Jordan Peterson's perennial philosophy takes a step to the left.

Nihilism Now: Politics After Atheism (AR+IO-012)

LINK: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0flJrV12NEokBWCn7cx0Gv

Elon Musk: Hero of Mars.

LINK: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1BKddbKY4fshAjciDzAukc

Would you rather be a hero on Mars or a villain on Earth? Would you rather be a captain of industry or a conspirator on Capitol Hill? Elon Musk doesn't have to choose. Yet.

Gendergeddon Ground Zero, Transgender Politics in Donald Trump's 21st Century

Testosterone is a mind-altering drug. This… this is why everyone hates Eisel Mazard.

LINK: https://open.spotify.com/episode/34vSr8XfCtwixEtqXE3ilP

The inevitable comparison between myself and Max Stirner: you think I'm stumbling precisely when I soar.

 Re: "But there is an art to giving criticism when the goal is to make someone change their ways, goals, ideals, methods ,etc.. An art that I am NOT a master in, but also an art that he miserably fails at."

You've made a solid effort at expressing what your fantasies about me were —and what your delusions about me still are. The problem is that you express yourself so much better than the other denizens of this Reddit group that it isn't immediately obvious that these are just spurious fantasies and delusions on your part.

Do you think Future of an Illusion is an example of "an art" that I have "failed miserably" at?

Do you think that I was inept in my critique of compassion? Do you suppose I was trying to be charming and affable (in a conformist sort of way) but then —oops!— I just stumbled and ended up writing this shockingly nihilistic philosophy that overturns everything my contemporaries want to believe in?

Do you think that I'm trying to be endearing to these people when I condemn them as tantamount to Neo-Nazis, for example?

The scarf of a revolutionary wrapped around the neck of a bureaucrat: was this my poetic attempt to make friends with Earthling Ed, but I was just "lacking the social skills" necessary to successfully seduce him?

Imagine how absurd it would be to criticize Max Stirner for failing to produce a philosophy that is carefully footnoted and reasoned through like A.N. Whitehead. You really could impose your own set of fantasies and delusions onto Stirner to then regard him as "a failure" because you imagine that he yearned to be something similar to A.N. Whitehead —but then failed due to "his social skills".

Yes, indeed, the whole jarring, nihilistic tone of Stirner's philosophy must be a sort of accident due to lack of social skills. He'd sound much more like Immanuel Kant if only he could: he must have had some sort of bizarre psychological disorder that was holding him back.

Do you see the mistake you're making here?

You are treating your own fantasies as if they were my objectives and intentions, and then you're misinterpreting what I actually did as if I had been stumbling precisely when I soared. I'm a master of "an art" —it just isn't yours.

Max Stirner was living his dream: you're guilty of the grossest kind of psychological projection if you insist that his work was a failure, simply because it doesn't resemble some other philosophy —especially given that this other philosophy is not one that he's imitating, it is instead one that he despises.

Veganism: Future of an Illusion is the book I wanted to write. It is my dream come true.

There is absolutely nothing about that book I would want to improve on in any way.

A small number of extremely brilliant people will appreciate it. Just like Max Stirner.

A large number of extremely stupid people will continue to pretend that they have tremendous intellectual respect for Peter Singer.

I do not live my life wishing that I had been the vegan equivalent to A.N. Whitehead or Immanuel Kant.

We can talk through a sort of surreal (hypothetical) scenario in which I disciplined myself to be utterly phony and play the sort of position that Sky is still playing within PETA, clamoring for my chance to hobnob with Joey Carbstrong at champagne and dairy-free-cheese fundraisers. Perhaps that's what would have made you happy, if you had been in my position, but that isn't what I wanted to do with my life. Not at all.

Re: "He should have spend time reading books or papers on how to give highly-receptive criticism; on how to have healthy and productive disagreements."

Is that what you've done? Is that what you've done with your own life?

Let's pretend that you have. What if I were to suggest to you, instead, that you should study the art of making extremely jarring and unforgettable statements that upset people's philosophical and political presuppositions? What if I were to tell you, after you and I had lived by our respective methodologies for quite some time, that you've evidently accomplished nothing at all with your attempts to be so affable, with your "healthy and productive disagreements", whereas I'm really quite satisfied that I've "left a mark" with this (more theatrical) methodology of mine.

What if my series of experiments with à-bas-le-ciel are worth more than another thousand imitators of Joey Carbstrong, carrying out another thousand sidewalk interviews? Or another thousand imitators of Wayne Hsiung holding up a thousand placards, and so on? Whitehead and Kant had many forgettable imitators.

Stirner was the best at doing something only he could do —and that was not imitating Professor Whitehead. I was the best at doing something only I could do. And at that I succeeded.

On living by the beat of my own drum: winding as many watches as possible, or winding just one.

Quote, "The whole grandiosity posturing exists to mask his low self esteem due to his failed life."

On the contrary, you need to believe that I'm unhappy, and you need to believe that I perceive myself to be a failure: the possibility that I could be happy with the life I've led (and that I'm happy with the life I'm leading right now) is extremely disturbing to you —it challenges whatever sense of pride you take in yourself as an exemplar of conformism. The idea of "a failed life" has to be measured out relative to some specific goal that the person was trying to achieve: not everyone wants to be a medical doctor.

You (AvgWebIntellectual) are the one who needs to believe that I regard myself as a failure: it's just impossible for you to accept that I could see myself as successful relative to the reasonable expectations I had for what the outcomes would be —and relative to a reasonable estimate of the size, scope and intensity of the efforts I made.

Why would I be unhappy —for example— with the outcomes of my "career" as a rapper? With just a little bit of effort I learned to express myself in an entirely new art form (satire set to music, etc.). Why shouldn't I be happy (or absolutely delighted) with the outcomes of that experiment? I see musicians who have labored in obscurity for decades with none of the rewards for their creativity that I so easily attained. I didn't have the expectation that I'd be the next DMX: rap music was a creative challenge that I took on with reasonable expectations —and so I'm reasonably delighted by the outcomes.

Do you realize how little work it was for me to write Future of an Illusion? And I am totally delighted with the outcomes. Again, why shouldn't I be?

So, further, why would I have anything to blame others for? Why would I have anything to make excuses for? It's crucial to your worldview (not mine) that I must now be bitterly regretting my "failure" —but that is only a failure relative to the life that you want to live, and your life is not one that I'd be interested in living. I am not in a position of making excuses or shifting blame: I'm proud of the book I wrote, and I'm proud of the satirical rap songs I recorded —both with remarkably little effort— and I know that they offer an interesting message for the few who are sophisticated enough to be interested.

Perhaps you wind up wristwatches at a factory every day and you believe this is the meaning of life: that simply is not my philosophy.

Perhaps you need to believe that every man who shirks his duty to earn as much money as possible by winding as many wristwatches as possible is overwhelmed with feelings of regret: that is not my experience. On the contrary, every single man I meet who insists there is some ineffable satisfaction that can only be found through conformism and drudgery turns out to be miserable —and in most cases they readily admit that they're jealous of the life I've lived. It used to seem to me absurd that so many people with PhDs told me they envied me, but let me tell you: now, I understand.

I don't want to be a medical doctor. I don't want to be a lawyer. I don't want to be interviewed by the C.B.C. in a blue business suit. I am absolutely delighted with who and what I've now become.

And, again, notions of success are relative to reasonable or unreasonable expectations: how could I have expected to impact the fate of the vegan movement more than I did, starting from a bunk bed in Kunming?

When I was in China, busy learning Chinese, I put a very small amount of effort into recording monologues in my spare time, and look at the outcomes! It's absolutely wonderful, and I'm in a position to be pleased without any resentment or complaint whatsoever.

To perceive me as a failure presumes I was aiming at something very different: if my dream had been, for example, to study with Peter Singer and gain a university credential in "veganology", then what I've done would be a disaster relative to that goal —but I'm a genuinely anti-establishment person. I despise Peter Singer, specifically, but I also despise any career path of that kind. I'm not being deprived of anything I'd desire behind that door (that a few people like Peter Singer hold the keys to).

This has been talked about in recent podcasts: it isn't true that I wish I could have gotten a PhD in Anthropology, Buddhology, veganology, or anything else of the sort —I look back at the people I've known who were on those paths and I feel so glad that I didn't end up like them. I am in the position, now, of understanding very deeply the worthlessness of the careers I formerly pursued, even relative to satirical rap music!

The refutation of my Redditors: the duck and the gazelle.

…this notion that the content I upload is "confrontational"… is anyone here so delusional that they think Doomed Republic would be improved if it were less confrontational?  How about Nihilism Now?  You'd like my critique of J.D. Vance to be less confrontational?  Really? Even the video I uploaded today ("Your Dog Hates You…") could only be improved by being MORE confrontational, NOT LESS.

Nobody wants to listen to an hour of indecisive waffling on any of these topics, and nothing could be more absurd than a bunch of cowards on Reddit attempting to "interpret" theatricality as a symptom of a mental illness. 

—————

[Tempeh-Muncher:]

My conclusion on recent events...

Le Seal is 100%... not a smidgen, of any sort, even a little bit....

bothered by ANYTHING whatsoever.... ever every.... posted on this sub.

—————

I'm not bothered by any of it: you can hear it in the tone of my voice in the podcast(s) —and you can hear the difference in Melissa's tone of voice, too.  You have really hurt her.  And you continue to do so.  And you apparently enjoy it.

One of the simplest things I said in that podcast is one of the most important: you can't hate stupid people for being stupid.  You just can't.

I've created all kinds of content in the last ten years (some of it serious, some of it comedic, etc.) and I've seen all kinds of responses to it: some stupid, some profound.  And some people can appreciate and respond to what I do, and some people can't.  And that's okay.  I really, genuinely do not resent the fact that stupid people are going to react to my content in a stupid way: I do not reproach a gazelle saying, "You should be more like a duck, with your legs so long!" —nor do I reproach the duck for lacking the nature of a gazelle.

Your dog hates you, your cat hates you, and Unnatural Vegan hates me, too.

LINK: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4849PigzKTidNcQqSXl2pX

The only vegan perspective on the domestication of animals. The only one. Pets and "Petism": the single most divisive issue in the vegan movement —and the problem most likely to get you kicked out of it.

NPD: in a time of red herrings, I was a yellow perch.

Re: "…it is rather suspicious that you could not develop a single lasting political alliance throughout your entire career…"

Tell me: who is Unnatural Vegan in an alliance with?

Tell me: who is Erin Janus in an alliance with?

Tell me: who is Vegan Gains in an alliance with?

Now tell me, honestly: can you imagine that I would want to drink a cup of coffee sitting at the same table as any one of these three people? We could extend the list to many more, from Isaac ("Ask Yourself") Brown to Paul Bashir.

You are beginning with an utterly false "optic" (or "framing") of the problem as if I had attempted and failed to sustain a political alliance with any (or all) of these people —and you're then taking the further step of attributing this failure to my "communication style" that can supposedly be reasonably interpreted as "NPD".

NPD is a very recognizable pattern of behavior, and a purely behavioral diagnosis: I have none of the checkmarks on the checklist for it —and for largely the same reasons that I have none of the checkmarks for autism.

This whole approach, Simba, evades the extent to which my differences with these people are real rather than merely a matter of communication style misinterpreted as a diagnosis of a psychological disorder.

Unnatural Vegan would absolutely never accept what I said about dogs and cats (pet ownership). She would absolutely never accept what I said about Peter Singer. This is not an exhaustive list of the things she would never accept about me: these are real differences entailing real enmity —they entail hatred from her directed against me, even if I do not reciprocate this hatred.

Now tell me, who has had a worse communication style, and who could not be diagnosed with a serious psychological disorder, in this same list of personalities?

• Paul Bashir. • Isaac ("Ask Yourself") Brown. • Vegan Gains. • Erin Janus. • Unnatural Vegan.

To say that these are people with "a problem of communication style" would be a drastic understatement. To say that each and every one of them could be diagnosed with NPD would, also, be an understatement.

It is absolutely absurd to say that Paul Bashir has none of the symptoms of NPD, and it would be absurd to say that these cannot be demonstrated from his communication style. You can now replace Paul's name with every other name on that list, and speculate at what other diagnoses (with what other disabilities) might be more or less apt than NPD.

———

Part two of two here, and I note this won't make much sense if you disregard part one, above.

Quote, "Whether you are 'narcissistic' or similar is not nearly as interesting as the fact that you have apparently been unable to adjust your communicative approach when such was crucial for your political networking."

This model, Simba, presumes (1) that there are people for me to network with, and (2) that I have tried to adjust my communicative approach to network with them, but I have been unable to do so.

These two terrifyingly simple points are not true.

Erin Janus is not someone I can network with. It is extremely unlikely that anyone reading this would need even one word of further explanation as to why. Vegan Gains is not someone I can network with —and, likewise, no long explanation is needed. I could repeat this statement for each name on that bullet point list, above, and I could add many more names to it.

The incompatibility between myself and these other "content creators" is not the result of anyone's inability to adjust their communicative approach, as you put it. The invidious rift between myself and each of them exists for relatively profound reasons (outlined efficiently enough in Future of an Illusion).

It is just not the case that I can adjust my communication style on the issue of pet ownership to then find myself friends and allies with people who want to kill cows to feed them to cats (and who believe the highest accomplishment a human being can dream of is adopting stray cats to help them get into kitty cat heaven).

To use an old catchphrase: stupidity is real.

Erin Janus is never going to be someone who could sit and have a conversation with me while drinking a cup of coffee. The inequality in intelligence is just too drastic for that.

The inequality isn't as hard for me to endure as it is for them: try to imagine how humiliating and emotionally painful it is for (i) Vegan Gains, (ii) Unnatural Vegan, (iii) Brian Turner, (iv) Cami Petyn and (v) Modvegan to talk to me about their history with antidepressants —and my history of criticizing their public statements about antidepressants. It is much harder for them than it is for me.

The difference between Communists and Anti-Communists cannot be overcome by a change in communication style, nor the difference between Muslims and Atheists —and it does not help to "misinterpret" this difference in communication style as narcissism on one side or the other.

A diagnosis of NPD would really be possible for Erin Janus, Vegan Gains, etc., but it wouldn't help any of them, and it certainly wouldn't help them to overcome the obstacles that separate them from me.

None of these people ever could have been my colleagues: none of them ever could have contributed to Doomed Republic. There never was anyone who could be networked with.

———

Re: "I am somewhat convinced that your communication style is a core reason for your repeated failures in life."

What failures?

The failure to seduce Unnatural Vegan? You might as well talk about a shark trying to seduce a manatee.

Happiness is not what people think it is. (Torn from the pages of Reddit!)

"He's not happy though....And his life of the mind is a construct."

I suppose it would be a devastating refutation for me to point out THAT I AM HAPPY.  ;-)

This is an interesting aspect of internet culture in the 21st century: the idea that one side "wins" and the other side "loses" simply by insisting, "I know you're not happy!"

The point here being, "You teach us that we should all force our girlfriends to read Aristotle and Plato's First Alcibiades with us, but just look at yourself: you're not happy!"  Genuinely, you have no idea how happy it might make the two of you —conversely, you have no idea how miserable.  The two of you might well break up by the time you get to the end of the Gorgias.

Happiness is not what people think it is: if I meet a true believing Communist who is happy this will not motivate me to re-evaluate the morality of Communism —nor will it make me re-evaluate the psychological significance of belief itself.  It does not matter how intensely happy the Communist may be, nor how miserable I may be by contrast.  The happiest drunkard cannot convince me that I'm miserable because I'm sober —nor can he convince me that he'd be any less happy if he were sober himself.  However, as I've already disclaimed: I am extremely happy with my life, at this very moment. (Feb. of 2025)

Happiness comes about in unexpected ways: I criticize the notion that you can know what will make you happy with any greater certainty than you'd ever know what will make you miserable.  The reasons for one's own happiness are always discovered too late.

A large part of my public work has been self-criticism, reflecting on bad decisions I've made in my life, and examining the false assumptions "behind" (or "beneath") those decisions.  You will notice that the participants in this Reddit group resolutely ignore this evidence that I'm not a narcissist (although it's a huge part of my corpus, even appearing within my books and articles, not just in my podcasts and videos).  If I were diagnosed with NPD I wouldn't be ashamed of it any more than a diagnosis with autism: each resembles the other closely enough that (e.g.) the symptoms of autism seen in Elon Musk could instead be interpreted as narcissism.  If you've known people with NPD you wouldn't ridicule them for this: they are quite incapable of doing what I've done (certainly more than a hundred times on the internet) publicly or privately.  They are also incapable of doing what Durianrider did, on numerous occasions, in having a laugh at his own expense (i.e., I have never believed that Durianrider had NPD).  They are quite incapable of making comedy mocking themselves, and/or engaging in the kind of serious self-criticism I've been so bold as to bore my audience with.

Studying Chinese at UVic made me miserable: I can explain to you the reasonable expectations that led up to the decision to study that subject at that place —and I can explain to you the false assumptions that the experience debunked.  That's how life is for all of us: the things that make us happy arise adventitiously —they are very hard to foresee.

This is one of many reasons why I urge people NOT to live their lives FOR happiness: they are making the mistake of regarding something unknowable as known. 

Reddit AMA… or, perhaps, AYA: Answer You Anything. ;-)

THE LIFE OF THE MIND, MISC.

One reply to two quotations in succession: (1) "If you enjoy reading intellectual books, great. But to posture it as something better than being social and physically active? I used to believe it, but now I think, "No, that's not true." (2) "He can frame it how he wants, like he's some badass we should all aspire to be like. But if he enjoys it, great. Yet, he frames it as some type of moral duty almost. And if he doesn't enjoy it, why is he doing it? […] He is like an "intellectual bodybuilder". Muscle mass and fitness are important, but you don't need to be a bodybuilder to achieve what's important."

I don't regard myself as having been "an intellectual bodybuilder" at any stage of my life: I am neither flattered nor insulted by this statement, I think you're in the position of being intellectually exhausted —and you presume that what I'm doing is far more intellectually exhausting still, when you peer across the chasm between us.

If you're doing humanitarian work in Laos, do you want to throw yourself into learning the Lao language? Not everyone does: there were people doing those jobs who had zero engagement with the language, history or politics. They earned their paycheck, got a pat on the back for trying to make the world a better place, and they got on an airplane when they'd had enough of the experience.

Without false humility, I'd say that the level of effort I made in learning Laotian should be regarded as the bare minimum requirement for someone who chooses to put themselves in that situation. When I slept under a mosquito net, I read the collected works of John Dryden with a flashlight (i.e., there was no electricity). I was also studying Pali and several different periods of history. That's what I did for fun, in my spare time, when other people were drinking alcohol and… worse.

I did have friends in Vientiane, but we spoke amongst ourselves in English —sometimes French, sometimes German. John Dryden, also, I read in English —not Lao. And when I was in the room, we would talk about history and politics. Most of those friends I met spontaneously, at coffee shops.

I owned a bicycle. I did long distance cycling (circa 115 km per run). I had other hobbies and interests. I had a gym membership for most of the time that I was in Vientiane, too.

Yes, there were people there who looked at how I was spending my time and wondered, intellectually, how I could possibly do any more; but from my perspective, I would ask how I could possibly do less.

So, I return to the quotation: "But to posture it as something better than being social and physically active?"

You reach a point of diminishing returns with "being socially and physically active" fairly quickly: how many hours per week do you want to be scheduled for exercise? How many hours per week do you want to spend socializing? The number is not zero in either case; however, if you really challenge yourself to put a specific number to it… it is going to be finite.

The repetition of these activities (social and physical) benefits you very little, and with more hours, past a point of diminishing returns, it benefits you less and less.

What I learned in researching and writing No More Manifestos really does accumulate: there's a sort of "intellectual benefit" (from that active research leading to an informed opinion) that will endure for the rest of my life —whereas spending twice as much time doing pushups (during those same months in which I wrote the book) would not have benefitted me in any way at all —or, at least, not in a way that would accumulate and still endure years later / right now.

Re: "[He talks about himself as if] he's some badass we should all aspire to be like."

I do not think "you all" should aspire to be like me, but I have known many (MANY) people who directly asked me for advice as to how they could be more like me. Really. Even long before I had a youtube channel. Young and old. Some people want to be more intellectual than they already are. Some people want to be sober. Some people want to be vegan. Some people want to be able to record a three hour livestream on Aristotle (or a bunch of other random topics from the history of political science) with zero notes, zero preparation, etc., in the way that I could (and I did).

You may think they're eccentric, and you may think I'm eccentric, but, in my experience, including many face-to-face conversations, there are always some people around who want advice as to how they can live the life of the mind as I define it. This can include very specific questions about reading and research —about how Melissa and I would read books together, for example. It can include specific questions about political protests, creative projects, etc.; so if you think I'm eccentric, you will have to imagine how eccentric these other people are who are asking for advice as to how they can imitate me in eccentricity.

The comparison to bodybuilding here is apt in one limited sense: not everyone wants to be a bodybuilder. However, those who do want to may well seek out advice from someone else they see bodybuilding, etc.

However, I don't see it that way: instead, a great deal of conflict arises from my perception of the issue in terms of "bare minimum requirements" and moral obligations. It would create less tension with colleagues around me if I had this kind of ("narcissistic") delusion that I was some extraordinary specimen pushing at the limits of what's humanly possible —if I considered myself to be an intellectual bodybuilder who could show off for the crowd. If I regarded myself as extraordinary, it would make others feel more comfortable about being ordinary.

Instead, I regard my contemporaries as falling short bare of minimum requirements —and at some point that becomes a moral problem, not just an intellectual one. When you're looking at a university professor who has not done the bare minimum reading required to teach a subject, that's not just a matter of individual laziness: it entails a moral problem and a predictable conflict with someone like myself.

I learned a lot in a short time, in those years in Laos. And I was surrounded by people who'd been there for many more years than I who never did any of the "bare minimum requirement" work that I did. But yes, I also had a very active life socially and physically: there were enough hours in the day for all that and more.

Reddit vs Reality: the ongoing conspiracy to put Melissa in a straitjacket for speaking her mind.

This… this is why Everyone Hates Eisel Mazard (AR+IO-011).

LINK: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4z58N2ctM7npXfcQh0lITW

Our parents, why they didn't become vegan, and we did.

On à-bas-le-ciel: vegan politics and the politics of veganism.

LINK: https://open.spotify.com/episode/73HhPXYuuawCzZAwtdziz5

Instagram is destroying stand up comedy... THE PODCAST.

The fourth episode of the History of Comedy Podcast (from Apuleius to Zelensky) but, in some ways, this is "episode zero" (AR+IO-010).

LINK: https://open.spotify.com/show/533d7BBnHnAFMgc1RZCKIf

First, it was an article. Now it's a podcast episode, expanding and reflecting upon the article. Antics ensue. Discuss.

Instagram is destroying stand up comedy: how not why. An article.

Circa 1994, I saw a good looking woman get kicked off stage (in a branch of Yuk Yuk's Toronto) simply for telling a joke that wasn't funny: she was on stage very briefly, but, from memory, after only the second joke she told, someone backstage pressed the button, and she was suddenly escorted away —as if it were "a gong show", where the performers could be eliminated at any time. I can remember the joke in detail: men were like shoes, she explained, and she didn't like them with the tongues sticking out. Button pressed, performance over, take no bows, give no outros: "hard out". That would never happen today —partly (not entirely) because she was the best looking woman on stage that night, and (lamentably) we still have a culture built around the bigotry of low expectations.

In 2026, (1) venue managers make decisions on the basis of how many Instagram followers a comedian has —and it is venue managers who have taken on the roles abandoned by booking agents, talent agents and entertainment lawyers (because there simply isn't enough money in the game for a percentage to be paid to any of those people anymore). (2) Success on Instagram (and Tiktok) has absolutely nothing to do with the bare minimum competence ("bamico") required to be a stand up comedian.

Let's have a brief digression on what exactly that bamico is, scil., the bare minimum competence:

(i) write original material,
(ii) rehearse original material,
(iii) select from, adapt and perform that material for the particular audience.

There are comedians here who are unbelievably terrible, consistently showing up with no material: they have neither written jokes nor anything else, they just narrate spontaneously off the tops of their heads. In both form and content, a lot of this sounds like it was originally performed for a therapist, not an audience: I cannot count the number of times I have heard a comedian lament, after a flop, "my therapist thought that was really funny". It would be one thing to kick them off stage, it would be another thing to ban them from the club forever: there is the very real option of saying to them, "You can come back only when you've written and rehearsed new material" —which is something very different from an improvised autobiographical monologue. The irony is that I am extremely experienced at improvised autobiographical monologues (and I've had more success with that art form than any of these comedians ever have had or ever will) but I recognize that it is not stand up comedy, and it is basically insulting to the audience to lapse into precisely the same kind of monologue that I managed to rack up eight million views on youtube with. Sincere, unrehearsed personal reflections are not stand up comedy —they may be interesting to an audience on youtube, if you've led an interesting enough life, or if you've got enough intellectual substance, or some kind of intriguing political ambition (and this is absolutely never true of any of these comedians, they uniformly lack all three). Still: not bamico, not comedy.

The problem with Natalie Cuomo is not merely that she is not funny: she demonstrates how Instagram is destroying stand up comedy. There's a surreal sense in which she isn't even trying to be funny: she is trying to be famous on Instagram, and doing absolutely none of the bare minimum things required to be a comedian. This is the comedic equivalent of a sexually attractive man posing (near nude) with a basketball on Instagram, and then touring basketball courts for small audiences because they relate to his combination of sex appeal and autobiographical reflections "on the App" —but he doesn't actually play basketball. He isn't sinking his time and energy into the sport's own bamico.

I am not going to tell you that 90% of Natalie Cuomo's success is a result of her sex appeal: I am going to argue that it's a solid 100% —and, worse, that sex appeal is cycled through several successive stages of commercialization that seem to have corrupted the already corrupt process of auditioning that stand up comedy is supposedly built upon.

Yeah, I said it: auditioning. In New York City, absolutely nobody auditions anymore: comedians are expected to "hang" with other comedians who then "give them the pass" for a particular club —comedians who know comedians get "passed" (this is used as both a verb and a noun) and are then regarded as approved in advance for performance on that stage (or at a cluster of associated clubs). This entails a cyclone of cocaine and bisexual ex-girlfriends who know that they can socialize with the right people (not even necessarily needing to sleep with the right people) to gain access to time on stage. And straight men play the same game of seducing other straight men by the same rules. The Eiffel Tower is not just a tourist attraction in France.

Venue management do not audition comedians as people, and they do not evaluate the material to be performed in specific before a show: there is an unspeakable desperation of comedians to "hang" with anyone who can get them "a pass" to a better club than the one they're performing in now. The role of the talent agent has been supplanted by a decentralized system of sex, drugs and rock and roll conferring legitimacy.

I really wonder why high schools have not replaced university entrance exams with a similar system, frankly —as much less hard work and talent are required to take notes while some moron sermonizes his way through your B.A. Presumably, one student can simply confer "a pass" upon another, on the basis of how they all "hang", with equal rigor, and equally predictable outcomes.

Venue managers may not notice that none of these people are doing the (bamico) work to actually have new material to offer, but they will notice the number of empty seats: thus Instagram becomes the crucial lubricant —and this has ramifications far beyond the cozy confines of New York cocktail parties.

Natalie Cuomo has over one million followers on Instagram: as with Freelee, years before, many of these followers are women who respond to N.C.'s sex appeal with a strange spirit of imitation (wanting to be like her) whereas others are men who are directly aroused by her content —and hearing her talk about her sex life is what's on offer here, not actual sex.

N.C. is not attractive to me, personally, and I do not find her autobiographical anecdotes arousing (nor interesting, nor funny) but I can see the difference between a barfly and the broad side of a barn. My extremely eccentric taste in women is irrelevant to this discussion: Natalie Cuomo offers the intoxicating mix of the relatable and the unattainable —her very mediocrity is a positive part of her appeal. However, if she had been fifty pounds fatter, consistently, for the last ten years, would anyone in their right mind think that this level of success would have been attained by her? Twenty pounds? Ten? Freelee, same question.

So, the venue manager sees that a comedian has a million followers and thinks that ("therefore") seats will be filled and alcoholic beverages will be sold at astronomically inflated prices if only this name is on the billboard. Sometimes it works: it works just often enough to perpetuate the pattern of utterly untalented comedians being booked this way —and never needing to actually write and rehearse material.

This is a problem that can be solved. Venue managers (or whoever will now replace booking agents, talent agents and entertainment lawyers) have to actually call in comedians for auditions, and they have to be prepared to tell comedians, "Come back when you've written some new material". Of course, this can only be possible if the comedians are going to be paid enough to justify the exercise: it is so much cheaper and more time efficient to just glance at your phone and see an Instagram reel (or a Tiktok, etc.) to then make the booking decision on this basis. "Well, if that guy 'gave her the pass', and this video has ten thousand views, I'm sure she can come up with something for next Saturday…" —that's the loop the industry is stuck in, as it spirals ever downward from industrial to charitable status.

In theory, comedians (male and female) could get bookings by having daring acts of physical comedy on social media (jumping off a rubber roof to land on an inflatable mattress made of solid concrete, etc.) but it is almost always sex appeal that's being bartered about here —male or female.

Money, fame, power, respect, sex. Not necessarily in that order.

Against Wayne Hsiung, and in defense of Political Science... AGAIN.