That name sounded familiar. This does seem to be the same Alexander Pope that CGPGrey stumbled across and strayed into the, apparently, well documented feud with Thomas Herne.
I've actually tried to befriend three random people on lemmy. Two of them initially went well and chatted with me on Element / Matrix for a while, then stopped responding. One of them never responded to my initial invitation to be friends.
I would love to make friends here based on my philosophical alignment and shared interests with a lot of posters I see, but if I'm objectionable, I don't want my lemmy legacy to be a series of failed friend requests.
I don't know, I never comment on YouTube. However, it doesn't seem like he posts on YouTube at all anymore. I'm not certain, but I think he might have refocused on his podcast.