Decoding the Gurus - Anthony DeMello: The Bob Ross of Spiritual Gurus?

Episode Date: June 25, 2021

Well, the hosts have had a good long taste of the culture wars and friends, it is a bitter, bitter draught. As a palette cleanser, we return to a simpler time, a better(?) time... The 1980's! When Chris Kavanagh was young and innocent, running about in short pants with a twinkle in his eye and (I assume) lobbing bricks at RUC armoured vehicles for the craic. At nights he would curl up and listen to CASSETTE tapes of a fellow called Anthony De Mello, while the eyes of Pope Ratzinger would stare at him disapprovingly from the poster (I assume) that was on the wall of his room.Yes, we're returning to the gurus our decoders were fans of during their young and impressionable years. And Chris rather liked Fr. Anthony De Mello. Who is he? A Jesuit priest who sounds more like a Buddhist monk with a message of peace, detachment, and the recipe for happiness. He says that society trains us to act like robots, encouraging us to go through life in a depressed haze. After you apply his recipe, you'll still be depressed, but you'll realise the depression is like the clouds, but you are the sky. He's got the good vibes of Bob Ross, but does that conceal something darker? Was spiritual self-help better or worse in the 1980s compared today? Listen, and you shall know all!LinksOne of DeMello's Waking Up Talks on Daily MotionDeMello's Spirituallity CenterMatt and Chris' 'You're Probably Not Galileo' article for Skeptic UKTim Nguyen's appearance on Eigen Bros

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer, and we try our best to understand what they're talking about. With me, not with me. I'm with you. You're with me. I'm Professor Matt Brown. And who are you? I'm Dr. Christopher Kavanaugh. Dr. Chris Kavanaugh.

Thank you for being with me. Chris Kavanaugh, famous anthropologist. My comp still plays. The center of my winding gyre. The falcon to my falconer. So glad you could be here. Thank you, Chris. How many of those references did I get?

Maybe I'm 0 for 4. I'm all right, Matt. I've noticed that I've got two mosquito bites from yesterday. And that's very upsetting to me. It's very distracting, upsetting, unfair. I just want to complain about it. Yeah, that would be disconcerting. Not least because I remember gloating yesterday when I was out in the park with my wife and

we were visiting my son's nursery. This was like a kind of sneakily observe your young child playing event in Japan. We had to like hide in bushes and stuff. I'm glad it wasn't on my own. It looked worse. But I was wearing a shirt and, you know, it's hot in Japan and whatnot. And then my wife was more appropriately summer adorned but she was often having to scare away mosquitoes and i was saying look at me i may look more uncomfortable but wise man that i am i am

protected all over my skin except my hands matt i've got three bites of my hand look don't complain to an australian about mosquito bites mate this is this is our life no look you're native you were born with mosquito bites they were like flying around your cot when you came out in my world mosquitoes were something i read about in books there were creatures that i heard tale of in legends not things that i dealt with the creature i had to deal with in ireland was called midges oh yeah yeah i i heard that and it really put me off visiting the highlands in scotland because apparently it's just overrun with midges and that sounds awful you don't don't want them but they don't the thing is they don't make that noise like when a mosquito goes near your ear it goes that was a good impression yeah

midges are just silent beasts silent killers that's right no you're right midges are the worst we have these things called horse flies in australia which are like oh fuck yeah they're just these massive like like they're like it's like a drone strike yeah they're so powerful in london i was like playing football in the park one night and was attacked by what i subsequently discovered were horseflies and they just my leg looked like i'd you know been mauled by a cougar or something afterwards but just these flies and i like looked at pictures and their jaws are just this contraptions of their so chris i have to tell you we went camping on stratbroke island and the the horse flies actually gnawed their way through the tent to get at our toasty flesh

australian horse flies are on a different level like i'm imagining that kind of jumanji situation with our big like pincer poking through the tent and ripping down so um well before before we leave the topic of small insects i you've probably seen this too which is the relationship that japanese people particularly young japanese women have are you going to be very racist are you going to small insects before we leave the topic japanese no this is going to be referenced to a charming little foible of of the japanese people who i respect immensely but i remember once there was like a mosquito a tiny little thing i don't even think it i remember once there was like a mosquito a tiny little thing i don't even think it was a mosquito it was like less than a mosquito and this young

japanese lady like killed it right and then went and got a tissue and then carefully collected the tiny corpse of this little thing and then carried it away and put it in the bin now for me coming from australia where you just, you know, you just smear those dead bodies all over your skin and that's just the idea of collecting them and putting them away in the bin. I just found it really fastidious. You're a barbarian, Matt.

You're a barbarian. That's not a Japanese point. That's a, like a respectable human convention that we don't leave insect parts smeared over our bodies after we crush them. I actually, I'm one of those odd people that feel

emotionally bad after I kill insects of any stripe. Mosquitoes and insects that bite me, slightly less because I feel they've forfeited but you know they're in my moral bubble of protection and then they pierce it and then the revenge is swift actually chris that fits with everything i know about you because i know that you are basically a good person but i also know that you feel that if you are attacked then you have moral

and i'm morally upright just towards insects less so people but hey yeah and i don't like them it's like a you know it's it's one of those things where it's like i don't want to feel bad for myself so that's why i won't crush a spider. But I don't enjoy catching it and releasing it, you know. No. It's just to stop the bad feeling, Matt. It's to stop the Catholic guilt. Yeah, exactly.

No, I'm with you there. I'm with you there. I'm an expert spider catcher and taker-ratterer. Good. Good, Matt. And so, you know, look, this is, it's just like the Dark Horse or the other podcast that give you this kind of deep shit that you you can't get in the intellectual dark web or the i don't know wherever else you go for your insights so you're welcome look we've made a good start on our 12 rules for life that's this is rule one

be kind to insects yeah forget petting cats don't squash insects and wash your freaking arm afterwards. Unless they attack you, in which case, kill the little shits. Yeah. Yeah. Rule number one. And two. Two down, ten to go. All right. Before we get started, I wanted to do a bit of...

Not before, Matt. We've already started. We're in the things. Insights are flowing. We've well and truly started. So we had some um feedback on the last episode with jesse signal and we had a really good thread from a mutual of ours on twitter professor nicholas h wolfinger and he had some thoughts as as another academic on this topic of

how the incentives play out in academia in terms of interacting with popular culture and so on and also the kinds of overselling that goes on like he picked up on a couple of things we talked about i mean one of them was of that quick fix psychology with this individualist kind of liberal naval gazing kind of thing that we do in the West. And a lot of his work is about the social and structural factors that lead to socioeconomic outcomes. So he made that unfavourable comparison with that kind of middle-class white angst and soul-searching and so on

in terms of approaching issues of race around inner reflections as opposed to looking at structural factors particularly like just the impact of intergenerational wealth in determining outcomes there's a nice discussion on those kind of topics and the potential conflict and emphasis there on the most recent episode of very bad wizards. I listened to it this morning, so it's sealing through my mind. So for anyone curious about an interesting discussion about those values and the potential conflict between them,

the opening segment of the new very bad wizards is, is worth seeking out. There's a free plug for the very bad wizards a rival academic adjacent podcast yeah we're nipping at their heels chris we're nipping at their heels yeah no we're not not even close don't spoil it don't spoil it matt but and yeah you know we got predictably critical feedback and various people disappointed with us for platforming Jesse. And like one thing I want to say is that anybody who thinks that we are reorientating to become like a culture war or social commentary podcast, you're going to be disappointed because we don't have any interest in that. So, you know, we deal with the culture war because lots of the folks that we look at are

immersed in it. And sometimes it delivers things that are worth talking about on the podcast, but we are not intending to become like a weekend week out, a culture war show. So if that's what you want, you're not going to get it here. So I'm just letting people know. What's that thing? Like I'm flagging up people. I'm giving them the advance warning. Managing expectations. Yes.

That's what I'm doing. That kind of political commentary can be gotten in many, many, many other places. Yeah. Oh, and the other thing I wanted to say very briefly is maybe on the back of the All in the Mind show that was released on us, the Guru Playbook, which if people haven't heard, it's a very nice like 30-minute segment about the podcast

and the kind of gurus we cover but it resulted in us being up in the top 100 actually within the top 50 podcasts in society and culture in australia for a little while we have subsequently dropped out to below number 200 but but still we were there for a little while so what's that thing like leave reviews and read us up and and do all that stuff and and actually yes also do leave reviews because i'm running out of like cheeky or funny reviews to read so yes this is a call for pick us up pick us up and and writey, funny reviews so we can steal your content. That's nice news about our transient fame in Australia, but it sounds like a lot of Australians listen to us

and we're quickly disappointed it stopped. Yeah, well, you know, it's just the fickle nature of fame matt we we've reached the dizzying heights of like number 40 or something on the australian podcast charts and now we're we're back out maybe one day we'll get back there but the dizzying heights it was good while it lasted no it was it was oh well so matt before you begin your usual attempt to get us on track and keep things flowing, let me just kick us to our one remaining segment. Let's just fucking do it. All right.

Oh, what's that, Eric? The Weinstein watch. So, I'm serious, Matt. I swear we will not spend a ton of time on this but it's worth updating people on what the the Buffon brothers are up to and Brett is currently in the news because he's trying to get himself banned from YouTube by releasing all the anti-vaccine pro-Ivermectin stuff that we've covered in previous episodes.

He's still going down there. He's had two strikes on his Clip account and one strike on his main account, then three strikes and you are off the platform. So he seems to be moving his attention elsewhere, but he's getting various glowing pieces from like Matt Tybee and barry weiss and whatnot saying you know silenced culture warrior the prophet of scientific doom is

is being silenced and yeah so it'll be a terrible shame if he gets removed from youtube i'll i'll be a terrible shame if he gets removed from YouTube. I'll be really sad if that happens because, you know, it just provides such insight. Well, we know you're a big fan of censorship, Chris. You're all for it. Yeah. Well, look, on that topic, in general, I think it's good to be tolerant of diverse perspectives and to have a relatively lenient view about the content that you'll permit. However, I think you do need standards and things in the pandemic, like promoting misinformation, demonizing vaccines. And if you constantly, consciously violate terms of service,

then getting banned is your outcome. And the people who say, well, this just increases and gives them a martyrdom narrative, doesn't seem to have worked out for Alex Jones and Stefan Molyneux and co. They all want to get back on the platform. Doesn't seem to have worked out for Trump. So there are reasonable debates to be had about what deserves censorship or where the barriers lie,

but outright promotion of false medical claims and demonization of vaccine efforts, I'm not that worried if Brett gets removed. And in fact, we have an article authored by you and me coming out in the Skeptic magazine, a UK-based magazine today, today hopefully which is a bit of a rejoinder to heather haying's article in area magazine comparing them both to galileo with these covid theories and i think we set out our point of view pretty well there so we'll link to that too hey oh yeah and so that's that's one brother, right? The other one. Maybe he was feeling that, you know, the anti-vaccine angle was being unfairly capitalized by his younger brother. So he needed to get in on the issue himself.

So I'm just going to read two of his recent tweets. I don't know what Anthony Fauci is, but I want him removed and investigated. The world doesn't need Dr. Anthony Fauci. No one is that irreplaceable. Something is wildly off here with these propaganda campaigns. I have no idea what, not a clue, but we need to remove Dr. Fauci. Vaccines work in general. They are safe in general, in my opinion. But rushed, novel, universal and with cryptically salient opposition by big tech is the antithesis of reason, science, liberalism, and progressivism. It's one compulsory experiment. This is marching toward evil.

If there's a fertility consequence, or an autoimmune crisis, or if these kids are dying from a vaccine that is more dangerous than the virus to young people, are dying from a vaccine that is more dangerous than the virus to young people, it will fall to people like me who spoke out to restore faith in vaccines to clean up after Dr. Fauci. Let's avoid that. Saviour of Western

Civilisation. Of our Civilisation. Yeah, providing access to antimatter technology, theories of everything, and willing to clear up Dr. Fauci's mess with these killer vaccines. If, Matt, if they are killing children, if they are destroying our immune systems. If.

Yes. Yeah. And if not, then they're doing the exact opposite. He still needs to go. He still needs to go. He still needs to go to there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It feels like he might be maybe a little bit envious of his brother's traction, attention, and so getting on board

because he hasn't really talked about vaccines a great deal. Has he? No. No. You know, it says what you would expect but if this is the outcome of their sibling rivalry like for god's sake the two of them they're just i don't know anyway we're not focusing on them today bye weinsteins back back in your little box for this

week. They're still up to nonsense. That's all I can tell people. They're dancing their merry tunes. Yes. But we are dancing to a non Weinstein tune this week.

We have decided to leap out of the culture wars into the 80s and look at a personal guru of mine, one Anthony DeMello, an Indian Jesuit priest. Jesuits being a type of Catholic and a psychotherapist previously. he was a public speaker and wrote some books on spirituality and did retreats and whatnot was popular in the 80s and and died as well i see sadly he died in 1987 which wouldn't have been that long after the video that we watched that's that's a shame it's sad. So, like, before we get started on anything, you know,

recently we've been talking about how these Defenders of Western Civilization podcasts that we've been looking at have a particular musical motif with the rousing Western classical music. So this made a nice contrast. Here's how this talk by Anthony DeVille started and so on yeah but it's it just it's not the same is it as the no i like it though it's nice it makes me feel nostalgic for the 80s it makes me want to listen to ice house and in excess very different music yeah these clips and episodes that we were looking at was this

video lecture that was recorded called wake up spirituality for today and it was three lectures right 30 minute talks he gave and they were combined into a video series that we watched that would have probably been released on vhs tape chris yeah yeah i actually heard them on audio cassette back in the day did you this was yeah i don't even remember where i got them from but i i had the audio you know i needed to turn them over and rewind and all that stuff so it's an amazing image imagining teenage chris curled up in your little Irish, I don't know, cobble, I assume. After all the bombs, that's all we had left, Matt.

And, yeah, turning over your DeMille cassettes. Yeah. Hiding under the covers, hoping my Catholic parents didn't. What spiritual nonsense are you listening to this heresy heresy like like the like the cardinals of the inquisition were gonna burst in at every any moment drag you away i do think that's worth mentioning because i will say that like i got interested in my teenage years in like buddhism and whatnot and i came across this this kind of strand of christianicism, which Anthony

de Mello was a representation of. And I was really impressed by it because in many respects, it ran counter to the kind of Christianity that I would be having, you know, kind of teenage rebellions against. But then after being so impressed by DiBello, I subsequently found out that after his death, Cardinal Prefect Joseph Ratzinger, who eventually became Pope Benedict, conducted a review of his work and released a warning that his books are incompatible with the Catholic faith and can cause grave harm. Was he excommunicated or anything like that like x no he just got a he got a warning on his materials in like catholic bookshops and whatnot so this so this is the kind of illicit catholic teachings that you only get in

dark alleys and belfast have you got any de meello working off tips? Well, I think it's good to start with your personal relationship with it because I wasn't aware of this guy and I didn't have your sort of religious issues, but I did have my mother's partner and her too very much you know grew up with a strong catholic tradition and we're also part of the sort of 70s 80s type countercultury type social justicey um i guess reaction to that kind of orthodoxy and i know that he was in particular was my mom was more of a skeptic but his his whole life was definitely a huge fan of this kind of, I guess you'd call it syncretist fusing of what they would see as the best parts of Christian teachings. And also a kind of a mind opening, greater awareness sort of thing, whichdhism and various other faiths so yeah i'm kind of familiar with with the vibe too i will say though that my spiritual seekings such as they were in

my teenage years were like strongly tinged with a a pretty strong streak of atheism and scientific rationalism kind of stuff so i never like i had an interest in buddhism but like in the variety that skews closer to sam harris's like buddhist modernism as we discussed with the scholar Evan Thompson. We'll put up the interview soon enough. So this was not really me exploring my Catholic heritage. It was more that I came across this because of like an interest in people like Thomas Merton and the Vietnamese Buddhists like Thich Nhat Hanh and stuff. And so I was more surprised that there was this wing in Catholicism. And it temporarily made me slightly more positive about the Catholic tradition. And then I found out about the reaction and it just reinforced my view that the Catholic

church was corrupted. that the Catholic Church was corrupted. So I'm less of a devout atheist or very strong about it as I would have been in my teenage years, but I wasn't then and I'm not now in any way like a strongly religious person. Okay, good. So just clarifying that for you, Matt. Yeah, I know, I know. I was implying things that shouldn't have been

implied so he's a great talker he's a great lecturer and he intersperses his teachings with quite a few jokes i've got nice examples of that so let's play it first just so people can hear him kind of introduce himself on the topics because you know it's not culture war it's not culture war but he's just he's a cath Catholic priest talking about like spirituality topics. So here's him explaining that. But let me begin with something that people are always saying to me. They know I'm a Catholic priest. And so they say to me, could you help us to pray? You know, I've written a book on prayer. Could you help us to pray better? So let's begin with that.

Yeah, so just, that's it. Just to point out, Forrestar is an Indian guy. That's where the accent is from. But the topic, Matt, is like, it's pretty strongly spiritual. And he's talking to a room full of like American Christians, I think, all white, wearing Edie's paraphernalia. Yeah, so it's interesting, isn't it? He's a Jesuit priest, but a lot of his talk is about, like it sounds like Eastern mysticism.

So that's probably the interesting angle that he's coming from. Yeah, there's a lot of syncretic content. And that's part of what appealed to me that he makes reference to Sufism, to Taoist traditions, or to like, from all, yeah, all the mystics from different traditions. There's this guy who comes to see a great Sufi master. And he says to the master, Master, so great is my trust in God that I haven't even tied my camel to the post outside. I have left it to the providence of God and the care of God. And the Sufi master says, go out and tie that camel to the post, you fool. Go out and tie that camel to the post, you fool.

God cannot be bothered doing what you can do for yourself. Pretty good, huh? But before that, you mentioned his penchant for telling stories and what you might refer to as dad jokes. So I'll just play two examples of that. There are many more, but here's two rather clear ones. I'm reminded of the woman who goes to her doctor and the doctor, the psychiatrist, says to her, did you wake up grumpy this morning? She says, no, he was fast asleep, so I thought I'd let him be. That's classic. That's classic.

That's great. That caused a chuckle, though. Yeah, that's a good example. One more. What about this one? I think this is possibly the Zen of his jokes in the series. Like that guy who stands up on a platform and he says, I was born an Englishman.

I will live an Englishman and I will live an Englishman, and I shall die an Englishman. And an Irishman in the crowd shouts, man, have you got no ambition? Yeah. Just get an anti-English stick in there. I found his jokes pretty cute. I thought, yeah, they worked for me as dad jokes. I thought they were nice.

I thought, yeah, they worked for me as dad jokes. I thought they were nice. Yeah. And, you know, the other point about the potential for him to be seen as something of a heretic, right, or a religious radical. It's kind of funny given how relatively mild the stuff that he's offering is. But I can see some of the reason that Cardinal Ratzinger would have took issue with his content. For example, stuff like this. Religion means drop your illusions. In as much as religion helps you to do this, it's fine. In as much as it distracts you from it, takes you away from it.

It's a disease. It's a plague. It must be avoided. So, yeah, I could definitely understand why the Catholic Church would consider him to be non-Orthodox. But, yeah, that's another good example where he's kind of talking about Eastern mysticism, Like that's another good example where he's kind of talking about like Eastern mysticism, which is that there's something deeper and you shouldn't get distracted by the church and the doctrines and the rituals and so on. You need to be embarking on this spiritual journey. Yeah.

And he makes the point that essentially that piousness is not what you should be striving for. And I liked that sentiment. It appealed to me. So here's another example of that. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and fail to do what I tell you? And they will come to me and say, Lord, we work miracles in your name. And he'd say, Lord, we work miracles in your name. And he'd say, I don't know you, not interested. Funny, he was less interested in Lord, Lord than we seem to be. He was more interested in, why don't you do what I tell you? Yeah. His takes on the New Testament remind me a bit of Jesus Christ Superstar, actually, because it kind of fits with the sort of hippie version of Christ, yeah? Yeah. And there's a part in it where he basically makes the claim, which I think would be more startling to a Christian audience in the 80s

in America than it is to us now, that suggests just being a Christian doesn't actually make you Christ-like or doesn't make you better than other people or more living by his teaching. So he had an ecumenical kind of approach that suggested following the real teaching of Jesus does not require being a Christian. And again, there's a message that the Catholic Church is probably not super in favor of. See, the two types of prayer, there's the Lord, Lord. That's pretty good. There's something much better. Do what I tell you.

You know something? There are people who do what he tells them without ever saying Lord, Lord, or even having heard of the Lord. Does that make sense to you? Does it? Does it? Does it? Yes, wonderful. And there are people who are full of Lord, Lord, but mighty little else.

Yeah. So, yeah, look, I've got to tell you, Chris, when I listened to this, what I decided to do right from the outset is just put aside all of the stuff about prayer and religion and so on, because none of that's going to work for me at all. And nobody wants to hear my boring atheist take on religion, right? So what I did is I thought, well, I'm just going to listen to it in terms of life advice, you know, in the same way you might. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, it gets pretty interesting, I think, in terms of his advice. Yeah, so those elements,

they're not really central to the topic. Like the three topics he covers is how to pray, love, and I can't remember what the other one is, awareness or something like that. But in any case, although those clips might make it sound like this has quite anti-institutional bias, it doesn't really.

Those are like all the clips from the content where he basically takes that stance. Yeah. I think you can mostly think about it as self-help lectures in a way because he's giving people advice on how to be happy, essentially. Yeah. advice how to how to be happy essentially yeah and i i will say matt that the way that you approached it i approached it slightly differently in that i viewed it as i already know the content i've like heard it many times before so i'm going to approach it the way we do with the other gurus and look at the techniques and the rhetorical methods that he uses to construct this argument. And I find a fair amount of them.

I think in most cases, they're being used in service of points, which are much less objectionable than the people that we usually cover. But at the same time, it is the same underlying manipulative structure at times to get people to see the validity. So I don't know where you would like to go first. Do you want to talk about some of the techniques or do you want to talk about some of the content that you highlighted? I think we should talk about the content first because I think that'll be the logical order. All right. So hit me. Tell me what you pulled out of his philosophical musings. Okay.

And you can try to find the clips that pertain to it. I've got them. I'm like a human clip library. Bang, bang, bang. Okay. So I think one of the really important themes that these lectures are about is, well, the first one is about detachment and he really emphasizes that a lot so he focuses on the idea that

it sounds very eastern to me where all of the things that we attach to which is recognition or success or possessions and so on are really like a drug that is actually addicting you and putting you on this wheel that's just causing further unhappiness and what you need to do is is detached. Let's take a look at those world feelings. They're not natural. They were invented by your society and mine to control us. They do not lead to happiness, only to excitement and thrills and anxiety and emptiness. And think of your own life. Is there a single day when you're not consciously or unconsciously attuned to what others think, what others feel, and what they will say about you? feel and what they will say about you. So he really, he takes that in a quite a strong direction because he really thinks we shouldn't be looking to others to provide any kind of support or

approval and that we should not be relying on other people in terms of relationships and with children as well. We shouldn't be conditioning them or programming them to become trained to be sensitive to approval or disapproval so i thought that was a pretty interesting theme yeah and i there's various clips that i can use to illustrate that but let's start with the ones that highlight the situation as he diagnoses it for people in their normal everyday life. And there's another mystic who says human beings are born asleep, they live asleep and they die asleep but that is so true. Maybe they're not born asleep. They're born awake. But by the time they develop their brains, they fall asleep. And they breed children in their sleep. They bring them up in their sleep. They go in for

big business in their sleep. They go into government in their sleep, and they die in their sleep. They never wake up. That is what spirituality is all about, to wake up. You're moving around in a drunken stupor. It's as if you were hypnotized. You're drugged and you don't know what you're missing. Yep. Now that's a good illustration of that. That one, I think, is angling it towards the theme of like waking up right the awareness or enlightenment or like introspection that if you're in this state where you have an unexamined life and and you can continue like that and you know your life will go through but if you start to look at it in the way that he suggests for spirituality or whatever process that it will be transformative and i think there's the negative and positive ways about

framing that but let me play just one more clip map which i think this veers more towards the negative side and slightly more manipulative side of that framing. How would we get out of this? How would we awake? How do you know that you're asleep? I told you that in the previous program. Are you upset and disturbed? Do you have problems? Are you not enjoying life? Never doubt it, you're fast asleep. Think of a little child. It's given a taste for drugs. As it grows up, the whole body of that child is craving for the drug. To live without the drug brings a pain and a suffering so great that it seems preferable to die. of pain and a suffering so great that it seems preferable to die. You and I, as children, were given a drug. It was called approval. It was called appreciation. It was called praise, success, acceptance, popularity.

Once you took the drug, society could control you. The tentacles of society got into you. You become a robot. Yeah. So he takes that sort of ascetic and detachment theme pretty far. And like you were hinting at, Chris, I think, look, there's a super reasonable and helpful moderate interpretation of that. And then you could also imagine it being taken too far. difficult people, for instance, at some point and how reacting to them and letting those sorts of negative energies and taking that on and being sensitive to these people being unhappy with you for whatever reason is not healthy.

And it's good to, I guess, detach from toxic people. And, you know, that's obviously good advice. But that more extreme version, which is that any kind of social feedback, yeah, that say children might receive, that we should be insensible to that, that seems pretty extreme and sort of a little bit inhuman. So I think some of the descriptions come close to echoing what we would now regard as like tropes in red pill narratives, right? Like seeing through the matrix. And like to some respect, it's actually them that are aping this language, right? Because this came first. Breakthrough language or transformative self-experiences is what the red pill culture warriors are drawing on and what the matrix drew on when it was covering these things. But in framing it about society has got its tentacles into you, it's controlling you, you're being manipulated and you're asleep. You're in a docile state, right?

All of that sits uneasy with me because basically you can make those arguments and there's validity to how we're socialized and how we're brought up and taught and we develop psychologically unhealthy habits and whatnot. But you can use that rhetoric to justify any insight that you want to package the people so i think the insight that he's packaging is actually relatively useful for people and not so harmful but you could use it to promote a weinsteinian worldview for example

well that that other thing though which is that it's society that corrupts, that we're kind of born pure and very quickly become corrupted by the corrupt world in which we're in, and that the spiritual journey is a way of waking up out of that. That's a very old theme, obviously. And, yeah, I don't quite buy that. And when I say it's inhuman, I think, you know, to encourage people to not have any attachment to, say, their family

and not be significantly affected, not in a truly deep sense by say the loss of loved ones or whatever, or being rejected by, you know, someone that you love. Yeah. That bothers me a little bit because I think that kind of philosophy, and it is kind of an aesthetic type of philosophy is one that just sort of denies, you know, the fact that humanness. Yeah. Where, you know, you and me, baby, we're nothing but mammals type thing. So look, the fact that... Humanness? Yeah, where, you know, you and me, baby, we're nothing but mammals type thing. So, look, the other thing, this could be off topics, we could talk about it later,

but talking about his rhetorical techniques, there was one little thing there which stuck out to me where he was talking about, you know, the story where Jesus lost his temple with the moneylenders in the temple and, you know, drove them out and whatever. And he mentions that, but he says, oh, no, no, no, he wasn't really disturbed or angry about that. Because see, that doesn't fit with his model of Jesus being this sort of

ascetic detached ideal. And I just didn't really buy it. Okay, Jesus was disturbed with the money lenders we could add one more how about the agony in the garden now you mustn't take those money lenders as being literally losing his temper I told you you could get into action but you want your blood pressure to go up you could swing into action you'll be more effective you know how the surgeon swings into action when he cuts and if he was really disturbed in the agony isn't it wonderful that he would also sometimes suffer from his programming as we suffer from ours and pretty soon he steadies himself because we're told that he steadies

himself pretty soon. That's wonderful. Yeah, yeah, I can see that. Well, let me, so let me play some clips, I think, to illustrate this. So this one, I think, further highlights the possible parallels with the red pill narratives. Is there a single day when you're not consciously or unconsciously attuned to what others think, what others feel, and what they will say about you? In other words, controlled by them, marching to the beat of their drum. And look around you and see if you find anyone who is freed from these feelings, world feelings. Everywhere you will find people immersed in these world feelings

because they live soulless, empty lives. Jesus Christ. So if you have feelings, you're living a soulless, empty life. I mean, that's one of the worst terms but the notion that look around they're all npcs with no souls like told them the rhetoric man like you know they're all right but so you know he's trying to argue that the people around like this this conditioning by society, that because people don't reflect on it, that it causes them suffering, right?

And he wants to argue that he has an alternative perspective, which is a way out of it. Now, the part, Matt, that maybe, and this might be binding to his rhetoric, but where you point out losing attachment to your family or loved ones, for example, is bad. There's this two-step that mystics do in that argument where they essentially argue, no, that's the wrong interpretation. It's not that you don't have those attachments. It's that you have them all, but your reaction to that attachment has changed. How do we get this? Through understanding. I talked about those illusions of ours. If you would see your illusions and your erroneous ideas

they will drop, you will change but that you have to do. I know what you mean. In fact I was going to say something similar thinking of the rejoinder and it's almost like they say, yes, you know, you should still want things. You should still try to achieve things. You should still care about things. If you do what I'm suggesting, you will still feel emotions. You'll feel sad sometimes. You'll feel depressed sometimes. You'll feel angry sometimes.

But you don't attach to those. They're like clouds in the sky, to use his metaphor. You're the sky. You're not the clouds. Now, suffering means to be disturbed by your pain, by your depression, by your anxiety. It's quite likely that as you embark upon this way of prayer, in the beginning, the depressions will continue to come and the anxieties will continue to come. But you know, in the old days, these were like clouds that passed through the sky and you identified yourself with the clouds. Now you're

the sky. You're detached from them, but they continue to come and go. Before enlightenment, I used to be depressed. After enlightenment, I continue to be depressed well so i'm not sure if that fixes the argument though because it's like detaching from like you're still attached but you're kind of detached from the attachment and like how is it different it's different in a very ineffable kind of way isn't it yeah yeah well but i and i think what the argument is that you can't describe to someone what enlightenment is. It's something that you experience. So it's very much so that it is ineffable. So I think I have a clip which is on that topic. Let me see. which is on that topic.

Let me see. There's a great master who was asked by his disciples, what did enlightenment bring you? And he says, well, before enlightenment, I used to be depressed. After enlightenment, I continue to be depressed. But there's a big difference. Suffering means to be disturbed by your depression.

That's what I mean by suffering. And there's many variations of that saying, right? Before I was enlightened, I saw the mountains and afterwards I saw the mountains or, you know, the Zen, the monk traveling on the ox and whatnot but yeah and in that case i think there is a paradox but it's potentially resolvable if you accept what they claim and that's the issue with sam harris's approach and so on that you've talked about as well matt that like ultimately it's a pseudological claim about salvation or about enlightenment right that this is this is people saying once you get there you will still act you will still do things you'll still feel emotion but there's something fundamentally transformed right and maybe like there's no way to know that except i think the mellowing coal would say when you look at the mystical writing from all across the different traditions

they were all saying that yeah yeah i think it's it's identical to the rationale that's behind seeking enlightenment where it can't be described and there's an apparent paradox there and it's it's most clear when he talks about depression so if you follow his advice you'll still feel depressed sure but it won't bother you it's like well are you like that that's a little hard to wrap your head around i think and like you can kind of get what he's saying and in fact like look I'm trying to to be sympathetic to it there's a way in which probably there's some truth to that because I could be wrong about this but I think it's reasonably effective that there are ways to train yourself to deal with say chronic pain and and I think if I remember correctly one of the ways to do it is to try to focus on it, appreciate that it's there, but sort of detach yourself from it.

And my understanding is that kind of attitude can be, for some people, a reasonably effective way of dealing with the pain. And so if you do that practice, you're not going to be free of the physical pain, but it does help. That's the impression I get. Anyway, have you heard of that, Chris? Yeah, and I think this is the segment that you're referring to. So the idea is, suppose a child is handicapped or a child is sick. You know, I know a Jesuit who's a polio victim and he's really crippled and handicapped. He's one of the happiest people I've ever met. victim and he's really crippled and handicapped. He's one of the happiest people I've ever met. It all depends on how the child society and family reacts to that. If they think it's a calamity and there are oohs and ahhs, then of course, this is what the child is going to pick up.

I've seen people in awful health with cancer, suffering intense pain. You know something? They're happy. They're happy. They're not suffering because suffering means you're fighting it. Yeah. So taking like a maximally charitable point of view, I can see how that kind of thing can be good advice because, you know, life's going to deal your lemon sometimes, right? And there's not going to be anything you can do about it, but what you can do is change your attitude to the adversity and adjust your perceptions such that it isn't the overriding thing that determines whether or not you're basically okay and happy. Think of something that is disturbing you right now, during these days, or something that disturbed you in the recent past. Think. is not coming from outside, not from the events, not from those things, not from the fact that

somebody died or that you made a mistake or that you met with an accident or that you lost your job or your money. It doesn't come from there. It comes from the way that you are reacting to the event, to the person, to the thing that is upsetting you. Yeah. And I think like, you know, we've criticized with Goop and on other like JPCs and stuff, this excessive focus on the self as being the most important element. But in some respects, again, there's a parallel here in the narrative, which is that what you need to work on is yourself and your reaction. The external circumstances are what they are, but the key thing for your happiness is to transform yourself. So here's an illustration of that. A woman who claims that she hasn't been loved and she needs it desperately. She goes to the movies and it's a

great comedy and she's roaring with laughter. And for 10 minutes, she's forgotten that it's necessary to be loved. And she's happy. What do you know? When she comes out of the theater with her friend and she sees her friend go with her boyfriend, then she thinks nobody loves me. I got no boyfriend. And he has a point, right? Like I think there's validity there to the fact that it can be helpful and I think a lot of therapy does this, to realize that a lot of your suffering is self inflicted, your circumstances, often are beyond your control. And like you say, Matt, you know, it's human to react to like abuse, physical or mental in certain ways, or extreme stress. But, but there are also steps where you can stop inflicting additional injury to yourself despite the outside circumstances. And I think there is validity

to that. But taken too far, it becomes this view that all that matters in the world is your internal reactions to things. And maybe that fits with stoicism and those kinds of philosophical traditions that you can be like tortured and kept confined, but nobody can imprison your mind. And I think that there's validity there, but also people can do a hell of a lot to you. And, and, you know, there's only these heroic figures who could be burning themselves to death and keeping their mind in control. And there are Buddhist monks that have done that in protest

and so on. So it can be done. done but i i think that that is verging on inhuman levels of self-control yeah no i think sometimes it seems like our takes are always this kind of you know golden mean kind of moderate takes which is yeah you know a little bit's okay but you go all the way it's it's a bit weird so i think that's the case here like if i if i think about what he's saying in terms of this achieving enlightenment and perfect happiness where you're completely detached from everything, and then I see these logical problems, you know, between being depressed but being fine with that. And I see sort of epistemic problems in taking it on faith, as you hinted at. taking it on faith, as you hinted at. But if I listen to it more as kind of aphorisms and life advice for people, then it can be pretty good, right? So for instance, I'm thinking particularly, let's say you're a socially anxious person and you're a bit neurotic,

you're a bit codependent with your partner, you're worrying too much about what other people think of you, you're thinking that your happiness rests entirely on your partner doing X, for instance, and so on. Then for someone like that, then a bit of this kind of stuff is excellent advice, I think, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. And like, so the insight that I find valuable as a teenager and that I still think applies is in reference to reacting to situations where you're dealing with difficult people or hurt or that. So here's an example of that. So with these two provisos, I'm not going to protect you from the consequences and I'm not going to push you around. You can do whatever you want and take the consequences. But I'm not disturbed. Imagine you're waiting in a line for a you want and take the consequences. But I'm not disturbed. Imagine

you're waiting in a line for a ticket and somebody breaks the line. Can you imagine how crazy it is that because someone has misbehaved, you're going to punish yourself? It's like taking a sledgehammer and hitting yourself on the head. You're going to get angry. You're going to let your blood pressure go up. You're going to lose your sleep. This is crazy. And everybody says it's normal. Well, they're all lunatics. That's all. They're lunatics. Yeah. So, you know, like imagine the kind of person who gets afflicted by road rage. And a lot of people do. They just get angry driving. Yeah. That's always struck me as a very weird thing um you know that's good advice obviously isn't it i find that helpful that you know when you're ruminating on something that somebody did that was unjust to you or that hurt you that like that person's not there now so

if you're playing over the hurt in your mind and like feeling depressed because of it it's a natural reaction yes but you're doing it yeah right that's right and that to me as a teenager was very insightful yeah i can imagine it'd be very helpful for an angst ridden teenager which i'm sure you were chris um so uh yeah like i think in moderation this stuff is excellent advice like the idea of detachment and not being overly sensitive to the kinds of rewards and punishments that other people like to deal out to you so imagine dealing with people on twitter or dealing with someone just for instance or dealing with a toxic work colleague. Then anyone who's dealt with toxic people know that they are very good at dealing out the rewards and the punishments to attempt to, I guess, train you essentially to do what it is that they want.

And everyone has encountered those sorts of situations to one degree or another and so some detachment from people is great but when he took it further then i think you could go a bit wrong because you know if you're talking about raising a child and that it's somehow bad to ever reward them or discourage them from anything, then that's bad parenting advice. I'm sorry. Like, you know, we're social mammals. We're social creatures.

We actually need a bit of social feedback and we should actually pay attention to if we're not going to become psychopaths. So, you know. Well, Matt, I think Follower DeMello has an answer to that complaint of yours let's let's just see okay would you stand up please matthew i'm trying to imagine myself as a parent uh treating my child without without praise or affection or encouragement that sounds like

when you describe it as a drug as a bad thing to give a child, I just can't imagine myself being a good parent, a loving parent, and not giving that to a child. Okay, great. Affection is fine. Did you hear me say affection wasn't all right? A parent giving affection is fine. But think of this. We're all busy telling people that they're okay. But think of this. We're all busy telling people that they're okay. You know why? Because somebody told them they were not okay. And you know something? You're neither okay nor not okay. You're you. Think about that, Matt. Put that in the bike park and smoke it. Yeah, I am that guy in the audience. And I didn't find his answer. I didn't find his answer. I didn't find his answer.

I have to say, I wasn't convinced by his answer. Sit down, please, Mr. Brian. You know, this image of the little robot that is controlled by praise and criticism, I think it's quite a powerful image, though. Here's another clip of him talking about that. You want to see what kind of a robot existence human beings live listen to this you've got the robot who comes here and i say my you're looking pretty and the robot goes right up i press a button called appreciation and right up it goes then i press another button called criticism flat on on the earth. Total control.

We're so affected by this. We're so easily controlled by it. Are you a robot, Matt? Can I press your buttons? I am a robot. When you think of the gurus, some of the gurus that we cover and how sensitive they are to attention and acclaim and how that seems to drive them then it sounds pretty good and yeah it's a powerful

metaphor isn't it that to stop being a robot and stop being on this wheel of punishment and reward that we need to detach and and go inwards and somehow engage with this something, this ineffable light or something. But I'm just not sure what happens then. How do you behave differently? And do you not pay any attention to the effect that you're having on other people? Or does your inner light guide your decisions? For instance, at another point he

talks about how we shouldn't be fixated on success and the markers of achievement and so on but then he very quickly says i'm not saying you shouldn't try to do things i'm not saying you shouldn't try to achieve things you should still do that and my thought was well why matt you're just reveling in your unenlightened state looking looking down from the bottom of the mountain and saying what's it like up there i cannot conceive but yeah but yeah like i said i think that a lot of that are common questions and complaints that people have. And the mystic's response in all traditions is to give unsatisfying answers, which essentially say, you'll know when you do it. Like, I can't tell you. And there's like, there's a manipulative element to that because in that case, why don't you just follow

L. Ron Hubbard when he says, look, do Dianetics and you'll understand once you do it. And I think that's the issue, that this is open to abuse. And even the people that are well-meaning. Like we often talk about things being a spectrum and I don't think it's the case that there are pure hearted saints from respectable religious traditions and history and there are the manipulative cult leaders, right? There's a spectrum there.

There's people that are conditioned by their religious and cultural upbringings as well. And there's probably nobody that's ultimately completely pure. But I think there is a spectrum in regards to the level of harm that can be done by encouraging people to do that. And, yeah, so I don't have the answers for you, Matt, because I'm not on that fucking point.

You're down here. You're wallowing down here with me and we're loving it um look i think you make a good point there which is that he is using the same appeal to revealed truth that alvaro and hubbard would be making and everything i've seen he seems like a lovely guy and his advice largely seems good and helpful. He doesn't seem in the least bit toxic, at least from this one lecture series I've seen. But as you say, he's still doing the same structural argument that a lot of much more toxic people do. So this probably sounds a little bit like this episode is us trying to red peel people into

some kind of hyper rationalist, atheist type framework. But this stuff is normal. Like this kind of rhetorical tricks are seen everywhere. And it's not like, you know, okay, he's a guru. Therefore, they're bad and harmful. What we have here is someone who doesn't seem harmful. He seems very nice. Like, who knows?

Maybe he's been molesting his followers and stuff. Yeah, he could be a child rapist. They all are, Matt. They all are. I kicked their ad film. Yeah. So, yeah, look, I mean, just my gut impression is that with stuff like this, like, I read it on just a psychological level.

Like, so take out all of the religious and the metaphysical and the spiritual aspects right just remove all of that from what he's saying and imagine that he's just a straight up self-help type person giving a motivational lecture or whatever it's it's kind of not bad psychological advice on a purely psychological level as long as he doesn't take it too far you know if he dropped the extreme asceticism and just stuck to the more mundane kind of advice then i'd say it's pretty good psychology there's a funny part in it just to mention in passing i don't know if you ever came across this book was popular in the 80s i think called games people play it was like a psychology book documenting these kind of psychological interactions and it was highlighting the pathology right like an example is that you know somebody might present a problem and then

people will offer solutions but the game version is that the individual doesn't want the solution so they will shoot down all the problems. And it was kind of like a self-helpy thing. But he makes reference to it. And I'd read that book as well. So it's just interesting because it dates it to that period. They want to be miserable, though they don't know it. You read that book, Games People Play, and you'll discover how they're unconsciously wanting to produce their suffering.

So they don't like the good part of the good news, but they don't like the new part of the good news. People, they say they want to get out of their suffering, but they don't. And that sentiment, I think we touched on it already, but it can lean towards potential victim blaming, in a sense. So listen to this clip. Somebody broke his promise to you. Somebody rejected you. Someone abandoned you. You know something?

No one has ever hurt you in the whole of your life. No one. No event has ever upset you. This was done by you. In fact, it wasn't even done by you because we wouldn't do this deliberately. It was done by your conditioning, by your programming, by the way you looked at things and at life. That's what needs to be changed. Well, in an interesting way, that's related to the episode with Jesse Signal and some of the comments from Nick Wolfinger, right? Because

I think it's a common problem, both with, I guess, spiritual mysticism, but also psychology generally, which is that individualistic internalised focus, which is that don't worry about the world, look inwards because all the problems lie there and with you. And yeah, I can see how that can have problems in ignoring things that do need to change, problems that do need to be fixed, structures that do need to be revised. So, yeah, I think that's a common tension,

not just with this guy or particular gurus, but with the whole area, really. Yeah, and, you know, if you consider it, I mean, I always, in this kind of situation think not about just people having difficulty with partners or whatever, which is, I think, what he's mainly talking about. Yeah, that's what he's talking about. But I'm instead thinking about, like, somebody who's suffered child abuse or something, right? Was that really nobody ever hurt you? Nobody inflicted anything that you didn't do to yourself. No, they did.

And your reaction to that, it's not just about your societal conditioning. It's that you were genuinely abused, right? And so I think there's an issue with minimizing the potential to look at like external causes, right? Because after the development, all the people like him want to move the focus onto you and your psychology and what you can do. And that might be helpful, but I think it requires that you downplay the harm that other people can do to people in their lives. And it does it in such a way that it's, it's potentially deceiving and, you know, in a way gaslighting, that you weren't properly abused. It was your mental reaction to the abuse that did it to you. Well, I mean, maybe I'll try to defend him a bit here,

which is that you're right, but I think it fanners to him. I think in his mind, he's talking to, like, middle-class, world people who haven't had terrible adversity. He may be wrong about this, right? I mean, he knows what's happened with some of those Christian families in the audience, but you know, in his mind, he's talking to people that do not have not, you know, ground under the wheel of oppression and are not kind of in the sort of wrapped up in some sort of desperate scenario of interpersonal abuse, but rather people that are sort of unhappy and wondering what's wrong with them, given that they don't have any huge problems

in their lives. So I think you're right. But I think he's talking, at least in his mind, to a different audience. Yeah. And I think he does fall on this tendency to redefine words, right? So like in the kind of way that Kendi did, for example, he redefines common words to have definitions where they don't mean what people expect them to mean and then says, aha, so you are wrong because you're holding the common definition. But it's more like, well, but you've just replaced a common understanding with a new specific definition.

What's an example of this? What's an example of this? Love. So let's see what love is. Actually, this is more like what love is not. Okay, we got to go there first. Either way, I want you to show me. So let me begin by telling you what love is not.

And then indicating, however vaguely, what love is. Love is not attraction. I love you more than I love anyone else. Translate, I'm more attracted to you than to others. How does that sound? You draw me more than others. You fit the programming in my head better than other people do. Not very flattering to you, because if my programming had been different, remember how people say, what does he find in her? What does he see in her? Ah, they say love is blind. Attraction is blind, not love. There is nothing so clear-sighted as love. So, Matt, do you have a slightly better grasp of what love is now? Oh, dear. But, like, okay, let me make the one point here.

I actually think maybe this is the worst section for me to have done because I think the argument he wants to make here about separating a kind of spiritual all-encompassing love for humanity for the world for your fellow being is is very distinct from what we talk about with romantic attraction and affection and infatuation. And in large respect, I think he's right about this. And even in the respect that romantic infatuation in long-term relationships usually has to give way to something which can also be called love, but which is not the kind of thing which people sing about

in love songs typically. Sure, sure. So, you know, but that's not a new idea. You know, the Greeks had seven different words for different types of love, right? And, you know, different philosophers and stuff like that. Was it Socrates or somebody who did the same kind of things, talking about how the only thing worth loving is with knowledge

or wisdom or something can therefore blah, blah, blah. I can't remember how it goes. But, you know, they do a lot of tricky things with that. And the general impulse of philosophers and mystics is they're not a fan, right, of erotic love and passionate love or obsessive love and just the kind of mundane, you know, the kind of love that someone like you would have, for instance, Chris.

Like they're totally against that. I don't have that kind of love, Matt. My heart is much too bleak for that. But I want to play an example of him talking about just how much disdain he has for that version of love. And perfect love casts out fear. Wherever there's desire of the type that I described, it always goes attended by fear.

So love is not desire. Love is not attachment. Falling in love is the exact opposite of love. And it's canonized everywhere. It's a disease. Everybody's trying to give it to you. You find it in your movies,

in your love songs. These are need songs. He's sounding much more like a Jesuit there, Chris. Love is a disease. Your attachment to your partner. There's other parts in this, but it comes across as a Jedi. Yeah, yeah. You know, the attachment leads to love, love leads to jealousy,

jealousy to anger. There's a reason for that, right? Because the fucking Jedis are just modeled off like Buddhists and un-Christianly mystics. So, yeah, so he's a Jedi, Matt. This is what it's about. Yeah, I was going to say, it's no surprise that he's so down on love because, I mean, that's definitely where the Venn diagram of Christianity and

Buddhism, mysticism kind of overlaps because for different reasons or similar reasons, they just weren't fans of very strong, like say familial attachments because, you know, God needs to come first, yeah? or if you're in the buddhist tradition then enlightenment or something needs to come first and those sorts of attachments belong to the the corrupt mundane world around us so they don't want us to be distracted by that yeah and matt so that you know part of the reason i liked the anthony de bella was because i was interested in Buddhism. And there's a lot of echoes of Buddhism in this, and sometimes very explicit, like this example.

Centuries ago, Buddha had these marvelous words to say. The world is full of sorrow. The origin of sorrow, the root of sorrow, is desire. The uprooting of sorrow is desirelessness. Let's translate that better, because by desire he meant a desire on whose fulfillment my happiness depends. And our societies and cultures are the whole time encouraging us to add to these desires. So we're more and more programmed to unhappiness and to non-love.

So I'm going to defend him again here because... He's right, man. I again here because he's right ma i don't think as long as you don't take it too far but that's good advice right so you just liked it because it was anti-materialist checked in don't care about your lamborghinis and your pool parties no i'd love uh no i don, this doesn't describe me at all, but I recognise the value in it. Okay, so, you know, obviously to a moderate degree, it's good advice.

So you've got the kind of teenage infatuation type relationship. Get teenage kicks all through the night, uh-huh. Yeah, uh-huh, uh-huh. Yeah, that's right. And that, you know, obsessing over sex and physical attraction, that's a terrible – I would never do that. Never, never, never, never. Yeah, but the football –

Have you got lost in the mental images that are dancing through your head? That's right. I forgot where I was going with this. I wouldn't be interested in orgies and Lamborghinis. I'm just thinking of a pool party with cocaine and stuff. Russell Brand there with his flowing locks. Yeah. But, like, okay, I will say, Matt, that, like, I've got issues.

I've got issues. I think we should talk a little bit after this about some of the techniques, right, that echo some of the gurus. But I will say I still find profundity in the kind of things that he's offering here in a way that i just don't fucking get when i listen to russell brand or when i listen god forbid scott adams or whoever but like even the people that are more on the spectrum of gurus who we've looked at that I think have reasonable points to make. I find this kind of stuff because it's transparent in what it's about, right? This is a Jesuit priest trying to teach

people about spirituality as he sees it. It doesn't pretend to be something else. And I admire that. Yeah, I got a similar take take there which is i was comparing him to jordan peterson right because jordan you know there's obvious similar yeah but one thing that's really different is that jordan peterson intersperses a kind of a kind of mysticism and self-help advice but he intersperses it with pseudosciencey logical things as well and a guy like DiMello is is 100% one thing yeah you don't see him quoting evolutionary psychology or talking about lobsters and going it's just science you know like it's it's like you said he's quite honestly he is what he says on the tin, which is a spiritual mystic.

And he's being straight up saying this is how you can be enlightened as well and let, you know, the real God into your heart as well. So, you know, that's a plus, I guess. Yeah. Look, I think, Matt matt this leads on nicely to the point i want to make that there are techniques here which are similar to what we see in the guru sphere right here's one example this is you could see this as a strategic disclaimer are you ready to look at things in another way? But a caution in the beginning.

Don't take anything that I'm saying because I'm saying it, because it wouldn't do you any good. You've probably swallowed too much from other people. Now, don't you swallow anything from me. I love those great words of Buddha. He says, monks and scholars must not accept my words out of respect, but must analyze them the way a goldsmith analyzes gold, by rubbing, scraping, cutting, melting. That's the way to do it. On the one hand, openness, receptivity.

On the other hand, the willingness to question, to think for yourself. Otherwise, you will lapse into gullibility, into mental laziness. So that's good, right? Like it's good advice. And a lot of it lies in how sincere you take the person to be but i i do read that as a sincere warning that people like don't just gullibly accept what i'm saying but i can imagine a guru saying the same thing but using it in a rhetorical way right and like maybe i'm being too gullible here but no no actually well when you played that

i assumed you were playing it to um take a shot at him and i was gonna i was all prepped to disagree with you but actually no my take was the same i i've yeah i feel like he's been straight up there in it's he's saying don't just nod your head to what i'm saying because i'm presenting myself as an authority on this and that I've got this special wisdom. You know, listen to what I'm saying to you and see if it makes sense to you and accept it because you think it makes sense. And yeah, as you said,

you can look at it uncharitably and say, oh, that's just a clever trick. But you know, no, I think he's being straight up there. And that's the thing, right? I think which is important. One of the themes of this show, which people should get, is that the techniques that we are highlighting,

like a strategic disclaimer, you can still make a disclaimer which isn't strategic, but which is genuine. And those are important. So you shouldn't look at every time somebody offers a disclaimer for a point in like the maximal cynical way. But you should be able to distinguish when like a Brett Weinstein offers a disclaimer and then for the next hour does the opposite of what they're saying and then returns to the disclaimer.

That's different. Like this very much fits with the theme of the rest of his talk. Yeah. So it could be a guru technique, but I agree that I'm not so sure it is. And here's another example of something that we might hear in other parts of the guru sphere. Now, what do you need in order to see things in a new way? Get ready for a big surprise. You don't need strength.

You don't need youthfulness. You don't need self-confidence. You illustrated by Matt. Yeah. So, I i mean like for me the issue there is on the one line i think it's a good message that you know you're not asking people to commit to some course you're not asking them to have specific characteristics or whatever you're just asking them to be willing to entertain an alternative perspective for a while but But again, you could use that framing to introduce any perspective. Like what if the world isn't the way that you imagine it? What if there really are pedophile cabals underneath everything?

I'm not asking you to sign onto this, Matt. I'm just going to ask you to have an open mind while I explain. And do you have sign on to this, Matt. I'm just going to ask you to have an open mind while I explain. And I do have the courage to think differently, right? The same reasoning, but for like QAnon shit. Yeah, that's right. It's very easy to give this guy a bit of a pass with those tricks. And I think they kind of went over my head a bit.

So well done, Chris. You spotted them. think i think they kind of went over my head a bit so well done chris you spotted them i was i was getting to go back to teenage chris and say keep an eye out chris yeah keep an eye out yeah so look i think that's right so i said you know you naturally give him a bit of a pass because he's not smuggling in crazy stuff that smells bad he's not anti-vax matt he's not anti-vax that'll get my goat but you know it's a little bit like was it was it dawkins or someone like that who was down on christmas and or the easter bunny or something can and telling kids that there's an easter bunny so the argument there it sounds a bit

silly perhaps if we talk about the easter bunny Bunny, but I think the argument is kind of sound, which is that the actual content may be innocuous. Yeah. Easter Bunny is a fun. There's nothing bad there or whatever. But if you're getting people into the habit of just believing fantastical things, then that's a bad habit to get into because it can then be used to believe in stuff that isn't as fun as the Easter Bunny, right? It's just not a good practice. And I actually kind of agree with that. So I told my kids when they were very young, there's no Santa, you're not getting any presents.

There's only rationality and logic. The cold abyss, you're just a sliver of light in between two infinite darknesses. Welcome to the Brown family. Here's your Carl Sagan, Demon of the Worlds, and Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. Good luck. Good luck. Get on with sending your genetics into the next generation because that's my immortality too that's all there is and you know they they cried a lot but i think they're better people for it

you know yeah i've had similar conversations with my children so that's good we're getting them mentally prepared for the cosmic evil and callousness of the universe that will consume them and all of us but relating that back to your point which is just that it's it's a bit naughty to to use those rhetorical tricks even when you're not smuggling in anything nasty just because it's just a you know it's best not to use them basically if you can avoid it yeah and here's another one which i think is like it's definitely not as bad and actually touches on your easter bunny business but it's a little bit like, I don't think this would be blowing so many people's minds in the 2020s as it might have in the 1980s. But listen to this,

see what you think afterwards. That being an American is only in your head, that there are no American trees or American mountains. This is a convention that people are ready to die for. That's how real it looks to them. Has it ever struck you that Christmas Day doesn't exist except in your mind? In nature, there's no Christmas Day, but you've got Christmassy feelings. That's right, money. It's just a social convention. Not paper.

You know, it's a social construct, man. Well, I'll tell you what, Christmas doesn't exist in my mind, that's for sure. Look, you know, that's like, you know, John Lennon, imagine there's no countries, etc. That's, yeah, that's not very controversial. I don't think it would have been particularly mind-blowing for people in the 80s either, yeah? Ah, maybe, maybe. He was just talking about the beginning of it is, you know,

looking down, looking out the window of a bus and realising there's no border between America and Canada or whatever it is like. But, you know, when he gave that example, I was just thinking of, yeah, that didn't apply in Northern Ireland. You could see the fucking border because there was a militarized war. So, you know, you can't anymore. Now that was taken away.

It might come back thanks to Brexit. Yes, the border is very ambiguous. It depends where you go, whether borders are physical realities or not. Another point, Matt, the parasocial audience, malarkey, or maybe not the parasocial, but more like praising the audience. Well, that's a good question. Help clarify what I was saying. Anyone else?

Oh, there are plenty of questions. That's wonderful. Look, but I'm not going i'm not pregnant because i did the same thing when i give a talk right when i when a student asks a question even a lecture let alone a academic comment you know that's a good question i'm just saying look what i'm being mean because you know i'm i like a lot of what he has to say but i'm just saying this is something that we all do or all people who are giving public speeches and whatnot but there is an element of it like matt stands up and says oh you know but uh mr de mello like you know

my kids shouldn't i be affectionate to them and no shut up mr brown i've already answered that but that was a very good question thank Thank you, Mr. Brown. Oh, thanks. Okay. Sit back down. Right? Like, there is an element of social manipulation to it. Not social, psychological manipulation. And Demelo should know about this because he's talking about our conditioning and stuff. It's a positive stroke.

Yeah, that's true. That's true. He's being inconsistent, Chris. Inconsistent. yeah that's true that's that's that's true he's being inconsistent chris inconsistent maybe i'm the guy on the mountaintop telling him you're just playing along to your conditioning man you're you're all puppets in my marionette play you can't play that game anyway anyway you want to can't you because you know i could say to him that his idea of God is just this social conditioning that he's accepted as a reality, like the border between US and Canada, man.

Yeah. What about that? And, you know, you asked for an example of like redefining concepts, and I give the one of love, which led us into a tangent, right? I think this is a more relevant example of that. Are you suffering? Do you have problems? Could it be said of you that you're not enjoying every single minute of your life? that you're not enjoying every single minute of your life? Did you enjoy the last three hours, every single minute of those last three hours?

If the answer is no, if the answer is you are suffering, you are disturbed, you do have problems, there's something wrong with you. Seriously wrong. You're asleep. You're dead. Now I bet that with most of you, no one has ever told you this. I wonder why. That does sound an awful lot like something the Moonies would say to you on the street when they're trying to recruit you, right? Do you feel a bit

unhappy everything not perfectly right in your life that's why you need to join us yeah we have we have the solutions to all of these this is a this is a known manipulative technique of cults and also mainstream religious work have you ever sinned are you saying that you're sinless and you know they'll say have you never done the mortal sin and then you find out that mortal sins include things that you stole like 10 pennies from your mom's purse or whatever and and like you know in the bible that says that if you don't repent for that you're going to suffer for all eternity are you completely confident that you've repented i have to tell you something my brother's a secondary, a primary school teacher. And like

Australia doesn't, you know, in the public school system, it's not meant to have this kind of crap in it. But they do have these volunteer religious education teachers who come in and do stuff, but they're not supposed to be doing that kind of thing, right? But they do. And my brother showed me the leaflet they'd been handing out. And it was like a cartoon sort of friendly thing. And the title of it was, Are You a Good Person? This is for six, seven-year-olds or whatever. Are you a good person? The little boy goes, yes, yes, I'm a good person.

And then, have you ever? I forget what the scenes were. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah. Yeah. And he's like, oh, yeah. It was just so manipulative and still makes me angry thinking about it, that they distribute that sort of stuff at schools.

Look, Matt, to give a culture war example, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian in their book, How to Have Impossible Conversations, suggest that one tactic to have a meaningful conversation with someone who holds different ideas from you is to ask them to quantify how certain they are of their belief. And most people will not say a hundred percent. And then from that amount that they, you can say, okay, so what would take you from like 90% to 70%? And they argue, this is like a good way to engage like a meaningful conversation no that's a manipulative technique that can be used in

religious contexts or whatever like are you certain that there is no god oh you're 100 certain what kind of scientific thing is that you're 90 well what would you know what would take you to 80 it's like it's looking for this little crack in the logic or, and, and using all of your rhetorical might to wedge that open. And it's the opposite of a genuine encounter or discussing ideas. It's, it is a rhetorically manipulative technique. And Anthony DiMello's reframing of any suffering any discomfort any distraction as you have something seriously wrong no you don't no and and the sort of double trick to it too is that elsewhere in the lecture he says that once you've done what he's suggesting you do you're still going to feel bored and depressed and all of these

negative things but they just won't matter in a kind of ineffable kind of way because you've detached from them so you know like even anyway no you're right that's a good point to me because like yeah if if you are consistent in the planet you're basically going to say well you're still going to be like that but you just won't be as affected by it but like were you dissatisfied yes well you could be enlightened or you could not be it's it's hugely depends on your uh reaction to that it's not like it's not diagnostic that's what i'm saying live by your own logic man you didn't expect people 40 years later would be microanalyzing this is what you get oh he's he's looking down on us from jesuit heaven he i think he forgives us chris he's that kind of guy yeah i i agree i'm sure he would see the humor in it and well look so overall you know we tried

to get to some nice elements or stuff that we liked and like i said i still find a lot of this that i found convincing or useful like i would i would still recommend with all the caveats that it's an interesting thing to listen to for people. And it's certainly better than some of the culture for draws that we've listened to in recent weeks. Like forget Brett Weinstein, just go look the mellow up that level to do your life better. But I'll play two clips. This is like on the concept of love and attachment and whatnot.

And it might be a bit Buddhist, but I'd be interested to get your thoughts on this because I find this perspective actually helpful and psychologically healthy as well. How could I love you if I don't see you? Now get ready for a surprise. Generally, when I see you or you see me, we generally, we don't see one another. We're seeing an image. A husband, does he relate to his wife or to his image of his wife? Is the wife relating to her husband or to her image of her husband? That experience is stored in my memory.

I make a judgment on the basis of that experience. I'm carrying this along with me. And I'm acting or reacting to you on the basis of this. Not on the basis of what you are right now. There's a picture on my window as I look through it at you. I'm looking through that picture. No clarity of perception. Well, I like that too, actually. That stood out to me as well, Chris, because, look, we're in aphorism territory here. That's part of the course for self-help-y type stuff. But I found that helpful because I'm one of those people that I'm very abstracted. I'm very absent-minded. I'm one of those people that I'm very abstracted I'm very absent-minded I'm usually like a thousand miles away from whatever's going on around me in some way shape or form and it's actually good for someone like me to be reminded to pay attention to the people that

you know particularly my family that I'm interacting with in that moment and it sounds schmaltzy, it's whatever, but it's still good advice. It's good advice for everyone, whether it's your friends, your partner, your children or whatever. It's very, very easy to get into that routine where you do relate to them in an automatic kind of way. And you're not really paying a great deal attention to them because they become like the furniture and stuff, the wallpaper. So that's good self-help advice, which is to stop and pay attention to the people that you care about. The Brown household is this dark place

where the universe is bleak and meaningless and you're all just the parts of the wallpaper in Matt's grand play of his life. We're getting inside, Matt. This is what self-help material is for. No, look, I know what you mean. And I'm there with you. I think in this case, for me, a little bit more

of what strongly comes out of that. And I think this is the part of good self-help stuff that you can take different things from insights that are useful, is that the images that we hold of other people and the things which often make us upset or disappointed are when people don't behave the way that we think that they should behave. And yes, that can be legitimate at times, but often it can be because we think that people are a certain way and people contain multitudes,

right? They can be assholes. They can be surprisingly kind or so on. So being aware that even somebody that you're besotted with and obsessed with is not the image that you carry around in them in your head. I think that's, you know, useful insight that would do people well people on twitter as well as people in the real world you just couldn't resist could you we're waking up the twitter addy uh just realize those are people on the other end of those tweets this this makes that that one more clip of our play because every time now i hear somebody say something which sounds like we live in a society you have made me think about george costanza right and every time i hear it now it's every single talk somebody makes this point

at some point in it and and now thanks to you you've programmed my brain to like internally say we live in this society i'm just going to inflict that upon you with this clip another thing that love is not it is not dependency now you know it's very good to depend on people. We depend on one another or else we wouldn't have society. Interdependence, wonderful. We depend on the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. We depend on the pilot, on the cab driver, on all sorts of people. But to depend on another for your happiness,

that is the evil. That someone would have the power to decide whether you would be happy or not. So it's okay for my wife to depend on me to unsacksack the dishwasher but for nothing else nothing just that well mainly you know a lot of people depend on me to make

their candles my role in society i want to go back to a pre-modern society where that is just that's what i am i'm just a candlestick maker maybe i'm maybe the candlestick maker did they make the candles or the things for putting the candles in no no they made the candles but okay right because that's even one dime no i don't make the candles i'm the candle holder maker you want the candle stick maker he's this kind of division of labor where someone's doing the wax and the other one's just laying out the things and the marxists would not be happy with this this is you know alienation from our products i just make the holders i don't even know what a freaking candle is you know you know what sounds so appealing about being a candlestick maker is

that i'm pretty sure there wouldn't be any microsoft outlook and emails and Zoom meetings and, well, just meetings generally, especially community meetings. Modern candlestick making is mostly Zoom meetings. Everything else has been automated. It's just the Zoom meetings. Like product design meetings and discussing the latest 3D printer. Discussing how we're going to position ourselves

and appeal to the mid-20s demographic yeah it's much less fun now yeah yeah so sorry you can't even be an innocent candlestick holder we need to burn it we need to burn it all down and go back i agreed agreed that's one thing that i think we can all agree on. Well, Matt, so that was my positive thing. Did you have anything positive to say? Or is it just relentless cynicism from you today? Oh, you know that. You're the cynical one.

Don't try to externalize that, Chris. No, look, my take's the same as yours, I think, on this one. Yeah, like I said a few times i liked his his aphorisms and his advice as long as you take it purely on a psychological level don't take it to the extreme you know i don't agree with what he's saying about don't be emotionally attached to your family and kids don't need to have any kind of socialization you know kids should just be engaging with their inner spirit and rather than being socialized and socialization

does involve some rewards and so essentially i'm not on board with that religious mystic aspect of it but purely as self-help then i thought yeah i don't like you i'd actually recommend this to people who you know this would be particularly good advice for someone who is maybe super obsessed with success and stuff like that and is feeling dissatisfied and a bit empty about it or people that are kind of socially anxious and worry too much about what other people think of them and maybe need to be talked down a bit from that so Yeah. I prefer this to the Jordan Peterson style of Christianity, right? Yeah. Like this is much less about Christian exceptionalism,

much more syncretic and world religion-y mystic-ness. Yeah. Which I appreciate it doesn't have the cultural chauvinism. It's like drawing examples from old traditions. That's right. It doesn't have the cultural chauvinism it's it's like drawing examples from that's right all traditions that's right it doesn't have any of that baggage it doesn't have the political undertones it doesn't have any of that stuff so it's kind of clean and like i said like i've got you know family members who are super into this whole way of thinking yeah this is like it's just like a super modern form of catholicism which is sort of merged with spirituality and also, as it happens, with social justice-y type concerns. And while my rationalist bro kind of science-y type cynical persona recoils from that fluffy duffy stuff, in my experience, the people who are into that stuff are pretty nice and pretty groovy.

And yeah, I've got no problems with it. Yeah. So, like, I think maybe a good place to end for Old DeMello would be to let him play one of his little stories, parables. Right. This one is about an old Jewish rabbi. Enjoy, Matt. I'm reminded of the Jewish rabbi who had served God faithfully all his life. And he said one day to God, God, I have been a devout worshiper, and I have kept the law as best I could, and I've been a good Jew. Now I'm old,

I'm old and I need some help. Let me win the lottery. It will help for my old age. Well, he prayed and he prayed and he prayed and he prayed. And one month went by and two and three and five and a whole year went by and three years went by. And the man in desperation one day said, God, give me a break. And God said god give me a break and god said give me a break yourself buy a ticket i mean those are quality dad jokes chris you have to you have to hand it to him yeah you know it's it's like an antidote from scott adams or brett weinstein from Scott Adams or Brett Weinstein and Russell Brown crossing over to discuss Ivermectin like just enjoy a stupid joke that doesn't tie in the culture war stuff it's it's just a little priest having a bad joke yeah it's refreshing isn't it Like he comes across as a nice guy and not someone who's a dick. And I appreciate that.

Yeah. Maybe that's the lesson at the end of this. Like he's not a dick. And really we should thank him for that. Oh, we do. Oh, we do. Thank you, Chris, for recommending de mello i it was great to get a blast from your past and also from the 80s a simple time a simpler time indeed yeah i know that i wasn't listening to

this in the 80s let's be clear i'm not that old man i'm not your age oh all right i i was but a young child in the 80s. I was born in 1983, so I wasn't into Christian mysticism in that era. So I came across this later in life. Yeah, you were precocious, but not that precocious. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. Don't worry.

Nobody thinks you're old, Chris. Nobody thinks you're old. It's okay. They do, Matt. Sometimes people on our Patreon or whatever are like, fucking hell, look what Chris actually looks like compared to what he sounds

like. They're saying it in a good way. I don't mean it in like, how horrifying. I mean that they are like, I thought he was an old, angry Irish man. They don't expect me to be such a youthful, handsome... You have the voice of a man who's been smoking

and drinking whiskey for 30 years, but it's not... I've been in the culture war for a long time, Matt. I've seen warm discourse, 2 plus 2 equals 5. The horror. Being dead. Those things. They stay with you. They stay with you.

Like you come back to society, but you know, they can't understand what it's like. I tried to tell everyone. I tried to tell them. But they don't care about it. No, no, you can't talk about it. That's how it goes.

You can't talk about it. They asked me what it was like. Well, look, so bye-bye to Mello, back in the downloads of my memory logs. And hello, our next jaunt in the personal guru sphere is into Matthew's personal guru, also also a guru of mine although i haven't really listened that much of his content it's more he's like a kind of just a figure on posters or whatnot but uh one carl sagan carl sagan yep of demon haunted world and what was that, like, documentary series?

The Cosmos, right? Yeah, The Cosmos, yeah, the book and the TV series. So, yeah, I liked him when I was a lad. But I haven't consumed any of his content for 25 years or more, I don't know, since I grew up, really. It would make an interesting contrast with DeMello, right, the week after because he presumably won't have so much of the spiritual stuff but he does have a spiritual element to his content right the kind of cosmic we are all star stuff yeah yeah groovy looking

forward to it yeah and I'll just note that we had considered doing Dawkins but as the content that we were considering with Dawkins is his crossover with one Brett Weinstein we will get that but not just now just give us a break I can't deal with that evil controversy

and Richard Dawkins is a man that is prone to his hot take. So we'll get him, but not this week. So yeah. Oh, Matt. Reviews. Reviews.

The feud continues with internet favorite philosopher, Liam Bright. I can only decipher that hymn because it is from Final Anti-Negativist, again. It's another one-star review, but he deleted his older one. So at least there's that. He's not bombing us with one-star reviews. I don't know if you've seen this or not, but here, allow me to deliver it to you. Help a philosopher out. Since my ability to perform induction has been called into question, I hope the host could be so kind as to lend me a hand.

If so far, every Australian I have encountered has been a liar, quotation marks, drop bears, overestimated their ability to run a good barbecue, and let's be real, being kind of racist. i infer about the next australian podcaster i happen to encounter so this was him responding to my accusation that he didn't understand induction properly but he clearly has a firm grasp of it there also on twitter I asked him how science works and his response was step one, put a shrimp on the barbie. Step two, exclaim, crikey, she's a beaut. Three, get punched out by a kangaroo. So he's got a very clear understanding of how science works as well. Look, I have to say, Chris, I think it was the one stars

which really underlined the moral force of his arguments. I said as much to him. And even though I'm tempted to debate some of those points, I feel like it wouldn't be in the best interest of the cast, although he is deleting them, which is good. But if we say something nice and maybe concede the ground utterly and his absolute rightness and all things, he might give us a five-star review.

Yeah, which would just be psychologically manipulating him. He'd be our little dancing puppet in our play. And we wouldn't do that to him because we respect him too much. So, yes, I think you're going to have to respect him too much so yes i i think you're gonna have to allow him to win the battle even though you know he's just look i will say in his favor he's took it down to the level of reality he's talking about australians what they're always up to this is my experience with australians too they never shut up about barbecues drop bear nonsense that's the one joke they have and yeah like i don't know i think he's he's got a point about induction there it's over my head

all this induction debating bashing but like but on the slamming australians i'm with him it's look it's impossible to offend australians because whatever you say about us, we just appreciate the attention. So just any kind of reference to an Australian cultural artifact, it's already a win for us. So, yeah, we can't stop winning. So thanks, Liam. That was good feedback. You are right about everything and particularly about Australians. Okay.

Two more. Two more. One star negative negative, quite short, at least they put us out of our misery quite quickly. It reads as, just pathetic, by Anon73882. Yeah, you would be anonymous, wouldn't you, with this kind of feedback? Anti-intellectual grifters, nothing of value. anti-intellectual grifters nothing of value well well and on that's that's valuable feedback well we'll take it under advertisement anti-intellectual that that's yeah yeah that does sting it stings it's a little too close to the truth for my liking it particularly it also stings being called a grifter given i haven't't seen any Patreon money yet. It's so unfair.

Don't you worry about the Patreon money. Don't you worry. You're keeping it in safekeeping somewhere. As Follow Ted said, it's just resting in the account. We'll let you add it when it's necessary. Don't worry about that. All right. Or your pretty head.

Okay. Now, the next review, much better, much more insightful by laminks five stars look at that and the title is relatively painless the podcasts are long but less painful than having to listen to the torturous podcasts of the gurus they review i might take a look at candy though he wrote candy i don't know that might be a slam on the way though. He wrote Candy. I don't know. That might be a slam on the way I pronounced it. Can't tell. Also, when some friends were warbling about Sam Harris,

I had no idea who he was. After listening to the Harris episode in DTG, I feel like I know him far more intimately than I would like. So that's true. We're intimately introducing people to Sam Harris's mental world. That's our allotment in life, Matt. Well, my favorite part of that review was that he referred to our podcast as relatively painless,

which I'd like to think is a play on the mostly harmless entry for Earth in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And if so, that was extraordinarily well done. Good job. Lamanx. Good job. But we're running out of reviews. We need more.

Come, people. That's an incentive. If you leave a review, you are guaranteed, guaranteed to have it read out very shortly. Yeah, yeah, you're guaranteed. You'll be featured. You'll be invited for interviews. Contact Matthew.

Yes, but we do appreciate them. So please do. And we have a bunch of interviews to be released over the next while. So you will be hearing from us again before you hear the Carl Sagan episode. Carl Sagan episode. But before we finish, Matt, we need to thank the people that pay at least one of us money for their services.

So our patrons, Matt. And what a lively patron we have where we post content and various things and there's interviews released early and you can see our faces if you want it's a it's a lovely place isn't it yeah that's right you can't get that kind of experience for free on reddit or anything um you have to you have to get into the patreon you got to pay the money that's right oh and also to mention tim newton was interviewed on a podcast called eigenbros

where he went into the the mathematical details of his criticism of geometric unity which he didn't cover in our podcast and it's it's very nice so if you wanted more details about the actual technical information about the criticism there's a two-hour video where he goes through them all in detail on eigen bros that's the name of the podcast great um again matt i'm in a file where i've got none of the friggin things highlighted so here we go we're going to hope that we're hitting people that we haven't got before i think i can remember the names i've said. First up is conspiracy hypothesizers, Noreen Bowden and Felicia Balcombe. Oh, sorry. I can't do that. Noreen Bowden, conspiracy hypothesizer first. Thank you. Every great idea starts with a minority of one. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.

We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. And the mistake I made, Matt, of course, was that Felicia is a revolutionary thinker, not a conspiracy hypothesis. Sorry, Felicia, on behalf of Chris. He's deeply sorry for that. And here is the correct clip to be played after a revolutionary thinker. Maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking.

What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know. Okay. Now, we also have Max Plan, who is a galaxy brain guru. Rare, rare, but they do exist. He's added to the constellation. Is that a high tier?

I forget the tiers. That is the highest tier, Matt. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my God. Thank you. Yeah. And here is his incredible reward. You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard. And you're so polite.

And, hey, wait a minute. Am I an expert? I kind of am. Yeah. I don't trust people at all. We shouldn't be punishing people at the height. We could be scaring people off the high tier there, Chris. Yeah, we got to have that freaking laugh.

Okay, last, two conspiracy hypothesizers that I'll put together just because they appear together on this document. One is Tina Matthews, and the other is Bertie van Soest. I'm not laughing at his name, I'm laughing at my pronunciation. It might be Bertha, so apologies. In any case, you're both conspiracy hypothesizers. Thank you. Every great idea starts with a minority of one we are not going to advance conspiracy theories we will advance conspiracy hypotheses every i'm out that's a shout out for today by the way am i ever going to get a shout out because i'm like i'm like a top tier patreon of our own podcast that's right so you can so you can participate in the because of the server stuff it only lets you

come in if you're a galaxy brain contributor or it only allows one of our accounts to be a host it's a it's a sacrifice you meet matt you yeah yeah you know what matt you are here thank you you are a galaxy brain guru thank you matth Matthew Smith. Oh, you're so welcome. You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard. I'm happy to. You're so polite. Happy to be. And hey, wait a minute.

Are you an expert? I kind of am. I really am. Yeah. I don't trust people at all. I got to say, that makes a subscription all worthwhile. I think that's right for me. Yeah, it was worth it.

It was worth it. And you will be available at the end of this month again for the monthly call-in, chat, live stream thingamajigger. So that's your reward for paying that monthly $10. So thank you, Matthew. And this has been fun. And thank you for not tearing apart my personal guru. He got off relatively lightly.

I was probably more harsher than you were. Yeah, yeah, you're probably paying closer attention than me. Yeah, I liked him. He's all right. He's a good bloke. So, yeah, you know, and look at the fine fellow you've grown up to be. So you couldn't have done, you can't be doing that much harm. True, true.

He's done one thing good in his life influence the young teenage me man oh oh by the way one notification i want to give to people if you don't see me it's mainly chris right who's interacting on the patreon account and there's a reason for that which is that they have a verification thing where the verification has to go to, I just realized it goes to decodingthegurus at gmail.com, which I could check, but I don't. So that doesn't really work. I'm glad you gave people that notification, Matt. That's a very important clarification.

So did everyone get that? It's merely me that does all the work on the Patreon because Matt could log in if he checked the email account, but he doesn't do that. So thank you for pointing that out. I'm glad you clarified that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, well, Matt, good point to finish on.

And as per usual, I will advise you to grovel at the feet of your muscle master. Why not? I'm not doing anything this weekend, so I'll take that advice. All right. Enjoy. When the heart is unobstructed, the result is love. In my country, the poets and the mystics put it so beautifully. mystics put it so beautifully. They say, is it possible for a rose to say, I will give my fragrance to good people and withhold it from bad people? The rose by its very nature cannot but love all. Is it possible for a lamp lit in the night to say, I will give my light to the good

people in this room and withhold it from the bad? Is it possible for a tree to say, I will give my light to the good people in this room and withhold it from the bad? Is it possible for a tree to say, I will give my shade to the good people who sit under me, but withhold it from the bad? It cannot. And the poet Kabir will say, the tree will give its shade even to the man who is striking it down, and if it is a sweet-smelling tree, it will leave its scent on the axe.