So, Kosta and Arlamaru has responded to some of the recent news coverage of him and not a whole lot of great content or great value in his response. He just goes on for about 40 minutes about how mean people are to him. So, let's play a little bit of his response as people just really, really mean to him. Or compact, same garbage. So these you can imagine the type of people, right? He's the worst kind of kiss-ass careerist, the kind of brown-noser for a sclerotic old party guard. Okay, so it couldn't be that people have any possible legitimate criticisms of him or the Politico article was pretty fair and even-handed. But anyone writing about him in any way that he does not wholly approve of is incredibly thin-skinned. Late-stage communism and not even a good career at that, I mean it pays nothing. And that's the type of- Yeah, so according to Bronze Age pervert, we should judge the worth of a career by how much money someone makes and by how many views they get. People attacking me now for some reason. So it's either, as I say, conservatives, oddly enough, writing in far-left publications, the new statesmen and so on, or these conservative rags. They hire an outright Antifa, really, for example, hardcore whiteness studies type Antifa from Sweden, and they rely on people not Google translating this person's articles that are in Swedish to see how he clutches about whiteness and such. And such creature now writes for supposedly dissident right or dissident populist right magazines in America, and most of the output is again trying to dox harass anonymous posters and such. Oh, so just simply identifying Kosta Alamaru and his life story. This is doxing. No, doxing means that you reveal private information about people such as their home address where they work that people would prefer to keep hidden. When you become a public figure like Bronze Age pervert has become simply mentioning your real name and that you enter Yale and you have a PhD in political science. That's not a dox. And really to do what Antifa does to raise up a mob against them or their families to police the right so that no original ideas actually get through to outside world. So it couldn't just be even handed coverage or they hope, but they make mistake because I have already bigger reach than their poultry circulation anyway. So oh, well, if he has a bigger reach, then then he automatically wins, right?  That's not the matter, but I just bring up to you the oddity of it all the conservative Antifa collaboration. Well, if it's so pointless, then when do you go on for about 35 minutes on the same theme? You had nothing of value here. Which if you listen to my show, I've talked about this for a while, but there's long been establishment conservative collaboration with Antifa against me and also my friends, the faction of truth, you see, because I'm not right when you're left. I'm not I'm not a dissident. I just want the truth. I just want to speak the truth. These people are dissidents against the truth and good taste. Also, I might add, I'm a modernist, a modernist, a modernist centrist. That's me. Okay, this is just plain delusional. Michael Anton had a pretty good book review of the Bronze Age mindset in the Clarem Art review of books, summer 2019 issue notes that conventional conservatism doesn't hold much purchase with large swaths of the under 40 crowd. Conservatism revolving around tax cuts, deregulation, trade giveaways, Russia phobia, democracy wars and open borders and not getting the kids riled up. What is the Bronze Age mindset book? So much of the book is questioning or attacking, attacking conventional wisdom on science, health, nutrition, often referencing some obscure figure whom most of us would dismiss as a crank. And in the books, perhaps most reasonable passages, the Bronze Age pervert, one is allowed where the history is being falsified, where the persons and events have been invented from whole cloth, centuries added to our chronology, entire chapters added to classic texts, doesn't have any evidence for this. And so for a person who's supposedly all about the truth, you think you'd be interested in such a thing as evidence. So a key to the Bronze Age pervert mindset and world view is that life is all about a struggle for space, as opposed to Darwin, who looks at life in terms of reproductive success. So according to BAP, Bronze Age pervert, all life seeks to develop its powers and master the surrounding matter and space to the maximum extent possible. The lower species simply means mass reproduction and enlarging habitat. So Bronze Age pervert generally has disgust with women and disdain for the family. For the higher animals, it means controlling terrain, dominating other species, dominating the weaker specimens within your species, getting first dibs on prey and choice of mates. He sees no fundamental distinction between living in harmony with nature and mastering nature. All animals seek to master their environment to the extent they can and the nature of man is to master nature itself. So he rejects the Darwinian claim, the fundamental imperative of life as reproduction. He asserts an inherent connection between physical health, good looks and human worth. And guess what?  He defines his title only once because the Bronze Age mindset, the secret desire to be worshipped as a God. In other words, mental illness. He venerates pirates because they are free, the most free men. They are especially prone to violating the own space of others. They are radically disinclined to be hemmed in by custom, law, tradition, and religion. So it's not surprising if Bronze Age pervert is an instigator for many different crime sprees and killing sprees. There's nothing in the Bronze Age mindset that would effectively constrain those who have that predilection. So Machiavelli intimates that his primary purpose in his discourses on living is to prepare a certain subset of youth to act when the time is right to overthrow a corrupt sect and to restore ancient virtue. So the Bronze Age mindset is written with the same intent. Count find in the Bronze Age mindset any principled reason or any reason at all to reject or object to tyranny or to slavery, serfdom, perpetual peasantry, might makes right, warlordism, gangsterism, bullying, and what most people would call injustice. So the only injustice that the Bronze Age pervert seems concerned with is the suppression of the higher by the lower. And I found a lefty podcast, which did a pretty good two-part series on Constant Alamaru, better known as Bronze Age pervert, is an excerpt. Engineer. So his older brother, Dan Alamaru, is very conventionally successful. He patented a method of securitizing political risk. He's been executive director in the head of the US country risk for the global investment firm UBS. Stuff like that. Here's another interesting thing about his brother that I love.  Would it have been big when we were in? I've heard that. When you were in middle school, probably. Yeah, I don't know how true it is. That originated on the cover of a student magazine at Georgetown University in 1996 that was managed by Dan Alamaru. I was gonna say, you tell me this guy, I have something to do with it. Bronze Age pervert's brother probably invented every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten. Oh, wow. Dude, dude, that's just the beginnings. We haven't even gotten to Jim from the office yet. Oh, it's coming up though, pretty quick. This paragraph even. Kostin went to high school at Newton, South High. Go Lions. And this is one of my favorite parts too. Something that's really funny. His junior year, he was the opinion editor of the school newspaper, The Roar. The Roar. Go Lions. Roar. While the editor-in-chief was B.J. Novak. Oh my God. A.K.A. Ryan from the office. Yup. Another one of their fellow classmates who wasn't in the newspaper was Jim from the office. He was there, but Jim and Ryan graduated the year before baby pervert. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Kostin graduated from high school in 1998 and his senior yearbook, which is scanned into the Internet Archive in its entirety, is simply amazing. He became the managing editor of The Roar and there's this great passage from the page about the newspaper. Quote, The Roar is 100% student produced. From the simplest news article to broad editorial decisions, we do it all ourselves. We love this tradition because it lets us be wacky, zany, clever or serious. Where else could you find crazy focused topics? Like I don't know what that is. A student showcase, a look into the tracking system and, emphasis in the original, a centerfold on 19th century German philosophers. End quote. That's kind of a weird thing to slip in there, don't you think? Yeah, I'm just like imagining. Like I wasn't able to get a copy of that centerfold. Unfortunately, but I'm just imagining like Nietzsche, just full of words. Very rare. So this podcast calls Bronze Age Pervert a flashy and flashy borat knockoff, which I think is an excellent description. A lot of good information and even some good analysis in this left wing podcast, as opposed to just this pointless, no value added rant by Bronze Age Pervert in his latest podcast. So I'll play a little bit more here from Kostan Alamaru, the man himself in his latest podcast. I'm a liberal, moderate, centrist. I should make, I should go back to East Bloc and make a party in a particular country that does not at the moment have any interesting parties. I will call it the- I'm completely delusional that he could start up some, take over a government in a country. Moderate centrist party. But that said, it's funny the unspoken part of all these hit pieces on me from all sides. It's how they recycle the so-called research that was commissioned by one Luke Turner against me. And this is an Antifa, a major Antifa donor, funder, call it whatever you want in London. That's what a lot of this comes out of.  He deliberately exaggerates his Romanian accent. I mean, I obviously deliberately exaggerate my Australian accent at times. He's, I like this description of him as a flashy and flashy, borat makeover. I think that's pretty accurate. Because they never acknowledged the source, right? And nobody else, it's all hush-hush. The original hit pieces that came out against the from his immediate Antifa employees got almost no views, but it's actually- Oh, well, views. I mean, that is the determinant of worth. That's so-called research that gets recycled. And so far, at least two European Marxists were pretending in American context to be dissident populists. They have recycled Luke Turner Antifa so-called research on me. Nobody calls them out. Which, by the way, I've told you long ago that I never addressed that. I would never confirm or deny these kind of petty doxing attacks on me and such. Okay, he just goes on and on, just absolutely no value added. So where there is value is in the new Netflix documentary on Wham. And this ties into Bronze Age pervert and his mindset. This new Netflix documentary on Wham is a celebration of life and of joy and of having a good time. So when Wham was releasing all its hits back in, what, 1983 to 1986, the critics just trashed Wham repeatedly. But Wham's music has held up, well, over time, while that critical commentary has kind of fallen away. Now, I noticed with the Bronze Age mindset and a lot of people on the alt-right, they compete to see who can go one down the most, that life is just so awful. And I'm gonna compete with you to show how awful the world is out there. And with groups like Wham, it's about having fun and taking advantage of the freedom and the opportunities that we have. There are a lot of problems with the world in 2023. There are problems with the world in 1983, but there's also a lot to celebrate. And in distant political circles, people compete in one downsmanship. Oh my God, the world's so corrupt that if I just hold down a job, I'm just taking part in some kind of corrupt system. And so I noticed with people who adopt the Bronze Age mindset or many people who get red-pilled, they start earning less money. They have fewer friends. They have less ability to hold on to it. They go into a destructive downward spiral.  There are many good things in the world today. And just competing in one downsmanship, it's not a recipe for a good life. It isn't even subversive. So in distant political circles, everyone wants to be subversive, but the opposite way of going out live would be the real counterculture, right? Celebrating life, celebrating opportunities, both members of the duo are immigrant sons. So there's nothing like being relatively new to a rich, prosperous free country to perk one upright's Janan Ganesh here in the Financial Times, right? There's nothing like family law about real hardship to help one see through the phony nobility of modern angst. Of course, at no point in this Netflix documentary does either man, Andrew Wichely or George Michael, dwell on such a downer topic. All right, back to this discussion on Costin Alamaru, aka Bronze Age Poverty. You're down to here, you know? Yeah. Maybe Schopenhauer, Pinchin, and Toplas. That's what I like to imagine. I can't get that image out of my head, no. Well, I mean, that's how you get red-pilled, man. Yeah, that's true. How you get red-pilled. Some other gems from the yearbook.  What do you mean?  He doesn't look like a student. He's got a suit jacket and a tie, and he's standing, his hair is cut super close. There's just something about him. He just straight laced. Yeah, extremely. And his senior quote appears to be a passage, a nonsense passage lifted from one of his father's research papers. It reads in part, quote, for resident polysilicon microbridge vapor sensor, if there's a large amount of reverse diode leakage, the P region can passivate prior to reaching the end region and so on and so on and so on. So there's one more photo of the yearbook that I want to talk about. It doesn't have his name attached. It's at the front of the book. There's a section where there's photos of student life and they've all got each page as what part of student life it's from, sports, pep rallies, outdoor activities, senior skip day, what have you. And it's just pictures of students. And there's one that I am not 100% sure it's him. But I think it is. It's a photo of a guy wearing this heavily textured 70s shirt with a big collar that flares way out and it's unbuttoned to just above his nipples.  This is what year we're talking about? 98. 98. And the caption reads. Brother, get out of here. The caption reads, excuse me, but I think you're wearing my underwear. Oh my God. And the page it's on.  Dances. This is how he turned up to dances his senior year. Oh yeah. I bet he was just the hottest commodity at that school. Yeah, no, I'm not 100% sure it's him, but that is 100% that same like anxious, overwrought, pervert energy. Right. And these are just snapshots, but I think we have a good sense of who he was going into college in 1998. He started by getting a bachelor's of math from MIT. An acquaintance of his from later in life told me that Kostin said he studied math before philosophy because that's what Plato recommended. Okay, so who's adding more value here? This carefully researched left wing podcast digging into the life and thought of Kostin Alamario, aka Bronze Age pervert or the pervert's own. Except to say that, yes, it appears many art girls and other such girls of high-taste girls from New York scene and other world. I think I am good looking and beyond that also like me especially for what I say, which, okay, I'll get to that in a moment about, but you'll see why I bring this up. But all I can do now is call out the oddity of it all, the context of these articles. And I hear that there are also other articles coming out against me soon from other big publications. We'll see if they get canceled or if they go ahead with them. So on one hand, it's to be expected, I think, because on one hand, it's very odd that there haven't been more mass media articles about me, you know, my book is made. Yeah, on the one hand, he thinks it's odd that there haven't been more mass media articles about him. On the other hand, he thinks it's odd when there are any mass media articles about him. One of bestselling, maybe the bestselling is certainly Far-Reaching Right Wing, so-called, if you want to claim that book. But, okay, in the last few years for sure, I sell, I do far better than any normie conservative book. Okay, you look at Amazon ranks and such, and for five years now, a bit more than five years, and yes, I know. Is anyone really after Bronze Age pervert?  He claims that he had to leave the United States after some article was published about him a few years ago. So, and I think he's particularly well-grounded in reality. He is undeniably brilliant, and he has undeniably done some genuine scholarship on the ancient Greeks. Friends are eagerly awaiting next book. It will come in more than one, but so five years and almost no articles covering this after they were claiming for a long time that they, well, what is this frog thing? We'd want to see a book. We want to see a statement coming out of this sphere online. And well, here it was, but no, it was untouchable. It was given the silent treatment. Mike Anton bravely covered it in Clermont in 2019, but that was one case. And maybe you are not aware, but Clermont has a tiny circulation, and it was even tinier at the time. I personally just me alone without frog friends. So, we all tend to emphasize those metrics which show us to best advantage. So if I was speaking right now to 6,000 live viewers, I'd be talking about, well, 6,000 live viewers can't be wrong. I'm obviously bringing great content now that I'm speaking live to six viewers on YouTube. Well, this is just an elite show. It's just only for the elites. We can't expect the unwashed masses to be able to understand such a high IQ show as this. So we always, most of us anyway, at least I do tend to try to frame things in whichever light presents us best. Had far more eyes on me at the time than Clermont did.  I went to this Friday night singles gathering and I asked this woman out. And then when I saw her in the plane light of day, she was like 250 pounds. And I couldn't even fit the seatbelt around her. So there've been several times where the lighting was a particular way. Oh, when I was 18, I met this woman at church and she looked great. She invited me over to her place that night to watch a movie. Then I went over to her place that night. And I think I arrived a little early and I saw her without her makeup. And it was absolutely frightful sight. And I had seen her at church with makeup on it and she looked good. Then I accidentally saw it without makeup and it just killed whatever ardor I had for her. So yeah, the light that you see things in has a profound effect on your soul. Because my book had already been doing very well from the day it came out. One point of correction on these articles, the only thing maybe I will address, the only fact to it, they keep bringing up the Amazon rankings. But forget, maybe conveniently forget that actually it got up to about rank 100 the days it came out, the weekend came out, that's site-wide, okay? Now, there is some good BAP content on his podcast, such as when he had Menchus Moabag, aka Curtis Yavin on the show. So let's play a little of that. It means absolutely nothing. It might as well not be displayed, you know? Yes, if I may interrupt, the reason many frogs and not just frogs, all kinds of people choose to buy the blue check now is because at least perception it gives some protection from arbitrary banning. If Elon did what you say and kept the old system but at least afforded people protection from this, this kind of capricious banning. And especially if he got rid of the rule of less magic stay against blue checks and journalists, which was introduced after Trump won. And that's what really ruined Twitter because why was that so good? Because people could come into the mentions. You could talk back to these people. You could speak to your betters, right? Yes. And then it was the banning of Milo for making fun of this Michelle Obama type of tweet with the Japanese royal family. Yeah, the only bother, yeah. This was a new thing and it went downhill from there. I mean, you were speaking of 2009 earlier. I remember even as late as 2013, like I would say, well, in theory we need better free speech internet, yada, yada.  You know, it was really, it was sort of no one cared. And then this sort of thing springs up. I love Elon, but he's a boomer. Someone born in 1970s, I've worked very hard not to be a boomer. Most of my friends are younger, you know, my woman is younger. Yes, this is power. There's a certain level of, you know, for a man, there's a certain level of it's a kind of success that happens. And the first time your woman is mistaken for your daughter. No, that's good, yeah. But she won't listen to show, it's all right. Yeah, so you're like, okay, you have this nobility and your goal, you cannot abolish the nobility. Your goal is to master it. And there's a couple of things wrong with a legacy blue check. First of all, the new blue check, you might as well call it, you know, Twitter pro. This is interesting conversation. I have my differences and criticisms of Curtis Yavin and of Bronze Age pervert, but this is a good conversation. This is the second most recent podcast released by Bronze Age pervert. Showing those blue checks too when reading tweets is absolutely useless. They mean nothing. It's a visual clutter. It tells you nothing about this person. As I read your Twitter, I have no interest in whether you're a blue check or not. That use of blue checks, it shows that Elon is a boomer in a way because what he's really trying to say with the new blue checks is I'm not a bot. And the reality is on Twitter, bots are not a real problem. I disagree with that particular part, but I can tell you more in a moment. I agree with what you're saying about Elon. I know people who know him and they all say he has very similar personality dysfunctions to Trump. I don't know. And in that kind of position, your attention span grows very short. As a reader of Twitter, I read, I don't tweet. You know, I can't, I've never even considered thinking of a problem with bots. I don't read posts by bots. Spam is incredible though. It is, it is not just business spam. It's at least previously, there were these blue checks that you mentioned, the legacy blue checks. They regularly use bots to boost themselves and many other such things. I mean, I have GOP, excuse I cannot use not the words, but GOP pathics, let's say GOP pathics who are regularly trying to quote unquote correct the record and do disruption, radical networks and so on in my mentions. And periodically, it's completely artificial. Every few months, there's like 300 spam replies. And you know, it's obviously, I don't know if it's the Santish, the Negro campaign or what, but it's something like that, some outfit like that who's doing this.  But, you know, I'm in a unique position because I only consume content on Twitter. I don't produce.  And so that check saying you're not a bot, you know, dear Jerry online, I know that Bronze Age pervert is not a bot. I don't need, I don't need the visual clutter. As far as I know, if I may say gossip on Elon, I'm sorry, I don't mean to interrupt you more, but yes, and I should tell the audience that I don't usually drink when recording, but with a guest is different. So I'm half a bottle of champagne in. So excuse if I'm being indiscreet, but I hear from people close to Elon that in the beginning after he took over, he half or 75% listened to his Silicon Valley billionaire friends, but that recently, for whatever reason, he's cut them off. He no longer listens to their suggestions regarding Twitter. And so I don't know if this mistake he's doing today with the scraping and the rate limiting is related to that or who's giving him advice. I can tell the audience, I know, well, basically for sure, 98% without having access to documents that, and we're going to talk this on the show, we have time, we're going to talk it later, but there is some kind, whether a sincere traditional conservative TreadCon or some Fedcast, federally cast a traditional so-called E, internet Catholic, giving Elon all kinds of bad advice, which is why of the frogs, I was unbanned I think because certain people in that world like me and asked for me to be unbanned, I don't know, but my friends have not been unbanned and not one person in frog Twitter from original, whether it's Mena, I guess quite a few others, including inkblot, who was extreme popular account on our site, who just simply posted animal videos and he's permanently banned and hounded. Okay, so I'm great analysis going on in the chat. This is an art house 40 stream. It's not a popcorn blockbuster summit movie stream. This is the 40 Sunday morning prestige show. You can't go low brow. He's up against the face of the nation and meet the depressed. How do you 40? Don't go low brow on your Sunday morning show. That's true, like the high brow Sunday morning shows. Used to be your favorite part of TV for me. Of the internet. And meanwhile, Elon is bringing back all the most noxious, you know, the face fags, the people who went to Charlottesville. Those noxious, sort of organizational ones, they're all unbanned. And I can tell the audience this for the first time. E. Michael Jones, who I have nothing against, I know I have friends who like him, he was unbanned, the day Elon took office, took over Twitter that is, but without Elon's knowledge at all. And ever since then, the same group of, you know, the whole people around the quantity campaign, the Charlottesville thing, all the most noxious, aggressive face fags, the people that the feds love because they entrap people in these idiotic public rallies, they're all coming back. But none of the smart witty, humorous frogs are coming back. We are all, you know? Yes, yes. There's something rotten there. And if I step back a minute, you know, there's an old aristocracy and a new aristocracy.  You know, those sorts of people, 90s libertards. And I was a 90s libertard. I know 90s libertardism well, I respect, right? But you have to get with the program. And the, and your job, to be king, it's like, you know, to be a social king in a way. And so you have to basically both constrain the old aristocracy and tame it, really. And the blue check was a critical tool in taming these people, or it could have been a critical tool in taming the legacy blue checks. A lot of there's much disorder. And, you know, I know people, they got a blue check because, you know, they were at a party with somebody to give it to them. Some came through bribes. It was very disruptive. But, you know, if the king basically has a fight with the nobility, with all the counts and dukes and so forth. And if he says tomorrow, okay, there are no more counts and dukes. Everybody's no sir, no lord, everybody's just mister. You know, the reality is there's still counts and dukes. And if he sells, then he sells, you know, count ships and duptons and so forth for eight pounds a month. Yeah, these people are still not counts and dukes. The great thing about old Twitter is that, you know, in the darkness, this new aristocracy, the frog aristocracy, the sort of dark, invisible aristocracy, flourished. And it grew strong. And then later, its enemies began to oppress it. I'm a capitalist, I believe in capitalism. And the capital of Twitter is reputation capital. And the reputation capital is not yours as CEO. Charging money to your best content producers makes no sense. You should earn more money off of them than they produce. You know, you should earn money off of their content and, you know, perhaps even share that money with them. That is one thing he is doing that could be good. But, you know, to basically find them for existing, this also makes no sense. You want to, you know, take these people and perhaps even regularize, formalize this blue check even more. You say, okay, you have a legacy blue check. Why do you have it? You know, come in, apply for this. You know, let's confirm that you're really a noble. You're really... Okay, it's kind of a fun, interesting discussion there between Manchester's Moabag, aka Curtis Yavin and Bronze Age Povert. And let's go back to this biography of Bronze Age Povert, aka Kirsten Olamaru. He eventually got a PhD in political science from Yale. Interesting. Yeah. At MIT. At MIT. His dad taught. So now, one of his earliest writings is from his time there at MIT. In 2000, there's a rant about limousine liberals in the school newspaper that includes an interesting line directed at a previous letter writer, quote, for God's sake, keep your engineering minds away from political and social problems. Which is sort of prefigures his later rejection of rationality. Sure. And is sort of like crazy for so much. Yeah, we'll talk about some of those big ideas in the next episode. Just focusing on biology for now. The biography for now. Yeah, I don't want to know about this biology. That's not, yeah. A lot similar to mine. I don't know what we're doing. Oh, OK. So after this, after his time at MIT, he went to Columbia to study philosophy, his master's in something related to philosophy. There's a 2005 letter to the campus newspaper from this time period where he defended a Harvard professor who, quote, raised some very reserved questions to a private body of faculty about whether there might be innate differences between men and women in their intellectual abilities and preferences. Well, anyone who teaches any number of students will tell you, generally speaking, that their most brilliant students tend to be men. But the girls and the women tend to get the highest grades because females are much more predisposed towards conformity and coloring within the lines. Boys and men tend to be much more aggressive and challenging. So yeah, there do seem to be substantial differences between men and women.  So it wasn't just some Harvard professor. That was Larry Summers, the president of Harvard University. October 2006. It's not really particularly noteworthy. It just attacks a bunch of articles that had recently been published in the paper as being too liberal. Interestingly, in the same paper, there's another student writing to comment on a homophobic prank that was played on the Yale campus anonymously. Now, there's nothing connecting it to Kostin, but there's something very alt-right about the prank. It's like anonymous emails were sent to students en masse during Pride Week, which included the lines. What are you coming out as today?  Embrace the hate. Homophobe? So is Jesus. A male chauvinist? A Nazi? There's no shame in being who you are. Just remember, admitting it doesn't make it right. They're also posters put up around campus. Right. So what kind of student is the most likely to do a whole bunch of work outside of class that doesn't have any effect on their grades? So certain students, women, and I'm thinking of one other group most inclined to, will this be on the test? What do I need to study to do well on the test? But male, frequently white students are much more likely to go bonkers, go all out studying all sorts of things that are not gonna be on a test just because they find it interesting and compelling, while other people are much more conformist and careerist. Defensively by the national organization to gain acceptance for your sins, the acronym of which spells no gays. Now this particular incident, it's too moralizing. He is not a moralist. And this incident is too moralizing for me to think it's him. But I think it highlights that on campus at the time, there was these undercurrents of the same kind of playful but threatening aggression that Kostin's just mastered. Totally. I mean, in the alt-right writ large, right? I mean, that's why we... Okay, if you don't like the current regime, all right? If you don't like that the left dominates almost all of our institutions, how could there not be some current of aggression and rebellion against that? The association like Pepe the Frog and like playful cartoon imagery with like some of the most virulent, racist, homophobic, misogynist things out there. Well, his time at Yale is actually the time period that I have like the best image of because several people that he was there with were kind enough to speak to me. So first is Stephen Smith. Smith's a professor of polypsi there at Yale. He was Kostin's thesis advisor. Wow, so he probably had a pretty good look at him. Are you listening to this? Yeah. More about him than I do, but what can I tell you? Maybe to start off with, you could just tell me about your experiences with Almaru, how you met him and your impressions of him. He entered our graduate program. I can't tell you what year exactly. I'm guessing it was, you know, I don't know, like 2006, maybe 2005 and was interested in ancient political philosophy in particular. He was always sort of shaped by Nietzsche in some significant way that was also... Okay, I'm playing video on the screen of Stephen Smith, famous political science professor at Yale University. He's got a lot of lectures on the history of political science on YouTube. He was vaguely connected with Leo Strauss and Plato. He also, I mean, this would tie into the, maybe the Bronze Age stuff. Kostin always had an interest in sort of, I would call it kind of deep anthropology, kind of warrior society that he was interested in, the themes of kind of warrior aristocracies. I mean, that to give in a way more sort of anthropological support to Nietzsche's ideas and so on. Those were some of the things he was interested in. Those were sort of the boundary posts of his sort of intellectual world aside from like his academic interests, what were your impressions of him? Whether that was just his natural disposition or whether it was something he just wanted to cultivate. He was always the kind of somebody who cultivated an aura of kind of maybe sort of secrecy. Kostin was not close to many people when he was at Yale but he had something like a friendship with another student named David LeBeau who was a, he's pretty, he's pretty lefty actually. Okay, so it doesn't really matter that the people doing this podcast are lefties, all right? As long as they're practicing, you know, good reporting techniques, they enlighten and enliven and provide more depth and knowledge than we previously had. Now, he's actually turned me on to Wendy Brown and his essay, Trumpism and the dialectic of neoliberal reason, though that sounds super boring, is just like, just like blew my mind. It's really good. It was like an early inspiration of this podcast. LeBeau is the associate director and assistant senior instructional professor in law, letters and society at the University of Chicago. Just a little note here. Again, I don't want to get too deep into Kostin's philosophy right now but LeBeau alarms Kostin in with the alt-right and Kostin himself has disavowed the term as meaningless and misleading, but he only started doing that after the United Right rally.  So who knows? Kostin's worried about people misrepresenting him.  You know, so whatever, who cares? Anyway, here's LeBeau. From the get-go, Kostin was alt-right. He was always outset to provoke and it was always telling a line between the ridiculous and the ominous and you could never tell what was a joke and what wasn't a joke. And you could never tell if you were saying the things just to upset people or whether there was something that he actually believed in. Which is, I mean, it's perfectly alt-right and this is already from the very beginning 2000. So there's a video that was sent to me from a Ralph supermarket on Doheny Drive near me and a half-naked woman was throwing around pies. And I saw the video, I found it hilarious but I was struck by how a friend of mine had a completely different reaction. He says, I shop there, I take my kids there. My kids go there, he was horrified by what happened. So I think when you don't have offspring and particularly if you're not married, if you're a bachelor, you're much more predisposed towards a nihilistic view of life. You don't take things nearly as seriously. I noticed whenever people get children in particular and they start having children, they get much more serious about life. They feel much more vulnerable. They become much more interested in trying to make the world around their children as safe as possible. And so there's a maturity, I think, and a sense of greater responsibility than to just yourself that comes with having kids. And Costin Alamario, AKA Bronze Age Pervert, apparently not one for real life bonds, not one for having a girlfriend, sustaining relationships or getting married, that line, having children. Correct. So I had, for the most part, a very playful relationship with him. So I mean, some of his playful jokes are, there was some email about our dental coverage as graduate students and he wrote on this one about dental coverage. For those interested, my cousin Don't go run, Don't go, Mr. Gork's dental aquarium. He made good dental work in White Van at Grand Avenue in Eastridge and parking lot outside plumbing supply stores. He forwarded me small price of 100. He do work, steal, keep gold, he's anything you want. It's almost a boron, yeah, so there's that.  He sends an email, so it's looking for an apartment, so what? I think if anyone knows anything about someone renting out an apartment, this is 2008. Renting out a room or apartment next month, please let me know. The tenants and staff of the other building were conspiring against me and I need a new place for a month, please. And I take this as a joke. It's like, all right, it was a joke where if it got a rise out of you, he won. So the best thing to do was to play and play it as a joke. That made sense as a strategy 15 years ago. At that point, there was a playfulness to it. Yeah. I probably thought he was harmless because in any other world, he would be harmless. And without the rise of the alt-right, he would be harmless. And whether the fact that he already existed then was a sign that the alt-right was coming or whether it's just an accidental consequence of his own personality and broader trauma, I don't know. That characterization kind of reminds me, I mean, I hate to say it, but I feel like of me and my friends growing up again. I know I said it before, but we were kind of shit-stirring types, public prank artists and class clowns and kind of disruptive types. But I mean, I think our teachers and our... Yeah, so people who get married and have kids, right, who put a great priority on their education, on their professional success, on their standing in the community, they're much less likely to engage in a lot of this kind of pot-stirring, juvenile prank-stirring. We had a lot of good influences, you know what I mean? That helps steer us in the right direction. But again, I feel, unfortunately, I feel a little level of like understanding and kindredness with this, with what I'm...  Right. So, that's David LeBeau. A second, one of Kosti's classmates spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, citing the quote, speculative nature of this project. And I can't blame, I mean, I can't blame a serious act include his impressions of Kosti. What about Elamaru's politics? Elamaru's politics, hard right. Workout in the Yale gym wearing an Israeli Defense Forces t-shirt, which he wore, I mean, the point of it was to provoke argument. Like any college campus, there are lots of critics of Israel in its relation to Palestinians, in particular critics of the Israeli Defense Forces, in the kind of uneven sorts of wars that they wage against Palestinian populations. And so Kosti would work out in the gym in this Israeli Defense Forces t-shirt and sort of relish the arguments that he got into. Was he very sociable? Did he keep to himself? Was he able to shut off? Absolutely not. You know, he would have encounters with him in various kind of odd circumstances.  And having a good conversation about classical music with him, actually. He had a lot of cultural capital, a lot. Like he just knew a lot about the history of ideas. He knew a lot about classical music and he liked to show off that knowledge. You know, he seems like a person at the start of graduate school who would be successful in an academic career. Is there anything else that you think is, like, noteworthy? I don't know. No, I mean, like I said, I thought he was a, you know, he thought it was intriguing in some ways. Intriguingly well educated, basically. The kind of person that you wanted to talk to and could learn something from as you talk to. But then just extremely... Yeah, most people are somewhat reluctant to say that any of their peers are noteworthy or extraordinary. All right, because you're giving them higher status. Unpredictable and odd. Like you never knew when he was putting on some kind of odd persona. None of that should surprise you.  So I also identify with that. I put on a lot of really odd personas. What type of person spends a lot of time and effort going into odd personas? Probably who lacks a sense of ease with himself because he lacks normal human connection. When you have normal human connections, people value someone who's stable and predictable.  It's upsetting, it's annoying. It just exerts a cognitive and emotional load when people are not predictable and stable. So the type of people who can afford to or incentivize spend a lot of time and effort creating personas are people who lack normal human connection. We prefer people in our life who are stable and predictable. When people start putting on different personas, it's tiring, it's annoying, it's exasperating, it's often infuriating, it bugs us. Why don't you be real? So this bloke putting on all these different personas, I suspect didn't have much ease with normal human relationships. People I spoke to were white dudes. Costing sees as at least potential equals. He doesn't feel that way about women. More complicated thoughts about people of color. But even still, they all agreed that he was odd. The word creepy was used. Sure, I can see how that would come to mind. Here is the anonymous classmate. So I can recall this one incident, probably David LeBeau was in this class as well. We were in a class with a professor named Shayla Ben-Aviv and she was teaching actually some Carl Schmitt. Apart from Leo Strauss's use of Carl Schmitt, there are some prominent contemporary left-wing Schmittians who argue that kind of populism is a better and purer form of democracy. So these are known as left Schmittians. I was sitting in the seminar and kind of arguing. And half Galician's got some good challenges in the chat.  The sweeping generalization seems stale. So Brunsage Perverts, a profound thinker, created a persona to brand more effectively to spread his content. No, he had this persona many years, even decades before he started spreading content. Why is this disparity such a mystery? It's not a mystery. It's what people do when their lives are empty, when their real self is not succeeding, they try to make up selves to see if these made up selves will be more effective at life.  Maybe in Asian conformist societies, not in latter day post-enlightenment ones. In real life, people prefer you to be stable. People need you to be predictable. If you're in someone's life every day, they need you to be predictable. People you work with and see every day need you to be stable and predictable. When you are not, they will swerve against you. You will become, you'll take up too much bandwidth in their mind. So I'm thinking about this one difficult woman in my life and the best description I heard of her was that it's hard to deal with it because she just takes up too much bandwidth. You don't have unlimited amounts of bandwidth. We only have so much bandwidth, so much energy and it's exhausting when people are unpredictable and unstable. So people who are married with kids, people with respectable jobs, people with friends and people with connections that they're interacting with every day, they're not gonna be able to maintain these stable and prospering ways of life if they're unpredictable, eccentric, unstable and putting on all sorts of different personas.  They're not gonna put up with you, putting on all these different heirs and trying out different accents and wanting to be called by a different name and changing your sexual identity. That doesn't fly with normal people who only have limited bandwidth and they need you to be stable and predictable. If you're not stable and you're not predictable, people will not want you in their life, whether that's in America, Australia, England, France, Germany, Nigeria, Japan or China. On behalf of some lecture meeting ideas, really for the sake of argument. And then after class, Kostin kind of came up to me on the street outside of that class and regularly lectured me for about an hour. You know, over my objections, I was just kind of playing devil's advocate in class a little bit to tease out these ideas, but he was really exercised about being. Yeah, that's another sign of someone who's really socially maladjusted is when they keep talking to you when you don't want to be in the conversation. Right? When I've often, I almost said corn hold, but I meant button hold people because I want to get something off my chest and they're just dying to get away. And it's when I'm at my socially maladroit phase that this happens. It's a really poor trait and no one likes to be held hostage against their will while you carry on different personas or you start ranting about stuff. And I think that's the biggest thing of that political position and argument that CrossFit needs to be a philosopher of the hard right wing, which is what he was doing with him. He also, you know, other philosophers used into would have been like Joseph de Neste, who's a French monarchist, Juan de Moussou-Cortez, a Spanish monarchist, certainly a right winger, you know, maybe even a kind of Neo, we could even say maybe a Neo fascist, certainly a strong critic of liberalism and democracy. And he told me at some point that he was living in his car. But it seemed discordant, given his kind of... Now, I am someone who's shown up to Minion every day for years and years and years and years and there is a stability in those connections. And people at Minion would understand if I put on a different persona when doing a YouTube show or when performing a one man play or performing stand-up comedy or if I'm an actor. People understand that, but they don't understand in daily interactions why on different days, you just have different personas for seemingly no reason. If people have a rational reason for understanding why you're trying out for a new acting role, that's why you're trying out a new accent or a new persona, then there'll be much more forgiving. But if for no reason whatsoever, you're coming out with new accents and new personas, normal people in your daily interactions are gonna find that that just takes up way too much bandwidth. Totally, right wing monarchist, old world, high culture persona that he put on. So you use the phrase neo-fascist to describe him. May I ask why you chose that word? Was it because? Yeah, because of this is when you do the Aztec Nazi fascist, the political theorist that invoked Carl Schmitt, one of which is this left populist Schmittianism, the other of which is what I would characterize as kind of a neo-fascist, hard right wing philosophical position. He always also seemed very disappointed with the nature of the graduate education that he was getting. So he said he came to Yale to study with. Okay, so this is a podcast that I'm playing here from a podcast called Unbalanced. It's a left-wing podcast. And this is Logan, a left-wing journalist conducting an interview with a Yale university classmate of Costin Alamaru, aka Bronze Age pervert. Steven Smith and Brian Garstyn. Oh, and there's another point there that I wanted to comment on that Costin Alamaru was very disappointed in Yale. So Costin Alamaru is very disappointed in almost everything and everyone. Like everyone and everything disappoints him as he has unrealistic expectations. So he's mad at the modern world. You know, he's mad at the different parts of the modern world that he encounters. He's just continually disappointed. No, I wouldn't really characterize them as right wing in any way. And Costin seemed disappointed about that. And he was definitely disappointed about having to take classes with anybody else. Certainly didn't want to take classes about anything except the topics that he was particularly interested in. And then he kind of, at some point, just dropped off the face of the earth as far as I knew. So Smith, Costin's advice.  So the online personality, right, takes over and the real-life Costin Alamaru kind of goes into a recession. So he wasn't surprised that Costin was disappointed by Yale? Well, I think the direction he's gone tells you kind of where he was trending at the time. There was one moment when he submitted his dissertation or drafted his dissertation to me. I was very upset with his talk about eugenics and so on. And the Yale Graduate Program is not the kind of place to give him much support. Brian and myself were probably the closest to him as teachers. And yet, we were both in some ways really, frankly, sort of appalled at some of the directions he was taking. Maybe it's also an example of the kind of Nietzsche and what doesn't kill me makes me stronger. And it provided him with grift for the mill that he's now churning out. Who knows?  Like maybe this is a difficult topic. I wanted to say he was a brilliant student in many ways, head and shoulders over many of the people in our program. I thought he was very impressive intellectually. His personality made it difficult. That's who he is. I mean, he was a brilliant person with a difficult personality in some ways. So difficult people don't find many people who want to put up with that, right? We don't have the bandwidth to put up with any difficult people in our life. Somebody who I felt really had extraordinary talent. I wish it had been put in a different direction. I imagine that's something you probably don't see very often these days. I couldn't peg it exactly when Eugenics died out. But I mean, it was not until they got on that, and I'm sure movement, you know? He had the stick Romanian accent. He's, there's something commoness and dangerous about him. He was a Dracula, an essential character. I don't know if I want that being my quote, the Dracula one. I prefer something more intellectual. But he didn't technically go off the records. Eventually changes a four username to Pound Wolf Iron Man, which was like a medieval Italian aristocrat or something like that, before settling on Bronze Age pervert. Weird. But the fora, this forum is sort of... Yeah, so he went through a lot of different online personas before he settled on Bronze Age pervert. Four chance pretentious cousin. Like they've got philosophy instead of memes and there's like even a mechanism for members to engage in formal debates. Oh, wow. It does have the same sense of humor as Porchan though. If you misformat a search, an error message pops up and to cycle past it, you have to click, okay, KK. Okay. Hilarious. So funny. Threads cover topics that range from high arts to gutter racism. I want to say Miles, his first post is really, it's like sweet in a way. How so? Quote, I ask everyone to forgive if my first post should be a disagreement with a long standing member. End quote. So people who are disconnected from others, they feel that pain and they will often post on the internet about how to connect normally with other people, which is what Kostin Alamaryu does here. And then he goes on to suggest that Plato's Republic should be consulted when they're building a list of potential alternatives to democracy. Sweet for Bronze Age pervert. Sure, no. This forum is where Kostin developed his ideas, his project and his persona. He was active on the forum for like seven years so I didn't do like a really thorough accounting of everything he wrote, but I asked our InfoSec consultant to scrape the website so. Sweet.  He's gonna be more than a decade. God damn. DMS, well, I'll just hand it to you after we get it. Yeah, come help us. So this is a full accounting and we're gonna dig into his actual ideas in the second episode, the next one. So I won't go into detail, but he's much less guarded in the forum than pretty much anywhere else. There's one post in particular I want to read in its entirety from September 2010. It might be the most earnest thing Kostin's ever written. It's misogynistic and bitter. I want to like, I don't want to downplay that. Contempt warning. But it really is a moment of weakness that's like touching in its way. It gives me a little hope that even Bronze Age pervert, like he's underneath it all, like kind of a fragile and salvageable soul, he writes, quote, what's to do in this case? It's been years and this rather pretty girl I know, all of a sudden wrote me now and wants to meet me. She's been strangely insistent, but I believe it is dishonorable to meet her. The reason is this. At the time, I made advances which she resisted. True, she had a boyfriend, but I took this as an insult on her part. Now, after many years of absolutely no contact, she wants to meet. I interpret her writing me now in this way. I believe she's been letting herself get banged, right and left by all manner of men other than me. And now she's decided to give me a try or something like that. I take this as deeply insulting and considering not writing her back, but as I'm not a malicious man and as right now I'm incredibly bored, I've returned some of her emails. She jumped on my first suggestion that we need for a drink. Should I do this? End quote. There's just something about this that seems like really earnest. It's like he developed his misogyny. Yeah, getting in touch with how you're vulnerable, right? That's kind of the beginning of wisdom, right? Getting in touch with how you've made mistakes, getting in touch with the people who you love, right?  That's a path for producing responsible commentary or writing or humor on life as opposed to this Bronze Age pervert persona. And comment here on Twitter. Someone started watching this stream, Arthur Trilby after Colin Liddell tweeted it and Arthur says that I'm right about people in your life being stable and predictable. I've seen daft parents pretending to be an outlandish character for fun with their kids, but after it gets boring, the child will say, stop it, I don't like it, I want mommy or daddy back now. It's unsettling when people in your life are unpredictable. Exactly. The action to like getting rejected by women is a way to protect himself. And here he is, he's in a situation where like a woman is like reaching out to him and all he has to do is like let go of his misogyny. And it's like, it's like cheating. People are making bids. If you're at all a normal person, people are making bids for your attention, whether it's to go for a walk, to share a coffee, to get a cigarette. And if you knock them back a couple of times, they'll start bidding for your attention, right? They will work next to you for years and they'll never bid for your attention again. So part of the way that I may have developed socially the past few years is to start to recognize when people are making a bid for my attention and to recognize it and to acknowledge it and if possible to appropriately respond back rather than ignore or denigrate. Piefing against them. I mean, it seems like one of his first inclinations is to turn to this forum and ask for advice as opposed to like taking a look inside yourself, thinking about it for a day or two, I don't know. Hey, go to Reddit, talk to our relationship advice, make a post, something like that. Sure, yeah. This is a neo-Nazi web forum that is talking about the same. So, and the rest of the thread like that just devolves into this like bro-y posturing, like everyone's like super eager to show that they think it's super gay to talk about being into girls. Wow.  And then it's like, you can hear his accent getting thicker, he says, he responds to the advice, quote, I'm not looking for a wife. I consider myself a seducer and corruptor of pretty girls and it is precisely my failure at bagging her while she still had BF, that is the gall of it. I make sport of such things since unattached girls are not challenging enough. So making sport of playing with people's affections and feelings is really antisocial. It's destructive for yourself. It's destructive for other people, right? This is someone who's in an antisocial spiral. End quote. Okay, so then the next couple of years, Kostin's just gone, but then he shows back up in 2017, sending emails gloating about Donald Trump's victory to his former classmates. He also did contact me after he left on Facebook. He was deactivated. And so gloating about things that others might be very sensitive about, not a good method for maintaining, developing relationships in July. Briefly re-activated the challenge and sent me a message, January 1st, 2017. He's deactivated again, but I remember definitively the icon for his Facebook page was Pepe. And it just said, happy new year, Trump is Prez. And then he disappeared again and I didn't respond. So the next couple of years, Kostin published a handful of essays under his real name, including a couple for the far right magazine, Talkies Mag, in 2016 and 17. That's where Richard Spencer made some of his bones that way too, right? And for Talkies Mag. He left there to found the alt-right. His name is Mag, and he found it after being met. The author's bio is for Talkies Mag, says that Kostin at this time period in 2016 and 17 is quote, currently traveling in Europe and writing a book about the lives of tyrants in ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy, end quote. At the same time, Bronze Age pervert was building a following on Twitter. Hilariously, when he started his account in March 2017, Kostin described himself in the Bronze Age pervert user bio as quote, step barbarian, nationalist, fascist, nudist bodybuilder, end quote. I read somewhere, I think it was a political article. There's a lot of information there, man. You sure you don't want to edit that profile a little bit? Oh yeah, he did. Just gonna bear it all, huh? Yeah. Quite literally. So I read somewhere that Charlottesville was supposed to be a coming out party for the far right to bring fascism and white supremacy inside the Overton window to make it okay to be a Nazi in the way that Occupy made it okay to be a socialist. Unite the Right happened August 11th in 12th, 2017, and the way back machine at the internet archive caught a snapshot of his Twitter profile a week later, August 18th, when he still identified as a fascist and a nationalist. But something changed as the follow-up from the rally became clear because the next snapshot on November 2nd, he sort of put his fig leaf back on. He no longer identified as a fascist or a nationalist, and he downgraded himself to an aspiring nudist bodybuilder. Oh, well, way to hide it, bud. Right? Oh, the window. Still in the period after Charlottesville coasting finally realized success. His book about the lives of tyrants never materialized, but on June 6th, 2018, Bronze Age Mindset was published on Amazon. And it is made to splash. The Dark Enlightenment thinker Curtis Yarvin, aka Mitch Smallbug, named dropped into a vox a journalist for an article that was published less than a week before the book dropped. After the publication, Yarvin further recommended the book to Michael Anton, author of the Flight 93 election, Informer National Security Advisor to Donald Trump. Anton wrote this 5,000 word review for the Claremont Review of Books. There's that name drop by Powerline. I mentioned up at the front end, and it just makes me wonder how many other like minor conservative outlets sort of gave it air early on. Right. Minnesota State Senator Roger Chamberlain is a fan. And Politico reported that the Trump White House was full of staffers who read the book and pointed out that one of Matt Gaetz's speech writers was also a fan. The book has maintained its popularity and Pervert has continued to develop his project and build following. He was banned by Twitter in August last year, but moved to Telegram, where he currently has more than 17,000 followers. He's also begun to write long form essays for extremist outlets, which I won't name here, but one of those outlets hosted a three essay symposium on his works or following the lead of the Claremont Institute, which publishes the Claremont Review of Books, which once published a six essay symposium on Bronze Age Mindset. And I think it's hard for people to really kind of like imagine just how influential this book has been to this movement, you know? So there's a bit of back and forth here because Anton writes the review, Pervert writes back to him, and then Anton responds to the response. And this is what Anton says. Bap is a short for Bronze Age Pervert. Quote, what of those readers who don't get the joke? How may they interpret these and other Bapian declarations? Or more to the point, what might they do? At prosaic level, I suppose I have in mind the following. I wonder if Bap has read or seen the film version of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. In it, in inspiring vaguely Nietzschean and not so vaguely fascist, teacher casts a spell over a number of impressionable girls. One of them takes quite literally to Miss Brodie's exhortation to fight in the Spanish Civil War, runs off to Spain and is killed. What would Bap say or think or feel if a reader not so finely tuned to irony took up his exhortations? End quote.  I don't know who the first person to discover it was, but Luke Turner on Twitter posted a thread of McLeod's tweets about Bronze Age mindset. McLeod writing in the margins of the book, praises the book and highlights several passages. In one, he rewrote a passage from the book, one of many that sort of glorifies sudden eruptions of destructive, even literally suicidal violence by men. The passage reads, quote, it calls on us to allow ourselves to be possessed by it and to wage war on its behalf against its enemies. It being this like masculine willpower that's above and beyond all things, I guess. One of the things I'm confident saying about Kostin is that his philosophy is, to paraphrase when you brown, un-rational without being irrational. He really privileges intuition and instinct as a way of knowing truth. So next episode, we're gonna dig into that. But his thoughts, like his philosophy, is for him kind of a way of... Yeah, so a good overview here on the biography of Kostin Alamario. Finding and understanding his instinct, which he seems to think is the true source of knowledge about truth or something like that, you know? So what I mean is that you can't really separate his politics or his philosophy or his project from his instincts, the feelings he has about himself and about the world and about his placement. And like what we're gonna talk about next time, his life story highlights some of the contradictions in his thinking, because I've been saying he's really smart and he is, but like there are big problems with his conspiracy rights. But we'll get to that. I just wanna end by paraphrasing the brilliant Snyder. I mean, one of his admittedly less brilliant songs, but it's still very appropriate. Bronze Age Berber, it's real name, and even Bronze Age Berber. He's a skinny public high school kid from Massachusetts. Not some monster from out of this world. Like a lot of other skinny public high school kids who stick of getting beaten up by the police guard all week long to go out on the weekend and watch the quarterback get all the girls. So, he's a fascist, man. Right, here's Bronze Age Berber in recent podcast talking with- When you say hire a business guy to do the business, but be the king of the society. You must understand the society.  And the truth is, you know, the king is, you know, yes, he's the champion of, he protects the people against the nobility. He also has to protect the nobility. You know, he protects everyone. And so to say like, to go to war against the blue checker by taking away their checks is just, this is not how you master the nobility. You have to make them serve you and love you. Look, yes, he has many problems here. I agree with you, including- Let me fast forward a little bit here. Not being killed.  Yes.   And of course, you know, these shadowy figures are trying to burn Paris as we speak.  Well, it doesn't appear that France has fallen. Instead, they appear to have done a pretty aggressive and assertive job arresting and prosecuting rioters. So maybe the French law enforcement apparatus is not as incompetent as many dissidents expected. Paris is really a France only healthy part as the countryside and, you know, the old cities which are theme parks, you know. And everything else is either, it's one kind of suburb, which is a sort of, it's either Bugman suburb or Barbarian suburb and, you know, neither- Yeah, France, just an absolute hellhole.  All right, there are vassals of France that are gorgeous. For these things is a credit to France.  I don't know how you feel about sub-shory laws. Yes. Laws regulating clothing for, because I feel that when I walk through the streets, I see, you know, well, it's a sort of double whammy. Because, you know, these people are poor, you know, physically, they're sorry specimens. And then they drape these, sorry, these bodies. Okay, a great deal of contempt for one's fellow citizens. So as a nationalist, all right, you should feel a bond with your fellow citizens of your people, of your nation, and want to uplift them and want to assist them. So this is definitely not a nationalist perspective. You know, that they've neglected, for decades they're draped in these shapeless clothes that, you know, 50 years ago, not even a bum would wear these clothes.  And this is an eyesore. And if I was running president, I would seek to correct that, as you say, through sumptuary laws. And he remarked, you know, back for all of your sensible feelings and proposals, I don't think they would have much popularity with American people, but I agree with you as a campaign program, but I agree with you on this. No, no, he's thinking, he's, this is all thinking, you know, I love, I love Anton, but he's a man of the last century. You know, it's like fundamentally popularity only means something when the people are strong, when the people are weak, you know, it should be, they should, they should sort of follow in reverence, you know. Sometimes the people are right and sometimes the people are wrong. Sometimes the experts are right, sometimes the experts are wrong. There's no group that is always gifted with truth and wisdom, not even ourselves. It's like when, you know, one thing I say often, here I'm in England, in London, you know, and I say that London, England is less democratic than it was in the age of Mary Tudor. And why do I mean that? I mean that because democracy is nothing more than the formalization of the power of the mob. When the people are strong, you know. I mean that's absurd to say that England is less democratic now than when it was under the reign of Mary the Tudor. Like how many people are there in the United Kingdom? 70 million, 60 million, something like that.  And there were far anything, anything. No force can resist them if they are truly determined.  Well, you had about a million determined people in France rioting, they seem to have been put down rather effectively by the French authorities. And, and it's sort of the weakness of the mob.   And they would proceed to do their best to do that. And, you know, you can say it was an age, it was an age was with far more themos, you know. And please do not insult me by saying themos. And it was far more themos. Okay, let's fast forward where they discuss how to pronounce the Greek. E, you know, and so they know that, but look, I don't mean to interrupt you, this is becoming a long time. Let me fast forward. The night for, yes, it's not huge hotel room, but it's something imagine doing that in New York.  Yes, and in New York, in New York, your hotel room is cleaned by a slave, like someone who was not socially connected to you at all. Whereas in Japan, actually your hotel room, they don't really have got-sur-biter in Japan, right? They actually have work for Japanese people. And the simple policy, there's so many, I mean, the purpose of government is national greatness, which is the greatness of every person. That's not the purpose of government. That's a luxury of government, right? The purpose of government is to enable the nation to survive. Second purpose of government is to operate things in the best interests of the people and their progeny, right? Doing great things is a luxury, right? That's not the primary purpose of government. Within the state.   And if they are not amazing, the position of the noble, like the position of the worker or the bourgeoisie, generally speaking, is to get married and have children. Most people find their meaning in life through their family. That is true for the working class, for the middle class, for the upper class, for the nobles, for the aristocrats, for the workers, right? Most people get their meaning in life from their family, not from what they wear, and not from this abstract philosophy. It is fine because the other nobles will laugh at you when you will not go out dressed in your sweat pants the next day. You know, for the woman in the Capri pants, it's very simple to say what she should be wearing if you're unattractive and un- You should be wearing a uniform. A burka is a kind of uniform, you know? So you don't see upper class women, particularly in England, they're with bad legs, because upper class women, generally speaking, who don't have attractive legs, they cover it up. So yeah, generally speaking, the upper classes dress more sensibly than the lower classes. Okay, this is part two of the Unbalanced podcast here, examining the thought of Kostan Alamaryu, aka Bronze Age pervert. Like, ground yourself in like a sense of egalitarianism and respect for people and you'll be okay. This book isn't gonna like brainwash you. Find the book for free, it's on the internet. Don't give him money. And just make sure you clear about your own values. I think that's good advice. So even these lefties don't try to make the case. Oh, you shouldn't read the Bronze Age mindset book. Especially the don't give him money part. Right, quick trigger warning. This episode is the third sentence of the book is, quote, I hardly have anything to say to most who aren't like me, still less do I care about convincing. Unquote. So starting off pretty strong there. Yeah, right? Like we're confident. Yeah, that's a pretty good summary of the Bronze Age mindset. And more clearly than anywhere else calls for a fascist revolution. In this chapter, he alludes to the Heian period of Japan writing, quote, the imperial bureaucrats grew useless and weak. And by the end of this age, all the actual physical power was with the samurai. What I find amazing is how long it took them to figure out they no longer had to listen to the weak commands of the imperial hierarchy and that they were actually the rulers. End quote. He explicitly compares Heian period values, which he names honor, duty, divine, right to modern liberal concepts like legitimacy, soft power, and rights. And he calls them, quote, delusions meant to distract and obscure men of power from their own strength and aims and put them in service to someone else. End quote. He continues, quote, eventually they do realize, however, that they don't have to listen and that they are actually the ones who rule. This moment when the game is up, the moment of revelation is what I've always found very amazing. In the modern world, everything moves much faster. I expect that not long from now, such men will awaken in the West and I suppose other parts of the world. The central point and purpose of the book and of his project is to make a fascist revolution conceivable, to sort of outline how his disciples could lay the foundation for one and to sort of imbi- And let's be real here. If there's anything like this kind of revolution, millions of innocent people would die. I mean, that's what would happen in this kind of revolution uprising. And in our likelihood, we would live under a far greater tyranny than we do now. Do you fascism with positive connotations? Cause it's a dirty word. It's not unlike the secret. He's just in the visioneering stage of the revolution right now. Oh boy. Yeah. What was the whole term about the secret? So why would Bronze Age pervert kind of have a mindset similar to the secret because he's a very intelligent man. And when you're an intelligent person, you get a great deal of pleasure from manipulating ideas, concepts, consequences of philosophies in your head. You spend a great deal of time in an abstract world.   We all tend to spend time in those things that we're good at. All right.  All right, we do what we're good at. We're naturally inclined in different areas depending on our genetic predispositions and our early imprinting.  Yeah, exactly. If you just think about it hard enough, it'll come true. Oh Lord.  Yeah. Or maybe he's just waiting for the world to collapse. So what type of person yearns for a revolution even though it costs millions of dead innocent people? What type of person who doesn't have much of a life right now? It doesn't have people who love him, doesn't love people, isn't connected or bonded with people. If you had a family, you wouldn't be yearning for a revolution who would very likely put your family at risk. So Jean-Francois Garapie lives in north of Canada. There's a very isolated life and he feels like he's well positioned to sit out and survive any revolution.   I remember there were two times in my early childhood where I deliberately set fires. And why did I do that? And as I understand it now, I kind of wanted the outside world to reflect my inside world. I think all of us kind of wanted to make the outside world reflect their inside world. If we're unhappy, then we want everyone else to be unhappy. If we are not getting the prestige, the titles, the success and honor that we believe is due to us, then if we're isolated and living in a fantasy like Costin Alamario, aka Bronze Age pervert, then yeah, we'll be very predisposed to wanting to overturn everything. I remember when I was saddled with over $50,000 in credit card debt between about 2012 and 2016, 2017, I was much more amenable to radical solutions than when, starting in 2016, I started getting my credit card debt tamed. By 2018, I had it all paid off, started saving money. I became much more invested in the present government, the present situation that was enabling my growing prosperity. Then just assumed fascists still rise to power. Maybe. Well, even the pen name Bronze Age pervert is a reference to the Bronze Age collapse. And the pirates that he and his fans like talk about all the time are the sea peoples who were theorized to have accelerated the Bronze Age collapse with their advanced forms of warfare. Oh wow. So how did I get $50,000 in credit card debt? $10,000 of it was reckless spending on how to make money online because I was no longer able to make a living writing online, but I was able to take that knowledge and I probably earned about, with that knowledge, adjacent to that knowledge, probably about $80,000. So I got it back. Then I spent $25,000 on my Alexander technique tuition. And then I wasn't earning very much money while I was studying to become an Alexander technique teacher between 2009 and 2012. So a lot of living expenses were paid. Then in 2012, I entered the full-time workforce and I wasn't able to make much progress with my debts until I got into various 12-step programs with regard to earning and deading. And by 2016, I was working 40 to 60 hours a week and substantially paying down that credit card debt. I also maxed out my credit cards in 1995 as I took a year to write my first book, A History of X, 100 Years of Sex and Film. Then I paid off all the credit cards by early 1998. So two times I, I guess, fairly deliberately maxed out my credit cards when I was trying to launch myself into a new career, whether as a writer or as an Alexander technique teacher. Yeah, he's an accelerationist. If he's not calling for an out-and-out fascist revolution, he's an accelerationist. And that's what he's getting to. Like, this is what he's working on, this is what he's on about, this is what he's doing. And we can't discount a numerological significance to his book, Climaxing, on chapter 69. I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have asked him. I wouldn't either, knowing what we learned in the last episode and all his little zany antics and things. Well, not only that, but he went to Yale specifically to study with Stephen Smith, who's one of the leading experts on Leo Strauss in the country. And one of Strauss' key ideas was that philosophers who had dangerous thoughts sort of hid them, imbued their work with like esoteric meanings. That for a post where he's talking about numerology and Machiavelli's chapter numbers, he's referencing an essay Strauss wrote about Machiavelli. So the multilayered quality of his project, it goes beyond just his writing though. Like for instance, he used to troll journalists who wanted interviews by directing them to a homoerotic BDSM story called Dominated by Doug. It's an 18 part, 105,000 word story that was published online from 1998 to 2004. I guess the perverse is a big fan. Just non-sense trolling, maybe, maybe. Well, in the first sex scene, Doug rapes Clay, the narrator who decides he loves it halfway through. Oh, Jesus. Then you get to know. I'm not religious, but I keep saying, oh, Lord, or Jesus. Oh, Lord, oh, Lord, oh, Lord, he's a lot closer.  In the final paragraphs, Doug expounds on his ideas of a kind of hierarchy of human types with men above women, but some men know better than women and only a small number of real men at the top.   Maybe, maybe. I could write a book with 70 chapters and do something funny on the 69th, you know what I mean? Doesn't make a genius, but I mean, I can see the point you're making. Well, there's another four of posts I wanna share. It's in this long thread on one of his posts. He's talking to people about esotericism in writing, and somebody makes the point that Nazi architecture was designed with different materials that were stronger and weaker so that they would decay in a certain way to leave alluring rooms for future generations to rediscover fascist ideals encoded in the architecture. Interesting, I had no idea. They're having this conversation in the context of talking about encoding or doing something similar with writing to try to make it intriguing to pull people in. Elmaru is part of a movement, the alt-right, and a key part of their project has been to craft alluring cultural artifacts in which they can embed far-right ideas and ideals. One of the functions of his big, grand Nazi architectural esotericism, when he names all these philosophers, when he's spinning these wild mythologies about lost civilizations, he invokes the image of mutant lizards calling herd, just like all that shit, like it's there to entice the curious and self-assured sort of into a labyrinth that he's made. It doesn't matter how many of the little passages to his writing just dead end.   It's shit-posting. Right. Right, so this is a left-wing analysis, but it's pretty profound. It's pretty accurate. It's value-added, unlike a lot of Bronze Age perverts' ranks. It's rig-rolling. It's like just the whole rainbow spectrum of edgelord shit, but imbued with political and mystical significance. Right. By politics, I mean fascism.  You know, I said last time that Michael Anton's review of Kostin's book is pretty solid, and it is. In it, he quotes that same Strauss essay, the one about Machiavelli that Kostin referenced in that four-post. So this is Strauss by way of Michael Anton, quote, the ruthless councils given throughout the prince are addressed less to princes who would hardly need them than to the young who are concerned with understanding the nature of society. Those true addresses of the prince have been brought up in teachings which, in light of Machiavelli's wholly new teachings, reveal themselves to be much too confident of human goodness, if not the goodness of creation, and hence too gentle or effeminate. Just as a man who is timorous by training on nature cannot acquire courage, which is the mean between cowardice and foolhardiness. Unless he drags himself in the direction of foolhardiness, so Machiavelli's pupils must go through a process of brutalization in order to be freed from effeminacy. Yeah, so you get brutalized when you read Bronze Age mindset. Okay, looking at the chat, Huff Gleeson says in literature, particularly death elegy, this is called the pathetic fallacy, that nature itself mourns the passing of the person. Whereas in reality, one realize how unimportant a man is, as nothing in nature reflects the sadness of the mourners. Luke, you should re-release your memoir, Rebel Without a Shure, but with a new forward by Dennis Prager. Who was it great to think of Leo Strauss or Neil Strauss? My friend says, I studied the works of Neil Strauss and put the theories into good use. Luke, you need to send Julie Hartman, Dennis Prager's YouTube co-host, Rebel Without a Shure. It might be the one work that could help her regain her lost trust in societal institutions. And quote, Anton follows that quote by saying that reading coasting is quote, certainly on one level to undergo a process of brutalization. Basically, he's like curating a museum of thought and like he's arranged all his favorite thinkers and ideas and strands of cultural DNA. And then he invites readers to just go and explore it at their own pace. And following their own interest and curiosity. Kind of like a wax museum. Just curating a wax museum gallery exhibition for weird dead old guys. Lean and hard into like the image of him is like Christopher Lee Dracula. I can't get the Schopenhauer centerfold out of my head from the last episode.   He's the guy pervert begged to come back, you know, on that short clip we heard at the beginning. Okay, this is Chateau Hattis. Beginning, he's the guy who inspired all of Kostin's wackiness. But at the same time, he's very careful to erase any leftist thinkers that influence him. Like nothing that he includes in his old museum contradicts his message. Now on to the next part of our exhibition. So a lot of Orthodox rabbis try to disguise and they deliberately fail to credit any non-Jewish thinkers or non-Orthodox thinkers who have influenced them. It's the sign of a very closeted mind. Someone is just solely concerned with the reactions of his own particular in-group. Someone with no wider or greater loyalties to things such as truth or fairness or accuracy. Jesus, the Bronze Age pervert. What's that word? Exegesis. Oh geez. It's one of those words that like, like I know I'm using it right in that sentence and I'm like, I can't quite tell you what the definition is. Right, I don't even think I have enough money in my bank account to be able to use that word. You want to know about his book? Yeah, let's do it. Okay, how you doing? Let's check in here really quick. You just letting the waves roll over you? Oh yeah, oh yeah, I'm good. You know, I'm just, I'm good. You don't sound good. I'm good, I'm good, baby, I'm good. Yeah, this is fine.  I like that, yes. This is, we're just paying our dues here. Okay, there are four parts to his book. Part one is titled The Flame of Life. No surprise, The Flame of Life is Kostin's vision of transcendent masculine violence. He spends most of the first part of the book talking about this idea without really saying it clearly and he spends the rest of the first part of the book just associating the already... I wonder how much real life experience Kostin Amario has with real life violence. So I suspect that many of the people who theorize about how wonderful it would be to have a violent revolution have never even been punched in the face that one good punch in the face and they probably wouldn't valorize violence nearly as much. Using value, idea, word, cloud of a concept with positive connotations. So at the end, the result is this very inspiring and like kind of vaguely erotic mess of like this violent, masculine beauty, truth, value, goodness, strength, joy, laughter, murder, suicide, master, race, word, feeling, vital, energy, cloud. The Flame of Life. That's it, I knew exactly what you were talking about when you said that. Oh, I wanna redo this, the Flame of Life. The Flame of Life. We should add some echoes to the back of that. Sounds like the Wizard of Oz or something. Now, one could probably untangle this mess of an idea but this is what I'm talking about, crawling through the muck. Like anytime the book makes you curious, you really have to ask how willing you are to debase yourself. The only one I got down and dirty with here was the bit about vitalism. For example, you know, you read the book and then there's, here's just a sentence comparing various Indo-European language family words which Kostin insists completely without evidence, quote, all ultimately refer to a kind of vital life force capable of superhuman strength, end quote. And then, here's like something I want. Yeah, right, it's like, give me this.  It's the manliest thing you could do. Here's another quote, in the beginning was the word? No, in the beginning was the demonic fire that bursts out in men like Alcibiades and lays low the cities of men and exposes all their nonsense. I wonder if he's like a mega death or an Alice Cooper fan or something too because this is very metal. It's vital, it's vital writing. Yeah, I mean, he's like trying to shove these like rousing feelings into it, right? But it's fantasy. Like this is just not how the world works.  Right, me either. Now Kostin would probably say that we are just bug men. Basically we're too effeminate, too have ever really drunk deeply of the pure man vital beauty truth feeling soup. Needless to say, I find this unconvincing. But again, he's not writing for us, man.  It's his clubhouse. And we can't come in and play if we don't play by his rules. So let's let that be for now. But when I have been talking about like how he privileges his instincts or when he privileges his emotions or his feelings as a way of knowing truth, like this is what I mean. He's just asserting that he has this almost mystical connection to some deeper truth. You asked me to try and understand what is appealing about this guy. And I think I was never a very religious person. I always had good influences around myself, but I also like learned to trust myself early on. And so I feel like I have a... So I grew up at Seventh-day Adventist and Seventh-day Adventist is obsessed. Seventh-day Adventists are obsessed with the end of the world, all right? The Branch Davidians, David Koresh, they came from the Seventh-day Adventist. My father did a PhD in apocalyptic, meaning what will happen at the end of the world. So I was raised that God was gonna come down to earth and consume almost everyone in fire and the elect, right? Those who are truly with Jesus, they will escape to the mountains when the forces of evil, those who want to institute a national Sunday law try to chase us down at the very last moment. Jesus will swoop down and save us. So this kind of apocalyptic revolutionary vision is very emotionally familiar to me. Strong sense, personally, towards my intuition and towards my instincts. But that doesn't necessarily mean that I essentialize that or that I place my instinct above anyone else's instinct or give a machismo. Populous propaganda, that there's these undeserving elites, the wrong elites, the wrong people are elites at the top who are crushing from the top and then invading hordes, crushing the middle from below, you know, and then the good people are caught in the middle. I mean, this just sounds like fascist anti-Semitism, really. Like that's what they relied on to fill this gap in their... Yeah, this ideology. And not just the othering, but the conspiracy aspect of it. If reality reflects supernatural truth and if that truth is the superiority of the strong and the strong willed, why aren't they already in charge of everything? Right. So like fascism needs a conspiracy theory. Like it needs an explanation as to why the weak are stronger than the strong who deserve to rule because of how strong they are.  Great comment here from Media Hits describing the Bronze Age mindset worldview. The world is ending, why date goals, why buy a home, why build a career, why get educated, just sit at home and watch anime. Okay, an unsuppressable vital youth energy possibly be suppressed? The answer is an overgrowth of yeast life. Each individual cell, me and you, let's trans people, people of color, on all the classics, each individual cell is subhuman and inferior, but all together it becomes like this stifling organism that can suppress the unsuppressable by sheer mass. Part two of the book, the parable of the iron prison. Basically what he's describing, what the iron prison is, is a mashup of what you and I would call neoliberalism and you and me. It's like, it's the global world order and woke capitalism and lefty critiques of the global world order and woke capitalism. In his book, he just calls this whole thing the iron prison, though since the book's publication he's really preferred global homo.  That's the catch all now. That's the catch all, yep, global homo. This is kind of like the big word, cloud, vital fire of masculine syrup from part one. And in the same way, his ideas about the iron prison are kind of half baked and that's somewhat intentional. He wants the reader to finish the work. It's taken baked pizza, you know. Still this is one of the most lucid sections of the book thanks to some evocative writing, such as quote, when I speak of something like owned space, it must not remain. Remember 2009, 2010, there are all these movies, the road about the end of the world, apocalyptic movies like The Road or The Book of Eli. Yeah, the apostle Paul says better not to marry, but better to marry than to burn with lust. So Christianity is a romantic religion, right? Spending time in apocalyptic thinking is romantic religion. You're seeing more to reality than is really there. By contrast, the sages of the Jewish tradition, most rabbis have put their primary focus on how you conduct yourself today. And building up possessions, building up wealth, building up a family, building up skills, building up your connections to your family, your friends, your community. These are all good things to make life better today. So you'll often see Jews will make complaints if the air conditioning is two degrees too cold or two degrees not cold enough. There's no mitzvah in Judaism as understood by most Jews to suffer. Well, for Christians, everyone has to suffer. Christ suffered on a cross. There's much more valorization of suffering and of a romantic vision of life. Much more focus on the end times, what happens in heaven, in Christianity, Judaism pays virtually no attention to what will happen in the next life. So you go to a Christian church and there's a much more transcendent otherworldly experience because Christianity is much more of a transcendent otherworldly religion. Judaism is the most, most this world focused of the world's religions. May near word. When you understand something, I mean, you must see and feel it like you would a landscape, you know from youth, how to navigate all its nooks, the different heights of earth, the banks of streams, where the trees are and how it feels inside them, how long it takes walking from this or that group of beach to the abandoned fact.  And there's an old Jewish joke about a man says he's got a job waiting by the tower of the city, waiting to spot the Messiah. And apparently the pay isn't very good, but the good thing about the job is that it is for life. Factory. So that the map is already in your body, unquote. One of the things I find interesting about this quote is that he's describing his childhood. So he's talking about either Newton, Massachusetts or Bucharest, Romania. And in the next section of the book, he's got just this diatribe where he just rants about the suburbs where he's clearly talking about Newton.  He complains further that.  All right, most people who are actually raising children don't think this way. So Costin Alamaru, aka Bronze Age pervert has all the characteristics of the modern charlatan guru, including all these proclamations on things that he knows absolutely nothing about. People move to the suburbs to raise children. There are no nooks and crannies where boys can form gangs, be away from prying eyes or parents and others and have the feeling that they are exploring and owning territory as there is in the city of the countryside. So in this section where he's talking about the iron prison, Costin's kind of describing the problem that is philosophy, for lack of a better word, is meant to solve. It's the dominant system of governing. Well, I think what he's talking about that here is try that in a small town. And you can have that same kind of ethic of try that in a small town. You can have that in a big city if you're part of some kind of traditional community. All right? So try that stuff in a small town. If you are wired into any kind of traditional community and it's not gonna go, you do have a sense of space and earning space when you're part of a tight-knit community. All right?  All right, when you're part of a small community, car jack and old lady at a red light, pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store.  Well, cuss out a cop, spit in his face, stomp on the flag and light it up. You think you're tough. Try that in a small town. Try that in any closely knit community. You can have closely knit communities in a big city. You can have a close knit community in Beverly Hills in Manhattan. You can have this ethos of a small town in those places if you are strongly connected to others. All right? So you have to buy, you make it down the road when you try to pull that stuff in a small tight-knit community. All right? In a small tight-knit community, we take care of our own. Cross that line, it won't take long for you to find out. I recommend you don't try that in a small town. All right? Try that with a tight-knit, effective, high IQ community. All right? See how far you make it down the road. All right? People who are raised up right or looking to take care of their own not gonna let you try that stuff in their small town even if their small town happens to be in Beverly Hills or Manhattan, right? There are a lot of tight-knit groups that are very effective in harnessing law enforcement, government powers, their own powers to provide incentives for outsiders not to come along and muck things up. All right? There are plenty of tight-knit communities in Beverly Hills and Manhattan, Miami Beach, right? That look after their own. They keep a watch out for outsiders with bad intentions. All right? Something goes down that's negative for your community.  People carry guns lawfully. People form neighborhood watch programs. They form security services so they can legally carry guns. So try that tomfoolery in a small town, right? Try that grooming in a small town. Try that perversity. Try getting away with that in a small town. Like come into some tight-knit synagogue or church and start trying to play with kids who are not your own. Right? Try pulling that stuff in a small town. Right? Let's see how far you go. I don't think you're gonna get very far. And some control in the US and Europe in particular, but around the world. You know, something you and I know, like we've talked about, that I found a super sketchy address for coasting online. And last summer, I went to Boston for a wedding. Okay, this is basic journalism. If you become famous enough, people will want to know about the community and what you live. Set aside an afternoon to go knock on the door. The Alamarus did used to live there, but they moved to Florida two years previously. In the neighbor I spoke to, didn't know them, but vaguely remembered their son. Talk about due diligence by the way. It was an opportunity. Listen here, listener. This man put his life on the line. Went knock on the door. Went knocked on like, yep, in suburban Boston. Hey, those are mean suburbs. Be careful, get out of my yard. Fuckin' spirit. Yeah! I just like walked around though and tried to imagine like what baby perverts saw when he was cruising the neighborhood on his huffy. I'm in Newton Center, Massachusetts. Not too far from the Harvard campus. It's very prosaic here. Stereotypically suburban. Even literally a white picket fence behind Alamarus house. He said the trip was mostly a bust. Alamarus didn't live there and hadn't for a long time, but I did notice something that I thought was worth sharing actually about the architecture, which is really funny. But Newton has been a middle-class, wealthy liberal enclave for a very long time. And the buildings reflected a lot of the values of the people who lived in them. You know, you can start to see in these houses the material promises of the New Deal that are like exemplified in the post-war Ramblers, slowly being supplanted. First by these big boxy monstrosities whose only notable aesthetic quality is that they're fuckin' big. And then later by just these gaudy McMansions that copy this or that classic or modern style is cheap. Okay, the chat says this, try that in a small town mentality is how Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin.   Sonny says Southern conservatives like fantasize about killing out-groups, people that don't fit in. It's not a secret they've done that for generations. Yeah, that's not a dominant feature of Southern life. It's very much the exception, not the rule. It's possible. It's like the march of progress, you know that picture? I think so, yeah. And the proof is just look at crime rates in the type of small towns that like country music, right? They're much lower than the crime rates in big cities or in towns that don't like country music. Yeah, it's like a human evolution from like monkey to caveman to modern human, but instead it's like this idealized New Deal materialism evolving into woke capitalism. Right. And that's just where he grew up. So you can kind of see where he's going from a little bit. Well, I mean, and also... As a kid. Yeah, well, the other thing is I kind of vaguely remembered a podcast episode I heard that cited Newton as a case study of liberal hypocrisy in particularly around race. I couldn't find that, but I did find a PhD dissertation by someone named Lilly D. Geismar called Don't Blame Us, Grassroots, Liberalism in Massachusetts 1960 to 1990, that made about the same point. Quote, by 1970 in an article entitled Liberalism and the Subverts, Newsweek characterized Newton and its neighbors as the seedbed for liberal causes, such as civil rights, anti-war activism, environmentalism, and feminism. The political activities of grassroots and liberals, however, also made this set of affluent communities the sites for the major battles that established lasting constraints upon the ability to create racial, spatial, and economic equality. End quote. At one point, Geismar even uses the word hypocrisy to describe Newton's residence opposition to busing initiatives. Like you said, you kind of see where he's coming from with that and kind of... We're also starting to see a shortcoming to his work, which is that he privileges his own experiences and instincts. And he seems to have no analysis of the limitations of his own experiences. So everything to his left becomes just this undifferentiated lump where it's like... You can easily fit new things under it. Yeah. He can't escape the suburbs in his mind. If there's anything that I can track about him is that not only are his politics are devoid of any type of empathy or compassion, but that he views those that value those things as subhuman and less than. And I can't believe you would even like begin to have empathy for someone else and base your worldview around that, get libtard or whatever. Yeah, I did see empathy and compassion as the basis for politics.  Right, empathy and compassion have their place in private life. They should not be a basis for government or for politics. Sure, that's just one. Youth. In this part, he sort of lays out his idea of how men can transcend the iron prison to touch that vital beauty truth. Youth slime mold. That's just throbbing away up there in the sky. Throbbing. Spoiler alert. The answer is variations on a murder suicide theme. Most of this part is parables of men who have done this, transcended the iron prison in some way or another. Most of them are ancient, but one or two modern dudes as well. In some cases, the suicide is metaphorical with the men just displaying a lack of concern for their own lives or well-being. However, and despite his wackiness, coasting is not an individualist. Murder suicide is never about self-grandizement. It's always in service of a grand purpose. For example, he references Achilles throughout the book who in his mythologizing was filled with a spirit of fire by the goddess Athena and went on a suicidal rampage. He links that rampage to a larger political goal. Quote, and you must understand one thing. The end of Achilles' mission was the total destruction of the city of Troy, the fire melting the brick of its alleys, its men killed, its women and children sold into slavery. This last was held to be the right of conquerors throughout the history of the Greek world or at least for its vital period of ascent. End quote. The grand fire, the culminating event or whatever.  Wasn't that just like the whole thing? Then whatever comes afterwards, you know whether the gangs of vigilantes take over or whether it's, you know, but it's all about creating the great fire. Yeah, is an accelerationist. Right, yeah. Anyway, continue. Okay, the very opening lines of this section are the ones that first intrigued me by their sheer fashionness. The life appears at his peak, not in the grass, but in the military state. This is also the section that shows the influence of pickup artists' culture most clearly, which you may not expect.  He's a pickup artist. Yeah, Chateau Harteast, I believe he's still posting on Gab. He very carelessly did not back up dozens of his drafts of posts. He did not back up his website. And so when WordPress determined that his website violated his terms of service, they deleted it. Chateau Harteast was so careless he didn't have it backed up. And that was just a killer blow to his ego and it hasn't been productive since. Lager, who coasting name drops online, but not really in the book, he was popular in the late 2000s to the early 2010s when coasting... That is kind of an example of how under-owning can kill you. All right, if you are so careless that your passion project has no backup, right? Life will inevitably throw you a curve ball and if you don't have things backed up, if you don't have contingencies, if you are not wired into connections with other people, family, friends, community, right?  So for Chateau Harteast, he was posting prolifically, he endured one setback and it has pretty much ended his posting career. He could not overcome that one setback. He lacked enough emotional flexibility to be able to deal with that one downturn in life. He was developing his ideas and Harteast's 16 Commandments of Pune illustrated his influence on coasting. Diving into the bile, man.  Where were you?  Wow. Okay, that's pretty good advice for life.  Women won't respond well. Women want you to have a higher purpose than just seeking their approval. So some good stuff there. You're irrationally self-confident. Yeah, here's that idea. Yeah, be irrationally self-confident in some situations is adaptive. In other situations, it's maladaptive. It's not like confidence or appropriate levels of confidence or irrational levels of confidence that just always right or always wrong depends on the situation. There are times when you should pause. There are times when you should ask for help.  There are times that you should be in a subservient position, taking directions from others, right? You don't want to go through life with absurd levels of self-confident. There's one story in Kostin's book of Hippocrates, an ancient Greek historical figure. In Kostin's parable, Hippocrates goes to a feast to try to win the hand in marriage of some... Rikata says, women want to be impregnated. The best my wife ever treats me is when she's actively trying to get pregnant.  So everybody has an agenda. And the more you live in reality, right? The less mono-focused you are on yourself, the more attuned you will be to other people's agenda and therefore the better you'll be able to get along with them. Right? Take a little time, figure out what's on top of someone else's agenda. It very likely will not be the same thing that is on top of your agenda. Aristocrates' daughter. He's basically won the competition when he's touched by that vital, brutal, masculine truth soup force and he dances upside down on a table and the father tells him he's out of the competition but Hippocrates says, quote, Hippocrates doesn't care, end quote. Kostin explains the parable, quote. In this one phrase you have the whole attitude of this beautiful, reckless, piratical aristocracy that colonized and conquered their known world. It's an attitude that upsets all the moral fags of our time, of the left and right. Hippocrates went there to have a good time to display and use his powers in excellence and biological superiority but these two things are the same. He didn't care about the gain or loss of a wife. He didn't go to act like a meek, beaten male. Back to the 16th Commandments of Poon.  As Harteast put it in his 16 Commandments, make your mission, not your woman, your priority. Kostin's taken this a step further and cut out women altogether. He sort of like moved the art of the pickup to the political realm where it's definitely fascist. You know, it's like this powerful, aloof, real man using his innate powers to pull in the masses.  On a side note, remember how I said I strongly suspect that Kostin obscures lefty influences? Oh yeah. This is another example of that. The only time I've ever seen him speak positively of a leftist writer is in a for a post encouraging people to go read that Susan Sontag essay, Fascinating Fascism. He calls it a hostile and liberal review but even so it is educational, shows what the other side thinks. Years later, he's still talking about that essay. This is from the same episode we heard earlier. I'm much concerned with theories of things like homophascism. That's a word they use or fascist aesthetic. I don't know if they use that particular one any more from Susan Sontag but the concept was indicated and you could say, The fact that this is a queer woman he's talking about is all the more amazing and it kind of highlights how precarious he is intellectually. That he can't even acknowledge influences like Sontag because it contradicts the central message of his cis male superiority. Well and insofar as that he will give them any. Okay, if a queer woman is right or wise then you have to, you should give her credit if you're a person of integrity.  A hint of credit, he rolls it out as like opposition research the same way that I would if I'm trying to share information on a particular fascist or something like that. He's like, well I don't agree with them but I mean, this is how they think, you know what I mean? Differences I happen to be right and he happens to be wrong. Oh see and I'm just over here like, I love Bronze Age Poverty, give me the fash.  That's all you really need to know. Both approaches are. They're fine. Both are good. Okay, oh but anyways, part four of Kostin's book is called A Few Arrows. In his review of the book, Michael Anton brushes off the section but I disagree with Mr. Anton. Like I said, Kostin's book climaxes in this section. This is the heart of what he's been saying and building to. Maybe Anton's right that like philosophically or intellectually the final section doesn't add anything but Kostin's a vitalist for him. Intellectual pursuits are only as valuable as the impact they have on the world and this section is where he lays out his vision of how disciples could prepare for a fascist revolution. It's a lot of practical advice tactics about how to further the cause. It's a lot of weightlifting, memeing, infiltrating military and security services and a whole chapter dedicated to the transcendent glory of bros before hoes. People hoping to understand or contend against the right and online intellectual and cultural spaces could do worse than to read this part of the book though. This is all the practical nitty gritty nuts and bolts and if you wanted to be a fascist operative, you know. Or if you were a lefty and you wanted to learn how fascists thought about what they were doing on the internet. Yeah, that's a waste of time. Don't do that, that's such a waste. You're undercutting me, Miles. You're supposed to be supportive. Oh, I'm sorry. You're supposed to believe in me. All right, I'll put my other hat back on. All right, keep going. Okay. Last time I'll interrupt. No, that's it. I mean, that's his book now. That's it, that's the book. That's the book. That's part four. Yeah, that's it. Familiar fascism in Kostin's writing. It's like this transcendent truth of biology has expressed in race and gender, rigid, elitist hierarchy, the assertion that only those at the top of the heap have any right to rule, climaxing with the leadership principle, and a cult of violence and death all sewed up in a perfect erotic but not garment. And any seams are covered by his bulletproof vest if I don't write it for you. I roll my eyes at him. It's probably clear, but I've tried to describe his thoughts while staying inside the boundaries he lays out.  Right, 100%. Let's stop playing his game, yeah? Yeah. Okay. Let's go hard.  Now that flame of life, word soup, that only makes sense if, A, there actually is a fascist God spirit above and behind the material world that only a select group of elite men are capable of experiencing, or if, B, he's mistaking his feelings for mystical truth. Feelings? I was thinking he has feelings. Oh, he certainly feels a way about women. He's touched by the divine limb of something.  No, that's a fantasy. 100%. So what we're left with is the core of his ideology, his philosophy, his whole project, his brand of fascism, it's just his own emotions, which he's sort of imbued with mystical and political meaning. Yeah, I think that's a pretty accurate analysis. Luke Ford, how did the Biden corruption charges affect your view of them? I primarily see politics in terms of structure, not in terms of personalities. I haven't probably spent five minutes thinking about the Biden corruption charges. I don't think I've read one article about them. I don't think the Biden corruption charges have made any difference to me. The charges of corruption against Donald Trump also don't make any difference, I think in terms of structure, it doesn't really matter that much if the Biden family is corrupt. What matters is the structures of an economy and the structures of a military and the structures of a system and how effectively and efficiently it meets the challenges put before it. So overall, I'd give Joe Biden a C grade, I think. I'm not talking about just like falling in love or being scared or whatever. I mean, really specifically, say the way he feels about trans people, whatever visceral reaction he has to trans people, he's mistaking that for a message from God, essentially. Did Shattu Hattis ever get dark? Yeah, his real name and information was spread across the internet. His transphobia, the discomfort he feels around women, his xenophobia, and on and on and on. And I'm not being flippant when I said he makes these feelings magical. He has a whole thing about how he isn't a materialist and how there's a mystical truth beyond physical matter. He even calls hormones big magic. This is where we're gonna start harkening back to his biography. He's brilliant, but he's not exceptional, right? Like when he goes home, he's got his brother there who's well on his way to becoming the kind of person that transnational banks make into a VP. And then his father's there at home, who's an experimental research engineer at MIT. I couldn't find too much about his mother, though someone with her name got a master's in education from UMass Boston in 1997. So she's also pretty smart.  He clearly struggles to talk to girls. He shows up to school dances in a blonde wig between Jack. Okay, let's get some Fox News coverage here of the new Jason Aldean song. And is responsible for nearly 30% of the country's shipping. Well, country music star, Jason Aldean is performing, I mean, he performed last night in Wisconsin and he is now speaking out about his controversial video. You know, it's gotten a lot of backlash across the country. That just shot into number one. The music video and his song, Try That in a Small Town, has come under fire because some people say it has racial and violent overtones. Well, Aldean directly addressed that controversy when he was on the stage in Cincinnati on Friday night. What I am is a proud American. I'm proud to be a country. I want to see it for sure to what it once was before all this **** started hyping to us. I love my country, I love my family and I will do anything to protect that. I can tell you that right now. Well, critics have been saying that Try That in a Small Town music video has racial undertones. Aldean denies that and he says that what's happening is an example of cancel culture. Yeah, it's got racial overtones because it's against carjacking and it's against disrespecting cops and it's against breaking and entering and robbing liquor stores and that's racist to be against those things. Right though. My God, the racism off the hook. I tell people he thinks they're wearing his underwear. Like I imagine him as a high schooler, you know, all those familiar angsty feelings walking around the neighborhood and what's he see? Textbook, liberal hypocrisy. Deep-seated racism and elitism hidden under platitudes about equality and civil rights. And right alongside it, at least in his mind, is Chuchescu's Romania, which is another kind of leftist liberal hypocrisy. You know what, there's actually another for a post where he calls for a natalist program for whites. Natalist? Natalist, that probably, yeah. I'd never heard the term natalist before so I looked it up and it's a policy. Yeah, it's amusing because Bronte's Pervod has absolutely no time for women. Doesn't particularly respect the idea of a family, building a family, having kids, right? These things are of no interest to him compared to the homoerotic joys of banging fellow aristocrats of the spirit. So you designed to encourage high birth rates. You seem to have heard the word before. Right. I have friends that are anti-natalists, unfortunately. There's a whole set of politics. Wow. There's no way he avoided trauma. No one who lived through the Chuchescu regime did. Right, of course not. But also something I learned after we recorded that last episode, the Socialist Party, which Chuchescu eventually became the leader of, the control of Romania from a fascist regime. And many of Romania's anti-communist folk heroes were fascists. How much fascist romanticism was around when he was growing up? Maybe none. Right. Bucharest stayed with him. At some point in high school or shortly after that he finds his way onto the internet along with the rest of us and he finds a community that's actively working to reconcile all the same conflicting emotions and realities that he is. And eventually it becomes the alt-right. I just wanna acknowledge that I'm on pretty shaky ground here. I'm trying to read another man's soul, but I'm not the only person who's seen this in Kostin. Here's David LeBeau, former Yale classmate of Kostins. And we spoke in part one. I reminded Avicii of whom I think he thought very much about who, you know, it was Blonde Bista at the beginning who just in violence because they didn't know any better and they just, they were just pure vital energy and they were unbounded and that part meant dominating without giving it a second thought. And then there's this priestly revolt where morality comes in to pain them, to subordinate them. And then mankind is never the same again. And there's no way to go back to the Blonde Bista. There's no way to become as innocently destructive as they were because we're too smart. And I think about him there. I don't think he's a well person. Let me say, I don't think he's, I don't think he gets a friend agreement like that, but I don't think he's a mentally well person. And I think there's something about the provocation that might have been some sort of, and I'm speculating here, some sort of compensation for sort of insecurity. Like I wasn't very, myself, I wasn't that popular in middle school and that I remember consciously cultivating my sense of humor. So that I would, and I turned out, it's the realm it says I'm actually extremely funny. And it was because it was a way to compensate for a felt lack of social standing. And I wonder if, again, I don't know what the context of his upbringing was. And I think there's some way in which the provocation and the provocation is a way to set himself apart from other people and to somehow feel superior and hurt people who maybe have things he didn't. I think there's something to that. And when I see the pictures of the Blonde Bista constantly on his website, I can't help but think that there's a sort of yearning to, I don't know if it's to be with, but I think it's certainly yearning to be those people and a knowledge that some deeper level that he won't and can't possibly ever look like that.  That's what so much of the website's about. The most vital just takes your woman. And it's very, it's jarring to see that come from him because, or it's not, I think it's quite typical. The Blonde Bista that he talks about would never be tweeting on a website, pictures of people and writing down all these gnomic phrases about the war to come or whatever. They would be out there doing things without thinking about it. So the very fact that he's writing these tweets is a testament to how impossible, or how wide the gulf between him as a person and these fantasy ideals of what the great heroic people look like are. Key, by creating his website, is testifying.