Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 811: The meaning crisis with Dr. Aaron

Episode Date: December 16, 2024

Tom is off this week and I am joined by Aaron Rabinowitz Ph.D. to talk about his latest article in the Skeptic UK: Also check out And follow Aaron on Bluesky at

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Ontario. Today's show is brought to you by Adam and Eve.com. Go to adamandeve.com right now and you'll get 50% off just about any item. All you have to do is enter the code word GLORY at checkout. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Recording live from Glory Hole Studios in Chicago and beyond, this is Cognitive Dissidence. Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big, or makes us mad. It's skeptical, it's political, and there is no welcome mat. Today is Friday, December 13th,

and Tom is not with us this week. Tom is dealing with some sickness in his family right now, and he is not with us this week. He could not make a show this week. So I had to reach out to an author I know, one Dr. Aaron Rabinowitz, and we are going to be talking to an author I know, one Dr. Aaron Rabinowitz, and we are going to be talking about an article that he posted in the Skeptic UK.

And we have a really interesting conversation, a really interesting conversation about masculinity and then a conversation about how masculinity and how men should operate in progressive spaces, how they should be more welcoming to people who maybe come from conservative spaces. It's a long, broad ranging conversation. We also talked about the creator accountability network. So let's get right into it. Here's the interview. So here I am about to go see the Nutcracker and you know what really cracks my nuts? People not saving 50% off almost any one item

when they go to adamandeeve.com and use Code Glory. I mean, why aren't you treating your sugar plums to a party scene all of their own? And guess what? When you use Code Glory at adamandeeve.com, you not only get that 50% off almost any one item, you also get three free gifts. Oh my gosh.

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So, get cracking on those notes. Okay, very good. Oh, we'll hear it. Okay, bye bye. Okay, I'm learning that it was actually a mouse king, not a rat prince. But you know what? The joke remains because don't be a reference, be a mouse king and go to adamandeve.com and use code glory.

Okay. Thank you so much. Bye bye. So I am joined by Dr. Aaron Rabinowitz, a podcast host of Embrace the Void Philosophers in Space and the ethics director of the Creator Accountability Network, Aaron, Dr. Aaron, here's my question. Now that you are donating your time to the Creator Accountability Network,

do you get to take right off more on your taxes now that you're a doctor? Is there a better tax incentive now that you're a doctor? I don't know, and the reason is, as an ethicist, that doctor doesn't translate into any more income. In fact, it translates into less income. So there's nothing to write off for, right? I think my understanding of taxes is very limited,

but I think you have to make money before you can write off, unless you're Donald Trump, I guess. I don't know. That's super important. It's super important. The way to get a write-off is you need to actually make money first.

That's key. Yeah, so we'll talk a little bit about the Creator Accountability Network later on, but I wanted to bring you on, Doctor, to talk to you very specifically about an article that just came out in the Skeptic UK. The article is entitled, The Meaning Crisis and How We Rescue Young Men from Reactionary Politics.

You penned this article and here's my first takeaway. This has nuance and it criticizes the left. So have you been canceled yet? I have been criticized, let's say. Yeah, okay, fair. No, it's the generally the response has been overwhelmingly positive. We'll do it this way. Setting aside the skeptic subreddit conversation,

which quickly spiraled into a dumpster fire. The conversation on Blue Sky, you know, this got shared by Olaf-femi Otaewo a little while ago and got shared around a bunch as a result. And so that got me a good sense of like a survey of what mostly elder millennial plus a couple of younger leftists felt about this. And it was sort of two thirds, this looks like what I'm seeing in my research or this is something that I have a concern about as a parent or

you know, this is something we need to take seriously. And then like one third what you would expect in terms of why are we centering men's feelings, like men need to suck it up and shut up. Like this is just telling men that they can just have their patriarchy again or something. So there was some of that, but it was definitely not the largest response. I feel like when I read it, I was very conflicted in a lot of ways. And I think this piece is very challenging in that way

because many of us that, you know, when we deal, like a lot of us people who are on the left, there are a lot of very hard lines that are drawn. And those hard lines are sometimes really hard to cross. And so, before we get into any of that stuff, why don't you just summarize the piece so we can start talking about the meat of it? Sure, so there have been lots of pieces like this

after any election, but especially after this one, where we have this particularly horrifying outcome, a lot of attempts to try to understand what happened, you know, ideally with the hope of doing better next time, or at least, you know, punishing the people who did something bad this time, right? So the, there's a bunch of different causes, right? First, we want to note, one of the complaints I sometimes hear with these kind of arguments is why are you talking about X and not Y? Yeah, yeah.

And like, there's a lot of things that matter here, right? And I'm only even remotely speaking an expert on a few of them. And so, I can't speak for a bunch of things like why the Latino vote went more significantly for Trump in particular, but I have been doing a lot of work on like the experiences of men and what makes it possible for men to spiral into harmful, far right, conspiratorial kinds of spaces. And what we saw in this election was a continuing growing gender gap voting-wise, where men, particularly young men across all demographics, socioeconomically, racially, et cetera, shifted

more towards Trump. And I think there's a bunch of reasons why that happened, but I do think we need to talk about like what's going on for men in their lives, in our world right now. Again, with the caveat that like, that it's not the only thing we need to talk about, right? We also need to talk about what's going on for white women.

We need to talk about what's going on for other groups and try to figure out, because I personally believe at the end of the day, people vote for, you know, a feeling of unmet needs. Now you can argue that their needs are actually being met and they're just whiners and they just, you know, are voting out of anger irrationality, or something like that. But I think for a lot of people, the votes sort of reflect a lack of felt meaning in their lives and a lack of other kinds of meaning-making narratives in their lives, and that this feels like a way to fight back against that.

Yeah, I... You know, when you talk about whether or not or why people were voting the way they were, you're right. There's, there's a, there's a myriad number of reasons why someone may or may not vote about, for a particular candidate. And we saw that in this latest election, I've been falling back to economics. Like one of the major things is the economic push. And we found from a lot of external polls and exit polls that economics

was one of the main drivers why people decided to vote in the way they did. But we also have seen this push towards the far right sort of manosphere. This group of people who are captivating a lot of young men. There's Rogan who's in there, you know, the the Talking Point USA guys, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand recently started becoming one of these people and they're sort of captivating this young group of, you know, influential, these are influential guys, influencing people who want to be influenced.

And your contention in this article is that they don't have any purpose today. We've sort of, in some ways, stripped that purpose, or at least hidden that purpose in some ways. And these guys, these influencers, for sort of the manosphere, this masculine group of influencers, they have a purpose. What is the purpose that they're offering

that, say, the progressives are not offering? Yeah, I think what they're offering is kind of... More and more, I think of it as the Warhammer 40K dream. Like, you get to be the guy who stands next to his bro and fights against the horde that is trying to overrun society. Sure, sure. You know, you get to be the person who stands on that wall and like says no.

Yeah. That's a really strong dream, I think, especially for a lot of young men who feel under siege, essentially, culturally speaking. They feel like it is kind of open season on them culturally and that at the same time, their needs are sort of dismissed and treated as not important. They feel derided especially by progressives and people on the left

who feel morally entitled to sort of punch up quote unquote at men. And you know, I really also want to caveat, I'm here to be sympathetic to everybody involved just like I think we need to be more compassionate towards men who are suffering in this kind of meaning crisis way. We also need to, you know, we have to not lose sight of compassion towards individuals who are being harmed by the behavior of men who are caught up in that crisis. The reason this matters is both because men are people and people matter and also because if we let this crisis

go unaddressed, it's going to get worse and that will mean more harm to everyone, especially non men. It's an interesting comment you made there when you said punch up. And I think, you know, we talk about comedy, we always talk about how we try to punch up towards things that are in power. You punch down, you're sort of picking on someone who has no power, and you want to

try to always attack those people in power. And I think one thing that we may think about the male population is that they always have power. They always have privilege. And in a lot of ways, you know, we're seeing a younger generation that doesn't have a lot of economic stability. They don't have, they don't have the same sort of level of, I guess, power or placement in society. And so now we're looking at a group of people who really aren't as powerful as I think

a lot of people want to make them out to be and so we are punching down on a large swath, a large group of people, especially economically. Yeah and like a lot of power is complex to certain spheres, it's intersectional, and a lot of this, you know, the other aspect we wanna bring in here is the capitalism aspect. So I think what you get is a mix of attempts from the left very reasonably to try to deconstruct patriarchy, to remove the like traditional meaning making narratives for men that go along with patriarchy

because they're largely dominance based. And so they, you know, require men to like, even the, even the most positive ones, right? Even though like, you know, I'm going to protect my loved ones, takes the form of like, I'm going to protect my daughter with a shotgun from boyfriend. Like, it protects property, like, ways that don't actually create healthy, caring relationships necessarily. These are, these are reasons that it is good to move away from traditional gender norms and, you know, approaches to meaning making. So you have that sort of pressure on one side.

And then on the other side, you just have this capitalist system that a alienates men from the like value of their labor, just like it alienates all workers, but a lot of workers are men. And so they don't feel like they have a sense of meaning from going to their jobs, because a lot of their jobs don't have meaning, because capitalism is about making money, not about making meaning.

So they are forced into that system as well. They're sold the idea of being providers within that system on sort of those traditional norm models, but that system is extracting wealth from them. So they're not getting ahead. So they see themselves as being not the like truly successful members of the community. They're not getting that kind of respect that they want.

And so, you know, you talked about economics. There's a couple of ways to approach the economic question with regard to voting. One thing to note is that when they do research into it, economic anxiety seems to bear out as actually being about racial or dominance anxiety. So it's about group dominance stuff where you're concerned that your group, men,

are losing out to non-males in various ways, which is true to some extent, they're not as much as they actually think. Because it is also the case that men do still disproportionately hold a vast amount of power within that capitalist system. Much more of the wealth, much more control. As we've seen from our election, we're literally a couple of dudes just bought the election for Donald Trump.

Like, yeah, right. That's still a problem. Yeah. really a couple of dudes just bought the election for Donald Trump. Like, that's still a problem. But what your point is really good, and this is what I want leftists to hear, is that like individual men are rarely the beneficiaries on a large scale of that. And are also, as we have all often said on the left,

you know, like victims of patriarchy as well. That systemic analysis where we say, you know, like victims of patriarchy as well. That systemic analysis where we say, you know, patriarchy and capitalism fuck men over too, that needs to like continue to engender compassion for them, no matter how frustrated we kind of get about their behavior. Yeah, and I, as someone who, I grew, I didn't grow up with a lot, right? So I grew up in poverty.

And, you know, when I first started hearing about, you know, male privilege and white privilege, I initially, my first thought was to push back on that. Like, I didn't feel like I was someone who was privileged, but it also gave me an opportunity to stop and think and realize that I was actually privileged several times in my life. And I was very lucky in my life to have certain privileges.

But initially, when you confront someone with something like this, there's a huge pushback. There's a big, I don't want to hear that sort of thing because I had a hard life and individually they may have, but privilege isn't as much an individual thing as it is a group thing. And so people, they misunderstand the concept. Yeah, and not to get us too far afield,

but since this does come up in my dissertation as well, and it's something that I have- A way to bring your dissertation in here, Doctor. Great, bravo. I mean, like the privilege discourse, yeah, right. The book forthcoming. You know, privilege discourse, I think is problematic because it creates that reaction. And I think there's a couple of reasons for that. I think the word privilege itself, we all,

if we're honest, acknowledge sounds like negative. It sounds dismissive, it sounds, you know, blamey in a kind of retributive, provoking kind of way. And it also, I think, has an all of like an all thing is considered conclusion sound to it, even though we recognize that, in principle, most individuals experience a mix of privilege and marginalization in their lives. When we say that you're privileged because you're a man, it carries the sense of like, you have an overall privileged experience, right?

Which may not be the case, right? What we wanna really say in this, I talk about luck as the thing, as a better language for talking about this. And you were just using that language, you switched to that language when you were interpreting this stuff. I think if you know, using that language. You switched to that language when you were, you know, interpreting this stuff. Yeah.

I think if you come at people with the idea that like everybody's lives are a mix of good and bad luck and like one kind of luck is you're born a certain person who has a certain skin tone or a certain appearance or something, and you will have benefits as a result of that, that you did not earn and don't deserve, that can be a really good foundation for instilling a motivation to pay that forward. So one kind of meaning making that I think we want to make more available to men,

which we have to do through a combination of encouraging them to do it and then genuinely respecting them for doing it instead of kind of telling them that they were expected to do that and therefore aren't respected for doing it instead of kind of telling them that they were expected to do that and therefore aren't respected for doing it. Is the kind of spending your privilege, spending your luck to help other marginalized individuals, right? We like one of the things I say in the article is it's specifically like this is primarily an article for men.

It's not for non men because I want to tell non men to stop shitting on men as a group. But like the active work of helping men to not slide into these spaces, that active engagement needs to be heavily borne by other men in progressive spaces who don't really have the like basis for compassion burnout

that other people might have and are more likely to be heard. Yeah. You're using your privilege to help the other people who at this point may not recognize their privilege or don't have as much privilege as you have. I, I, I'm doing another project right now. Um, plan incoming for people who are listening to this show. I have another project in the, in this sort of, in the, in the, in the pipe at this point, but I've been listening to a lot of Joe Rogan.

And one of the people that he interviewed very recently was a person by the name of Evan Hafer. Now, Evan Hafer owns the Black Ripple Coffee Company, and he's also a ex Green Beret, a CIA guy. And they had a long wide ranging conversation just like every Joe Rogan show is a big long wide ranging conversation. But they stop at a certain point where both of them stop and look at each other and be like, man, I've been so lucky in my life. I've been so lucky in my life. And there's a point where I thought to myself, and now I haven't read your dissertation,

but I thought to myself, I was like, you guys are so close to talking about privilege. You guys are this close to talking about privilege. You just didn't get the language right, but you 100% talked about essentially what privilege is and how you've experienced in your life. Yeah, I think that even people who are very far on the other end of the spectrum from me on a lot of these issues, there's still certain kinds of language that they have available

to them that conveys some understanding of these issues. And so one thing that you can get good at doing if you are trying to figure out practical ways to help is the code switch more effectively with those kinds of people. So I talk about things like there, but for the grace of God go I. That's a very Christian way of saying I am very lucky that I am not in that situation and it should engender sort of compassion and humility. And I think that like those are the things that... So, you know, like I think there's a couple of ways that we can try to attack these kinds of problems. And some of them involve acknowledging certain individuals' needs for gendered meaning-making narratives.

And other ones involve trying to expand their perceptions of what can be a meaningful narrative for them. And one of those is really moving towards compassion for men as something that gives them that same feeling that they get from that Warhammer 40K image of how to do the thing, right? Like, because clearly they're getting a dopamine hit from that. And we want them to be the same dopamine hit

from helping somebody who's sick, right? Like, cause clearly they're getting a dopamine hit from that. And we want them to be the same dopamine hit from helping somebody who's sick. Right? And that Warhammer 40K thing, there's this whole, I mean, we could tie that into the Christian narrative. You could tie that into like fighting good versus evil. There's an idea, and I think this is a very masculine idea, that there's something out there that I need to fight against

or that I need to protect people from. And that's a very masculine trope that weaves its way through lots of different stories, but also through our own stories, right? It's through something that we tell ourselves. And these guys are, I mean, if you look at Warhammer 40K, I mean, for crying out loud, it's like, you could look at that and draw the parallels between building a wall on our southern border and 40K. And there's a huge parallel to be drawn

between what the people and the humanity in 40K think and what they think about xenomorphs and things like that. So there's a huge parallel to be drawn here. A very terrifying, scary parallel, but a parallel to be drawn for sure. I mean, yeah, so Jordan Peterson very clearly rises to prominence because he's selling exactly that, a kind of narrative that is very steeped

in Christian symbolism about a fight of good versus evil, where evil is chaos and chaos is wokeness. And I think there's a fascinating, like it's, I want to see so much more cultural analysis around Wyrmur 40k because it starts out as a satire. Like it's very clearly a satire. 100%. There are cathedrals with giant guns that walk around punching each other. That's the thing that happens.

Yeah, man. I'm right there with you. I'm right there with you. Whenever anybody starts, like, looking and idolizing the space marines, I'm like, you realize those are the bad guys, right? You realize those are the bad. So, yeah, anyway. Except the problem is, the more recent novelizations in Warhammer 40K, the video games that you can play.

They've embraced it. Yeah, it's basically this, but unironically, like, they're trying to, within the gonzo, over the top universe that it's based in, create narratives where like, these are the good guys, and this is good, and like, you know, these are noble sacrifices by heroes on the field of battle and stuff. And that is kind of creepy and terrifying, especially because it has gotten popular in that format. Right? Like possibly more popular as a result of that,

because generally speaking, uncomplicated, you know, vengeance narratives are an easier sell than like complicated social satire. You know, I personally want to see cathedrals punch things, but not everybody's into that. Right. So what I think is a big divergence that I talk about in the article between their approaches and like the approach that I want progressives to have.

And this is why I ended up in the Skeptic Mag, which is about skepticism with compassion is their idea of what makes someone ready to be an ultramarine is cruelty. Like, and this was something, this was what sort of crystallized for me as I was writing this piece. You know, you hear the idea of like,

cruelty is the goal or cruelty is part of the project or it's, you know, it's a feature, not a bug essentially. And like, a lot of people think of that in terms, and I was thinking for a long time, thinking that in terms primarily of like, it's good entertainment, it trolls the libs, it you know, fires up your base, like it, you know, allows you to be demonizing of those people. But there's another layer to it, I think, for them intuitively, which is it, it makes you a strong man, essentially. It makes you hard.

So the meme I cite in there that shows up over and over again in these spaces is like hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, which is where we are right now. Good times create weak men. That's you and I. And then weak men create good times, which is where we are right now. Good times create weak men. That's you and I. And then weak men create hard times. Right? Speak for yourself. I'm just saying Tom's not here to fight me so I can make that joke.

Tom would be the strong one who would protect both of us right now. So in their minds, I think like there's a whole coherent narrative where the woke at the gates, their weapon isn't violence, it's playing on your compassion in order to weaken society, in order to undermine its foundations. And so you have to be strong enough to resist their demands for respecting their pronouns or whatever. And so that gives you a way to feel like a strong person, while essentially largely being a keyboard warrior

who's just online shitting on people who are asking for compassion and feeling like you're, you know, every time you do that, you're shooting an orc in the head, essentially. That's what they're selling, a shared online game experience of murdering faceless baddies. Yeah, you're the weakest person in the world

typing on your thing, pretending you're the weakest person in the world typing on your thing, pretending you're the strongest. I wanna talk about another meme you put in this article, and it's an image of Kevin Sorbo, which is amazing. And it's from Talk, Turning Point USA, and it says, and the quote here, I guess, is from Kevin Sorbo,

"'They know a society of strong men would never allowed, "'would never have allowed what's happening right now, and that's why they attacked masculinity first. What are they talking about right now? What does that even mean? I look at that and I'm baffled by it. You know, they mean the, like... overthrowing of all the traditional norms

and replacing it with a communist empire where they're gonna take away all your freedoms and guns and you know, like, et cetera. Like, you know, this is essentially a version of the, you can't take away my guns. They're the thing that's gonna protect me from the government when they come for me. Only it's, you know, Sorbo's giant bicep instead of a gun. He's holding a bow and arrow, same basic idea, right?

Same basic idea. It's the bicep that's really important. That's what's shielding you. Because again, they have a deep, they have like this cultural conservative view that like survival of the fittest is about individual strength. And so if you teach men to not have individual strength,

then that'll be the beginning of the end for society. Rather than like, I mean, there's a sort of hilarious underlying truth to what they're saying and that there's a sense in which men have been domesticated by society over 40,000 years or something like that where like that is a good thing though like it's not we all like what is yeah we have make any sense like sure we were co-domesticated with dogs too. Yeah, right, yeah. It's not a bad thing.

It just makes us better at interacting with other people without fighting. Yeah, we were domesticated by cats so we could take care of them. That's the key. Like, cats are the ones that are in charge. They're the ones who tell us what we need to do and when we need to do it. Now, cats, they wouldn't make you weak. If you have more dog pets, then society will be strong and powerful. You know, let's get will be strong and powerful.

Let's get off on strong and powerful here for a second. Cause I want to talk about, your contention is that the right is offering these young men these narratives. And these narratives are that you can be strong, you can be manly, you can have traditional male and masculine values and pursuits, and you can, the patriarchy's okay,

et cetera, et cetera. And I don't disagree with some of those things. Like I think everybody should pursue the things they wanna pursue. If those are traditionally masculine things, go have fun. Like you wanna go chop trees down and lift heavy things and do all that. Great, enjoy it.

But I also recognize too that some of that stuff is bad. So what would a progressive offer in exchange for what they're offering? Because they seem to be offering very traditional values, which makes sense. They're conservatives. So what would the progressives offer these young men? Get ready for a Las Vegas style action at Bad MGM, the king of online casinos enjoy casino games at your fingertips with the same Vegas strip excitement MGM is famous for when you play classics like MGM Grand Millions or popular games like blackjack baccarat and roulette with our ever-growing library of digital slot

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Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Yeah, so I think there needs to be a combination of options.

So first of all, what's not on the table is just going back to the old ways. I don't think that we should be offering that people can do traditional patriarchy if they want to. Like setting aside the fact that we're not going to necessarily criminalize the trad cath lifestyle or something. Like that's not what we should be encouraging in young men. And the fact that that is part of this problem is really also very terrifying. So what we should be encouraging in young men. And the fact that that is part of this problem is really also very terrifying. So what we should be offering is something like the healthy masculinity stuff

that people have long been, I think, trying to develop since, you know, the 60s and 70s. Where, so this gets into a question of like values and gender. I, for a long time, have really struggled with where, so this gets into a question of like values and gender. I for a long time have really struggled with the idea that we should ever gender values or virtues, right? So everybody should be strong in my opinion. Yeah, absolutely. It's not, it shouldn't be treated as a masculine virtue.

But for some people, I think their meaning-making narratives need to feel gender coded. And the part of the way I've come to understand this is in conjunct, it's like in a kind of not exactly one-to-one, but somewhat comparison to a discussion around gender in trans communities. So within trans communities, there's a debate about gender elimination versus expansion essentially. So like some people want to abolish gender. Wouldn't it be like colorblind talk around race though? Sort of, but more like we want to abolish any concept of gender and gender norms.

Not saying that we have gotten there yet, but that like, we shouldn't continue to talk about XYZ as being masculine or feminine ever, just get away from that idea, versus folks who want like to feel, you know, who identify as a certain gender. So, you know, born male identify as female, and want to be perceived that way. And that part of their experience,

their wellbeing in life, their flourishing is tied to not only their perception of what things are related to that gender, but that others perceive them as having those features, and perceive them as being a member of that gender as a result. I think we can be sympathetic to that as a felt need, as a preference, as part of a life of meaning and flourishing, and that we can think about that the same way for, essentially for cis men who need to feel like when they are protecting people,

it's a masculine kind of protecting people, right? And we wanna give them is a version of that that doesn of protecting people, right? And we want to give them as a version of that that doesn't involve dominance, right? We want to help them feel like, and I think, you know, I love martial arts. I was just on the Bull Shido podcast yesterday or their YouTube show talking about Tai Chi and that like they are a good group

who's doing work in these spaces to push more progressive ideas amongst men who are more likely to listen to Joe Rogan than anyone like me. And that martial arts can be one of many kinds of spaces where men can learn, to be honest about the difference between healthy and toxic masculinity. Right, this was something that we talked about. Some people will get really silly when you use the word toxic

masculinity or the phrase toxic masculinity is if they don't understand how qualifiers work and that you're somehow saying that all men are toxic and not clearly distinguishing between a certain, but like, if you have done any martial arts for any amount of time, spent any amount of time in a martial arts space, denying that toxic masculinity is not only a thing, but a huge fucking problem. Yeah, yeah. Is it my opinion the same as if you were in leftist spaces

and then you pretend that people in those spaces don't shit on men for fun all the time? Like you're just, you're not living, you're not being honest about reality, right? So, but you can provide alternatives, right? Be that kind of martial arts instructor or partner who is good at healthy masculinity, who recognizes that because you are on average going to be larger and stronger than the other person, what are the respectful ways to engage with

them, to train them, to help people feel comfortable when they're alone in spaces with you, et cetera, et cetera. That can all be stuff that can be coded as like, this is what it is to be a good man, right? Is to acknowledge your luck as a result of being a man and pay that luck forward and be aware of it in all these different ways. Well, I started training a Western martial art rapier fighting. So they did this with a group called HEMA,

is a group that does another group called the SCA. they do this with a group called HEMA, is a group that does another group, is called the SCA. I learned in the SCA, HEMA came much later, but it's basically, you know, you fight with like a sword simulator and, you know, another offhand weapon, often a dagger, another sword or something, and you do full contact touches on other people,

you do full contact cuts on other people, et cetera. And there's been a big push in that group for a while on how do we make these spaces more acceptable to women? Because what we're doing is we're pushing women out of these spaces because of exactly like you suggest, this sort of suck it up mentality, this rub some dirt on it mentality that we were all brought up with when we were young, that were just genuinely toxic, shitty ways to look at the world.

And then now we're in this crisis where we're not accepting the women, so women don't show up. And then you're wondering, well, where are all the women? Why don't they want to join this sport? And it's because, well, you were a giant asshole most of the time, that's why. And so there's been this weird reckoning that's been happening in that sport for, gosh,

it's been about a decade now. Yeah. And the SCA has its own problem with white nationalism and SCA has got a bunch of problems. SCA has got a ton of problems. One of them happens to be toxic masculinity. Other ones abound. But you know, the toxic masculinity problem is very similar like you're describing to the Nazi bar problem, as we've seen a lot of recently in the discussions around the exodus from Twitter, where the classic story, you know, if someone, there's a guy in the bar

and the guy next to him sits down and the bartender pulls out the bat and is like, get the fuck out. He explains he's a Nazi, because he has a Nazi tattoo. And he's like, why don't you let him stay? Cause he'll be back with his friends and then it'll be a Nazi bar. So if folks aren't familiar,

it's the shorthand of Nazi bar is not just that's a place where a bunch of people who are Nazis hang out. It's that used to be a functioning place and they let some Nazis in and now it's not a functioning place anymore. Now it's a fucking Nazi bar. And it happens with toxic masculinity, right?

If someone, especially if, you know, the person leading a school has that kind of behavior, it will attract those kinds of people and will push away people who are not of that form. And then you have that sort of social siloing. So, you know, there's too much talk sometimes about the nature of echo chambers and things, but there is a problem when you get a group

of self-reinfor but there is a problem when you get a group of self reinforcing individuals with a certain mindset who all listen to Joe Rogan and who all feel like there are women are the problem. And because there's no women there, there's no, there's no pushback on that. And because there's no progressive men there, there's no pushback on it either. And like that can be a space in which those mindsets can spiral, can snowball essentially. So yeah, you need to offer healthy alternative spaces for those sorts of things that, you know, cater to that feeling of needing to be viewed as a man, as having some of those features while not being toxic about it. And then you need to be doing the work of getting helping men to value and feel valued by doing progressive work, the social justice kind of work that all of us should be spending more time on service work and that kind of thing. And then there's the larger systemic

solutions where you have to dismantle capitalism so that everybody's lives... Because capitalism is alienating all of us from a life of meaning. Like we're all in a meaning crisis. Men are just in an acute one because of a mix of, like they've had their traditional forms of meaning stripped away more substantially, whereas other people have been more enfranchised to have more paths to meaning than they did previously.

And because there's a general accepted view that like men's problems don't really matter that much. And so there isn't much being done to try to address this issue. They're kind of just being abandoned to the Jordan Petersons of the world. And you're contractually obligated to say that because you're a doctor of philosophy now and you have to be anti-capitalist. So I realize that that's in your contract to say that. Yeah.

Yeah, they'll send, they'll sick the doctors of philosophy on you and you'll need to fight them off like a space Marine. Okay, so, but you mentioned rewarding people in progressive spaces, right? So rewarding, how are they not being rewarded? What's, what exactly are you talking about here? Yeah, and like, this is a complicated one.

Like many of the things I'm talking about here, I really don't want this to ever sound black or white. So if you spend time in online progressive spaces, there's a lot of problematic behaviors, right? So for example, you're probably familiar with the phrase white knighting, where progressive, usually men will show up and act really aggrieved on the behalf of marginalized individuals.

We'll try to, you know, that's essentially a kind of toxic version of what we should be doing, which is, like we're saying here, sort of challenging other men in our communities when they are doing things that alienate members of marginalized communities genuinely. But within these communities, you also see sort of what starts out as an understandable reaction to constant cloying for approval from often white progressive individuals, a kind of mentality where if you're going to show up in these spaces and you're a less marginalized individual, you cannot expect any respect or credit for doing this work. Mostly what you can expect is to like get criticized

a fair bit and often be corrected and often be corrected for not responding to that correction correctly. And that like, again, where many, much of this is coming from burnout from people who have explained the same thing over and over again, the effect it's having is people who want to be in these spaces and want to do work in these spaces are feeling alienated from those spaces.

I feel like they're not welcome there because they're not like for a large, to a large degree, again, understandably. But if we are trying to include people in our coalition, right? There needs to be valuing and respecting of their work within these spaces as well. And that's, that I recognize can sound vague. There are a lot of different ways that that can be done. I really do think the first one is just reducing the amount of reflexively shitting on people

who you perceive as being higher status. That is a kind of retributive thread within social justice work that I have argued against in a variety of places where I think we end up sounding a lot like conservatives when we talk about what we see as privileged individuals, that they deserve to suffer or that they shouldn't have their needs met

in the way that other people's needs should be met because they've been benefited from these kinds of systems for so long. I think we gotta move away from that and we gotta move towards restorative approaches. And that involves re-upping our attempts at compassion. And again, for the people who have burnout, please don't take this as a,

I don't care about your burnout. I'm talking to the people who I don't think have burnout, I think have just gotten in the habit because they're in these spaces of going along with the idea of this kind of retributive behavior. So I think if you remove that and make things feel more collaborative again, that that alone is going to open that door for people who want to live lives of meaning-making within those spaces. As a person who runs a podcast that deals with left people, on occasion, I have gotten my fair share of hate mail.

But I've also received very strange mail from people, like, that you suggest. So you'll suggest, like, a person who is clearly someone who is a person of privilege talking on behalf of a marginalized group. They will often implore me, not as a person. They will implore me on behalf of a marginalized group to change my opinion on something. And I'll be like, but are you part of that marginalized group?

Like, do you have their permission to use them as a pawn in this conversation? So that happens quite a bit on some of the times that I have an opportunity to communicate with people and that happens. But I, you know, one thing that pops in my head when you say this is, it feels like we need an on-ramp for people who are progressive, right? So if you're somebody who is brand new and you're thinking maybe I might wanna change who I am, there needs to be an on-ramp. And I think it's our job, yours, mine, and other males

that are white males specifically that are in this group to need to help shepherd those people and be the on-ramp to help them into this group and not introduce them to these spaces that are sort of hardcore left that might treat them in some really negative way because we need to like in some ways protect those people initially so that they don't immediately reject all this ideology. that they don't immediately reject all this ideology? Yeah, that is, I absolutely agree. And it's something that is one of the themes within the work I've done on shows

like Embrace the Void and Philosophers in Space. I have over the years gotten, I'm not nearly as big a show as y'all are, so it's a much smaller trickle of emails, but a trickle of emails from people essentially saying, I was on that spiral. I was an edgelord. I was, you know, in proto incel territory.

Like I was feeling that pressure, that crush, that meaninglessness. And then, you know, I listened to your stuff and it felt like someone who was in a progressive space who wasn't, you know, telling me that I'm worthless or, who wasn't telling me that I'm worthless or telling me that I'm a colonizer or something. Or that you didn't belong here too. Right, or you didn't belong here.

And that was also just showing compassion for the situation. And those people, some of them have gravitated towards the Philosophers in Space Facebook group, where to go back to your question initially about cancellation, um, I got probably the most recent time that I got a lot of heat from the left was bare man versus bare discourse. Um, which I don't know. You remember, I assume, right?

That was the woman would rather be in a forest with a bear than the dude. Yeah. Right. That swept the internet is now endemic to our discussions about gender. I see it referenced on the regular, you know, this is why women choose bears, that kind of thing. Sure. Yeah. I came up pretty strongly against bear discourse. I thought that it was bad.

Actually. You did. I did. Wow. I was like... See, I was totally on the bear side. 100%. Oh, okay. Yeah. No, I was like, this is I was totally on the bear's side. 100%. Yeah. No, I was like, this is a bad way to talk about this.

Because what it's trying to do... Do you think it's talking about it toxically in some ways? Yeah, I do. I think it is. I think what it's trying to... I'm gonna get so much hate mail for this segment. Oh, my God. God, I can't wait. I can't wait to throw it all away. Go ahead. It's so good to reinvigorate.

But like, this is what I mean when I talk about we need to not shit on men as much in these spaces reflexively. Bear Discourse was so much about shitting on men. And I quietly heard from a lot of men who were like, I appreciate you pushing back on this because I agree with you, but I don't want the hate publicly. And I also saw a lot of men saying a lot of very silly things in order to try to rationalize what was going on. But at the end of the day, like what I think was happening was it was an attempt to talk about something that is a real problem. I think the better way to describe it is Schrodinger's Rapist, which is the thought experiment being if I encounter you or alone in a room or something, right,

and you're a man, I don't know if you're a rapist or not. Nobody looks like a rapist, right? There's no test visually for this. So you're essentially, until it happens or it doesn't, I have to be concerned about that. And that is what we mean when we talk about women sort of learning early on, that they have to be careful about that. And that is what we mean when we talk about women sort of learning early on, that they have to be careful about men in general

as they go through life. That is a reasonable thing to point out. Because of the nature of bear discourse, that misses the point in a variety of ways and instead got us all into a bunch of stupid side conversations, like are men literally more dangerous to you than a bear? Like if you were alone in a room with a man versus a bear,

who's going to be more likely to cause you harm? And the answer there is bear. It's just bear for a variety of reasons, right? I would imagine, yeah, sure. But this became like the original, like videos that got famous about this that started that trend. There was one of them was like a woman being like, oh no, I can fight off a bear, but I can't fight

off a man because if a man wants to rape you, there's no fighting them off. That's just the end of it. There's no stopping them. Which I think highlights the problem, right? Yes, it is true that some men are are rapists and that you can't tell visually from looking at them. But the idea that men are super strong, you know, rape monsters that makes them harder to fight off than a bear is a kind of demonizing of men. It's a kind of portrayal of men as having... I see what you're talking about.

I see. You know, like being so much worse and more dangerous than they actually are in this kind of way, it obscures the actual concern and replaces it with a much weirder. And the other part of the conversation was about like, that men on average have worse intentions towards women than bears. That like the male, you can reasonably assume the male's intentions are going to be worse towards you if you're alone with them than the bear's.

Which again, I just don't think is true. Can I just say that it feels like you're strawmanning this bear conversation? Yeah, okay. You wouldn't be the first. My first thought is like, I get it on the 3,000 foot level, but when I drive down into it, it doesn't make any sense. But I think it's a fair comparison in the sense that

it shows that women sometimes have some great fear of men and they can't say that out loud. So that shorthand for that conversation makes it so that women feel safe about talking about how sometimes they feel very, in very dangerous situations with men that could be very normal situations. Absolutely.

And that's why I offer Schrodinger's Rapist as the alternative shorthand. I don't know that yours is a better, I don't know that that's better. Because I really do think in use, like shorthand still convey more content than just what you were describing there. I see, yeah. Different language means, you know, in use, like sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh I don't want to get into the weeds about how much a bear can eat or how dangerous a bear or the fact that they can run 30 miles an hour.

30 miles per hour. We're getting in the weeds about how tough bears are. Here's the important part. What we need is a space Marine to take care of all those bears. Right. This is where the ultralines come in. They're 100% safe. Okay.

What I want to point out is that we've lost sight of the fact that what we said earlier is true. Men are socially domesticated, right? We are pro-social creatures. By and large, men do not want to cause harm because by and large, humans do not want to cause harm. It is physically unpleasant for us to do so. It is why we have to learn legitimizing narratives like belief in God and free will and garbage like that for us to justify harming each other.

So that's a difference between you and the bear, right? If like, think about it this way, if you're, if you happen to get caught between the bear and their bear cub versus between a human male and their human child. And my sandwich, go ahead. Right, like which of those situations is worse for you? It's the one with the person who you can't communicate with

and who is far more likely to just go through you to get to their cub, right? Because they're not pro-socially evolved creatures like a human male. So again, this is important because I get a lot of messages from really anxious men who are like, I already have social anxiety and I wanna try to interact with women

and be in progressive spaces and do these things, but I can't cope with this being constantly attacked or shit on if I slightly get something wrong or constantly hearing that people, like think about the people who have trouble going out in public and then see a million women say, I think you're as scary as a bear. It probably makes them less likely to go out in public.

That's fair. I think that's fair. At the end of the day, what we can say is, individual men can be dangerous. Talking about men as a group in this kind of way is probably more likely to be harmful, is probably stereotyping, just like if you were talking about a race or any other homogenous, you know, a non-homogenous group of people,

like religious people. You shouldn't be talking about all religious people in X kind of way like this. And the same thing, like what we've lost sight of is that doesn't apply to men. And I think we should get back to that. I think that's a great point. And I definitely think if you have problems

with what Aaron said, you should send him messages for sure. This is not my portion of the show. This was Aaron's portion of the show. So if you have some real issues, especially how Aaron like comported himself on the show, he is looking for that kind of feedback all the time. So I just want to mention that out loud. I'm a canned credentialed creator.

You can make a report. Yeah, no, this is a perfect way. You could just send any problems you have to- Let's talk about how to make a report about me now. Let's do it. Yeah, we could send any problems you have with this episode, send them to the creator accountability network, and then Aaron can just delete them from the server

before they come in. It'll be perfect. Hey, this will be a really good test of our checks and balances system to make sure that I don't have access to the report ahead of time. To the reporting structure, exactly. And that I am excluded from the decision making.

Other people can analyze what I've said here and decide if it is in fact bigoted in some way. And we can discuss. Before we move into the curator category network to talk about where it is. I have one more observation. Is this why many of these creators, Joe Rogan in the past has come out and felt like he was pretty atheist in the past. He seems to be, at least from a couple of shows that I've been talking about, seems to be talking more about Christianity and more about that sort of thing. We're seeing more of this come up like with Russell Brand, for instance, who now is now reconverted to Christianity.

We're seeing this sort of Christian message pop up. Is it purposeful on their part to create this Christian message and to bring this Christian message in because it's so steeped in that patriarchy ideal that it gives these guys this meaning that they have lost in a lot of ways. I think I've talked with you all about James Lindsay in the past.

That was one of the earliest people that I did like work on exposing his connection to sovereign nations, the white Christian nationalist organization that funds him and like supported him and built his website and stuff. I put a marker down long ago that was like, one day noted published atheist James Lindsay

is gonna come out as a Christian. And everyone was like, that'll never happen. What are you talking? And like every day, like every week since someone's like, is this the one? And they'll send me a message where he's like dabbling in cultural Christianity or talking about how the loss of Christianity may have been

the beginning of wokeness or, you know, and I'm like, no, until he actually says the words, he hasn't done it, but he's going to do it. And, you know, I don't know if he ever actually got there or not, because I stopped following him a while back because people stopped disagreeing with me that he had gone so far off the rails. But I do think he is indicative of the trend line of anti-woke to anti-woke Christian grift. And there's probably a couple of reasons for that. One is what you're pointing out there, which is just there's psychological correlations between belief in like regressive ideas, authoritarian stuff, belief and religion and belief in, you know, like going into those kinds of Christian spaces.

So those things are gonna hang together because they all create permission structures for dominance. Then there's also, I think, the Jordan Peterson effect. I think like there's a reality where early, like early influencer bias, essentially. Jordan Peterson is one of the most successful, most of like impactful anti-woke people. He's been on all the shows.

He's the leader of the SenseMaker movement, et cetera. And he has brought a very specific, you know, crypto Christian or explicitly Christian at times approach to all of this stuff that I do think has flavored it. Then you also have the fact that much of this is plast, like a thin veneer covering endless depths of white Christian nationalist violent tendencies. And so you've got your Deo's vault people underneath all of this. You're, you're, I'm going to post pictures of the Crusaders standing up to like, again, your classic Warhammer, 480k mindset, right?

Absolutely. It's just Crusaders all the way down. That's the equivalent though. Right. And, like, arguably it's hilarious with the 40k stuff because, in the 40k universe, the Imperium, the humans, everybody's bad in that universe, but a lot of folks have gotten the impression

they're actually the good guys. They are technically an atheist culture, but are also a religious culture because they all worship the God Emperor. Wow. Right. So they are like a nominally secular, but actually incredibly zealous religious culture. Sound familiar?

Yeah, man. God, Jesus, I hate that so much. I had an anti-woke, 40k guy on my show. Everyone should listen to the interview. It's a great fun debate. He at one point argued that I was wrong to suggest that like, it was being picked up by people as white Christian nationalist symbolism because technically the God Emperor said that he's not a God before he was enthroned on his God Emperor throne and referred to as the God Emperor for 10,000 years.

Yikes, yikes, yeah. And we sacrifice 10,000 psychics, psychers every day to his poor blood on his throne or whatever. Amazing, amazing. All right, let's get into the Creator Accountability Network. Let's talk about that briefly. So where is the Creator Accountability Network? How's it going?

I know that it started off and then I know Tom and I are credentialed. Several other people are credentialed now. Tell us how it's going. Yeah, I would say it's going well. It's going a little slowly, but that is just a mix of us being a largely volunteer organization and the like complexities of what we've put together for the sake of making

sure that everyone is treated properly. So that includes sort of the training and onboarding of creators, helping them understand the agreement that they are signing up for, all that sort of stuff. It takes time. So Sarah, the executive director and I have done a lot of those trainings. So basically what I'd say is we spent the first year of the organization building

the system, figuring out what we actually needed. Could we make this thing work, running a bunch of tests on, you're building your hadron collider essentially and making sure it's not gonna black hole the planet. Year two has been essentially the onboarding of our first, like our test wave of creators, which we really appreciate y'all being

at the sort of front end of that. It has been very helpful. Every time we've talked about it on your show, we've had creators emailing us wanting to join up because they hear about it and they wanna do the thing. So we've been through that. We have dealt with reports. I can't obviously get into detail,

but our system is up and running essentially. Good, good. I can't obviously get into detail, but like we've, our system is up and running essentially. And it's been really positive. We are going to start gearing up for some fundraising in the new year so that we can make sure that we can continue to afford like the cost of just having a nonprofit is a fairly high. And then the cost of, you know, people paying people enough to be able to spend the time to grow the organization, all that kind of work that needs to be done. So we're going to get into that. And then we are about to start sending out sort of large mass emails to creators to try to, you know, bring in more and more waves of creators.

We didn't wanna sort of overload ourselves as we were making sure that things were working. So a few people doing it. Yep, exactly. So we've been hearing from lots of folks and it is a slow process, partly just because as all creators these days, we all have ADD and we're all doing a million things.

And so just getting the things scheduled initially can be a challenge, but it can be done very quickly. We've had creators who've reached out to us and we're credentialed within a month, you know, or like provisionally credentialed within a month and like making reports and stuff. So I don't want to make it sound sort of overly laborious. I think we've got it down pretty well to a science in terms of what we need to tell them

in their trainings and what we need them to do on their shows in order to make people aware of the reporting system, et cetera. Yeah, the toughest part for us when we got credentialed was just the scheduling. That was genuinely the toughest part, was just trying to get everybody in the same room at the same time. That felt like the toughest part, was just trying to get everybody in the same room at the same time. That felt like the toughest part for us to try to get the trainings done. But once that was done, it was a super smooth process.

And I'm so happy that it's starting to take off. And when you guys do start fundraising again, send us a message, we'll have you on the show so you can talk about it and you guys can get some more funds in there to help make sure that the space that we're creating in is safe for everybody. That's really awesome. It's great work that you guys can get some more funds in there to help make sure that the space that we're creating in is safe for everybody. That's really awesome.

It's great work that you guys are doing. I do appreciate that. Yeah, I think the biggest challenge has been understandable hesitancy from larger creators. We always knew that was gonna be a problem, and it has proven to be a challenge because, folks who are doing this kind of work, I think it can often feel very precarious.

Like you've found the magic formula and you don't want to mess with it in any kind of way. So like, if it's not broke, don't fix it kind of mindset. Makes it, like a lot of our creators, we get the most avid people who are like, I don't have a ton of audience, but I really support this idea. And we love those creators. We want those creators desperately. But we also want larger creators because A, we get to help more people if we have those.

And it helps other larger creators feel comfortable. Like that's... Yeah, sure. It's that unionizing, collaborating, coming together thing. So, you know, our goals for this coming year is to continue to try to find those larger creators who are willing to trust us, who are willing to take that dive, essentially. That's great. Hey, Aaron, if people were going to find

the Creator Accountability Network and your podcast, where would they look? Yeah, so you can find the Creator Accountability Network at creatoraccountabilitynetwork.org, where you can sign up to volunteer if you want to help in any sort of way, please reach out even if you don't feel like you have necessarily the specific skills that are listed on the website as ones we're focused on getting folks for right now. We're always looking for more hands to just do this kind

of outreach stuff. But also like just reach out to your creators and say, Hey, this is really cool. We want you to be a part of this. Can you please sign up for it? If they hear that, like some of them will listen. And everyone we help is great. My podcasts are on all the major apps, Embrace the Void, Philosophers in Space, you know. That's it.

I'm on Blue Sky now. Go to Blue Sky, please. Get away from the Nazi bar. It's ETV pod at Blue Sky now. Go to Blue Sky, please. Get away from the Nazi bar. It's ETV pod at Blue Sky. We'll post your Blue Sky handle on our show notes as well as all the other relevant links. If you have any problems with today's episode, Aaron, Dr. Aaron is taking all your emails.

So send him along. He can start a brand new, you could start a brand new hate parade. I'm sure he's going to enjoy it. Thanks so much for joining me today. And I recognize this is a difficult conversation that isn't over, but it's great that you're starting this conversation.

I think it's something that needs to be talked about. I appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me on. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] All right, so that's going to wrap it up for this week. Will, you're going to be back. And so now normally we to wrap it up for this week. Will is going to be back. And so now normally we would record a patron show this week and we weren't able to do that. Tom couldn't make it this time around.

He had family obligations, so he could not be here. So we might not be able to produce a patron episode this month. We'll let you know if that falls through or if we can try to squeeze it in some other time. We'll see if we can do that. But we hope that you recognize that we're on a stranger schedule because Tom's family obligations and the difficulty Tom's having at home. We of course wish Tom and his family the best.

And if you want to send him a message, he will read it, send it to dissonance.podcast.gmail.com. Tom of course will read that message. He will see it in a message, he will read it, send it to dissonance.podcast.gmail.com. Tom of course will read that message. He will see it in our inbox and he will read it. So feel free to send that message to him. And with that, we're going to leave you like we always do with the skeptics creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter mommy issue. Hypno Babylon bullshit couched in scient in, scientician, double bubble, toil and trouble,

pseudo quasi alternative, acupunctuating, pressurized, stereogram, pyramidal, free energy healing, water downward spiral, brain dead pan, sales pitch, late night info docutainment. Leo Pisces, cancer cures, detox, reflex, foot massage, death in towers, tarot cards, psychic healing, crystal balls, Bigfoot, Yeti, aliens, churches, mosques and synagogues, temples, dragons, giant worms, Atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, the complete plans, security systems, soup to nuts, shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, double-speak stigmata, nonsense. Expose your sides.

Thrust your hands. Bloody, evidential, conclusive. Doubt even this. Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash dissonance pod. Help us spread the word by sharing our content. Find us on tik tok, YouTube, Facebook and prez all under the handle at dissonance pod. This show is can credentialed, which means you can report instances of harassment, abuse, or other harm on their hotline at 617-249-4255 or on their website at creatoraccountabilitynetwork.org. you