it. Well, Zeman wrote five articles a week plus a podcast every single week and then he would take a break at like the end of the year where you there would be very light content for like two weeks um but i was talking to him one time and and what he said was uh i think i shared some some criticism that someone made

that sometimes he played fast and loose with um with details and he was always doing it partly to provoke people but also to hand wave nonsense right So, like, you don't go into, like, for example, Pete, like, you were in the right position to hear him brutalize libertarianism. Well, not even to brutalize it, but to just dismiss it. He was completely dismissive of it, and he would say libertarianism is astrology for suburban white boys. And, you know, it's pretty accurate. And people would say, no, like, and then hit him with all this theory. And he's like, yeah, but that theory doesn't work.

It's nonsense. So anyway, he would do this to provoke people, but then the other thing also is that he would have a deadline and he would write these articles before starting his work day, and he worked for himself, and then he would be very lightly online for the rest of the day until the evening, right? Because he'd be working. And I asked him one time, like, how do you do it? and he said well what you do is you sit down and you write and you don't worry too much about editing it and then you send it and you move on he's like think of it like a post on a forum in the old days like you get you get your thoughts out and some you'll put a little more work into it and you'll have some references so that it can be more thorough but otherwise you just send it out into the

world and because what he found was that there were posts and shows that he did that he put a ton of effort into but he wasn't like really happy with it that other people loved and they got a lot out of it and he said you never know what's going to hit so just send it and it's and it's really good like there's a point where you put enough work into it that it's not going to improve anymore so you just send it and like maybe maybe the way to uh you know really communicate what you want to do is after doing this really detailed deep dive and call in response to some, you know, conservative ink polemic nonsense is to just wrap it up by just saying, you know, after all that, what we need to be honest is that this person is just a liar

and, you know, underscore that and move on. So his, his philosophy was really interesting in that fashion because originally he was a poster. That's how we got his start. Like people would ask him. You know, people suggested that he started a blog because he would be in the comments sections in the aughts of like all the, you know, all the stupiditarian think tank websites and like excoriating people, you know, excoriating these articles in the comments. And he'd have people reach out to him, people who became allies. And they would say, we got to the point where we would dread, we would talk amongst ourselves. We would dread seeing Z. man in the comments section because he would just brutalize us and just take over the whole

flow of things. Like he was one of the first people to be doing that and really create a real online right that hadn't been there before. Just an aside, Carl, it seems like an awfully specific example you've used there of someone who has an article or maybe several that they can't quite get out. But I think it's important as well to talk about, you mentioned his work ethic, which is certainly notable, but he did have sort of this iterative process with that, where you know, you'd see an idea come up and then two or three weeks later, you'd get a better, more detailed version of it. And so sometimes it's sort of interesting to listen through, you know, a couple episodes all in a row because he'll touch on certain things. like as you've you know mentioned he was speaking much more frankly much more directly about

Israel after you know October 7th and there was sort of this interesting run where you know it was reacting to if you guys remember the Ted Cruz appearance on Tucker you know where he sort of blasély said you know I got into office with the intention of being you know the strongest supporter of Israel and he goes through this he examines the same thing from kind of multiple angles. You know, he, you know, one week would be talking about, and you see this in his essays as well, obviously the, you know, the Christian Zionism angle. But another one, which I think was really interesting is he was a very accurate critic of like the blob, as he would call it, the swamp as the Maga people do, which is, and he would bring this up all the time. He's like,

look, like, the fact is less than 10% of senators are in competitive seats. So it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that what they say is, is crazy to you because they're not at risk. They're playing to their base. They're playing to what matters to them. In the case of Ted Cruz, it's people with a lot of money in Dallas. And they don't really care about what you care about. And I think that, you know, that sort of incisive way that he cut through a lot of, you know, both kind of culture war BS, but also just kind of daily political grind. Let his critique a lot more weight because it's like, okay, like, and you mentioned earlier, Pete, that he wouldn't really get angry.

He wouldn't sort of descend into the kind of rage bait nature of it. And because of that, he could keep a really important distance talking about politics, which, you know, again, made his, you know, thoughts worth reading, his podcasts worth listening to. Because at a certain point, it's like, okay, how many people can you listen to get mad about something? Okay, like that activates your monkey brain. That's something to do. You know, it's probably entertaining. I guess. But if you're actually interested in learning, like figuring out how the system works, what's the best way to attack it? Well, a guy who says like, yeah, no, that cycle is sort of feeding into the machine. You know, you're doing what you're supposed to do. And I think that that's a, like, it's all too rare. You know, even among, you know, self-described dissidents. You know, there's a great deal of, you know, kind of rage and anger, which is certainly understandable. But it's not necessarily helpful in all in all times.

I think that you mentioned Pete that, and he was very, very funny, his humor is incredibly dry. And oftentimes he would sort of just let something hang. And you mentioned Carl, right, that he would sort of deliberately, you know, provoke online autists by messing up under details. There were many things like that where he would do it specifically to get a rise out of people. Mispronunciations. Oh, yeah. Yes, yeah. Over and over again.

It was so awesome. He would purposely pronounce Hoppa's name Hoppe just to piss off the libertarians. Which I think is, like, it's incredibly funny. And he'd do it enough that like the first time it's a chuckle by like the 10th or 12th time where he's repeating it multiple times in a sentence. Which is like crying, laughing. So again, like I, that that aspect of his work, I guess can't be understated either. Pete, I can't hear you all of a sudden. Yeah, sorry.

I muted out. One of the things he told me that I think a lot of people didn't realize was that on a weekly basis, his website got hundreds of thousands of unique visitors. And he said he worked in, he lived in the Washington, D.C. area. He lived in Lagos. And he was constantly working in Washington, D.C. And he was constantly talking to people. And people, on the hill read his stuff all the time. I mean, like powerful people were following him and reading him, and he would get this confirmed from people all the time. You know, I think Carl mentioned it, that he worked a full-time job. Well, I mean, I don't know that he worked for anyone else. I think he may have been an independent contractor, but he worked full-time and then did this full-time. Now,

he didn't have a wife. He didn't have kids. So he's able to do that, but everyone, you know, all three of us know that there comes a point at some time where you're going to be like, you sit down to write something and you're like, I got nothing. I got nothing. And I'm just, I have to bail out. There's nothing I have to write. He always had something to write about. And he always, he always injected at least one or two things into those blog posts and into his. his episodes especially his episodes that you didn't know that you just you're like oh wow where'd that come from um he his his understanding of how the right well the quote unquote right the gop the regime right how they were just rehashing ideas from the progressives and like everything that they were doing like there's this famous saying about how conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit no i mean in some cases sure but in a lot of cases the the the the gop and the regime right is just looking at like things that the left is doing and they try to

repackage it in their own way to make it work and it's just not going to work because the left is going to do it better because it is a leftist idea you can't do it and if they did come up with something on their own it means so much of um of the things that that like conservatives and libertarian people brag about like oh you know we were for gay marriage before anyone else was it's like well yeah and then it finally got adopted and it got adopted into the regime how's that working out how's you know all the all the degenerate stuff that you've you know open borders how'd that work out sure you know you cato the cato institute is the open borders institute whenever you see somebody on tv or you see a politician quoting how open borders is

going to help the economy in this way that that's coming directly from cato that's that's directly coming from alex star wars name on twitter and people don't realize just how much of the enemy these are and then libertarian you know then like you know auburn libertarians will be like well that's not real libertarianism and then you know you realize how much libertarianism is like communism because you know that's all the communists say well you know soviet union wasn't real communist and it's just all this well that wasn't real this that wasn't real that and you know zeman was able to show you how just exactly how horrible the right is not the right the gop the the regime Republicans, how horrible they are and how much more of an enemy they are to you than

the actual left was. I mean, that's where we, when we talk about when Stormy's out there going, the, you know, the real enemy of any right-wing revolution as a conservative. I mean, Zeman was saying that, you know, 25 or 30 years ago. Yeah. Yeah, he, he would actually go to these conferences in D.C. all the time and would know all these people and would talk to all these people, these writers. And so I think what he was really good at was demythologizing them, like taking away this fake credibility out there in, you know, among the Hoy-Polloy, who are very online and who follow politics closely. And he's like, you're the only people that pay attention to these people other than themselves.

Like nobody cares about who these people are. And he would explain the way that it worked in really simple terms. Like Pete, you were talking about how he would go through the money and all the different jobs and sinecures that people would have. And, you know, one of the, I'll just come right out and talk about it. Um, you know, we, we've kind of danced around his, uh, his dalliances, uh, and interactions with a certain tribe. And a lot of people, he would basically explain to them that they fundamentally didn't understand, um, their own thought process when it came to how much they empowered their enemies because they you know he would call it magic of jew theory a lot

of the time as he'd say you know these people are as you say all the time pete these people are the biggest Zionists and you know uh jewish supremacists in the world but they just call themselves anti-semites and we see this we see this all the time right now despite everything you have people acting like they have some secret knowledge and that they're some they're they're part of this thing where they have to whisper it and it and it's like the the way that he approaches every topic in this kind of abstract while still direct fashion but but going through the steps was something that people didn't have patience for and so they would lose patience with him but he also would call out grifters all the time and there were so many grifters in you know and when things are right you know in right wing and kind of fringe circles like people are desperate for anyone who says something that they agree with that they feel like they're they're a voice in the wilderness and oh i'm not alone because you know so-and-so said this thing and he would point out no this person has a history and you have to be aware of the

kind of circumstances that they're setting up. He would go meet with people all over the country, all the time, and all these different organizations, and he would then come back and, you know, be candid in private about how they were, and most of the time it was there were a lot of great people there, but there are some grifters that are trying to steer them wrong. And, you know, the strongest attacks that I ever heard against him were from people that were affiliated with these grifters, he would constantly point out how, and we've seen some of this in the OGC, not in the OGC and from OGC members, but in other organizations, which

I will leave unmentioned, but there are, there's outreach and certain rules that these people have because they think that they're competing for the same pool of members, rather than it being a growing thing. And the way that you actually behave when it comes to either the way you deal with your membership or you deal with organizations, you see them as competing factions, and you're just trying to go after the same people. And he was very good about pointing out like, Grifter A, who gets all this online fame and gets elevated by the media to be the spokesman for all of us, even though they're

a disaster like can't you people connect the dots on this so it was this intelligent framing where where he would basically say you're being you're being owned and run by the people that you're accurately recognizing or a problem but you're letting them defeat you and we see this all the time and we see it's it's amazing that we see it in 2025 as naked leaves we do but it shows how poisoned the discourses has been for generations on the right. And it comes from this losing, loser attitude that people develop, you know, and where they're like, I have to keep losing. Otherwise, people won't realize how serious I am and how much of a purest I am.

And he would call that out and people hated it. Yeah, I think we might be the most recent version is what, you know, I was referencing earlier. And I can't remember who. I know he, I guess I shouldn't say the names of the people he was going after in particular, but you can probably guess. And this was you know, even relatively, you know, late. You know, this was in probably late 2024, 2025 the last time he really went on a tear on this subject. And he was really good at well as picking at the kind of like kind of like high school lunchroom behavior you often see on the right where you know the goal is not actually to win the goal is to be the specialist boy of them all you know the goal is to you know

be the most you know dissident and to be sort of you know the king of a of an ash heap and I think that he you know very accurately to your point Carl said like you know pointed out that kind of gap between stated and revealed preference right what you say you do versus what you actually act like And that role is much needed. And, you know, we've sort of seen this post, you know, the death of Charlie Kirk in the more establishment conservative circles, where that event has, you know, almost completely become just a way to, you know, signal for and compete for status. You know, if you follow a lot of these people, you see it's basically whatever they wanted to say anyway, and this is what Charlie Kirk told me before he died, or Charlie Kirk actually thought this. And you've seen that same behavior, that same very human behavior. And, you know, I think that, you know, one of the things that, you know, led, really added a lot to his work was a very kind of realist and grounded understanding of human nature.

You know, one of his later shows was on slavery and that was something that came up there where he was basically like, well, regardless of how you feel on this, this is something humans do. And this has been done many, many times. talking about that is, you know, it's not like some unique moral ill of, you know, the, the American Antebellum South. But also he applied that same attitude, like, look, like humans are, there's a definite human nature to a lot of the social analysis in a way that I think was, to be honest, made it even better. I think one of the things that he was constantly fighting against and this is just echoing everything you said was the hating one group so much that you black pill and you don't you don't do anything i mean we see this all the time i mean i'm 98

episodes into a book about the jewish experience russians and their experience with jews in their country i'm not one of these people who is so caught up in it that i let it control everything in my life i'm still out there doing everything i'm still out there telling people that you can yeah sure unbelievable uh overrepresented power basically control our government that doesn't mean you can't thrive that doesn't mean you can't win that doesn't mean that we can't we're not going to win that doesn't mean that they're in my opinion they're defeated they've lost they just don't know it yet people have people are abandoning any kind of almost kind of reverence that has been built up built around this group of people um since since the war since

world war two and i think that's one of the reasons why he didn't concentrate on that group so much I mean, I'm looking at, like, one of the last episodes he did, the third to the last episode he did, was called In Search of Antisemitism. I mean, it was just basically calling out one of his favorite whipping boys was William Buckley. I mean, how could it not be? And he, I mean, was there anybody in our thing who knew more about Buckley than he did? I mean, he knew everything about the guy. Certainly not. Yeah, no.

you know and you know he would do episodes like that where he would be like yeah overrepresented i mean taking guys taking our guys out and everything but this is a new day this is a new day and going forward um you know we can't sit back i mean this is a guy who was insanely successful in his personal life i mean he could i mean he had exotic animals I don't know if people know that but he owned exotic animals the wildest giant cats you can imagine

well and I in one of our should I say somewhat socially lubricated discussions at the bar he ran me down the history of owning giant cats and he had like

scars and injuries from being you know playfully attacked by like a wild animal and look like I liked the guy a lot but my conclusion from that was you are a crazy person like this is how people get eaten and he was unbothered by that i mean you know to give him credit i mean he lived in baltimore proper like the ghetto and uh he lived there for years and and there was one point where people were threatening to dox him and he he said i literally just pulled up my home address and sent it to them and said come come on

down, come on down to Baltimore. And they look at it and they're like, oh my God, I wouldn't know when he lived in one of these little pockets where like his street was okay. But like every night he would hear gunshots. And when he finally moved out to West Virginia, he was like, why did I wait so long to do this? Why did I wait so long? It was kind of funny because, you know, it's sort of, I feel like this is pretty common. I just don't concern. myself with anyone's docs at all. And so I had genuinely no idea that docs had happened until he had a, and I think it was a part of a question and answer episode, but someone, you know, wrote in or it was just on his mind, he was talking about, you know, how to deal with the media.

And one of the things he said that was really funny is he's like, yeah, well, what they want is they want a reaction. They want to see you squirm. And so, you know, when he said, when I had reporters saying isn't this where you live or, you know, is it this your name? He just wouldn't respond. And he'd never mentioned his content. He'd never mentioned it anywhere. And he's like, yeah, I'd follow them on Twitter and I'd see them freaking out about it. Like, just trying to post it over and over and over again to get it to stick.

And he's like, I'd just freeze them out. And again, you see both like his sense of humor there where it's like he got some satisfaction of just driving these Cretans wild. But I always thought that was a particularly good strategy. You know, and I think as someone like many of us who has, you know, face doxing or, you know, kind of negative repercussions due to online behavior, uh, that attitude has served me well. And I think that, you know, as you said, he had a very wide, very, you know, large audience. And so I'd be surprised if there weren't other guys with similar experiences who sort of followed the Z-Man tact successfully. I'm, I'm so horrible at this. Like I, like you said you don't care about doxing. And like when someone gets dachs, I'm like, oh, that sucks, you'll be okay. I've met Carl twice. We've hung out twice.

He's told me his real name twice. I can't remember his first name. That's how bad I am. I also legitimately don't know Carl's real name now that I think about it. And this is funny because this is just to decide, this is something that it took. the wife a long time to understand. You're like, so wait, you talk with this guy all the time. You've been to his house and you literally don't know what his name is. I'm like, I mean, I've got a Twitter handle. That's pretty close. Uh, just kind of the

context speaks for itself, babe. Yeah, exactly. Last words before being founded a meat freezer on the side of the highway. Just to give you just to give you an example, I've hung out with Lee Enfield three times, three different occasions had dinner. I've had dinner and drinks with him three times no idea what his real name is don't care i think it's lee don't care yeah he and he looks exactly like the avatar he uses on uh on twitter so head which is funny because um um j here was uh he's exactly the same yeah he used it he used a crazy i but he used an avatar for very long that was i mean well if you just like you know put it through a i and said well what does this human look like you would have basically been

face docs a long time ago. Yes. Yeah, it was it was the worst. And you actually, you know my real name. Not that different either. Like it's a very bad student. It's pretty funny. And believe me, I would not remember your real name if I haven't sent you if I hadn't sent you mail. That's the only reason I remember. Well, well, I think Carl wanted to wanted to wanted to do something here so um let me um let me let me let me share a screen here and um yeah let's do this so um yeah his uh his uh his dural science segment that he would do on a regular basis. He would be laughing trying to read these,

you know, these theses by these imbeciles. And then he would break it down. And this is the funny thing. So I've worked from home for years, right? Every Friday, I would play his podcast in my office through the speakers while I'm sitting here, working away, and without fail, my wife would walk into the room right when he switched to Zerl Science. And she would just be like, why are you listening? Why do I constantly hear Cindy Lopper coming from your office? And I'm like, it's from the podcast. And she's like,

uh-huh, okay. Actually, if we're talking about music, the bluegrass tune that he always used is the intro to his podcast. It's one, it's a great recording. It's also like a Pavlovian response to me. And if you guys didn't know anything about bluegrass, right, there's a lot of, you know, repeated motifs or repeated riffs. And so it's music that I grew up listening to. So I'll have it on all the time. And, you know, that that, and I can't remember the name. I think it's Cripple Creek. I can't remember or some version of it will come on. And it's exactly that point. It's like I'm completely back in the mode of like I've been trained like a dog. Right. It's like, it's like, oh, it's Z man time.

time for some good takes yeah that's funny you know i i have to share another story um and he and i talked about it uh in person um but years ago some friends of mine were involved in mutual friends were involved in uh some in an online space and they they started a short-lived podcast that they ended up wrapping after only a couple episodes because of a doxing campaign, a very vicious one that was conducted and it had some rather negative outcomes, unfortunately, which again, the correct thing to do is to just disregard and move on with your life. And if anyone, you know, is confronted theoretically by HR or something, you just deny

They just deny, deny, deny, and anyway, so they did that. They didn't have any issues, but so you can't find it online anymore and it might not exist anymore like we don't know. But anyway, it was a very good, my friend's wife was a very good interviewer and Zeman was going on and on about how it was the best interview that anyone had ever conducted. with him and I told my friend this and he said yeah we've heard that all the time we asked him two questions and he talked for an hour straight on the on the strength of those there was there was more conversation than that but he just was just riffing and so it turned into this like gentle call and response where they were just kind of encouraging him to keep going and I also liked that one because he talked about me and it was when my first book came out which is why I remember

in the first place, but I just had to tell that story because, you know, he was like it was the best interview that anyone ever did with me. And I recall listening to at least five or six others that people did with him where they wouldn't hardly let him talk. They were trying to keep him on the train tracks and be short and quippy, but he didn't work that way. What he would do is he would start getting these associations going and he would talk for, you know, minutes on end to wrap up a subject, but then he would ask people questions to keep them in the conversation. And if they were like, no, I'm the one who asks questions, you know, it wasn't going to go anywhere. It wasn't going to be a good conversation, which is why he did so few in that format. He would

come on, um, you know, spaces and live streams and riff with people, but he, he really disliked to that kind of controlled format, which is why he also didn't do that on his show with other people. I think he did, I think he has like one or two episodes where he did a recording with someone that he put out as his podcast. He'd usually let it be someone else's show. Yeah, it was, uh, speaking as an interviewer, he was a ton of fun to talk to. You know, if you could sort of mirror him and figure out where it was going to go, it was just this incredible feeling of you're getting kind of live,

like live stream of consciousness, pearls of wisdom. And, you know, I've gone back through, I think Pete, you put up a compilation of all your conversations with Seaman and I was going back through it. And, uh, yeah, it, they were rare and they were, honestly, really, really good. Because there are a lot of guys who can, who can present, who can do a monologue, but can't necessarily, you know, translate that. And his style was definitely in that vein, as you've said, but they're great. So, I mean, honestly, you know, if you guys are not familiar with Zeman, and that would be a weird thing to be 55 minutes into a podcast and

about a guy you've never heard of, Pete's collection of his interviews is well worth your time. I think similarly, uh, Blood Satellite put out an interview just before he passed. Like it was a few days before and I think it's the last recording of him. That's another one you can find. But I'd highly recommend both of those and then like go back to his stuff. The essays hold up. You can still find them. The podcasts are available literally everywhere.

Go back and listen to them. They don't have ads. You're not going to pay any money for it. But I highly recommend them. They are very, very good. And, uh, yeah, those, those few interviews he did were very very good yeah it's funny i'm looking back at um the names of some of the episodes we did and it it always seemed like i picked a name just to be funny like one was mugshots

debates and hitting the target which if i think back i'm like i have no idea what that was but then i found that in february of this year february 28th 2025 he appeared on the old glory club live stream pony Express radio and the title of that episode was back to Epstein Island it's just you can't get away from the humor with him it was like you were never going to it was like yeah the guy was dead serious about everything and the and the guy knew his stuff knew his politics knew his burn him knew knew what power was all about and new domestic policy in this country and what was wrong with domestically but man every time i think of him it's like i start laughing it's just it's impossible not to he was literally one of the fun and one of the things i missed

the most is i do my sunday live streams and my sunday live streams people who've listened to him i'm sure some people just skip over him it's just me interacting with the chat and he would always come in on rumble he would comment on rumble and it would always be something poking fun at me and i missed that so much i mean it was he was so good good for that he was so good to rib you give you a nice friendly ribbing from like from the old school where if he did that to a lot of people who you know are a lot younger than i am and not of our of mine and his generation they may have taken it personally but i knew exactly what he was doing and he was just a master of it he called a friend of ours who was in this private chat

he called him a bald black Jewish midget like almost every single day on Gab they would just like quote post each other and so my buddy would play the straight man where he'd you know post like enraged WoJack and stuff like that as a reply to it but like he would just he would just rip on people in the funniest way and and yeah just just nonstop yeah i mean if you guys have anything else any other stories you know we're right at about an hour and um yeah we'd talk anymore i might get teary here because um yeah i remember the day that it was that it came out and you know it wasn't we couldn't confirm it right away because the report was um you know we weren't really sure but when it was confirmed you know i remember um you know my wife got Terry and I'll use this excuse because she got Terry. I got Terry too. So yeah, that's that sounds like a good excuse. To sort of wrap it up, I small account for a very long time. And so I really remember the guys who sort of gave me a hand up who basically said like,

oh, you know, this isn't going to be big exposure for me. This isn't going to be, you know, something I'm going to profit from really in any way. And Zeman was incredibly generous with his time and advice both on and off air in a way that was in no way motivated by profit or motivated by I guess kind of social cachet. And that to me showed a lot about his character. He was very passionate about what he said, passionate about what he believed. And it was almost unconcerned with any sort of money or accolades that came with that. He was right. He said it.

He wanted to get that out there. And that's a very rare thing. And so I always appreciated him for that. Appreciated him for saying like, yeah, sure. Like I'll give you a shot. And I don't mean to say that because it benefited me. But just to say like that is uncommon. And particularly Pete, as I'm sure you're aware, you talk to a lot of people.

You cold approach a lot of people. And, you know, there's a bell curve. most people are perfectly pleasant but when someone goes above and beyond you know when someone is you know checking in when someone is you know responding quickly and well it makes a difference it matters to you and you know i'm not going to pretend we were best friends you know i met him once in person but he was a very good man in addition to being right and being funny and you know i think that's probably the best way to describe him yeah i agree it was it was delightful to meet him

it was like I had known him forever we had corresponded for a really long time and so when we heard about it everyone was kind of there were people coming to conclusions because of an article that he had written

the day before which was inaccurate it was an inaccurate assumption and but he messaged I was trying to see if I could share this with you guys but it doesn't look like going to be able to. But the group chat that I was in with him

was the last place where he engaged with anyone publicly. And he just wrote fucking hot. And I don't know. He had a dry, rye sense of humor. And I can't help but think that he probably thought that that might ultimately have been a little funny, you know, in a retrospect. But that was why when we heard what was going on from people who knew them locally and went up to go, who were planning on meeting with him that day anyway, that we believed

it and immediately started telling people to chill out on the assumptions that they had. Yeah. But yeah, a great guy and just a giant. And honestly, I feel like we're diminished. The space is diminished without him because of the way that he was able to bridge all those gaps. And he really inspired, honestly, he really inspired me because he wasn't afraid of meeting with people in person at times that others were. You know, people in 2022 were petrified of leaving. the house and going face to face to engage with other people who were even vaguely right wing online. Because the people who were new to all this, who were getting arrested in 2021, who found out that they didn't live in a free country, you know, they were the ones who were surprised. The right wingers know that you don't do this stuff, right? And so for him to be like, well, you're not doing anything illegal or dangerous. Like you're going to talk to people you know it's fine like just just avoid these kinds of things and the you know the metaphorical

bomb throwers um avoid those people and and do your thing and i think um i can't help but think that a lot of him talking about these his way of doing this of just going around and meeting with people he get invited to events all the time and he'd fly all over the country to to go to him a couple times a year. Those would be his vacations if he wasn't going to a ballgame with his buddies, you know, in Boston. And I think it was a really good mentality that we needed to hear, just a voice of sanity. And, yeah, I'll miss them and I'll always be happy that I got to meet him in person finally. you know this has been a year that started off politically you know pretty strong and um you know

but it's definitely tailed off you know the the excitement wore off really quick and i pretty much know what he would be writing you know he he was not somebody who thought that uh that the drastic change was coming immediately. He wasn't black-pilled about the future. He just knew it wasn't going to happen now, all the things people wanted to see. But the one thing that I really would have liked to get his take on, because I know he probably would have had a different take

than any one of us and anyone we know is the Charlie Kirk assassination. I really wish I could have a Z-Man episode about Charlie, Charlie Kirk assassination. I'll leave it at last. Yeah, man. Yeah. Jay Burton, plug your shit. Yep.

So Jay Burton show, Spotify, YouTube, Apple, anywhere you listen to podcasts. Actually, inspired by this, I think I'll probably put out a compilation of my interviews with C-Man. I have three of them. So that will be out roughly contemporaneously to when this drops. You know, just to sort of, you know, provide a snapshot at the man, you know, I think the oldest recording is maybe two years old, you know, up to one that was six or seven months ago. So, yeah, if you want, you can check out the Jay Burton Show anywhere you listen to podcasts and look for the Z-Man retrospective there. Carl Dahl.

Carl Dahl.substack.com, Cowdeo Dahl on Twitter, and two books on Amazon. Amazon, faction and faction with the crusaders. I'm inspired by Z-Man to, I've been playing with this idea to do a PO box because he had so much fun with his PO box. And that's where he got his endless supply of cash that he used to pay bar tabs when he went to events. He was like, people mail me on the loaves full of cash. So, anyway, thanks for having us, Pete. Thank you, gentlemen. We'll talk soon. Take care. Thank you.