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I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingyona show.
All right, Jay Burtons here, how you doing? Jay?
Speaker 3: Doing great? Pete? Thanks for having me back.
Speaker 1: On of course. Carl dol here. Carl, Hello, sir. Well,
I guess with the end of the year here, we're
going to, uh remember somebody and maybe maybe we can
think of other people that you know, we've we've lost
this year. But z Man was somebody who was quickly becoming,
you know, a part of you know. I mean he's
always been, he's been at the forefront of this thing.
But I mean he came to the OGC conference this year,
I've seen him at American Renaissance, and you know, a
bunch of us got to spend have spent time with him,
and he tragically passed this year. And uh, I know
Carl has been in a group chat with him for
like years and has known him a lot longer than
I have, at least digitally. So you know, I just
thought we'd you know, talk about what you know, his
life in his work, which is prolific, and yeah, just
try to remember a good guy, a guy that we
all like. So Carl, why don't you go first? You
knew him the best out of all of us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, It's really interesting because when he and I met
in person at the OGC National Conference in Tennessee. I
went up to him and I was trying. I was
orbiting around him every time I saw him, because you know,
I knew what he looked like, et cetera. I didn't
get to talk to him until after I gave my
presentation on Saturday morning, and I just walked up to him,
like he's mid conversation with someone else, and I was like,
if I don't just interrupt this conversation to introduce myself,
we'll never get a chance to actually talk, because you
know how it was with him, as people swooped down
on him anytime there was a break to just talk
to him and pick his brain. And so I rudely
interrupted a conversation, which I find appalling to do by
making a reference to like an inside joke. Our joke
was that now that he lived up in the hills
of you know, West Virginia, he was drinking spider juice
all day because he was talking about how he had
all these spiders all over this house that he was
cleaning out and everything like that, and he would be
tipping one back after a long day of working in
the fields and stuff like the slave that he was,
and we just hit it off and we spent that
whole night. I mean we talked to you, Pete. He
and I were standing there and Jay also, We were
standing there for like four or five hours just talking
and it was like we and we had never met
each other in person before, but we had both been
on GAB since the very beginning of it, and we
had been in a group chat for I did the
math and it was like eight years eight and a
half years something like that with this with a small
group of people. And the thing with Chris is that
like he was very giving of his time. He would
he would talk to anyone who would who would listen.
But as you also know that like he would, he
he was pretty easy to interview because you ask him
a couple questions and then he'll just talk for fifteen
minutes and he'll string together this long series of like
complex thoughts and we'll wrap everything up really nicely tied
with the bow. And you know, so he was just
an incredible guy to talk to, a great resource read
all the time, he knew all the basics, and he
would spend a lot of time talking with people saying,
I've been in this thing for a really long time.
I understand why your position is X, but what you
have to understand is also why. But at the same time,
like this year, he was blown away by how much
mimetic progress had taken place in the past year, you know,
like politically he didn't have a lot of hopes for
the Trump administration, but he was amazed by how much
they actually did do and was actually being done. But
most importantly, the mindset that had shifted among people. He
couldn't believe how much progress had been made in such
a short time. So it was one of those things
where he spent at least as much time talking about
how like he felt almost like he didn't know how
to what was going to happen next, because kind of
the perspective that he developed after decades in this thing
was like being turned on his head instantly. So very
interesting conversation that we had there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I did not know z Men for as
long as you did, Carl. I found him fairly late,
I think off of an interview that he did with
Pete if I'm not mistaken, And for me it was
incredibly refreshing because Zieman was at all points. A realist.
He was very reasonable and we very quickly hit it off.
As you said earlier, he's very giving of his time
and so when you know, my tiny little Twitter account
just reached out and basically said, hey man, I'd love
to talk sometime, he was very accommodating to me. And
it was really interesting going back into his backlog, which
you know, once I you know, i'd heard him on
Peach Show and once I'd made contact, I just voraciously
went back through, i mean years and years of podcasts
and you know, years of essays. Several things struck me,
which is one he had a lot of life experience,
both in and outside of right wing circles, and that
led to a very very helpful perspective. And I mean,
even now, there are many of my ideas that aren't mine.
There's emails, you know, I took them from him, and
there's a great and this was fairly recent, you know,
it was maybe six or nine months before he died,
a really great podcast he did basically applying the same
you know, kind of framing of Sam Francis's Beautiful Losers,
not to the conservative movement but to the radical right,
because he was saying these you do the same things.
You want to be, you know, the purest guy on
an island of one. But that's not how it works.
You live in the real world. And so his his
you know, radical politics, if we want to take that framing,
was ironclad, right. You couldn't say he doesn't believe it,
or you know, he's ignoring X, Y Z thing. But
it was always tempered in a realism that let lend
his criticism a lot of weight. I got to know
him much better over the course of Honestly, I used
to do these these kind of long Twitter spaces. I'd
drive a lot for work, so I'd be on the
road for three or four hours and I'd just have
an open mic talk to people right to keep myself
from falling asleep. And very often z Men would come
in for just an hour or two and just talk.
And he gave me very very good career advice. He
was a small business owner. He did very well for
himself there, and it was sort of the you know,
the advice that someone who has you know, passed through
the corporate world gave to someone who was, albeit in
the process of crashing out of it. And it was
incredibly helpful because he would follow up afterwards and be like,
hey man, I remember you saying this, like how did
that go? Which he didn't need to do. This was
just a random Twitter space with a guy he had
a few conversations with and to your point, Carl about
you know, his kind of dim view version view of
you know, the future, but mixed with a sort of
unexpected hope in the kind of rising kind of I
guess mimetic relevance of the right wing. He and I
talked a lot at the OGC conference shortly before he passed.
Don't have the best attention span, and so during a
lot of the talks I would end up at the
bar and there was a man and we talked for hours,
just you know, kind of bullshitting just about life, you know,
and also you know, more explicitly political things and two things.
One I want to say he was incredibly generous with
his money as well, because I did not pay for
a drink the entire weekend. It started as like, oh,
hey man, I'll pick it up. And then every time
I'd go to the bar, he would like, with a
sixth sense, look back over to the bartender, make eye
contact and just put it on my tap, which I appreciate,
you know, I'm not not above simple bribery. But also
one of the things he said that was really interesting
is he was talking about, you know, this kind of
radically increased relevance of right wing ideas, you know, things
that were relegated to kind of the shady underbelly of
the Internet. Now he's you know, in a room surrounded
by two hundred people plus their minds who are capable, competent,
are not freaks by and large, who have imbibed this fully,
it's sort of a given. And it was interesting because
he was incredibly optimistic about that. He was and he
said this to me, and I believe you as well,
Carl very impressed with you know, the caliber of guys
at the OGC, And it was honestly, it was really
encouraging to see someone who'd spent so much time in
the movement saying like, oh, like this is positive, this
is a huge development. And you know, unfortunately he didn't
get to see, you know, where that led. But I
think it was sort of an interesting conversation to have,
especially because and I don't remember if this was in
my final episode with him, or was in the conversation afterwards.
But he and I had this conversation which sort of
had increased weight after his death, where he was basically
talking about the fact that, like you know, he he
did not have children, and he realized that he probably
wasn't going to get to see the next thing. Now,
who knows if he meant in thirty years or in five, right,
I'm not trying to speculate there, but he was saying
the conversation sort of turning this thing about being sort
of like a profit out in the wilderness right ahead
of the curve, someone who saw where things were going,
but you know, sort of like Moses doesn't actually get
to go into the Promised Land. And I don't know,
I thought it was it was very poignant, you know,
after like many of us, I was suddenly you know,
notified of his death. Yeah. I have really nothing to
say bad about you know, z Man. He was very
generous to me personally, and his work is, as far
as I'm concerned, you know, superlative.
Speaker 1: Well, it was twenty twenty for me. I was coming
back from Ron Paul's conference in Sexist which happened in
November of twenty twenty, and Jeff dist and I were
both on the same flight from we connected out of
New Orleans and we were sitting there and the flight
was delayed and we're just talking and I just looked
at him and I said, this libertarian stuff, just if
this year has taught us anything, it's just theory, it's
just wishful thinking. It's you know, unless you're going to
force it upon people, it's not going to happen. And
you know, he just like as Jeff dist Is does,
he just gets a stern look on his face and
he goes, I don't know, maybe you should listen. There's
this guy Charles Haywood, and there's this guy z Man,
and maybe you should start listening to you know, listen
to their shows and see what you get out of
out of that. And I remember, you know, z Man
was way more of a writer than a podcast or,
although he was a a phenomenal podcaster. I mean, how
anyone can do sixty minutes exactly every week on his
own is the dot on the dot? So I read
a couple of things while I was sitting there, and
then I started listening to his podcast when went back
a couple of years, and I just realized that this
guy had a sense of humor that was familiar to
me because I mean we were a couple of years,
were a couple of years apart, and he one thing
about him was I really wish he was here now,
because we all realized that foreign policy is seems to
be what the regime and even Trump's regime is most
focused on. But he was not a foreign policy guy.
He wasn't ignorant of foreign policy, and he could riff
on foreign policy better than ninety nine percent of the
comments or out there. But he was a domestic guy.
He was talking about what the hell was happening here?
He had race down pat He contrary to popular belief,
he you know, there was a tribe out there that
he was very well aware of, and after October seventh
he started talking more about them publicly. You know, I've
I've had people like if I bring up ze Men.
When I brought up ze Men on Twitter, there'd be
like one or two people who would come in there
and go, you know, he was Russian and he was Jewish,
and I can encourage those people that Canada. Canada isn't
such a nice country anymore because of all the jeets,
but their healthcare is amazing and you should probably seek
it out. But z Man was when it came to domestic,
when it came to race relations, when it came to
nobody understood kan inc better than him. There is an
episode from like a year ago where he goes through
all of like the con Ink think tanks and just
shreds them, tells you how much money they have in
their coffers, how much money they get a year, ask
questions like these guys don't get any money, how are
they so powerful? And I mean he just he was
a fountain of knowledge and he was a great He
was a good person that if you had somebody who
was just starting to think like we do, to point
to one hundred percent, there was no anger in the man.
He often did episodes on purpose where he would have
a guinness before and have a guinness during, and those
were the funniest, some of the funniest things you've ever
heard in your life, because he was obviously getting buzzed
and obviously just was you know, of course every episode
there was going to be a belly laugh for something
he said, but those episodes there were more than one.
And you know, I mean I just after I met him,
at a ran the first time, and then the second
time got to hang out with him, and then the
third time at OGC this year. I mean, he just
he became like a member of the family. I mean,
my wife was with me every time that we met,
and they always talked. You know, he was personable and
you know just I mean it really hurt when he
when the news came down.
Speaker 3: There was another and tier point on you know, his
his ability to sort of skewer Kananc. There was a
great episode he did. I think he was talking about
Jonah Goldberg. If not, it's someone who's basically the same person,
and he was going through You're kind of talking about like,
you know, what is this guy's actual track record, Like
what is he advocated for? How has that turned out?
And then saying like, look like you know, if you
if you were a you know, a stock analyst or
whatever who had this kind of track record, you know,
if you had if you were some actually important job
you'd been fired decades ago, and then went into, as
you've said, the kind of financial compensation where he's like, oh,
like yeah, sure, you know this job you know pays
two hundred grand a year, which in northern Virginia or
New York isn't all that much. But he would go
in and say, well, he's not just working there, he's
also got this seat there, he sits on this, he
sits on that, and say like, look like these guys
are basically getting you know, millions of dollars to lie,
you know, to deliberately advocate for you know, destructive policy.
There's another great one, and this I think was almost
exactly a year ago. It was just when the whole
conversation about USAID kicked off, where he was basically going
through the kind of web of corruption, you know, where
these grants are handed out and there's kickbacks, and as
in many things, he was incredibly ahead of the curve.
Right we're in kind of in the midst of this
Somali scandal, and I mean it's been a month and
a half. There are more developments every day, but you
see that, you know, his analysis even you know, I
think it was technically early twenty twenty five, but still,
you know, a year ago was incredibly predictive. He could
call shots at you know, a year out, and I
think that his his work holds up even out of
in the immediate time because he would mention, you know,
the current affairs, he would mention what has happened this week,
But it was always with with mind to kind of greater,
more notable trends, So it wasn't just the kind of
daily grind. And that's what one kind of propelled me
to keep digging through his backlog, you know, like, oh
this stuff still holds up. It's not just you know,
kind of summary of the day sort of stuff, but
you start to pick out, you know, certain trends over time,
and you can see like, oh, like you know, he
was on something two three years ahead, and you know,
to the listeners. That's why I'd encourage going back and
listening to his old stuff, because like it doesn't feel like,
you know, when you know, whatever social media algorithm picks
up a post six months out of date, you're like, okay,
well who cares about this? You cares about signal gate
anymore or something similarly stupid. There's actually, like genuine there's
a shelf life to it, and that's very difficult to do.
Pete Is, I'm sure you're aware, right, taking a conversation
about something relevant and also making it transcendent, I mean,
that's an art form and you and I get to
cheat because we get to bring other people in and
sort of bounce our ideas off them or just let
them talk for you know, an hour and five minutes
and read a plug at the end. But z Man
was just effectively just going, you know, by himself. And yeah,
it's incredibly impressive that he was able to in a
format which is difficult to do, produce as much as
he did and produce as much of a high quality output.
One of his favorite and this is kind of enduring.
It's worked its way into the way I talk an
outside of you know, the internet is referring to and
he loved excoriating kind of what we call now like
the PMC or the lap top class, you know, the
very you know, entitled sort of you know, progressive, upper
middle class people. I think you referred to them as
cloud people and everyone else as dirt people.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 3: And it's such a simple, dry way to say it,
but I not only find it really funny, but it's
a very insightful term for that dynamic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's interesting, you know, you pointed out he
was a great person that you could share his content
with anyone on any given topic. Like during COVID, he
was one of the people that I was directing people to.
They would listen to his podcast because the average person
doesn't read anymore, Like there are people that will read blogs,
but like we must be honest with ourselves, that's a
small fraction of people, but they'll listen to a podcast.
And the number of people from all over the kind
of right leaning world that I, you know, directed to
his content and just totally lapped it up and be like, hey,
I went back, you know, he said this interesting thing,
So I listened to this, you know, this great podcast.
Like you could if you want to read for a
couple of weeks, all you have to do is go
to his archive and look up James Burnham and you
will you will read such incredible summaries of you know,
all of his thought and you know what he was
really getting at, whether it's you know, regarding the managerial
revolution or the Machiavellians, defenders of freedom, et cetera. Like
in a way that he's like he predigests it for
you so that when you go back and you read
those books, they're they're an easier read because he's he's
helping make connections because you didn't read necessarily like five
source books on political theory that Zmai did that James
Burnham also read. And he's like Burnham came out of
this school and da da da da da dah, which
is why you know this. These pieces influenced this. And
so if you if you don't know this, you're not
going to get it automatically. Well, do you want to
read those five books? You know you can and it'll
be enriching to do. So it also might be kind
of a waste of time other than what you get
out of, you know, than reading Burnham. And so he
was great for that where he could you could just
ask him, Hey, what what are some books that I
need to read about Burnham? And he'll he'll tell you
and so that you can understand him. And then you
go back and you talked about it all throughout throughout
his catalog. There there there was this other thing that
he would that he would do and he would talk
about this sometimes in the podcast sometimes uh uh, you know,
in group chats, and and he was in a lot
of group chats. But he would talk about the process
of writing and the discipline and Jay, you and I
were just talking about this a couple of days ago.
Where you know, every everyone who takes their their writing seriously,
you want you want to be a really good representative
of your work, and you want to really nail it well.
Z Man wrote five articles a week plus a podcast
every single week, and then he would take a break
at like the end of the year, where there would
be very light content for like two weeks. But I
was talking to him one time and and what he
said was, I think I shared some some criticism that
someone made that sometimes he played fast and loose with
with details, and he was always doing it hardly to
provoke people, but also to handwave nonsense, right, so like,
you don't go into like, for example, Pete, like you
were in the right position to hear him brutalize libertarianism.
Well not even to brutalize it, but to just dismiss it.
He was completely dismissive of it. And he would say
libertarianism is astrology for suburban white boys, and you know,
it's it's pretty accurate. And people would say no, like
and then hit him with all this theory and he's like, yeah,
but that theory doesn't work. It's nonsense. So anyway, he
would he would do this to provoke people. But then
the other thing also is that he would have a
deadline and he would write these articles before starting his
work day, and he worked for himself, and then he
would be very lightly online for the rest of the
day until the evening, right because he'd be working. And
I asked him one time, like how do you do it?
And he said, well, what you do is you sit
down and you write, and you don't worry too much
about editing it, and then you send it and you
move on. He's like, think of it like a post
on a forum in the old days, like you get
you get your thoughts out, and some you'll put a
little more work into it and you'll have some references
so that it can be more thorough, but otherwise you
just send it out into the world. And because what
he found was that there were posts and shows that
he did that he put a ton of effort into,
but he wasn't like really happy with it. That other
people loved and they got a lot out of it,
and he said, you never know what's going to hit,
so just send it and it's and it's really good.
Like there's a point where you put enough work into
it that it's not going to improve anymore, so you
just send it and like maybe maybe the way to uh,
you know, really communicate what you want to do is
after doing this really detailed, deep dive and all in
response to some you know, conservative ink polemic nonsense, is
to just wrap it up by just saying, you know,
after all that what we need to be honest is
that this person is just a liar, and you know,
underscore that and move on. So his his his philosophy
was really interesting in that fashion because originally he was
a poster. That's that's how he got his start. Like
people would ask him, you know, people suggested that he
start a blog because he would be in the comments sections,
in the oughts of like all the you know, the
all the stupid libertarian think tank websites, like excoriating people,
you know, excoriating these articles in the comments. And he'd
have people reach out to him, people who became allies,
and they would say, we got to the point where
we would dread and we would talk amongst ourselves. We
would dread seeing z Man in the comments because he
would just brutalize us and just take over the whole
flow of things like he was one of the first
people to be doing that and really create a real
online right that hadn't been there before.
Speaker 3: Just in aside, Carl, it seems like an awfully specific
example you've used there someone who has an article or
maybe several that they can't quite get out. But I
think it's important as well to talk about you know,
you mentioned, you know, his work ethic, which is certainly notable,
but he did have sort of this like iterative process
with that where you know, you'd see an idea come up,
and then two or three weeks later you'd get a better,
more detailed version of it. And so sometimes it is
sort of interesting to listen through, you know, a couple
episodes all in a row, because he'll touch on certain
things like, as you've you know, mentioned, he was speaking
much more frankly, much more directly about Israel after October seventh,
and there was sort of this interesting run where, you know,
it was reacting to if you guys remember the uh
Ted CRU's appearance on Tucker you know, where he sort
of blas aly said, you know, I got into office
with the intention of being, you know, the strongest supporter
of Israel. And he goes through this, he examines the
same thing from kind of multiple angles, you know, he
you know, one week would be talking about and you
see this in his essays as well. Obviously, the you know,
the Christian Zion is a angle. But another one which
I think was really interesting is he was a very
accurate critic of like the blob as he would call it,
the swamp as the Maga people do, which is and
he would bring this up all the time. He's like, look, like,
the fact is less than ten percent of senators are
in competitive seats, so it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter
that what they say is is crazy to you because
they're not at risk. They're playing to their base, they're
playing to what matters to them. You know, in case
of Ted Cruz, it's people with a lot of in Dallas,
and they don't really care about what you care about.
And I think that, you know, that that sort of
incisive way that he cut through a lot of you know,
both kind of culture war bs but also just kind
of daily political grind let his critique a lot more
weight because it's like, okay, like and you mentioned earlier,
Pete that he it wouldn't really get angry, and he
wouldn't sort of descend into the kind of rage bait
nature of it. And because of that he could keep
a really important distance talking about politics, which you know,
again made his thoughts worth reading, his his podcast worth
listening to, because at a certain point it's like, Okay,
how many people can you listen to get mad about something? Okay?
Like that? That's and that activates your monkey brain. That's
something to do. You know, it's probably entertaining, I guess,
but if you're actually interested in learning, like figuring out
how the system works, what's the best way to attack it? Well,
a guy who says like, yeah, no it that cycle
is sort of feeding into the machine. You know, you're
doing what you're supposed to do. And I think that
that's a like it's all too rare, you know, even
among you know, self described dissidents. You know, there's a
great deal of you know, kind of rage and anger,
which is certainly understandable, but it's not necessarily helpful in
all in all times, uh, I think that you know,
you mentioned Pete that he was very very funny. His
humor is incredibly dry, and oftentimes he would sort of
just let something hang. And you mentioned Carl right, that
he would sort of deliberately, you know, provoke online autists
by messing up in your details. There were many things
like that where he would do it specifically to get
a rise of.
Speaker 1: People mispronunciations oh yeah, yeah, yeah, over and over again.
It was so awesome. He would he would purposely pronounce
Happa's name happy just to piss off the Libertarians.
Speaker 3: Which I think is like, it's incredibly funny. And he'd
do it enough that like the first time it's a
chuckle by, like the ten or twelfth time, where he's
repeating it multiple times in a sentence, he's like crying,
laughing so again. Like I that that aspect of his
work I guess can't be understated either.
Speaker 2: Pete, I can't hear you.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, sorry, I muted it out. One of the
things he told me that I think a lot of
people didn't realize was that on a weekly basis, his
website got hundreds of thousands of unique visitors. And he
said he worked in he lived in the Washington, DC area,
He lived in Lagos, and he was constantly working in Washington,
d C. And he was constantly talking to people and
people on the Hill read his stuff all the time.
I mean, like powerful people were following him and reading him,
and he would get he would get this confirm from
people all the time.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: I think Carl mentioned it that he he worked a
full time job. Well, I mean, I don't know that
he worked for anyone else. I think he may have
been an independent contractor. But he worked full time and
then did this full time. Now, he didn't have a wife,
he didn't have kids, so he's able to do that.
But everyone, you know, all three of us know that
there comes a point at some time where you're going
to be like you sit down to write something and
you're like, I got nothing, I got nothing, and I'm
just I have to bail out. You know, there's there's
nothing I have to write. He always had something to
write about, and he always he always injected at least
one or two things into those blog posts and into
his episodes, especially his episodes that you didn't know that
you just you're like, oh wow, where did that come from?
He is his understanding of how the right, well the
quote unquote right, the GOP, the regime right, how they
were just they were just rehashing ideas from the progressives
and like everything that they were doing. Like there's this
famous saying about how conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: I mean in some cases sure, but in a lot
of cases, the GOP and the regime right is just
looking at like things that the left is doing and
they try to repackage it in their own way to
make it work. And it's just not going to work
because the left is going to do it better. Because
it is a leftist idea, you can't do it. And
if they did come up with something on their own,
I means so much of the things that like conservatives
libertarian people brag about, like oh, you know, we were
four gay marriage before anyone else was. It's like, well yeah,
and then it finally got adopted and it got adopted
into the regime. How's that working out? How's you know
all the all the degenerate stuff that you've you know,
open borders, how did that work out? Sure? You know
you Cato, the Cato Institute is the open borders Institute.
Whenever you see somebody on TV or you see a
politician quoting how open borders is going to help the
economy in this way, that's coming directly from Cato. That's
that's directly coming from Alex star wars name on Twitter,
and people don't realize just how much of the enemy
these are. And then libertarian you know then like you know,
Auburn libertarians will be like, well, that's not real libertarianism.
And then you know, you realize how much libertarianism is
like communism, because you know that's all the communists say. Well,
you know, so if the Union wasn't real commune and
it's just all this, well that wasn't real this, that
wasn't real that. And you know, ze Man was able
to show you how just exactly how horrible the right is,
not the right, the GOP, the regime Republicans, how horrible
they are, and how much more of an enemy they
are to you than the actual left was. I mean
that's where we when we talk about when when Stormy's
out there going the you know, the the real enemy
of any right wing revolution as a conservative, I mean
z Man was saying that, you know years ago, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he he he would actually go to these conferences
in DC all the time, and and and would know
all these people and would talk to all these people,
these writers, and and so I think what what he
was really good at was de mythologizing them, like taking
away this fake credibility out there in you know, among
the hoy poloi who who are very online and who
follow politics closely, and he's like, you're the only people
that pay attention to these people other than themselves, Like nobody,
nobody cares about who these people are. And he would
explain that the way that it worked in really simple terms,
like Pete, you were talking about how he would go
through the money and all the different jobs and sinecures
that would people would would have and you know, one
of the I'll just I'll just come right out and
talk about it. You know, we we've kind of danced
around his uh, his dalliances and interactions with a certain
tribe and a lot of people. He would basically explain
to them that they fundamentally didn't understand their own thought
process when it came to how much they empowered their
enemies because they you know, he would call it magic
jew theory a lot of the time, as he'd say,
you know, these people are as you say all the time, Pete,
these people are the biggest Zionists and you know, Jewish
supremacists in the world. But they just call themselves anti semites.
And we see this all the time right now. Despite everything,
you have people acting like they have some secret knowledge
and that there's some they're they're they're part of this
thing where they have to whisper it. And and it's
like the the way that he approaches every topic in
this kind of abstract while still direct fashion, but but
going through the steps was something that people didn't have
patients for, and so they would lose patience with him.
But he also would call out grifters all the time,
and there were so many grifters, and you know, and
and when things are right, you know, in right wing
and kind of fringe circles, like people are desperate for
anyone who says something that they agree with that they
feel like they're they're a voice in the wilderness. And oh,
I'm not alone because you know so and so said
this thing. And he would point out, no, this person
has a history, and you have to be aware of
the kind of circumstances that they're setting up. Like he
would go meet with people all over the country all
the time, and all these different organizations, and he would
then come back and you know, be candid in private
about how they were, and most of the time it
was there were a lot of great people there, but
there there are some grifters that are trying to steer
them wrong. And you know, one of the strongest attacks
that I ever heard against him were from people that
were affiliated with these grifters. He would constantly point out
how you've seen some of this in the OGC, not
in the OGC and from OGC members, but in other
organizations which I will leave unmentioned, but there are there's
outreach and certain rules that these people have because they
think that they're they're competing for the same pool of
members rather than it being a growing thing. And the
way that you actually behave when when it comes to
either the way you deal with your membership or you
deal with organizations, you see them as competing factions and
you're just trying to go after the same people. And
he was very good about pointing out like grifter a
who gets all this online fame and gets elevated by
the media, you know, to be the spokesman for all
of us, even though they're a disaster, Like, can't you
people connect the dots on this? So it was this
intelligent framing where he would basically say you're being owned
and run by the people that you're accurately recognizing or
a problem, but you're letting them defeat you. And we
see this all the time, and we see it's amazing
that we see it in twenty twenty five as nakedly
as we do. But it shows how poisoned the discourse
has been for generations on the right. And it comes
from this losing loser attitude that people develop, you know,
and where they're like, I have to keep losing otherwise
people won't realize how serious I am and how like
how much of a purist I am. And he would
call that out and people hated it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think we might be. The most recent version
is what I was referencing earlier, and I can't remember
who I know he I guess I shouldn't say the
names of the people he was going after in particular,
but you can probably guess. And this was you know,
even relatively you know late, you know, this was in
probably late twenty twenty four, twenty twenty five, the last
time he really went on a tear on this subject.
And he was really good at well as picking at
the kind of like like kind of like high school
lunchroom behavior. You know you often see on the right
where you know, the goal is not actually to win,
the goal is to be the specialist boy of them all.
You know, the goal is to you know, be the
most you know, dissident and to be sort of you know,
the king of a of a of an ash heap.
And I think that he you know, very accurately to
your point, carl said, like you know, pointed out that
kind of gap between stated and revealed preference, right what
you say you do versus what you actually act like,
and that role is much needed. And you know, we've
sort of seen this post, you know, the death of
Charlie Kirk in the more establishment conservative circles where that
event has you know, almost completely become just a way
to you know, signal four and compete for status. You know,
if you follow a lot of these people, you see
it's basically whatever they wanted to say anyway. And this
is what Charlie Kirk told me before he died, or
Charlie Kirk actually thought this. And you've seen that same behavior,
that same very human behavior. And you know, I think
that you know, one of the things that you know,
Led really added a lot to his work was a
very kind of realist and grounded understanding of human nature.
You know, one of his later shows was on slavery,
and that was something that came up there. Or He's
basically like, well, regardless of how you feel on this,
this is something humans do, and this has been done many,
many times. Talking about that is you know, it's not
like some unique moral ill of you know, the American
Antebellum South. But also he applied that same attitude that like,
look like humans are, there's a definite human nature too.
A lot of his social analysis in a way that
I think was to be honest, made it even better.
Speaker 1: I think one of the things that he was constantly
fighting against, and this is just echoing everything you said,
was the hating one group so much that you blackpill
and you don't do anything. I mean, we see this
all the time. I mean, I'm ninety eight episodes into
a book about the Jewish experience Russians and their experience
with Jews in their country. I'm not one of these
people who is so caught up in it that I
let it control everything in my life. I'm still out
there doing everything. I'm still out there telling people that
you can. Yeah, sure, unbelievable over represented power basically control
our government. That doesn't mean you can't thrive. That doesn't
mean you can't win. That doesn't mean that we can't
we're not going to win. That doesn't mean that they're
in my opinion, they were defeated. They've lost. They just
don't know it yet. People have people are abandoning any
kind of almost kind of reverence that has been built
built around this group of people since since the war,
since World War Two. And I think that's one of
the reasons why he didn't concentrate on that group so much.
I mean, I'm looking at like that. One of the
last episodes he did, the third to the last episode
he did, was called in Search of Anti Semitism, and
it was just basically calling out one of his favorite
whipping boys was William Buckley. I mean, how could it
not be and he I mean, was there anybody in
our thing who knew more about Buckley than he did?
I mean he knew everything about the guy. Yeah, no,
you know, and you know he would do episodes like
that where he would be like, yeah, overrepresented, I mean,
taking guys, taking our guys out and everything. But this
is a new day. This is a new day and
going forward. You know, we can't sit back. I mean,
this is a guy who was insanely successful in his
personal life. I mean he could. I mean he had
exotic animals. I don't know if people know that, but
he had he owned exotic animals.
Speaker 2: Wild giant cats, he can imagine.
Speaker 3: Well, and I and one of our tray say, uh,
somewhat socially lubricated discussions at the bar.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: He ran me down the history of owning giant cats,
and he had like scars and injuries from being you know,
playfully attacked by like a wild animal, and look like
I liked the guy a lot, but my conclusion from
that was you are a crazy person, like this is
how people get eaten. And he was unbothered by that.
I mean, do you have credit?
Speaker 2: I mean he lived in Baltimore proper, like the ghetto,
and he lived there for years. And there was one
point where people were threatening to docks him and he said,
I literally just pulled up my home address and sent
it to them and said, come come on down, come
on down to Baltimore. And they look at it and
they're like, oh my god. I would when he lived
in one of these little pockets where like his street
was okay, but like every night he would hear gunshots.
And when he finally moved out to West Virginia, he
was like, why did I wait so long to do this?
Why did I wait so long?
Speaker 3: It was kind of funny because you know, it's sort
of I feel like this is pretty common. I just
don't concern myself with anyone's docks at all, and so
I had genuinely no idea that docs had happened until
he had. I think it was a part of a
question and answer episode, but someone you know wrote in
or it was just on his mind. He was talking about,
you know, how to deal with the media, and one
of the things he said that was really funny is
he's like, yeah, well they what they want is they
want a reaction. They want to see you squirm. And so,
you know, when he said, when I had reporters saying
isn't this where you live? Or you know, is it
this your name, he just wouldn't respond. And he'd never
mentioned his content, he never mentioned it anywhere. And he's like, yeah,
I'd follow them on Twitter and I'd see them freaking
out about it like, just try to post it over
and over and over again to get it to stick.
And he's like, I just freeze them out and again.
You see both like a sense of humor there where
it's like he got some satisfaction of just driving these
these cretans wild. But I always thought that was a
particularly good strategy, you know, And I think as someone
like many of us, who has you know, face docksing
or you know, kind of negative repercussions d'ed online behavior,
that attitude has served me well. And I think that,
you know, as you said, he had a very wide,
very large audience, and so I'd be surprised that there
weren't other guys with similar experiences who sort of followed
this z man attacked successfully.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm so horrible at this. Like I, like you said,
you don't care about docsing and like when someone gets
docks I'm like, oh that sucks. You'll be okay. I've
met Carl twice, we've hung out twice. He's told me
his real name twice. I can't remember his first name.
That's that's how bad I am.
Speaker 3: I am also legitimately don't know Carl's real name. Now
that I think about it, and this is this is
funny because this is just to decide. Uh, this is
something that it took the wife a long time to understand.
You're like, so, wait, you talk with this guy all
the time, You've been to his house, and you literally
don't know what his name is. I'm like, I mean,
I've got a Twitter handle that's pretty close.
Speaker 2: Just kind of this speaks for itself, babe.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, last words before being founded a meat freezer
on the side of the highway.
Speaker 1: Just to give you, just to give you an example,
I've hung out with Lee Enfield three times, three different occasions,
had dinner, have had dinner and drinks with him three times.
No idea what his own name is, don't care, don't care. Yeah,
he looks exactly like the avatar he uses on on Twitter.
So which is funny because Jay here was he's exactly
the same he was. He was a crazy He used
an avatar for very long. That was I mean, well,
if you just like you put it through AI and said,
well what does this human look like? You would have
basically been facetoks a long time ago.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, it was. It was the worst. And you actually,
you know, my real name. You're not that different either,
Like it's a very.
Speaker 1: It's pretty funny. And believe me, I would not remember
your real name if I haven't sent you, if I
hadn't sent you mail that I remember. Well, well, man,
I think Carl wanted to wanted to do something here,
so let me, let me, let me share a screen here,
and yeah, let's do this.
Speaker 2: So yeah, his his Girls Science segment that he would
do on a regular basis. Uh, he would he would
be laughing trying to read these you know, these theses
by these imbeciles, and and then he would break it down.
And this is the funny thing. So I've I've worked
from home for years, Right every Friday, I would play
his podcast in my office through the speakers while I'm
sitting here working away. And without fail, my wife would
walk into the room right when he switched to Zerile Science,
and she would just be like, why are you listening to?
Why do I constantly hear Cyndi Lauper coming from your office?
And I'm like it's from the podcast, and she's like, uh, huh, okay.
Speaker 3: Actually, if we're talking about music, the the bluegrass tune
that he always used is the intro to his podcast.
It's one. It's a great recording. It's also like a
Pavlovian response to me. And if you guys didn't know
anyth about bluegrass, right, there's a lot of you know,
repeated motifs or repeated rips, and so it's music that
I grew up listening to. So I'll have it on
all the time, and you know that that I can't remember.
I think it's Cripple Creek. I can't remember, or some
version of it will come on and it's exactly that point.
It's like I'm completely back in the mode of like
I've been trained like a dog. Right, it's like a
z Man time.
Speaker 2: For some good takes. Yeah, that's funny. You know, I
have to share another story, and he and I talked
about it in person. But years ago, some friends of
mine were involved in what mutual friends were involved ins,
some in an online space, and they started a short
lived podcast that they ended up rapping after only a
couple episodes because of a docsing campaign, a very vicious
one that was conducted and it had some rather negative
outcomes unfortunately, which again the correct thing to do is
to just disregard and move on with your life and
if anyone you know, is confronted theoretically by HR or something,
you just deny. You just denied, deny, deny, and anyway,
so so they did that. They didn't have any issues.
But so you can't find it online anymore, and it
might not exist anymore, like we we don't know. But anyway,
it was. It was a very good my friend's wife
was a very good interviewer, and z man uh would
would was going on and on about how it was
the best interview that anyone had ever conducted with with him.
And I told my friend this and he said, yeah,
we've heard that all the time. We asked him two
questions and he talked for an hour straight on the
on the strength of those, there was there was more
conversation than that, but he just was just riffing. And
so it turned into this like gentle call and response
where they were just kind of encouraging him to keep going.
And I also liked that one because he talked about me,
and it was when my first book came out, which
is why I remember it in the first place. But
I just had to I had to tell that story
because you know, he was like, it was the best
interview that anyone ever did with me, and I recall
listening to at least five or six others that people
did with him where they wouldn't hardly let him talk.
They were trying to keep him on the train tracks
and be short and quippi, but he didn't work that way.
What he would do is he would start getting these
associations going and he would talk for you know, minutes
on end to wrap up a subject. But then he
would ask people questions to keep them in the conversation.
And if they were like no, I'm the one who
asks questions, you know, it wasn't going to go anywhere.
It wasn't going to be a good conversation, which is
why he did so few in that format. He would
come on you know, spaces and live streams and riff
with people, but he really disliked that kind of controlled format,
which is why he also didn't do that on his
show with other people.
Speaker 1: I think he did.
Speaker 2: I think he has like one or two episodes where
he did a recording with someone that he put out
as his podcast. He'd usually let it be someone else's show.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was uh. Speaking as an interviewer, he was
a ton of fun to talk to, you know, if
you could sort of mirror him and figure out where
it was going to go. It was. It was just
this incredible feeling of you You're getting kind of live
like live stream of consciousness, pearls of wisdom. And you know,
I've gone back through I think Pete, you put up
a compilation of all your conversations with c Man that
I was going back through it, and uh yeah it
They were rare, and they were honestly, really really good
because there are a lot of guys and who can
who can present, who can do a monologue but can't
necessarily translate that, and his style was definitely in that vein,
as you've said. But they're great, So I mean, honestly,
you know, if you guys are not familiar with the man,
and that would be a weird thing to be fifty
five minutes into a podcast and about a guy you've
never heard of, Pete's collection of his interview is well
worth your time. I think similarly, Blood Satellite put out
an interview just before he passed, like it was a
few days before, and I think it's the last recording
of him. That's another one you can find, but i'd
highly recommend both of those, and then like, go back
to his stuff. The essays hold up. You can still
find them. The podcasts are available literally everywhere. Go back
and listen to them. They don't have ads. You're not
going to pay any money for it, but I highly
recommend them. They are very very good. And yeah, those
those few interviews he did were very very good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's funny. I'm looking back at the names of
some of the episodes we did, and it always seemed
like I picked a name just to be funny, Like
one was Mugshots, Debates and hitting the Target, which if
I think back, I'm like, I have no idea what
that was. But then I found that in February of
this year, February twenty eighth, twenty twenty five, he appeared
on the Old Glory Club livestream Pony Express Radio, and
the title of that episode was back to Epstein Island.
It's just you can't get away from the humor with him.
It was like you were never going to It was like, yeah,
the guy was dead serious about everything, and the guy
knew his stuff, knew his politics, knew his Burnham, knew
knew what power was all about, and knew domestic policy
in this country and what was wrong with domestically man.
Every time I think of him, it's like I start laughing.
It's impossible not to. He was literally one of the
fun And one of the things I missed the most
is I do my Sunday live streams and my Sunday
live streams people who've listened to him, I'm sure some
people just skip over him. It's just me interacting with
the chat. And he would always come in on Rumble,
he would comment on Rumble, and it would always be
something poking fun at me. And I missed that so much.
I mean it was he was so good for that.
He was so good to rib you give you a
nice friendly ribbing, like from the old school, where if
he did that to a lot of people who you know,
are a lot younger than I am and not of
our general of mine and his generation, they may have
taken it personally. But I knew exactly what he was doing,
and he was just a master of it.
Speaker 2: He called a friend of ours who was in this
private chat, he called him a bald black could Jewish midget.
Like almost every single day on GAB, they would just
like quote post each other and so my buddy would
play the straight man where he'd you know, post like enraged,
woe jack and stuff like that as a reply to it.
But like he would just he would just rip on
people in the funniest way. And yeah, just just non stop.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, if you guys have anything else, any
other stories, you know, we're right at about an hour,
and yeah, we'd talk anymore. I might get cheery here
because yeah, I remember the day that it was that
it came out and it wasn't We couldn't confirm it
right away because the report was you know, we weren't
really sure. But when it was confirmed, you know, I remember,
you know, my wife got cheery, and I'll use this
excuse because she got cheery, I got cheery too. So yeah,
that's that's that sounds like a good excuse.
Speaker 3: To sort of wrap it up. I small account for
a very long time, and so I really remember the
guys who sort of gave me a hand up, who
basically said, like, I'll you know, this isn't gonna be
big exposure for me. This isn't going to be, you know,
something I'm going to profit from really in any way.
And ze Man was incredibly generous with his time and advice,
both on and off air, in a way that was
in no way motivated by profit or motivated by I
guess kind of social cachet, And that to me showed
a lot about his character. He was, you know, very
passionate about what he said, passionate about what he believed,
and it was almost unconcerned with, you know, any sort
of money or accolades that came with that. He was right,
he said it. He wanted to get that out there,
and that's a very rare thing. And so I always
appreciated him for that, appreciated him for saying like, yeah, sure,
like I'll give you a shot. And I don't mean
to say that because it benefited me, but just to
say like that, that is uncommon, and particularly Peteuse. I'm
sure you're aware. You talk to a lot of people,
you cold approach a lot of people, and you know
there's a bell curve. Most people are perfectly pleasant. But
when someone goes above and beyond, you know, when someone
is you know, checking in, when someone is you know,
responding quickly and well, it makes a difference. It matters
to you. And you know, I'm not going to pretend
we were best friends, you know, I met him once
in person, but he was in a very good man
in addition to being right and being funny, and you know,
I think that's probably the best way to describe him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree, it was. It was delightful to meet him.
It was like I had known him forever. We had
corresponded for a really long time. And so when when
we heard about it, everyone was kind of there were
people coming to conclusions because of an article that he
had written the day before, which was inaccurate. It was
an inaccurate assumption. And but he messaged, I was trying
to see if I could share this with you guys,
but it doesn't look like going to be able to.
But the group chat that I was in with him
was the last place where he engaged with anyone publicly,
and he just wrote fucking hot. And I don't know
he he had a dry, wry sense of humor, and
I can't help but think that he, you know, probably
thought that that might ultimately have been a little funny,
you know, in a retrospect. But that was why when
when we heard what was going on from people who
knew him locally and went up to go who were
planning on meeting with him that day anyway, that we
believed it and immediately started telling people to chill out
on the assumptions that they had. So yeah, but yeah,
a great guy and just a giant And honestly, I
feel like we're diminished. The space is diminished without him
because of the way that he was able to bridge
all those gaps, and he really inspired Honestly, he really
inspired me because he wasn't afraid of meeting with people
in person at times that others were. You know, people
in twenty twenty two were petrified of leaving the house
and going face to face to engage with other people
who were even vaguely right wing online because the the
people who were new to all this, who were getting
arrested in twenty twenty one, who found out that they
didn't live in a free country, you know, they were
the ones who were surprised. The right wingers know that
you don't do this stuff right. And so for him
to be like, well, you're not doing anything illegal or dangerous,
like you're going to talk to people, you know, it's fine,
Like just just avoid these kinds of things, and the
you know, the metaphorical bomb throwers, avoid those people and
do your thing. And I think I can't help but
think that a lot of him talking about these his
way of doing this, of just going around and meeting
with people. He'd get invited to events all the time,
and he'd fly all over the country to go to
him a couple times a year, you know, those would
be his vacations if he wasn't going to a ballgame
with his buddies, you know, in Boston. And I think
it was a really good mentality that we needed to hear,
just a voice of sanity. And yeah, I'll miss him,
and I'll always be happy that I got to meet
him in person finally.
Speaker 1: You know, this has been a year that started off politically,
you know, pretty strong, and you know, but it's definitely
tailed off. You know, the excitement wore off really quick.
And I pretty much know what he would be writing.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: He he was not somebody who thought that that drastic
change was coming immediately. He wasn't blackpilled about the future.
He just knew it wasn't it wasn't going to happen now.
All the things people wanted to see, but the one
thing that I really would have liked to get his
take on because I know he probably would have had
a different take than any one of us, and anyone
we know is the Charlie Kirk assassination. I really wish
I could have a z Man episode about Charlie, the
Charlie Kirk assassination. I'll leave it alas yeah man, Yeah,
Jay Burden plug your shit.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 3: So Jay Burten Show, Spotify, YouTube, Apple, anywhere you listen
to podcasts. Actually, inspired by this, I think I'll probably
put out a compilation of my interviews with c men.
I have three of them, so that will be out
roughly contemporaneously to win this drops, you know, just to
sort of provide a snapshot at the man, you know.
I think the oldest recording is maybe two years old,
you know, up to one that was six or seven
months ago. So yeah, if you want, you can check
out the Jay Burton Show anywhere you listen to podcasts
and look for the z Man retrospective there.
Speaker 1: Carl Dahl.
Speaker 2: Carldall dot substack dot com, cowdio Doll on Twitter, and
two books on Amazon, Faction and Faction with Crusaders. I'm
inspired by z Man to I've been playing with this idea,
to do a PO box because he had so much
fun with his PO box and that's where he got
his endless supply of cash that he would use to
pay bar tabs when he went to events. He was like,
people mail me en the loops full of cash. So anyway,
thanks for having us, Pete, thank you gentlemen.
Speaker 1: We'll talk Sam Sack Care