Reviewing GLO's "Pillars of Wisdom"
The West has fallen--ought we to bang Ukrainian refugees?
In this piece I’ll review a resplendent purple tome called The Pillars of Wisdom, written by recent podcast alumnus and longtime Manosphere worthy
.TL;DR — You should buy it. GLO’s prose is lively and engaging, his practical advice useful and actionable, and his broader narrative sophisticated and compelling.
This isn’t the tepid grainy Denny’s coffee you usually get with Manosphere books. Also the cover art is genuinely quite beautiful and fun to look at, which says a lot coming from me because I often find it difficult to appreciate visual art.
Initially I requested that GLO send me a digital copy of Pillars because the texture of paper triggers my sensory issues, inducing a disagreeable nails on a chalkboard feeling. Alas, he informed me this wouldn’t be possible because the book is only in publication physically so as to protect against piracy.
Smart move. Most people aren’t disembodied spergs like Wally B and rather appreciate corporeality; if anything screens code as low status among the Smart Set these days. With this choice GLO doesn’t just protect his IP but also increases the scarcity of his product while showing he’s ahead of the curve and likely has ideas worth paying for. Always a lovely surprise when an intellectual turns out to be a decent businessman!
So I agreed to review a meatspace copy of Pillars, even though I hadn’t cracked open a physical book since a memorable night in 2017 when Hurricane Irma knocked out my power while rampaging through Tampa and I spent the better part of an evening skimming through Mein Kampf by candlelight. I found Hitler an incisive writer but also a bit overwrought—something I’ve since come to appreciate for the sheer bulk it lends his manifesto when applied to the buttcheeks of mischievous Jewesses.
Coming in at 363 pages GLO’s magnum opus is very nearly as hefty as Uncle Adolf’s, but I was pleased to observe that his prose flows a lot more beautifully—it’s evident why the man’s posts on r/TheRedPill were so popular back in the day.
Unfortunately Pillars is also bound hardback and it seems like bad form to use it for hitting women, which is honestly kind of a shame because even the Jewish ones would likely find GLO significantly more offensive than Hitler.
The most outrageous material is typically found in the section titles:
“Brown Beta Males”
“Export Your Healthy Unvaccinated Penis”
“Liberal Women Are Incapable of Love”
“Drinking From the Corpse of the Sun”
“How to Stuff Your White Meat Into Asian Girls”
“…Use the Desperation of Ukrainian War Refugees to Your Sexual Advantage”
“The Most Chivalrous Thing You Can Do for American Women is Anal”
But what’s interesting is that when you get into the actual substance of GLO’s writing the edgiest stuff pretty much always comes from deliberate framing. Much like yours truly, the man loves to deploy spicy and provocative rhetoric to make entirely reasonable ideas more interesting. As he himself notes in the book’s forward, lurid section titles like the ones listed above are mostly there to grab your attention with dopamine cummies and keep you engaged while he lays out his argument.
…which honestly makes a lot of sense given that he’s writing for a generation of Zoomer guys who grew up in such a porn-saturated environment that it feels a bit uncharitable to expect them to concentrate on anything that DOESN’T occasionally drift into overt pornography. Just think of this tactic as literary Adderall.
And if nothing else Pillars deserves your eyeballs for that reason alone—it will prove incredibly useful to anyone interested in writing for an audience of young men in 2025. GLO’s been in this game for over a decade now, and to pull that off you can’t simply be insightful and entertaining; you need to understand how to pivot authentically with the culture, which is something he pulls off brilliantly here.
Just speaking as someone who’s always thinking about new ways to optimize my beloved reader’s emotional engagement, I picked up on a lot of subtle and ingenious tactics from Pillars that I’ll absolutely be stealing for my own work.
But let’s get into the actual substance of it—what exactly is GLO doing here?
The first part of his thesis is that the modern West is irredeemably broken—that men shouldn’t pay it any loyalty, and ought to psychologically “break up with the West”. GLO savages contemporary courtship norms, economic systems, and social dynamics, noting that the system’s rigged against you and you need fangs to compete effectively. And that’s the second part of his thesis: modern men have no dignified choice except to deploy lots of manipulative and asymmetric life strategies to get ahead.
So do I agree with him?
Well… kind of.
Obviously the second part of GLO’s thesis resonates incredibly strongly with me given that this is literally the reason I founded Tortuga. For years now I’ve basically maintained that anyone who DOESN’T aggressively leverage asymmetric strategies in 21st century America is just sort of retarded, and that anyone who helps young men do so effectively is a lovely winner.
But the anti-Western stuff honestly makes my eyes glaze over. Honestly The West has been quite good to me personally, and I often suspect it’s precisely because we’re living in such a weird and decadent era that I’ve been able to carve out a somewhat dignified niche for myself in the first place. If you’re the sort of guy who’s smart and charismatic enough to become internet famous and have niggas pay for your advice and opinions this honestly seems like a pretty amazing time and place to be alive.
Yet it would be so very pedestrian to overindex on such a substantively trivial disagreement over framing, don’t you think? I doubt it boils down to anything more important than the Russian’s approach to life versus the Irishman’s.
In any book like this the value proposition consists in the author’s ability to weave a compelling narrative that ultimately endows the reader with actionable heuristics for navigating the world. The extent to which anyone finds these heuristics useful will depend on their temperament and background and life experiences, and it’s quite probable that whatever facet of Pillars one man finds repugnant is precisely what will enable another man to access its eponymous wisdom.
The key to succeeding in this realm is being maximally compelling to your own niche— not trying to be everyone’s friend and churning out a river of gray goo.
At the end of the day GLO is encouraging guys to be agentic and opportunistic and forward-thinking—to think of themselves as capable predators instead of as victims. The practical strategies he offers are effective and attractively presented to the sort of feller who’d benefit from buying the book. Meanwhile a lot of the ideas in Pillars are genuinely compelling, and represent an actual step forward in a discourse space where “innovation” usually resembles trying to fix a clogged toilet by sloshing around in the stagnant miasma. Unlike the other guys GLO actually has a plunger.
In fact, a lot of the best material in Pillars is a direct attack on Manosphere / Redpill platitudes. I especially appreciated his broadside on Stoicism, which has always struck me as fantastically insipid and gay—not to mention wholly impractical for any man who doesn’t come from a lamo Stiff Upper Lip culture.
At least one realm in which the Russian and Irishman can agree.
Anyway go buy The Pillars of Wisdom by clicking these words.
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"I found Hitler an incisive writer but also a bit overwrought—something I’ve since come to appreciate for the sheer bulk it lends his manifesto when applied to the buttcheeks of mischievous Jewesses." *slow clap*