Decoding the Gurus - Carl Sagan: My God, it's full of stars

Episode Date: July 23, 2021

In the second instalment of the personal gurus season we take a look at Matt's childhood science guru: the famed astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan. Sagan's regarded as an intellectual hero amongst skeptics and supporters of science but is the admiration warranted or is this a halo effect enhanced by youthful innocence and the distorting mists of time? Was Matt's first science crush justified? Is Carl as 'right on' as popular sentiment suggests? Join us as we struggle to peer into the vast abyss, stare deep into the heart of the guru constellation, and uncover the truth. It's time to take a long hard look at a small sliver of our demon haunted, pale blue dot. Along the way we address the burning issues including: whether Carl Sagan is actually a woke cuck, how Chris feels about chimpanzees in lipstick, if humility might actually be a good thing, and whether the universe was actually created for rocks.So join us as we return to a simpler time, when scientists wore turtleneck sweaters, ill advised tweets were not yet possible, and gurus were REAL gurus.Also featured in this week's episode: Weinstein Watch, Viewer Feedback, the Next Guru Announcement, and an illustration of how to provide an even tempered & measured response to critical feedback.LinksCarl Sagan's 1994 'lost' lecture: The Age of ExplorationSagan's Final Interview with Charlie Rose

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus. It's 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 i'm professor matt brown and with me is my perennial bridge over troubled waters the assignment to my garfunkel associate professor chris kanaugh hi chris well hello i thought you were gonna repeat yourself in your old age and do the same introduction that you've done before but no you didn't you proved it i did the last minute it was a curveball so congratulations you're not going to see now just yet this is the objective for every episode just to throw you a curveball and see how you react and uh you don't have a comeback for that one do you i don't i never get what any of those

you know you don't get the gravel to your muscle master i don't get your 70s and 60s references so i i just assume that it's it's all complimentary and accurate it's pretty complimentary in this case you've never heard of simon and garfunkel what's wrong with you okay i know them yeah they do that song the sound of silence right that's them yeah that's them that's them so our favorite two intellectuals of the modern era the weinstein rollers i believe they've been out in force we know that mr brett has been out with heller trying to convince everyone to kill themselves by taking ivermectin instead of vaccines that's his general thing at the minute that's what he's generally up to that's his kind of default mode we were considering doing a emergency release episode to

cover some of his anti-vaccine stuff but i think something has happened today um so brett weinstein of course has been heavily promoting ivermectin as the silver bullet the miracle cure and a far better alternative to fix that old COVID than the vaccines. And he's been relying heavily on some meta-analyses, at least one of which was done by what seems like... Tess Lawrence. Yes, Tess Lawrence, who is an activist, I would say. activist i would say um i think her credentials are real but she is a dubious figure promoting hydroxychloroquine and a various cocktail of drugs for that's what i that's what i mean to say her associations shall we say are a bit dubious i don't think she's just a pure disinterested

actor shall we say no um so it's a bit of of a fly in that ointment the last couple of days because one of the largest studies that supposedly found strong benefits for the use of ivermectin has been what seems to be totally discredited and retracted from the journal in question. So I was interested to see how brett would respond to this and with scientific rigor he's uh you know brett isn't emotionally invested in these kind of things he's just following the evidence so i'm sure that he will respond in a very scientifically informed and critically minded way right yeah for sure sure, for sure. So I'll just read that out.

Those who argue that large-scale randomized control trials are the only reliable evidence in evidence-based medicine have misled you. Now you can see why. Large RCTs amplify systematic error in addition to signal, whereas meta-analyses amplifies signal and corrects for error. Now, there's so many things wrong with this, Chris, but probably the first thing I could say about this tweet

is that it is impressive the way he's attempted to judo flip this finding because this particular large-scale study was the only one, really, I think, and it was adding a great deal of weight to these meta-analyses that he was relying on. All the rest were very small ends and had many problems. Now it turns out that this one has massive problems, if not complete fraud going on, and his judo flipped it into illustrating how he was right all along.

It's amazing. That's shocking. I'm shocked that he would do that. That's so out of character for Brett that it's stunning that's shocking i'm shocked that he would do that that's so out of character for brett that it's it's stunning to me matt that he would even say that um yeah that is like no it isn't this completely characteristic of brett and of course instead of like this attempt to flip it is so stupid as well because like the whole point with meta-analysis is the quality of the data that you put into meta-analysis is what comes out of a meta-analysis. Yes,

meta-analysis can correct to some extent for individual bias in studies. If overall, you have a smorgasbord of studies, including high quality studies. You cannot correct for all the studies being low quality and biased. If you do that, you simply get a signal, which is a compilation of biased and low quality results. So Brett's saying that, well, it doesn't matter if individual studies are terrible. It does indeed, if that's the quality that is representative of the studies that are going in and that's the criticism of the meta-analyses that brett is relying on pretty much all of them say the studies are low quality even in their own conclusions that indicate that we need higher quality studies so so yeah of course he would do this but

it's undermining his claims but he he can't acknowledge that it certainly does but by the way i do have something funny to tell you related to this so on the joe rogan reddit subreddit on the Joe Rogan Reddit subreddit there's a post up that says Amazon reviews of horse ivermectin suggest Brett Weinstein's followers are self-toasting with apple flavored ivermectin horse paste it's a kind of collage of these reviews for horse paste which is saying things like do not trust our crooked medical system all viruses are parasites and this kills them within 36 hours after a single dose i'm not taking an experimental vaccine that is not fda approved and so on so it seems just generally the due to promotion of ivermectin, people are taking ivermectin infused PS4 horses. So I had a joke tweet, I think a while ago, which was like,

I wonder if Brett told his audience to eat dog food, like would some of them do it? Like would they? If he really made the kiss for it, could he convince people to eat dog food? And I think that's where the kids are, maybe, maybe he could. It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out because if it follows the same path as hydroxychloroquine,

whatever, which once it's been discredited public sentiment flips pretty quickly and he's totally hung his hat on this and you know he's sticking to his guns obviously with that tweet that i ran out and i can see him sticking to his guns and writing it all the way to the bitter end it's hard to see an exit strategy for him here assuming of course that ivermectin the evidence continues to stack up again actually for i was anticipating that he would start to hedge but he's not so like at least credit to him there that he's riding this right into the grind um i think the reason for that chris is related to what we're talking about, which is that the Achilles heel of many of these characters

is their overconfidence. Like he's not pretending, he's not grifting in a conscious way. He is absolutely convinced of his rightness and he finds it inconceivable that he might be wrong about that. So I don't think it would occur to him to hedge and pull back because he's convinced himself. So this is the narcissism at play, I think. That's true.

And speaking of narcissists, the other Weinstein is in a good mood, although he hasn't joined his brother on the ivermectin train. He actually released a tweet saying, thank you for asking, but I have no comment or no opinion on the ivermectin. So that's hanging out, poor Brett, to dry. Maybe he reads the writing on the ivermectin so that's uh hanging out poor brett to dry maybe he reads the writing on the wall there but he is however feeling very vindicated today because the rolling stone have released an article with the headline was jeffrey epstein a spy and this is a report about him telling various people that he had connections to intelligence agencies and so on.

It's not a great article. But of course, famously, Eric claimed that Jeffrey Epstein was a construct of the Israeli intelligence agency played by a series of actors. Or at least the man himself was not Jeffrey Epstein. That was a character created by the Israeli intelligence to entrap scientists. So Eric is taking this as vindication. An article has appeared that says something similar. So that's it. And he doesn't just say, well, look at this, the worm has turned.

Here's the tweet I want to read for this. I want academic freedom on this platform, Jack. It takes too long for the normies and the press to get the truth. Your Twitter safety just isn't good enough. This account was taking huge risk to talk about Epstein and intelligence. Don't ever think of throttling me again. Oh, that's the one I saw. Yeah, that tweet has it all hasn't it that's that

don't dare throttle me and just imagine jack dorsey i don't know does he get these notifications from eric but like what wait who are you again that's self-importance it's just amazing isn't it like eric thinks if his tweets don't get enough attention the only explanation is that the head of twitter is telling his safety team like we need to shut down weinstein he's he's got his finger on the pulse man like hit the weinstein button you know shadow ban shadow ban do whatever you can he's getting too close to the truth man again you joke but

I do actually believe that's exactly what Eric's thinking that's what he's imagining is going on we've got to stop him before he unleashes wormhole technology and then takes the whole damn system down. Oh, dear. They never fail to deliver, do they, Chris?

No, the gift that keeps on giving. Yes, thank you, Eric. Thank you, Brett, for another entertaining moment in Weinsteinian history. But, so, you know, Matt, we've done a bunch of interviews recently. We have one more that's coming up soon with Evan Thompson that we've already recorded,

The Scholar of Buddhism, which is an interesting chat. But today, though, we're on to a normal episode, a guru. Or is he? Or is he, Matt? This is the second in the personal gurus sequence,

the second and last. We had Anthony DeMello, and this week, who do we have? We have Carl Sagan. My God. My God. It's full of stars, Chris. It's full of stars. Look, I think he definitely is a guru because, you know,

we've talked about this before. Our concept of gurus is encompassing. It doesn't necessarily imply that they're terrible people and a stain on our civilisation. He could be a good guru. He could be a bad guru. But I think it's clear that he is a guru. He was one of these characters that really invented the role

of the public intellectual scientists, probably him and people like Einstein even. Obviously Einstein was a fair bit more important scientifically, but they both occupied a similar sort of space in the public consciousness of that kind of scientist with a big, all-encompassing worldview with important messages to teach us. So basically, are you saying, Matt, that like, not the words in your mouth, but basically,

they're like the previous generation version of you and me? Like we are the Einstein and Carl Sagan of the modern era. That's what you're getting at, right? Yeah? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I know you've looked up to me as something of a segan-esque character and i've been happy to provide that role modeling for you chris i think it's helped you i've often thought to myself that these conversations are very much like if carl segan and and einstein had met and recorded their thoughts this is the kind of thing that they would have produced no they they would yeah they would probably more successfully

i don't i don't know if we've quite got the knack of the the natural self-promotional ooze that manifests from the idw folk bob but it was a good goal it was a good goal so in any case in any case chris i i will say that i will say that carl sagan is definitely a guru but it remains to be seen whether or not he is a good guru or a bad guru yeah there's a big question there is he is he terrible or is he not it's very hard and people will have to wait and find out what our teeth is but the um it's uh the suspense must be killing them. Chris, Chris. Okay. I see.

I got the idea. I was getting them, Matt. The sledgehammer sarcasm, I perceived it. You caught that. I caught that, yeah. But I also know what a critical son of a bitch you are and how even someone who is, you know, generally quite good, you have the knack of finding inconsistencies, problems with them. Often they don't turn out to be quite as good as they might appear.

I'm looking at you, Rutger Bregman. Yeah, Rutger Bregman. Well, yeah, to spoil that surprise, I will say I really like this. And I can't help but feel that in looking at Anthony DeMello and Carl Sagan, that it's given me an appreciation, even with Anthony DeMello's issues, which were there that we discussed, and maybe some of the things that we'll get to with Carl Sagan. that we discussed and maybe some of the things that we'll get to with Carl Sagan, it just feels like we're somewhat lacking figures like this in the current discourse. And of course, there's a

bit of looking back with rose-tinted glasses, but this talk that we'll get into, there's so much in it that's valuable. There's so much humility in his presentation that is just so rare in the gurus that we look at that it's it's hard not to think that there was a better class of gurus maybe just one generation ago that's yeah that's that's all yeah and i think that's it's even more remarkable when you know you keep in mind how long ago this was. So we're looking at a talk that he gave in 1992, I think. But of course, he came on the scene in the early 70s, I think. And that was a fair time ago. So he could have been pretty great for the time, but I wouldn't have been at all surprised to sort of look back and find that some of his takes

didn't age too well. And it might not look quite so great to contemporary eyes. But we will see whether that's the case, won't we? We will. And so just in case people want to find it, it's Carl Sagan's 1994 Lost Lecture, The Age of Exploration, which you can watch on YouTube. It's like an hour and a half long and it's worth checking out so matt since this is your guru i'll let you lead us where shall we go forth mcduff let's start with a little bit of a statement by carl about inspiration i think

we today living in polluted, under-polluted skies and in cities with light pollution have mainly forgotten how gorgeous the night sky can be. It is not only an aesthetic experience, but it elicits unbidden

feelings of reverence and awe. Secondly, people made up stories about the stars. They invented Rorschach tests up there, followed the dots, constellations, looked like a bear to you, Og. Yes, I guess it does. And then forced their children to memorize

these absolutely arbitrary patterns. I don't see the bear's tail, dad. Shut up. So just in case anybody doesn't know, like Carl Sagan was a astronomer amongst many other things. Cosmologist, astrophysicist, and popular science communicator. So this talk has themes related to astronomy and and science and so on and he was not just a science communicator though but legitimately a a well-published well-referenced scientist heavily involved in promoting the search for extraterrestrial life right the SETI initiative that came so all of that we probably should have said at the start

but that clip probably highlighted his interests in that kind of thing absolutely I mean Carl Sagan's best known for being a science popularizer the cosmos tv series and book he wrote a number of popular science books but he was also a well-published astronomer and had a very respectable academic career. Before that, he wasn't an Albert Einstein, of course, but he was more like a Richard Dawkins who was a proper evolutionary biologist and so on and then went into focusing on popular writings. He was, as you said, heavily involved in promoting SETI and also was part of

scientific advisory panels advising on, for instance, the dangers of nuclear war and nuclear winter in particular. And basically did a whole bunch of things and was awarded a whole bunch of awards and medals and got a great deal of cultural recognition during his lifetime and sadly died a little bit prematurely in 1996. So his career, starting from the 70s until almost 2000, spanned kind of my entire young life. And I became aware of him when I was a kid and saw things like Cosmos and eventually end up reading books like the Dragons of Eden and so on. And to be honest, I kind of forgot about him for many years, but I've just always had that sentimental attachment, but couldn't remember the details.

So I sort of remembered him from a much younger self. And so I wasn't at all sure coming back to him now, whether or not I'd still like him just as much. Yeah, and so that clip talking about looking at the stars and people identifying constellations and projecting stories onto them, it fits in with a general discussion he has about how looking at the past, the mistakes that we as a species made in reasoning about our world were entirely reasonable and in many respects are intuitive to the way that we still think and that we shouldn't look back at the people in history as that they are unsophisticated, uncivilized brutes, and we are their kind of genius offspring,

but rather that we are them, but for science and technology, right? Yeah, I think he is a guru, because even though probably 90% of his material is pure science education he he certainly does weave that into his worldview how to understand ourselves how to understand humanity and what we should be doing and diverse topics like how we should be treating animals and nationalism and so on i just want to say for the audience that we'll of course be focusing on his takes which are kind of more connected to that big picture stuff because we're not going to cover his stuff about stars and nebulas and the big bang because even though that stuff is awesome there's nothing much for us to say about that we're sort of looking at that 10 yeah yeah i will say matt that we'll do the grommeter episode after where we look at like how he fits into our schema but there are obvious elements

where he does fit like you say he has takes on a variety of topics like not just spanning within his area of expertise but i think that in many other ways he doesn't fit in terms of a lot of the characteristics that we see we would normally identify in the gurus that we look at, but we'll, we'll see that as we go on. So I don't think we need to be defensive about covering him because he's an influential guy. And if he scores low on our grometer, that's all right. We need variation, Matt. We're scientists. We need deviation to calibrate the instrument precisely. So we need somebody to throw Eric Weinstein into sharp relief. Exactly. Exactly.

So let's continue and hear him outline one of these kind of big picture talking points that you mentioned. We humans have had civilization only for about 10,000 years. only for about 10,000 years. Our species is a few hundred thousand years old. Our genus, the genus Homo, is a few million years old. And therefore, for the vast bulk of our tenure on earth, we were something other than sedentary. And the word has such an aura of self-congratulation, civilized. What were we? We were hunters and foragers. By the way, I just want to say I enjoyed that.

This theme for what are we so self-congratulatory civilized. That was good. I'd like that too. That stood out to me. And that fits with his theme too, because I think it's not insignificant that his first example when talking about humanity was not some European enlightenment figure or something like that. He was talking about the amazing technological achievements in the really all-encompassing way that encompasses everybody. And you can hear how impressed he is with the achievements of human beings to be able to survive and prosper in these natural environments without all of the whiz-bang

technology that we've got today. Yeah, there's another clip, I think, which speaks to that, and which I appreciated, not just because he praises anthropology in it, which is always good, but more because in doing so, he illustrates that he is not a rigid reductionist you know scientific chauvinist in a sense like it doesn't come across in the same way as needed the grass tyson and richard dawkins do sometimes that they think the humanities are all just dancing around writing nonsense and fairy tales for idiots he respects at least anthropologists and it comes across quite nicely in this clip. Our knowledge of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is due to a few courageous and far-seeing anthropologists who went and lived with the few remaining hunter-gatherer groups

before they were finally and utterly destroyed by civilization. The anthropologist from whom I learned the most about hunter-gatherers is actually here with us, Richard Lee of the University of Toronto. I don't think he's exactly correct that all hunter gallerers were completely decimated, but it is true to say that in the majority of cases, their lifestyles have been hugely affected by the encroachment of surrounding society. So yeah, after introducing that there are valuable insights to begin from anthropologists looking at hunter-gallery ways of life. He then talks about tools that hunter-gallery societies were building.

The first thing that I think is very important is that they are highly technological. The technology is wood and stone and domestication of fire technology, but it's absolutely technology. And there are experts and other people who are not quite as good at the technology. But not only are they technological for fun, they are technological because their lives depend upon it. Okay. And the archaeological and anthropological record is clear that we were technologists all the way back to the beginning. So the idea that science and technology is something new, something unusual, something we can even find books that say not really very human, is completely backwards. Technology is, if anything, the most characteristically human activity, although as I'll mention later, it is not exclusively a human activity although as i'll mention later it is not exclusively a human activity yeah so i thought it was really telling that he chose to lead his lecture not with stuff about

stars and galileo or what have you but rather with this discussion of hunter-gatherer groups. And one time that I was feeling exactly the same thing is when I did a seven-day hike in a place called Carnarvon Gorge in the outback of Australia, about 600 kilometres west of Rockhampton in Queensland. It's an amazing country. It's this gorge. It's a very rugged, harsh country, and it's just hundreds of kilometres from everywhere. In some places, it looks like the surface of the moon when you're actually driving to this place, even though it does get quite lush inside the gorge.

And there are lots of artefacts of Aboriginal activity there, and we know that it was a place that Indigenous groups often visited and travelled to and met there and so on. Now, we just spent seven days hiking and we had these high-tech tents and we had plastic bottles to keep our water and dehydrated food and all sorts of types of assistance to us. But even so, it was hard, you know, going 100 kilometres for us soft, civilised folks. And it really brings home to you what a challenge it is for a human being to survive out there. And without any of those assistances and luxuries

and safeguards and so on that we had, we would just play acting it, right? The Indigenous people who actually lived there and travelled there did it and they did it with what Sagan would rightly call technology and science. You had to know an awful lot. You had to have an incredible degree of skill to be able to locate water, locate food, locate shelter, be able to create tools and things that you needed to survive. You can't just buy it at the hiking shop. So I'm probably not explaining

that well, but I just think Carl Sagan's view there, where he does see a continuity between the kinds of technologies and the kinds of understanding of the physical world that inverted commas primitive hunter-gatherer groups had to have it's quite right to draw that continuity to civilized again using air quotes civilizations later on and also as he as he mentions with non-human species as well yeah he talks a bit later about somebody trying to learn a tool technique for fishing for pteromites using a method that chimpanzees learn and how even after I think it's nine months to a year they're very bad at it compared to chimpanzees but also they need to apprentice at it. It's similar to when you see stone tools and they're presented in media and whatnot.

It's always just stick a sharp thing onto the edge of a stick and now you have a spear. But the reality is like to make lithic weapons or lithic hunting tools took hours and hours of chipping effort. And there's anthropologists and various archaeologists, I think, have tried to reconstruct the processes involved. And they're massively complicated and time-consuming efforts. So it's a really good start for this kind of lecture to highlight the continuity of technological achievement in humanity as a whole, and not just focus on the purely modern era, or like you say, Enlightenment Europeans, as that's the beginning of when technological development began. So that's quite a nice corrective, I feel, from a lot of the narratives that we tend to hear now, where

there is presented as essentially a bleak and horrific past until the modern era begins. And at the same time, he doesn't seem to fall so much into the trap of Rutger Bregman, of romanticizing the people in the past, because later he talks about superstitions and so on. But it's more that he simply is giving credit where it's due. Even what looks to us unsophisticated technology is the product of a lot of effort and a lot of human intelligence. So that's a good message. Yeah, it's a great message. And I guess it feels particularly refreshing today where we seem to be falling into these two camps, one of which is sceptical of reductionism and positivism, the humanities and the left side of progressive politics.

And then you have the science boosters who, as you said, Richard Dawkins, who question the value of literature. And anthropologists in particular. Yeah, so it's like Carl Sagan, I don't know whether it's just a sign of the times or if it's him in particular, but it just seems refreshing to not be a part of that dichotomy.

Yeah, and I will also say, this isn't like a defense of anthropologists. There's plenty of terrible anthropologists out there and there's plenty of waffle in the anthropology discipline. But it is just this willingness to acknowledge insight from other quarters, which is refreshing. So one of the themes, I think, throughout the lecture, explicitly, is the need for humility. And this is a, I mean, it's something that is catnip, I think, to me and you, which is possibly why we enjoyed this discussion so much,

because the core message is, don't be so proud of yourself and of what we've achieved. As individuals or kind of groups. As humanity, that's maybe a different story. Yeah, and actually, I think it gets to that because, you know, there's a certain element of it about erasing the distinctions between races and ethnicities and nationalities, which might not be so in vogue today amongst some certain progressive spheres. But before we get to that, let's begin with him talking about humans and their perception

of themselves as uniquely important. Now, having said that, I want to turn to the important and rueful fact that every human culture has considered itself at the center of the universe. What's this about? Well, I think it's very straightforward. Back then in hunter and forager times, many modes of modern nocturnal entertainment were unavailable. Some were available, but many were not. Television was not available. So, nocturnal entertainment, Matt, something you would know all about.

But I think that's a good illustration of the point that we just raised, that he isn't romanticizing, right? He's highlighting an issue for all societies that we know about in pre-modern history as well, like expanding into modernity, that they consider themselves the center of the world and potentially the universe. And he wants to argue against that, right? So, like I say, not a naive view about the divine state of pre-modern humans. We're all kind of wallowing in an undeserved sense of superiority. Is it the Inuit had a word for themselves?

They described themselves as the real people? Not that there was anything especially parochial about them. As you said, everybody at all times has been like this. But it's just indicative that pretty much any culture has had a concept of themselves as the center and as strangers and far off places are considered at the outside. I mean, we have like the name for China is the Middle Kingdom in the kanji is middle and country so the suggesting quite clearly were the location of china is but that like you said that's what every culture is thinking he does a segment talking about how every culture tends to put themselves at the center of the map and to people not from that culture it seems weird like why are those people at the

center when we are clearly the ones at the center? And it's a nice point to make. And it leads on to this point about the way that we view nature. Not only did every culture draw this conclusion, but I think it's clear that our ancestors took enormous personal satisfaction in it. Because think about it. We are at the center of the universe.

The center of the universe is surely an important place. Not only that, what other animals, what plants, make use of the apparent motion of the stars? Only us. Therefore, the stars have been put there for our benefit. Yeah, so I think here he's referring a little bit to what's a common theme in a lot of religious teachings, which is that people were created by God, and everything else was created by God too, but we're special, and everything else from the stars to the moon,

the sun and all the animals and plants have been put there for our benefit. Now, Sagan's obviously someone who loves looking at the stars and thinks that's a wonderful activity, but he, as we'll get into, feels we should absolutely not think that we have any privileged perspective on that. Yeah. And so the next clip is talking about how applying naive reasoning can lead us astray, which I feel is especially relevant given the current pandemic and the various responses to that. But this in particular bleeds into flat earthism, which I'm sure Satan would be disappointed, but not surprised to find is still around today. Now the most superficial examination of the sky shows the stars are rising in the east. Some of them pass directly overhead and some of them pass on small circles close to the horizon.

But they all rise in the east, they all set in the west. And then, in the daytime, they do something else. They somehow go around the bottom of the earth that none of us has ever seen. It's flat as a board, of course. And then the next morning, they come up again in the east. Now, there's absolutely no doubt from this fact, that the stars, the planets, the sun, and the moon all go around us, and we're obviously not moving, that we are at the planets, the sun and the moon all go around us and we're obviously not moving, that we are at the center of the universe. It's an observed fact. Anybody who denies that

is there's something wrong with them. One of the things that's always nice about Carl Sagan is, I guess, the tone. So he's very interested, of course, in the history of science and definitely thinks of the discovery of the heliocentric kind of model and so on as a really perfect example of scientific progress. But he never ridicules or is dismissive of people back at the time when they were wrong about that. And here he's emphasizing, of course, that it's a perfectly intuitive and easy or logical mistake to make to think that the world is flat and that everything you see in the sky does go around us because that's what it looks like. It actually takes a fair bit of effort, a fair bit of careful observation,

It actually takes a fair bit of effort, a fair bit of careful observation, and a fair bit of careful thinking to dismiss that explanation. So he doesn't go for what could be an easy kind of narrative there, which was blaming, oh, it was the repressive religious authorities that are to blame, or it was these stupid people that hadn't learned about science yet. or it was these stupid people that hadn't learned about science yet. I think his message here is very charitable, and it's appreciating that it's a long, hard journey to develop a scientific understanding of the world. Yeah, and I appreciate that, like you say, that charity that he extends back and kind of makes clear that us including him in a different setting would be the kind of people that were thinking like that so that's the message

is that don't look back on the previous eras as these kind of primitive-minded people, but recognize that when people are misled by what's around them in the world, it's not always obvious, right? And I think in some way, this speaks to the counterintuitive nature of a lot of scientific findings and why it's understandable that people are reticent to get vaccinated, right? Because they feel there's something about an essence being violated, right? Or that it's not natural, why people are hesitant about GMO food. There's a lot of things where there's reasoning which fits well with our evolved psychology, but which is ill-equipped to deal with the scientific realities. And we shouldn't ignore that, basically, when we're looking at,

you know, why people do what they do. It's not that people have to be misled. It's in many ways intuitive to mislead ourselves. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, it fits with his theme of humility here, which is not to be contemptuous. And this is probably a lesson I should probably try to absorb, which is not to be contemptuous of being wrong about things. And to remember that it's really just luck that we find ourselves at a particular time and place where we have even the chance to inform ourselves a little bit better than our ancestors did, because they were doing the best they could with what they had available. And that's as true of a hunter-gatherer with their own conception of the world. It's as true of them as it is of a religious scholar in Europe who was absolutely

certain about Earth being the center of the universe. Yeah, and I will add to that, Matt, just to rescue my own vindictive nature, that while I agree we should reserve our vitriol for the previous generations to some extent, given the different circumstances. I think it's perfectly legitimate to take to task the people in the modern era who have had scientific education, who do have access to information and the ability to spend some days, do proper research on topics, but yet constantly default to intuition or conspiratorial thinking, like certain brothers that we may know, right? I think in some sense that when people are claiming the mantle of scientific thinking and approach and essentially doing the opposite,

as Carl Sagan went on to do in a lot of his work, calling out pseudoscience and superstition, that it's reasonable to do that. But you can still do it with charity, right? You can understand the pitfalls that people have but it doesn't mean you shouldn't be critical of what people are doing you can just do it with empathy that you know it's understandable that people would find those kind of things intuitive yeah for sure so let's get back matt to how humans like us are chauvinist monsters and we really need to be put in our place about our relative unimportance to the galaxy. And they're saying we're at the center, we're important,

we're special, everything goes around us. There's a resonance here, a resonance between that and our emotional hopes and needs. The idea that the universe is made for us, not because of any particular merit of ours, but just because we're here or just because we're human. we're human. To me, this seems to resonate with the same psychic wellsprings responsible for the view that our nation is special and the center of the universe, which, by the way, is the literal meaning of the Middle Kingdom for centuries applied by the Chinese to China. And even those who haven't made it that explicit, nationalists of all stripes. You can see it, by the way, in the maps, how often each nation has itself at the center of the map. Now, it's probably important to remember that this talk is given in 1992, which was a fair

while before the current climate where it's extremely in vogue to be talking about Eurocentrism and colonialism and so on. And he's speaking to an audience of Americans, of course, at that time in the full swing of relishing their role as a global superpower and at the very centre of the world. he's i guess reminding his audience in quite a gentle way that that kind of thinking is inherently broken yeah i think he becomes even more explicit about how far he extends that notion in in this other clip which follows on from that point that he was just making. And the same psychic wellsprings that say that our gender or our ethnic group or our particular melanin content in the skin or a particular language or a headdress or clothing styles or convention of pulling

out the handkerchief when we sneeze or anything is important and central, and all those alternative ways of being human are somehow less central, less important, less worthy than we are. less central, less important, less worthy than we are. We have a weakness, and scientists are creatures of the culture in which they swim, in which they have grown up, and so we also are vulnerable to this siren song, which we can call chauvinism or geocentrism or anthropocentrism. Yeah, right on, Carl. I really like that because there's a bunch of stuff that he combines, which are, I think, quite intuitively combined, but maybe not so commonly that you hear together in the current climate. of science and that scientists are also subject to biases and prejudices and that we should be aware that they swim in the culture that they are working in. And that's a very, I think, by folks in the culture war be seen as a very post-modern neo-Marxist point of view. But he's not saying that to undermine science. He's saying, in fact, to argue that we need to be more objective or strive to be more objective by recognizing that fact. And in the same way,

you could read the first part as a fairly strong criticism of identity politics, right? Arguing that ethnicity, gender, nationality are not these super important indicators that we should attach such meaning to. We shouldn't seek to elevate or denigrate people above any others, and gives the example of sneezing as just a it's just a convention so why would we be proud of that and i see a lot of appeal to that message right like i get that there's a a criticism of that that there's a naivety right that we can abandon those things given the societies that are set up the way they are but i don't get from his talk that he's unaware of like structures of discrimination or history he's just making an appeal that we should develop a pan-human sense of connection and respect and

that this is really the only future that we can strive for in the long term that makes sense and like i don't see a naivety and i just see something that's worth aiming for even if it's not immediately achievable yeah the thing that makes carl segan a little bit remarkable in this day and age is that he is, as you say, putting forward a super progressive and even somewhat what would be called today woke point of view. But he bases it on this very scientific, materialistic, positivist, reductionist even worldview. And that's what's so weird because today those things have been put in opposition and i guess that's where he you know he really rings my bell i suppose because i this is

this is just my personal opinion which i want to distinguish from analysis but you know i feel like he's right i feel that if you do have a, accurate view of the world and you take to heart the sort of stuff that he's talking about, which is that humans are not special. We weren't put here by God. We don't live in the Middle Kingdom or in a country like the United States with a manifest destiny. And no one group of people has any special privileges over another. privileges over another like a lot of good social and political views flow from this very humble scientific worldview that he's laying out so yeah what can i say i like it i like it yeah he's a guru promoting humility and including in himself and the the community. And so let's just hear him one more time chastise us for our chauvinism. So my masochistic streak in action. Tell me, Carl, what we're doing wrong.

No, we're not at the center. No, we're not important. And to my mind, many of the key findings of science, much of the modern scientific perspective, evolves from debates with that character. That point, echoing the message that you just highlighted, he also criticizes the religious message that we see ourselves as stewards of the environment and he counters no, right? Even though he is a guy that was very pro-environment and he says this. We've been put here by the Creator to take care of things. Stewardship is the very engaging word that is often used.

Who knows what would happen to the environment without us? So we have an obligation to make sure everything goes as God would have wished it. I mean, we're probably overstating this point, but what really works for me is that message of not taking ourselves too seriously. And it's just, it puts him in contrast to all of the other gurus, basically, who just take themselves extraordinarily seriously. And when they want to flatter

their audience, they tell their audience that you are part of this special community that is going to save the world. I remember when I tweeted something that annoyed James Lindsay. I think I'd criticised him because he was attacking some male model for wearing a dress or something in a photo shoot, and I tugged on him a bit. And his response to me, which was, in his mind, the worst put-down he could imagine, which was this, that you're irrelevant.

That was his put down to me. And it didn't work because I completely agree with that. And I find that somewhat comforting even, you know. I think a normal healthy person has the worldview of Carl Sagan and doesn't have the worldview of one of our gurus in which they are at the centre, in which the entire world depends on their amazing insights and that we're on the brink of some revelations,

if only people listen to them more. I see in general, in just so many ways, that humility and recognizing limitations are an important thing and something which is like undervalued in the current ecosystem that we live in especially on social media where everybody is a content creator everybody is putting forward themselves as as somebody with something special and i think the the message that you know even if you have specific skills, even if you're proud of what you've achieved and all, that's fine. But you have to have like a degree of perspective about it. And like, to give an example, Matt, I think, you know, people that need to tell you how many books they've read or how many lectures they've listened to or that kind of thing. These are not usually the people that it's evident that that's true, right?

Like Carl Sagan doesn't say during this talk, I've read 200 books on astronomy, and I have 600 papers published, right? But Jordan Peterson, when he's talking about global warming, will say, no, I read 200 books on global warming, and yet he will get basic science wrong. And he'll make claims about how many hundreds of hours he's devoted on topics, and then display that he hasn't read

the Communist Manifesto or something like that, despite focusing for hours about the problems with Marx. So, I mean, I'm basically evangelizing for humility and self-deprecation. I'm putting my culture as the one that the world should emulate. I don't think that's true. Like, don't be like, fuck, but, you know, I'm just making a joke. But I just fundamentally endorse his message. That's what I'm saying, Matt.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, I think these are good puristics for spotting good gurus and bad gurus because you'll never see Carl Sagan claiming to have personally revolutionized our understanding of astrology or anything else. Yeah. Yeah. You know, like –

And all of people there. Yeah, and, yeah, you know he is charismatic yeah he he's he's mellifluous he's got he's got the gift of the gab and he had he had a kind of celebrity which your modern day gurus would dream of right yeah and yet he didn't do that he albert Albert Einstein's another person who could have easily slipped into self-grandiosity, I think, all right, and said, oh, you know, you should listen to me with my opinions about everything because, look, general relativity, hello. Are you sure he didn't?

I don't know enough about Einstein to comment on that. Okay, I'm not 100%. Look, let's cover Albert Einstein one of these days. My gut feeling is he doesn't. But, okay, let's put aside Albert Einstein. I'll stick to Carl Sagan. And, you know, he doesn't do that, whereas these pretend gurus really do. They spend so much time attempting to convince you in a hundred different ways of their amazing insights whereas when i have consumed carl sagan's content when you watch

cosmos for instance or you listen to any of his lectures he's not doing like little references to his own insight for this or his own study on that or how he's got this fresh new take about black holes whatever what he's doing is he's doing public education of science he's not taking the credit for himself he's acting as the handmaiden or the the servant to a community which is much much bigger than he is at least that's the feeling i get from listening to him yeah i agree and so matt we'll get off the humility point but there's one final clip which you prepared which i thought was very nice and it's kind of talking about the the golden barriers that we've erected between humans and other species and how we shouldn't be doing that there are people who find it very upsetting who still long to be at the center and And one area where you can see the emotions not hidden but written out in clear is in special creation. the particular objects of the devotion of the creator of the universe, that we're different from the other animals, never mind plants, not just in degree but in kind. And you know the list.

No one else has altruism, compassion. No other animal loves their young. Nobody else can foresee the future consequences of present actions. Nobody else has art or music. Nobody else can use tools. Nobody else can make tools. And this list it goes on and on. He is making this point, you know, 20 plus years ago that many of these have been shown either to be not true, for example, make tool use and manufacturing, or to be different in degree rather than kind, like Franz de Waal's work arguing about morality and the development of fairness, perception, and primates, and so on. So this is not to say there aren't elements within human society which are exceptional in how they've developed but i think the message that as exceptional as we are in amongst animals

we are fundamentally of the same kind of thing and it's a quirk of evolutionary history that we ended up the dominant species on the planet and a quirk of cultural history too that we ended up being so dominant i suppose yeah in both directions right the genetic and the cultural dual inheritance model if you will i know that you can actually there are people who will push back and kind of highlight the level of cumulative culture, for example, that humans have is something which marks us out and so on. And you can, like, the thing is, you can focus in that perspective, but I don't think that Sagan's message is that you should never do that. It's just that you should do it with a sense of humility about not viewing humans as this completely separate entity from the natural world that reigns over it supreme.

But no, we are just a product of it. I see it as him challenging the idea that there's a special essence. So in the same way that he emphasises how, in terms of our astronomical location, we're not at the centre of any universe, in the same way as before he was emphasising that you shouldn't think that your group, whether you're Inuit or Chinese or American or European, has some special essence that marks you out as separate and distinctive. The same is true for the human species and other animals. We don't have a special essence.

And I think that's what you are saying and him. All right. So we've humbled ourselves enough. Now we've evangelized the gospel of self-deprecation with St. Paul. So what's next to look at with Mr. Sagan? What next? What next is a good question. Let's hear about Sagan's idea of self-worth and the role that luck plays in our lives.

That sounds riveting. Okay, here we go. Dr. Wing asked, what further demotions, humiliations do I foresee for us? You see, the idea that our sense of self-worth comes not from anything that we've done, not from anything worthy, but by an accident of birth, is where the crux of the humiliation is, in my opinion. I would say those of us worried about being demoted, those of us who wish for us to be important should do something important. Make an easily understandable, achievable, and inspiring goal for the human species, and then set out and do it. That would give us the confidence that we sorely lack by being dependent on our self-esteem being based on nothing we do.

We want to have self-esteem. Let's make a planet in which nobody is starving. Let's make a planet in which men and women have equal access to power. Let us make a planet in which no ethnic group has it over another ethnic group. Let's have a planet in which science and engineering is used for the benefit of everybody on the planet. And my personal idiosyncrasy, let's have a world in which we go to other worlds. I think I'll stop there.

Thank you. I don't know that the applause was necessary from you, Matt. We could have just provided. But the thing is that, you know, I have to say, Matt, he's just such a woke idiot. He's, you know, he's obviously being indoctrinated by critical risk theory. He's doing heavy-duty virtue signaling there, isn't he?

Yeah, the liberal agenda. Who's he virtue signaling to what what a cuck that's i mean you know right on though hey can you think of anything wrong with any of that or is it too platitudinous you know i'm trying to i'm trying to be i'm trying to show some of our trademark cynicism and meanness no i liked it you know the if you want to throw a bone to the petersonites in our audience he did kind of hint towards the you know you do stuff stop complaining and moaning and if you want to be proud of something you've got to actually make efforts out in the world to to change things but i think it doesn't exactly work because

he's talking about like humanity as a whole and what we should be striving for so individual responsibility is not entirely the thing that he wants to emphasize though right it's the kind of societies and the values that we should instill. And like, yes, just to be clear, sometimes it's for me to be clear, that was sarcasm. I don't think he's a woke idiot. I think that is an illustration that those kind of sentiments are not exclusive to the woke social justice set, right? Like the viewpoints here. it sounds quite modern in a lot of respects what he's saying and i don't have any objection there because you know he's talking about a world with greater gender equality less racism so i mean who who can complain with that i was thinking of star trek particularly the next generation when he was doing that because that's that's was thinking of star trek particularly the next generation when he was doing that because

that's that's the kind of star trek hyper rational but very principled very modern sort of philosophy which i'm all for i think it's great and the other thing i like about it it's very optimistic it's it's forward looking i like the way it's both hectoring and optimistic say like don't be so proud of yourself for just being born a human you losers yeah you gotta contribute something to the species before you get to be proud and yeah i think that's a a sentiment that is a good reminder and probably fits in with the notion that it's all right to be proud of your culture and so on, but you shouldn't rest on your laurels because of just the circumstances of your birth. You didn't choose

those. I like the way this kind of thinking is big picture. It's almost like a question a child would ask, which is, okay, this species, humanity, should we be proud of ourselves or not? We did some cool stuff, you could argue, but from the point of view of pretty much any other species on the planet, like Agent Smith says in The Matrix, we're a disease, you know, we screw everything up. The Matrix, Matt.

It's The Matrix, yeah. The Matrix, it's not The Matrix, The Matrix. That's a very egotistical mispronunciation of you. Sorry, sorry. Yeah, as a species, we've done a lot of clever things, but most of those clever things have been done for total self-interest. So I like the Star Trek Next Generation vibes, which is you have a civilizational purpose which goes beyond just feathering your own nest and making your own personal life more luxurious and comfortable.

You could potentially have other goals. You can imagine a species having other goals. And, you know, you could disagree or argue about what those goals should be. Someone like Sagan would say that exploration, exploring the universe and plumbing the limits of science is a great and worthy goal. But yeah, like you said, he adds to that other pretty important goals. Like technologically, it's completely within the power of the human species to eliminate hunger and most of the diseases that are wrecking the world but we don't but we could so you know i like that maybe we should maybe we should yeah so to summarize it

in a piffy way are you saying we live in a society i feel it's evergreen insight and speaking of evergreen insight i have a little surprise for you matt because we agreed that we'll look at this specific interview but in my way i couldn't resist looking at some other seeking content and i came across what was billed as his last interview i don't know if it was or not, but it was certainly towards the end of his life with Charlie Rose. And it had some nice parts in it that I thought highlighted some important things. So there's some amount of discussion in it about God and agnosticism and what is the appropriate boundaries of skepticism. And I thought it's quite interesting because in some respects, Sagan had a fairly accommodating

worldview when it came to, you know, he was famous for publishing books, debunking pseudoscience and rank religion. That's a terrible phrase, but like that. Superstition? Superstitions. Yes, that will work better um but so there were these two clips where he's talking about standards of evidence and how to deal um with evidence and i thought they were good um illustrations of his kind of

model of skepticism so here's the first one is faith? It is belief in the absence of evidence. Now, I don't propose to tell anybody what to believe, but for me, believing when there's no compelling evidence is a mistake. The idea is to withhold belief until there is compelling evidence. And if the universe does not comply with our predispositions okay then we have the wrenching obligation to accommodate to the way the universe i like that matt because it's just an antidote to the worldview promoted by like russell brand and the conspiratoriality minded gurus that the universe revolves around us and our mentality and desires. And the message there is, no, we have a duty to accommodate ourselves to

what we discover about the nature of the universe, regardless of how insignificant it might make us seem. And the contradiction with the other guru types and how they frame the kind of level of importance to attach to your own internal narratives was pretty striking to me. Yeah, like a lot of the topics we talk about, you could describe what's wrong with a lot of them in terms of unwarranted certainty. This unwarranted certainty that ivermectin is a miracle cure.

This unwarranted certainty that the election was stolen. His advice there, which is that we should try to be a little bit better at withholding judgment when things really are uncertain, is good. judgment when things really are uncertain is good. And I also like the grouping together of religion and other forms of non-evidence-based beliefs. I mean, I feel like they've got a lot in common. They all involve a totalizing worldview. They all involve post- rationalization for what is essentially a faith based belief. And they are all just very bad at doing critical thinking and evidence based analysis. So, you know, he's saying don't do that. And I say, hell yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And so there's a point in this interview with Charlie Rose where he raises a counter point to Sagan about like his advocacy for agnosticism when it comes to the existence of aliens and his stance about religion and whether there's a contradiction there. And I think, again, it highlights some really nice principles that he wants to advocate for. nice principles that he wants to advocate for. You convinced me a long time ago that it was arrogant for me or for anyone else to believe that there wasn't some life outside of our... To exclude the possibility. To exclude the possibility was an arrogance of intellect that we should not... I still do so.

You couldn't prove it. You didn't know it was there. the arrogance for you we don't know if it's there we don't know if it's not there let's look and if you take that why can't you say there's a lot we don't know I say a lot of power there that we don't what we don't know you know that? It's what I believe. About a lot of stuff. I mean that every fraudulent claim has to be accepted. We demand the most rigorous standards of evidence, especially on what's important to us. Yeah. Like, I love that because you've got the admission and no hesitation to admit there's a lot we don't know.

And yes, lots of things could turn out to be true. But whenever the interviewer, Charlie Rose, is kind of saying, well, you know, isn't it just arrogance then to assume any stance to argue that types of gods don't exist or that kind of thing? types of gods don't exist or that kind of thing. And his counter response that, no, because we need the identity, be willing to call out fraudulent claims or claims that lack evidence. And for things that matter, we should care about the standards of evidence that exist. It's just, it felt like there's not necessarily a contradiction there, but it is something that could easily be weaponized by people to simply insert doubt for things that don't deserve doubt to be inserted.

Yeah. So a lot of the conspiratorial talk you will see really weaponizes the skepticism, doesn't it? So, they will use that argument, which is, well, you cannot prove that this isn't possibly true. So, we should consider it seriously. And that's different from what Sagan is advising. But as you say, it can very easily be used as a rhetorical trick. You need to have an appropriate degree of open-mindedness and an appropriate degree of skepticism. But it's so easy to go too far and be so open-minded that your brain falls out and be so skeptical

that you basically invent conspiratorial reasons to doubt everything and end up knowing nothing. And I heard on a very centrist-y podcast, The Fifth Column, their most recent episode, where they had a great guest who was talking about a kind of epistemic crisis that we're in at the moment, and talking about the kinds of propaganda that Donald Trump has ushered in and techniques that are also being used by Russian bot farms, which is just so, so much doubt and so much confusion and so many possible alternatives and narratives that might possibly be true or so on. And their goal is not to convince people of any particular thing their goal is to make people

give up on the idea that you can know the truth about anything at all yeah so i think um carl sagan's advice there is particularly important today yeah it's kind of the distinction between scott adams skepticism and like actual real genuine skepticism or brett weinstein skepticism i'll get that pronunciation one day and the fifth column i listened to that episode as well i enjoyed the fifth column though i you know i think they lean more towards the libertarian spectrum of things but they had jonathan roach or roach on i don't know how to pronounce that's the guy it was so cathartic because he he basically like when they were saying ah yeah but you know isn't it just you know can we really say that

things on the liberal media are better than on right he was like yeah we can because you know and he and see him with like russian disinformation stuff. It was just, it was enjoyable because he knew his stuff and very strongly argued that even though there's plenty to criticize in left-wing media, it does not mean that you can ignore what Trump has been doing

or the partisanship on the right. So yeah, that just a good episode if you want to hear pushback against that kind of views um so ma we normally try to find a part where we have something positive to say it's it's like i don't think that's fair in this case because it's almost like we have said, nothing but glowing remarks about Carl. I do want to highlight one contradiction, one possible contradiction that I find in the Q&A segment where he was asked a question about animal testing and the ethics involved therein. And it's not so much his response about that,

which is understandable. You as you'll hear, he basically endorsed that we should use it sparingly, but it can be necessary that it shouldn't be used frivolously, which seems a reasonable position to take. But just follow through Matt till the end and see if you can spot the potential contradiction here. a potential contradiction here. But we'd also not argue that no animal experiments could be done. And I think if I had to

explain, somehow it was my job to do so, to some people whose child was dying because a medical procedure was unavailable, which might very well have been available if animal experimentation had been performed.

I don't know how I would do that justification. Now, you might say to me that I'm putting humans higher than other animals. And where do I come off doing that, especially at the end of an evening where I've been decrying chauvinisms? This, to me me is like the argument that is sometimes, Dave Morrison mentioned it in his talk today, why should we take any steps to save ourselves if an asteroid is going to hit the earth, since asteroids have hit the earth in the past? And, you know, others have gone, so we might be here, so

we'll go, so, you know, whatever it is, the raccoons will have their chance, or the ants, or the sulfur oxidation state-altering submarine worms will inherit the earth. At this point, I have no difficulty in, since I happen to be, it's an accident of birth, a human being, a human being to justify human beings trying to survive under sometimes trying circumstances. That's my judgment. I'm sure if, you know, I were a lizard up here, I would be talking about, yes, let's sacrifice the humans so we can get better medicine for the lizards. After all, I'm a lizard. I'm sorry, I can't help it. So, Chris, where do you stand on this?

Do you support putting lipstick on monkeys? You look like the kind of guy that would want to do that. Yeah, well, I support that, but not for medical testing purposes, just pure self-enjoyment and the thrill of the cheers. Well, how I choose to spend my free time is not the subject. Nobody else's business. You know, I keep the Japan for very specific reasons, Matt, very specific reasons.

So, yeah, like, I just think there is a certain contradiction, right, when you just give a talk, which is extolling the importance of humility and to avoid anthropocentric views of the world to then say, well, but, you know, fundamentally, I'm a human. So, you know, sacrificing other animals for our good is, you know, fundamentally, I'm a human. So, you know, sacrificing other animals for our good is, you know, what can you expect from me? And I, I, it's true. Like, there's no, there's no condemnation there, because I'm a human too, despite rumors to the contrary. And I, I also would willingly sacrifice animals to sustain myself on that. i'm not claiming to be better than carl but i'm just saying i didn't spend an hour extolling the limitations of anthropocentric worldviews so yeah don't worry chris no one listening to this thinks you're better than carl you didn't you didn't keep this bit in the clip but he started off with saying that he felt extraordinarily conflicted

on that issue and as you say he acknowledges the contradiction there and i think it's don't call out my rhetorical techniques but i didn't edit the clip you know it just it was just for time just for time yeah just for time yeah yeah yeah look i mean look you're right it is a contradiction but you know he's right too in that i know i can't think of anyone who could reconcile that perfectly can you think of a non-contradictory like assuming you don't like torturing monkeys for sport can you think of a principal way to approach that stuff that is totally self-consistent except for the kind of compromisey milk toasty you know avoid gratuitous kind of things avoid it whenever possible but accepting that in some cases going to be basically prioritizing people you could make arguments i

suppose based around consciousness right degrees of consciousness or self-awareness and so on you know um if people do i will say that the history of animal experimentation i mean i think he would completely sign on to this but it's full of some horrors for what various intelligent creatures endured for little scientific purpose or benefit i'm thinking of the experiments of Harry Harlow, which Harlow used to, you know, sort of undo some notions in psychology that were harmful about the way to deal with infants. Also involved putting young social primates into pits of despair, so-called black boxes,

and removing all interaction and sunlight for them for months to see what they did. Like, and, you know, that's a level. That's like, I find those as disturbing when I read about them as I do, you know, human experimentation. But I get that they're not on the same, like, moral level because we're humans, but it's just...

It's in the same ballpark is what you're saying. And I agree. But, you know carl sagan would definitely classify all that stuff in terms of gratuitous um yeah suffering for marginal benefit in fact i'd put anything under the social sciences and psychology as marginal benefit yeah i just so i think that like you're never on really tricky grounds if your argument is at the very least, we need a lot better standards and a lot more concern about the humanness with which animals are treated and to avoid undue suffering. But like I say, I think it's a way of dodging the issue because the Carl Sagan would say the exact same thing. Yeah, he'd agree with you 100 so looking at it more broadly human beings now consume like 60 of the ecological energy budget of the earth you know we've displaced a huge number of species and squeezing every other species on earth into a smaller and smaller box right because we're just

taking more of everything for ourselves and i personally think we've got to reverse that and take it in the other direction. And I think with smart use of technology, we can probably do that without suffering huge decreases in standard of living ourselves if we're smart about it. I also personally think we should be very conscious of just the sheer number of people on the planet as well you know how many people you can sustain at any one time so i'm fully in favor of decreasing the box that our species consumes oh my is this the great your great reset you're coming out as a like you you want to yeah increase the population by a couple of billion uh yeah this is all your globalist plot that's why you don't like talking about the great reset you're on board with it yeah i'm fluoride in the water

to sterilize people that's what i'm after um so but the reason i mentioned that right is just to say that even though i'm in favor of shrinking it a great deal which is probably a reasonably radical position i wouldn't be in favor of shrinking it to, say, prehistoric levels, right, where humans were just another primate wandering around hunting and gathering, where we really did consume just a sliver. I'd probably go for like a compromise kind of position, right, where we maybe take 30 or 40% of it maybe and leave the rest for all of the other species, which isn't really fair on them if you take the super strict philosophical stance that we do not prioritize humanity then my position is inconsistent

too even though it is fairly radical in favor of the animals i feel like we're just fighting a position that almost no one except from like extreme mad peter people will take though yeah our position that the environment is important that animals should be preserved like these are the mainstream but yeah it should not be tortured like there there's a couple of people on the fringe saying you know no do you know like yeah for neil varnish and the insoles of shoes we we should sacrifice gorillas and and cetaceans but they're in a minority for a good reason so we're we're not we're safe matt we're not stepping on any third rails here but to be super clear i guess all i'm doing is just defending his wishy-washiness on it because i don't see how

i don't see how you can't be you just have to be wishy-washy sometimes just defend them all the time defend defend defend your hero i get it no no no look i sympathize with you because i really really wanted to find something that i could you know show what a great dispassionate critical thinker i am and even be willing to criticize my hero who's saying all the things that press my buttons I really wanted to virtue signal my dispassionateness, but I couldn't. I couldn't find it. So let's turn to a response he gave about a question about consciousness. Now, consciousness has various meanings. If it means an awareness of the external world and modifying your behavior to take account of the external world, then I think microbes are conscious. you mean deep thoughts like Bishop Barclay's

contention that nothing exists except what's in his mind, I'm with the microbes myself. You see, how do you know that I think any thoughts? Only because I happen

to be communicating to you. You can't easily tell that I have philosophical thoughts by looking at me drinking this cup of water, right? So imagine that I was mute, that I could not communicate by speech or writing or anything else, then how would you know if I had such thoughts? The evidence for not just the so-called higher apes, but running through the apes and the monkeys, to me is very persuasive that they have thoughts. Not only deep philosophical thoughts, but useful practical thoughts,

like lying, like deceit, like planning to fool others, thinking about it far in advance. I've got to say, I really liked his ping on Bishop Barclay, his supposedly super deep human thinking about consciousness and God or whatever is just nonsensical to say the least. So you could be like super smart and be and use that intelligence to invent

complete nonsense can't you yes we're familiar with this from the gurus that we cover but i don't know who bishop barclay is but i'll grant that his title alone does not inspire confidence in me okay but as an anthropologist did you like what he was saying there about consciousness yeah yeah like the hesitation in that yeah was simply that yeah i'm basically fully on board with that and i share the intuitions that he has about the relative dispersal of consciousness across non-human species and that it's better to think of consciousness on the spectrum than as a golden barrier, right? But I am aware though, because of spending some time with the comparative psychology research literature, that there are surprising limitations in our next of kin species speaking, you know, with chimpanzees and gorillas and so on.

There's so much which looks extremely similar. And in that sense, it's often hard for us not to anthropomorphize. And we might be justified in doing so, but there's various clever experiments which indicate that certain abilities which seem like they should be straightforward are really not. They come naturally to us. And a really nice counterintuitive illustration, which this doesn't exactly speak to that, but I just think it's such a nice finding, is that when you give chimpanzees a puzzle box and you demonstrate for them to go through these steps to get a reward from the box. And they'll watch you and they'll copy the steps. And the same thing goes for children.

All right. You show them the steps and you're tapping and you're doing various things. Then in the next stage, you show the box and now it's a see-through box where you can see the insides. And you realize that some of the steps are pointless, right? They're just like tapping into an empty space. They don't do anything to extract the treat. Chimpanzees will drop the useless steps and they'll just go for the instrumental goal, right? They want the sweet, so they realize, oh, we don't need to do that. Whereas the human kids, even though when they can see that there is no mechanical purpose for the steps,

they'll what's called over imitate, right? And I like I always find that interesting, because it's a, you know, the common phrase monkey see monkey do, but actually humans are the ones who are much better at imitating in a non instrumental fashion. And so humans copy the behavior better, but the chimpanzees take a more like goal orientated approach to it would almost be the opposite of what people predicted right because humans are more intelligent um so but what about a chimpanzee baby if you gave me that box i'd go straight for the treat i'm sure i wouldn't no oh you're wrong so this is the other beautiful thing about those experiments they fought that they

thought oh but this is just kids you know they're they're following uh like the cues of adults maybe there's a mechanism they don't understand or so on no when you get kids that demonstrated the kids they over imitate it when you get adults that demonstrate that the kids, they over-imitate it. When you get adults that demonstrate that the adults, they over-imitate it. Us humans are over-imitators par excellence. And, you know, that's part of what makes us cultural animals. In that sense, it comes like a limitation, but it's not. And that's just like, you know, it's a kind of funny counterintuitive example, but I think if you take it in another way, it is an element of exceptionalism amongst humans. And Carl Sagan's worldview downplays them.

I think that's a good thing to do, but I do think there are certain aspects that essentially do make us an exceptional species. Yeah. Well, just before we move on, an interesting correspondence there with the over-imitation is that well-known study of, that would put pigeons in those skinner boxes. Yeah. Yeah. And they didn't do anything horrible to them, thank goodness. When they pickedcked on a lever, sometimes they would get a treat when they pecked the lever, and they'd very quickly learn to peck the lever.

But they had other interesting conditions where there was a lever or something, sure, but the treats would be delivered on a totally random schedule. And what would happen is that the pigeons would develop these little rituals and behavioral quirks perhaps bending their neck or sort of taking a step or something like that when the happened to come out so they were over learning the association between their behavior and the reward and people do exactly the same thing and you, you know, it's one of the reasons that people develop delusional thinking about gambling, gambling fallacies, because gambling is a real life thing. If you're playing a poker machine or something like that, it's delivering rewards on a

totally random schedule. But people who have gambling problems often also have these little delusions about what will make the machine pay off, very similar to how the pigeons do. So anyway, it just struck me that's an interesting, similar case of overlearning. I apologize, Matt. I'm going to digress us further into your area of expertise because just one question though you meant you said you know gambling delivers random rewards but like aren't the payoffs pretty much structured in such a fashion that they're like you know timed interval rewards of a certain amount in order to maximize engagement you know the the one-armed bandits are carefully manipulated to provide just the amount of wins at the kind of times to keep people hooked right so it's not random it is random so

don't don't contradict me chris let me clarify for you so yes it's what what you're thinking of in your naive yet charming way is... What you're thinking of is, yes, those one-armed bandits are tuned in a whole bunch of different ways to increase their addictive potential. But those things are primarily related to the visual displays, right? So the sounds and the symbols that are shown. For instance, they will do things like show near misses so where the symbols almost line up and they will show those at a rate higher than is real leading people to overestimate their chance of winning in the future another thing

they do is losses disguised as wins so they will pay off so you know you spin it costs you a dollar it'll pay off and you'll win 40 cents. And what will happen is all of the lights and the sounds will play, the same sounds and stuff that are associated with a real win of, say, $10 where you've actually made a net win. Those same plays also play when you really lose. So they do do those tricks, right? But what they don't do, almost universally, is that they don't do any kind of timing. It's a memoryless process, right?

So every time you press that button, it is a perfect random event. So there is no sort of structuring of the intervals or anything. It's actually illegal in most places. It's almost like you're an expert in this area. I'm just a little man dancing through the forest with my intuitive uh jordan peterson insights it's just good though you can sit at the feet of true expertise let's get back to um consciousness you know we can't measure consciousness per se but we can measure a lot of the neurological and physiological things that are associated with

perceiving pain, for instance. We can determine that way that there's at least very similar things going on in the brains of animals and humans when similar sort of phenomena are occurring to us mentally. So it's becoming a smaller and smaller leap just on a biological level to say that those same things are going on with animals. What do you think about this? I mean, I'm no expert on this one, but to the degree that people are special,

a lot of it is associated with language, right? When we think, we are thinking using the same areas of the brain and we're using linguistic constructs, not just to communicate with one another, but also just to think. So we know that there are parts of the brain in humans that are specialized for language. I'm pretty sympathetic to suggestions that very recent human evolution, the stuff that catapulted us towards this global technological civilization, is actually associated with evolution stumbling upon an abstract general purpose language rather than tool use and purely

technical prowess. What do you think? You've just tuned out. You think you've had something completely different, you son of a bitch. I have not. I was paying very clear attention there. I was just thinking deeply about the model that you were describing. And there's a lot of people that have mapped linguistic competence to elements of consciousness but i think there's there's kind of like an never-ending debate about the chicken and egg scenario there right like the ability to express complicated ideas develops before or after the ability to do complex vocalizations and grammar right when it comes to the ability to communicate complex vocalizations and grammar, right? When it comes to the ability to communicate

and to have an array of vocalizations, there's a lot of species that have that. There are even species that seem to have dialects, but the complex grammar or that kind of thing just doesn't exist, right? There's been some claims it does and some discussion about birdsong and how that can incorporate a kind of grammar,

but grammar in the way that appears amongst humans seems like a unique aspect. And to be honest, the whole area is just so complex. There's like tons of theoretical models. And I dug india a bit when i was doing my masters and i came away from it thinking like it's a super interesting topic but i just i've got no idea which perspective is right on it like i'm kind of convinced by each paper i read and stephen pinker actually was on a really good paper i thought about this a long time ago so it just reminds me that you know when people are shitting on them about culture war

stuff like it's research stuff sometimes it's pretty good um yeah look chris no i'm totally the same i don't know i'm just spitballing here but um i'm not i mean you do so like the my gazing into the sun look is just like trying to work out what i actually think about this the answer is like i don't have a i don't either but look just on a purely gut level i guess i'm sympathetic to just very broad brushstrokes here right that our cousins among the primates probably have a great deal of overlap with us in terms of like phenomenological consciousness right yeah but to the extent that we are different it's largely due to culture which is really based on complex

language anyway and language so that's just my gut feeling if i had to gun to my head force me to have an opinion there it is yeah you didn't you didn't but i gave it to you anyway yeah yeah well then you know it's cosmic man people are getting insights from anthropology psychology that's what they come from um now. Now, to round things off, I think we can offer some closing thoughts after this, because there's a clip which is quite famous, a little bit long, but I think worth hearing at least in part, which is a variation of his pale blue dot speech, where he basically is talking about an image where the satellite took a photo of Earth, turned back on its way out of the solar system and took a photo of Earth. And Earth appears as a mote of dust on a pale blue beam of light. And he has some poetic reflections about it. And I've heard this segment in other formats and it never feels to

strike me as like something profound and worth listening to. So it's worth people searching out the whole pale blue dot clip if you haven't heard it, but here's a little blast of that. So there it is. I mean, take a look. It's a pale blue dot. That's us. That's home. That's where we are. On it,

everybody you love, everybody you know, everybody you've ever heard of lived out their days there. The aggregate of all our joy and suffering, thousands of confident ideologies, religions, economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every history of our species lived there. The earth is a very small stage in a great cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, presidents and prime ministers,

party leaders, so that in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of the corner of a dot. Yes, famous speech, justifiably so. Very inspiring and profound. A couple of things, Chris. One is the thing that really hits home for me with that pale blue dot image, like it's obviously gives us a sense of the precariousness of the biosphere and the great dark, right? But that's even more striking when you remember that the entire biosphere is basically an eggshell around what is basically a ball of molten lava. And if you go from as deep as microbes can exist in the Earth

to the very top of the stratosphere, it's like an eggshell. So it's not only a dot, everything that he's talking about is this eggshell around that dot we have molten lava on one side and radiation infused space on the other so yeah it should give you pause the the content of that speech is rightly themed for the profundity of it and also as you say highlighting how delicate the existence that we find ourselves the situation of the earth and there's a nice part earlier in the talk where he kind of he's criticizing that and for uh what is it called anthropic principle yeah right the goldilocks zone kind of thing saying the universe was created in such a way that humans were able to exist. And as he argued, you could equally argue that the universe

was created in such a way that rocks were able to exist, right? The lithic principle. And I think that there's room to incorporate both views that the place that we live on and the time that we find ourselves here is something special and we live in a delicate ecosystem and we are just one dot in a massive universe of stars that we will will be dead long before anybody knows anything about. So it's humbling and also profoundly depressing. I'm quite content to offer my overall thoughts on Sagan here, which is just to highlight that he doesn't engage, I think, in most of the things,

negative guru techniques that we highlight here. But he is, in many respects, something of a guru to people or a figure of admiration. He has opinions on a variety of different topics. He speaks in a poetic, metaphorical way, and his tone of voice is like melodious. So he has charisma is what I'm trying to say. But what I think this episode does is highlight that one, we agree with Carl Sagan. And to the extent that we can therefore be trusted to have a objective view, it's possible for people to occupy the role of gurus and to also be promoting messages which are good and

offering worldviews which are not fundamentally narcissistic and self-promotional or whatever the case may be like i just think to the extent that carl second is a guru he's a good guru in my book yeah yeah our friend aaron described him as the Bob Ross of gurus. And I think that's pretty accurate. Yeah. So like you said, he's definitely a guru in the sense that he's like a meaning maker. He's weaving narratives in a poetic way. As you say, he's voluptuous, he's charismatic. A lot of his talk is almost like poetry, even though he does take a lot of diversions into the sort of substrate of scientific fact, including useful and appropriate anthropological studies and so on. is in the same way that Jordan Peterson does, builds a map of meaning and what's important and what matters and how we should think about ourselves.

He sort of sketches that out in a poetic way, resting on the substrate of a very scientific worldview. But here's the thing. I mean, so you can be against that in principle, but I think it's impossible to avoid. A lot of people talk about it these days, about how religion's on the wane. So there are these new religions, including being woke or whatever, because people have an innate need for

meaning and narratives. Now, whether or not the specific examples given are true, I think that's fundamentally true on some level. The scientific stuff goes a long way, but it doesn't tell you what you should do. It doesn't tell you what you should care about and what's important. So he's a guru in the sense that he's sketching out one possible narrative on top of that scientific substrate. And he does it well. That's why we like him. Unlike Jordan Peterson, when he gets into the scientific examples, they're appropriate. And the inferences he draws from them are correct inferences, and they support his argument in a very logical way. But, you know, in the end, he's sketching poetry that I like. And to the extent

that I understand any of this stuff, it feels like the substrate he's building on, he's building on it in a sound way to get to those conclusions. So yeah, thumbs up from me. He's a great guy. Shame he's dead. Yeah. I wonder if he would be in the QAnon if he was alive now. I don't want to do that.

I recommend his book, Demon Haunted World, is still worth checking out. And yeah, just, you know, these past two weeks have just reminded me of a time when we had a better class of gurus. I'm going to be a guru, a classic guru-ologist. I want to go back to the real gurus before these online gurus came, you know, sauntering in.

Yeah, the gurus were better when I was a kid. Yeah, we had real gurus, Matt. They're real gurus. They went into the jungle and killed people. So I think this is a good time to announce that after our jaunt into the personal guru sphere and fiddling around with that, that we have decided to leap back into the culture war trenches and the mucky world of online psychologically damaged individuals. We know you love it.

We know that's what you want. That's the content you come here for. We're going to go slamumming next week with one Gad Saad. Gad Saad, he's been requested. We were thinking about Zizek or Jimmy Doran. We'll get there, but we're going to do Gad Saad and we're probably going to do it

too for Gad Saad and somebody terrible that he's interviewed. Maybe Gad Saad and Jeffrey Miller. Gad Saad and Diop Rubin. We'll work it out. But Mr. Sad, your time has come. He's going to be delighted, I'm sure. He'll probably find us on Twitter.

He'll love the attention. Yeah, possibly. Well, so there just simply wouldn't be enough to do with him on his own. He's just not substantial enough. So we really need to do an episode with someone else there. And I think we should make that clear. The episode that he didn't deserve an episode dedicated solely to him. But yes, Gadzad, you're coming up.

I've got a feeling he's going to be like Scott Adams. But let's see. Maybe I'll be wrong. Well, let's see. I mean, because I don't know much about him. All I've seen is a few clips of, you know, a few minutes long. They haven't been good. What I have seen has not been good.

I will say that. I've heard him interviewed by Sam Harris. Yeah. Let's see. Maybe we're wrong. Maybe we're wrong maybe we're wrong and speaking of people that are wrong let's talk about a couple of reviews that we've received you know i like to get the negative to the positive side of this fear and i requested that people left us reviews and

we got a bunch of them most of them are positive because we're just you know fundamentally good but i we did pick up a couple of negative ones that i also enjoyed so let me just read one of them which is titled nitpicking as podcasting and this is by pg783 the format of this podcast is so annoying. It is set up like a debate, but where one side always gets the last word. These two dudes play a short out of context clip of whatever guru is on their docket, then proceed to nitpick and belittle whatever point was made, then move on to the next point. Rinse and repeat. It is incredible how many ideas come up lacking when set before the penetrating intellect of these guys. In a normal debate, a contested point could be expanded or defended,

but in the world of this podcast, any and all assertions are quickly ridiculed and dispatched. It's like playing tennis with no one on the other side of the net. And guess what? These guys always win. They act even handed, but just beneath the surface is an attitude of profound snottingness the whole endeavor is a bit sinister actually now i my my i think you know

that's comprehensively harsh yeah what i think would be fair is to rebut this in a manner that this guy would love where he's completely unable to respond and just endorses his point i can read out his review in a snotty accent and it already reduces the legitimacy of his points by 50 but like look no he's got he's got a reasonable point about uh that it's a bit unfair that the people don't get the chance to respond but what the fuck do you want you want us to call them up play the clip and request that they give us their feedback like oh how do you answer this mr talib he's not gonna respond and also the whole point is that like we are looking critically at their content yes you could do it too if you want just pause this podcast and you know make your own comments and release it do it just just do what you want but the whole format of the podcast is

set up as critical commentary analyzing like people's things so like that's the format that's the format tennis tennis provided net these people talk for like four hours unmolested just waffling on about their ideas and they they rarely get any pushback for it so pardon me for expressing that critical opinion into your microphone oh i'll send them personal emails and beg them to respond before i dare utter criticism is that okay pg7183 are you happy now what's that i can't hear your response i'm sorry pg7183 i just want to invite you on for the podcast to criticize us because we love that kind of thing we embrace it chris is gonna love talking to you and rebutting all of

your points it'll be fun yeah send us any um reach out reach out tell your people to talk to our people we'll set this send us an audio clip and we'll take it apart. So, yes, thank you for that. I did ask for reviews and they were provided, so that was nice. But here is a positive review to wash away the PG7-8-3 bile. This one has a bit of negging. It's a positive review, but it has a bit of negging. I enjoyed it.

It doesn't have the degree of criticism that's going to elicit your very defensive and sensitive response. Defensive, Matt. That's just joking. It's just joshing around with people. I could do that for all the clips. Is that the level of people want? They're like, no.

So calm down, PG-7. Just relax. No, it's just a podcast. This one is from Colonel Kurtz. Don't know if he's a real colonel or not, but the title is Excellent Listen, so it's already off to a better start. And then it continues.

Despite their oversimplification of stoic philosophy, misrepresentation of Sam Harris, and the constant digs at their English superiors, Chris and Matt are thoughtful, funny, and intelligent guys playfully picking apart today's public intellectuals. You won't agree with all of it, and maybe they tend too much towards cynical and negative views, but it's kept light by their effortless chemistry and sharp wit.

It's not quite yet as good as Very Bad Wizards, but I've got fear that they might one day get there. Keep up the good work oh that's good that's well tempered that's just the right that's very good and you know of course it's written by an englishman you can get the you can tell by the passive aggressive and the and the gemming by fate praise very english yeah backhanded compliments that's fine but you know that just had to balance out old old pgs comment there so so that but that was fun and i agree one day we will be better than very bad wizards not yet not yet but we're we're getting our voice so you just watch out um and so yeah that's our reviews thank you both for for sending them in and all the other people who did

because there's other funny ones, which I'll get to next week. I know we've run long, but there is one other piece of feedback, which isn't a review that I wanted to mention. We received via the Patreon messaging. I actually think it was. So I won't go into quoted in depth,

but in essence, we got a message from somebody who was a Brett Weinstein and I think Eric Weinstein ex-fan, so to speak. And they basically made the point, they appreciated the podcast, the critiques helped them, you know, kind of see the problems in the narratives that the brothers were spinning and that they enjoy the format of the show and everything. It was all very positive, but they just mentioned that it was kind of hard for them to deal with initially when they were listening to our criticisms and there's points where we're laughing or reacting in a credulous fashion to something that Weinstein had said.

And the guy was pointing out that, you know, after you've invested a lot of time with these guys that you can feel a little stupid that you couldn't see what people are pointing out and laughing about as like transparently obvious and i i've got things to say about that but what do you think about that feedback yeah i think that's that's good feedback because, yeah, you know, we do have a bit of fun with it. And when you do all that analysing stuff that we do and then gather together the evidence, if you like, and put it all together, it all seems incredibly obvious. So it's worth emphasising I don't think it's incredibly obvious.

A lot of that stuff, many of those characters I listened to extremely casually and my gut feeling at the time was it's fine it didn't really strike me as obviously bad and it wasn't until we did those deep dives and really stopped and thought about it that it became clear so i could see how someone would get that impression and uh sorry but it's more fun to laugh and mock it we're gonna keep doing it we're gonna keep doing it but i yeah it's no i i could because like the guy made the point as well that we we often do this claim that we're not targeting the mockery at the followers because like the people do tend to be good at what they do and that's true it's

not just a disclaimer i think i i have a lot of sympathy for people you know the people do tend to be good at what they do. And that's true. It's not just a disclaimer. I think I have a lot of sympathy for people, you know, the people don't have time to go through the literature and ivermectin or maybe don't have the relevant expertise to do that. And like, and why should they, right? Like that's not something that you can expect everybody to be capable of doing. And they might have just genuine interest in science. And these are the guys that they picked up. So I would emphasize the same point you did that we make it look effortless. But it's actually, you know, the thing is, this podcast takes time, we have to go through the content, we have to highlight the clips and we have to dig the things out.

And like you say, when you put it all together, it can be straightforward to see. But when you listen to Jordan Peterson or Eric Weinstein or any of the people and it just washes over you, it can often be very compelling and you can feel like, yeah, you know, the points that they're making are valid and sometimes they are, but the way that people listen to content isn't, you know, it's kind of, they don't listen like this. They don't stop things and say, okay, so what was step one, two, three of the argument there? We do that because we're doing something weird. Yeah. We're doing something very weird and not at all natural. Like, I must have seen so many TEDx lectures that at the time I thought, wow, yeah, that's really what. And then I looked into it a bit later on and realized that it really wasn't very good at all.

But it sounded good because they're a good lecturer. You know, they gave a good talk. They sounded very convincing it's absolutely no reflection on yourself to find bullshit convincing because they work hard at bullshitting i'm not talking about tedx people some some tedx lectures are fine obviously but but you know when they are bullshitting like you said chris you can't tell unless you just happen to have a real depth of expertise in the specific things they're talking about in the specific examples they're giving or you're willing to as you say pause it and then go and do all of this background

research and but why would you do that that's not that's no way to live your life you know yeah i know i know so yeah so like i i just wanted to flag it up because i think it's important to say that it's impossible for me not to be sarcastic and cynical and stuff they're non-negotiable parts of my personality but i i still will keep in mind and and try to highlight that the mockery is not intended to people that are duped. Like that's, there are people who I think deserve blame for that because they should know better, but there's lots of people who don't, and you don't know people's circumstances or what else they're dealing with. So, so yeah, that's, that's all. I just wanted to like, spend some time on that because it was a nice message and I think it had an important point.

Yeah, I agree. some time on that because it was a nice message and i think it had an important point yeah i agree so we don't go for gazillion hours let's get to our patron charts outs and sign off for the the day yes um so matt first of all joseph whalen who is a conspiracy hypothesizer every great idea starts with a minority of one we are not going to advance conspiracy theories we will advance conspiracy hypotheses thank you joseph and next we have nick brower and Nick Angiono, two Nicks, dual Nicks. Both coincidence, Matt, that they are both. No, they aren't. One's a conspiracy hypothesizer and one's a revolutionary genius.

But I'm going to upgrade them and play them both the revolutionary thinker one. And you just have to guess which one is the conspiracy hypothesizer and which is the revolutionary thinker one and and you just have to guess which one is the conspiracy hypothesizer and which is the revolutionary thinker which one matt which one will it be which one 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. And I've got another revolutionary genius. I'm just, I probably already messed up those two names, but I'm definitely going to the pronunciation on this one. Sorry, I apologize. It's Mifuna Basi ikpe who is a revolutionary genius and someone i'm deeply

sorry for my mispronunciation so thank you very much you're good at saying nick but not so good at other names that's right nick i got that one right yeah that western chauvinist that i am 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 the last one for this matt our last one for this week is a Galaxy Brain guru called Ralph Kink. Ralph Kink. Thanks, Ralph. Ralph Kink. Yeah.

Nice name. Nice name. Quite tangy. Tangy. I'm just saying tangy. What's wrong with that? Nothing wrong with that. It's a perfectly good name.

Agreed. Agreed. Galaxy Brain that he is. Thank perfectly good name. Agreed. Agreed. Galaxy Brian D'Ati is. Thank you, Ralph. Thank you. 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. Maybe we'll get some updates to these with Gadsad next week. Yeah, I feel like Gadsad could be fertile ground for those. But thank you, Mr. Kink. That was good.

Yes. So, Matt, where can people find us in this worldwide interconnected web? In this crazy mixed up world? Well, I'm at 31 Everglade Street. No, no, that's not true. Cut. Cut. Yeah.

So we are at Guru's Pod on Twitter. We have a Reddit, which is decoding. Decoding the Guru's subreddit. Yeah. I don't remember our email address or anything else yeah gurus pod oh no wait gurus pod is our twitter and decoding the gurus at gmail.com is our uh like email account thing and then you are after c dent i am after c dent online yeah my semi anonymous account and

i'm c underscore kavanagh with a k and no u's that's where we are and uh the reddit is very active isn't it chris like it's i was just i'm just amazed at and yeah and like even though when i participate on the subreddit it feels like nobody's upvoting me or replying to my comments please pay attention to me on the reddit because it's uh you just can't handle it but i i do browse through the reddit even though i don't comment much because i know that will just be ignored but uh yeah like a lot of the discussions like people ask questions about some pretty technical stuff and then they get really good answers from people who actually know stuff. So, yeah, it just seems like a cut above your stuff.

I mean, I know this is kind of the kind of follower praising thing, but when I look at Reddit, usually it's like full of shit. But ours is actually a better subreddit than most subreddits, and that's just a credit to both of us, I think. Well, definitely. And now it's cursed, Matt. Now that you've said that, it will become a seething cesspool of hate and white supremacy. And people will pay this back to show that we endorse that.

So good job, Matt. You've landed us in it with your parasocial manipulations. They've just created troubles for us but but yeah the subreddit yeah i've jinxed it is good for the time being go if you want to for the time being at this present moment it's okay that's all we're saying in july 2021 we said it's okay but we didn look today, so we don't know what friends they posted. Yeah, that's right. We're not admitting any kind of legal liability if you get involved

with a subreddit and you get abused on gender, race, or identity characteristics. That's not on us. That's Matt. That's Matt. And upvote his post, please. Please vote my post. The other thing for the final moment of self-indulgence,

I appeared on Stefan Kesting's podcast, The Strenuous Life. I lead a strenuous life. I talked about strenuous life activity. No, I didn't. I talked about gurus and our garometer um for two hours so if you haven't got enough of me you can go and listen to that and there's a video of it as well if you want to see my face so this is how it is that chris you're doing public appearances without your co-host you're sidelining me you're you're seeing like a career for yourself that doesn't include me. Why wasn't I invited? You get plenty of shout outs.

I give you credit endlessly. And plus you were busy on Walkabout that week. So I did a promotional duty of recording, but it was really enjoyable. It was a, it's like more of a discussion than an interview. Like, you know,

the same way we do. And Stefan's like a really sharp guy so interesting thing and another crossover with the brazilian jiu-jitsu world so so check it out i'll i haven't listened to it yet but i will check it out you know i just can't get enough of your opinions two hours of gold maybe Maybe I should forward it to PG783. Sorry, PG, sorry, sorry, sorry. Sorry, sorry, we value the critical feedback. We value your feedback.

We value your feedback. It was very valuable. So, Matt, all that remains to be said is that you now should go and gravel at the feet of your muscle mass. I will. Maybe between three and four. I think I've got a window.

So I'll pop it in then. That's all right. I know I should do it. Okay, Matthew Smith. I will see you next time with God's side. God's side. Can't wait. See you then. Bye.

Bye. I'm going to go ahead and do that. One thing that it has done is to enhance my sense of appreciation for the beauty of life and of the universe and the sheer joy of being alive. You had a healthy portion of that before this, but even you it happens to. Oh there's no question. Appreciation. Every moment, every inanimate object and to say nothing of the exquisite complexity of living beings. Yeah, you imagine missing it all and suddenly it's so much more precious.