Pimpfluencers and Philosopher-Kings
The Weird Guys Report
What do you have?
Be honest. What do you actually have?
I know what I have.
The tools and connections to escape the Matrix.
The discipline and mental strength required to win.
A brotherhood that would die for me.
What should I do today?
Make a million dollars then blow it all on cigars?
Fill one of my 17 supercars up with hookers like a clown car then bottom out on a pothole in the Albanian countryside?
Fly private to Dubai, clog the toilet because I only eat steak, get a peeling sunburn on my bald scalp, then get kicked out of a nightclub for yelling?
I have options. I’m free.
I’m already one of the 50 coolest men on the planet.
Add my millions and the weaponization of my physique?
Top 10. Easy.
Don’t lie to yourself, pussy. One day as me is better than your entire soy life.
That is a typical tweet from a man named Andrew “Cobra” Tate (@OfWudan). He’s a bit like Dan Bilzerian: Bilzerian was a poker champion, Tate was an accomplished kickboxer, now both make a living as digital pimpfluencers. He’s also got some John McAfee (z”l) in him: Tate constantly brags about his wealth, is almost certainly lying, and seems unable to return to the United States for some reason, so he lives in Eastern Europe Tate is your prototypical online Chad red-pill tradcon hyper-masculine right-wing fuck-your-feelings Lamborghini sigma grindset valor-stealing shitcoin-shilling daygaming sexual-marketplace-economist motivational screamer high value man who’s trying to sell you a speaker’s fee, membership to a networking group, or an online course about how to make your wife want you again.
If you follow Tate or listen to his podcasts (Don’t.), you come to understand his political pseudophilosophy. The West is cucked. Antifa leftists have gone mad with power. They want to Make America Queer Again, so procreation is only possible by beating off into a cup. They want to jail you for not wiggling your ass to “Believe” by Cher. Kids today are whiny and spoiled and they scream if they don’t get the iPad because they’re going to Drag Queen Storytime instead of being beaten. They’re growing up into soft, undisciplined betas. That’s why China is going to win; they understand brotherhood. That’s why you need to move to Poland or Romania, where you can still see cohesive, loving, heterosexual families raised with old school respect while speeding your McLaren to a brothel. That’s why you need to sign up -- right now -- for whatever his life unfucking tool du jour is.
Tate has never read a book because he loves chaos and action too much . He hates YouTube videos because people talk too slowly. He wants to escape. He craves the past, before it all got so crazy. That’s why he loves the Eastern Bloc. He wants to seal himself from the world, with all its vicissitudes and differences of opinion, and enjoy a simple life: prostitutes, cigars, fast cars, and posting online.
Three weeks ago, the Times profiled Paul Skallas, who, just like me, runs a newsletter that’s surprisingly influential among overthinking, understimulated men. Here’s the lede:
In a tumultuous time humanity looks to the ancient world for guidance and inspiration. It’s a dynamic at least as old as Petrarch, the 14th-century Italian poet whose scholarship on the Greeks and Romans helped kick-start the Renaissance.
Paul Skallas, a 36-year-old technology lawyer and writer, has today picked up antiquity’s torch. He’s an evangelist for wisdom derived from the distant past.
Skallas writes about the Lindy Effect. The term comes from a 1964 article about comedians who hung out at Lindy’s diner. They believed comedians had a finite amount of material in their lifetime. If you perform too much too early, you run out. Career longevity is inversely correlated with how quickly you put stuff out. This is my excuse whenever I skip Chazzy’s World for a week. The former trader and pop-economist Nassim Taleb expanded on this idea: the longer something has been around, the longer you can expect it to be around in the future. “The only effective judge of things is time.”
Skallas uses the Lindy Effect to prescribe a lifestyle built around time-tested habits. For example, alcohol has been around for thousands of years and modern science has shown it to have some health benefits. Warnings of the danger of excessive drinking have been around for just as long, and science has also proven them correct. According to Lindy, we can expect both drinking and concern over drinking to exist for another few thousand years.
To that end, Lindy/Skallas/Taleb advise against anything too far from what the Ancients would have done. Skip the fat-shredding, hypertrophic, anaerobic fitness plan and go work hard in the yard. Fad diets don’t work as well as following the dietary restrictions of kashrut, halal, or Skallas’s preferred Eastern Orthodox cyclical fasting. Pipe tobacco is safer than cigarettes, or God forbid, a vape. Brush your teeth but skip the mouthwash. Choose rice, vegetables, and fish over McDonald’s. Get some sun, but not too much. Walk. Spend time with family. Read. Sleep.
And though the essence of Lindy sounds reasonable, it can be taken to extremes. One of my favorite Lindy guys, @SpiritOfPine, recently tweeted that he does not use sunscreen, bugspray, deodorant, soy, headphones, fluoride, seed oils, or condoms for Lindy reasons. But a very quick Google will show you that deodorant, condoms, soy, sunscreen, and bug repellant have all existed in some form for thousands of years. In fact, for denying them, SpiritOfPine’s stinky, bug bite-ridden ass is actually not Lindy. Checkmate!
There’s actually a lot of crossover between Lindy purists and Tate-affiliated ego addicts. They are men drawn to ideas of “traditional masculinity” and the very traditional, masculine thing of being told exactly how to act by another man. And of course, a lot of them are social media marketing professionals. Cobra Tate, Lindy, and their acolytes are all selling us (the fellas) the same thing.
Cobra Tate is a caricature of a rich guy. The Lindy Lads are caricatures of smart guys. Both are pitching bizarre, annoying ways to live your life. Two versions of freedom, both with a lot of rules. Instead of normal problems, you can worry about being up to the eyes in payments on sports cars or finding references to IPAs in ancient Greece. Women will respect you because you act like a horny, steroidal asshole or because you’re a little husky, which projects security according to the Phoenicians. Both are codes to check every decision in your life against and an ideal to work for, but never achieve. They’re selling you an alternative to the most difficult and rewarding lifestyle: just kinda hanging out, doing whatever you want, and being happy about it. You’re not a billionaire playboy on the lamb or a philosopher-king thinking about atoms and playing the lyre. You’re a guy who likes to chill after a long day at your computer job. And that’s ok.
Us kings need a week off once in a while