Decoding the Gurus - Darryl Cooper, Nazi Apologetics, & Disturbances in the Discourse

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

Join Matt and Chris for a deep dive into the discourse created by Darryl Cooper’s controversial interview with Tucker Carlson. The decoders tackle Cooper’s revisionist takes on Winston Churchill, Hitler, and WWII, asking whether throwing in strategic disclaimers really makes it all okay.They also explore reactions from the wider comment-o-sphere, including the musings of libertarian firebrand/idiot Dave Smith, mainstream historians and history YouTubers, and the hosts of Triggernometry, Konstantin and Francis, as they try to unpack Niall Ferguson’s sharp critique of Cooper. Along the way, Sam Harris enters the fray, on a search for grown-ups in the alternative media.But does Harris offer a mature critique, or is he engaging in his own cycle of grievance-mongering? Matt and Chris examine his response and consider if it rises above or contributes to the podcasting noise. Whether you are a staunch critic of Sam Harris or a devoted fan, we promise this episode has something to disappoint everyone!LinksTucker Carlson: Darryl Cooper: The True History of the Jonestown Cult, WWII, and How Winston Churchill Ruined EuropeThe History Underground: Was Churchill the Chief Villain of WWII??? A Response to Darryl Cooper & Tucker CarlsonCooper's follow up thread on X.Triggernometry: “Tucker Has Become an Enabler of Fascists” - Sir Niall FergusonDave Smith | Darryl Cooper | Part Of The Problem 1169Sam Harris: Episode 383 Where Are the Grown-Ups?Free Press: Sohrab Ahmari. Pseudo-Scholars and the Rise of the Barbarian RightSPLC: McInnes, Molyneux, and 4chan: Investigating pathways to the alt-rightVox: Ezra Klein. Sam Harris, Charles Murray, and the allure of race scienceVox. The Sam Harris Debate.Arthur Jensen Profile at SPLC. The researcher who contributed to the Neo-Nazi journal.The Churchill Project. Reply to Darryl Cooper: The Truth About World War II.The Bulwark: Robert Tracinski. The “Charlottesville Hoax” Hoax.Independent Article on the 'Cat' roasting video.

Music Hello and welcome to Decoding the Guru's podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about. I'm Matt Brown, psychologist from Australia. With me is my partner in crime, Chris Kavanagh. He's an anthropologist of some kind from Japan, formerly Northern Ireland. Hello, Chris. Am I from Japan though?

Oh God, sorry, Japan. You had settled with me in my opinion. Chris, are immigrants ever really from the place they settle? Like are they, can they ever be a true resident there or are they always going to be treated as outsiders? That's what the current discourse has got me thinking about. Well, yeah, I think they can. I got me thinking about. Well, I'm yeah I think that can I just think I can't but I yeah, that's a you problem. Yeah

I'm not a permanent residence. I'm a permanent resident in in Japan. So you are you are It's like I'm in a way too much information. There's a information the internet could use That can't be used against you, don't worry. Maybe I was just checking you all. Whatever. Just, you know, anytime you say something on the internet, you're like, is that going to be used against me somehow? So I'm just, yeah. So Chris, quick content update, because we finished that big triumvirate on Dr. K and we're like, let's do something different next. We're looking forward to different options.

We had two options, didn't we, initially? Do you remember, remind me what they were, our two initial choices. It was either Peter Thiel. Or Curtis Yarvin. Or Curtis Yarvin. Not really palate cleansers, to be honest, either of them. But you know, those were our choices.

But then we thought, hang on, we, there's other people, there's other things happening that we feel we might want to do first. Well, we felt a disturbance in the guru sphere, which was related to this interview that Tucker Carlson did on X with Daryl Cooper, another podcaster who has a podcast called Marder Made. It's a kind of history podcast that does these multiple part series, your kind of thing, Matt. You know, like whatever, 20 part series on the Jim Jones is his most famous one, right? The cult leader. Anyway,

a relatively popular historical podcaster, but also somebody that's mentally unhinged a well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, well-known, one of the things that they talked about was World War II and whether Winston Churchill was the mean villain of that conflict, which would come as a surprise to the majority of people hearing that suggestion. And it was presented as that kind of, you know, oh, a controversial take the kind of thing that you're not allowed to say, and we'll get into that. But it also led to a outpouring of responses across the grocery and their vibrations

were felt. And we are going to look in depth at a recent response from Sam Harris to the topic, because it highlights a bunch of dynamics that we're going to talk about, but we'll have a look at some other responses as well. So yeah. Well said. All of that is true, Chris. So let's get straight to it then, shall we? Why not? Let's do it. Okay. So the first clip is I'm gonna show you like the mean clip that people heard this one. And I told him that I think, and maybe I'm being a little hyperbolic, maybe, but I told him, maybe trying to provoke him a little bit, that I thought Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War. Now he didn't kill the most people, he didn't commit the most atrocities,

but I believe, and I don't really think, I think when you really get into it and tell the story right and don't leave anything out, you see that he was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did, becoming something other than an invasion of Poland. Or just, I mean, at every step of the way, like people are very often, I find surprised to learn. So it was comments like that that are understandably controversial, proposing that Winston Churchill, not Adolf Hitler, as is popularly believed, being the chief architect

and villain of World War II. So provocative stuff. What's next, Chris? Yes. So you heard there as well, various qualifications, right? Maybe I'm being a bit hyperbolic and he was referencing that he mentioned this initially to Jocko Willink because he did a podcast series with him. So that's who he's saying he initially floated the idea with. So one thing was, you know, maybe actually Churchill was the chief

villain for making the conflict escalate and prolong and his responsibility has been overlooked and he's been treated to a hagiographic presentation. Another point is that perhaps the whole thing around the Holocaust and that kind of thing, it wasn't all a premeditated plan, like the kind of way the final solution is presented. It was more like an accident in a way. I'm saying, Germany, look, they put themselves into a position, and Adolf Hitler is chiefly responsible for this, but his whole regime is responsible for it, that when they went into the East in 1941, they launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners and so forth,

that they were going to have to handle. They went in with no plan for that. And they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead there. You know, you have like letters as early as July, August 1941 from commandants of these makeshift camps that they're setting up for these millions of people who werehift camps that they're setting up for these millions of people who are surrendering or people they're rounding up. And there's two months after, a month or two after Barbarossa was launched. And they're writing back to the high command in Berlin saying, we can't feed these people. We don't have the food to feed these people.

And one of them actually says, rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn't it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now? And so this is like two months into the invasion, right? And like my view on this, you know, I argue with my Zionist interlocutors about this all the time with regard to the current war in Gaza. cuters about this all the time with regard to the current war in Gaza. Yeah. So there you go. There was a lot of death on the Eastern front in the occupied territories in the East, a lot of deaths among Russian POWs, but there was no plan to mistreat them like this.

It happened really because of lack of preparation, which you can blame them for. It was a logistics issue. It was, and it was actually, they were thinking about it humanely. Like they wanted to ease the suffering of the POWs. That's, you know. Yep. So that's a different, certainly a different take than what is commonly believed. Yes.

Also, also Hitler, you know, vilified as this, you know, horrific dictator who, you know, launched an aggressive war across Europe, you know, that emulated millions and millions of lives and caused untold suffering. What's not talked about is how much of a peacenik he actually was. A year goes by 1940 comes around and they're still at war and so he launches his invasion to the West takes over France takes over Western and Northern Europe once that's done and the British have you know escaped at Dunkirk there's no British force left on the continent there's no opposing force left on the continent in other words the war is over and the Germans won. But by what point?

Fall of 1940. So there's literally no opposing force on the continent. And throughout that summer, Hitler is firing off radio broadcasts, giving speeches, literally sending planes over to drop leaflets over London and other British cities, trying to get the message to these people that Germany does not want to fight you. Like, we don't want to fight you. You're offering peace proposals that, you know, said, you keep all your overseas colonies. We don't want any of that. We want Britain to be strong. The world needs Britain to be strong, you know, especially as we face this communist

threat and so forth. Like, this is what's going on. And I think that if there were people in Britain who, well, if they hadn't put it this way, if they hadn't been so successful at delegitimizing the peace approach by demonizing Neville Chamberlain and so forth and holding him responsible for the invasion of Poland, that people would have understood, like we don't need another repeat of the First World War. Yeah, so there you go. After the fall of France, the retreat of the BEF at Dunkirk, Germany had occupied France,

the Netherlands, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Poland, many, many other places beside, essentially controlled all of central Europe. After that point, Britain and Winston Churchill, it's fair to say, was instrumental in this, did not make a separate peace with Germany, decided to fight on. So really maybe it was the British who were... ...Combining the conflict. were. It's not. I mean the conflict.

Now, some might view that as an opportunistic request whereby Germany wanted to focus on fighting the Russians in the East without worrying about their Western flank and that that might not have been their long-term plan to leave Britain alone. But even in that case though, Matt, yeah, the presentation is we should, you know, Hitler, a man of his word, it's fair to say. Like someone famously good. Yeah, that's right. He made a lot of agreements.

There were a lot of treaties signed, you know, prior to the fall of France and Hitler famously kept every one of them very, very true to his word. Uh, when he said he wanted peace, you know, you can believe him. Yes. So I think it's fair to say it's a rather naive view about like Hitler's intentions. They're no, it may have been in his strategic interests to have a temporary truce with Britain or you know like he might have not have wanted to pursue the conflict even in the next couple of years but

fair to say his aspirations were quite far-reaching in scope based on historic documents about what Hitler wanted for the Third Reich. Absolutely. At that point, he'd largely achieved most of his aims in terms of dominating the entire of Europe. He was already developing plans to basically betray Stalin over the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact where they divided up Poland between them. He was going to break yet another agreement and get even more living space to the East. And yeah, a peace with the UK, so as not to provide like a launching pad for allied pressure on the Western Front would have been very convenient.

I have no difficulty believing that. Yes. So in any case, Churchill, his reason for opposing the Nazis was because he was a warmonger, an alcoholic, a psychopath, as Darrell Cooper explains. It's well known, very many of the sins of Churchill through his time in power in different stages, right? Like his treatment in India, there's various presentations of him not being purely a heroic figure, right? And Darrell Cooper agrees with those in general, a very negative presentation, but also it might have been due to some other factors that were motivating him. And this is 1920. So this is shortly after the Bolshevik revolution. Basically the point of his paper is he says these people who are over there, they're all going one direction or the other. They're going to be Bolsheviks. They're going to be Zionists. We want them to be Zionists. And so we need to support this. And so that was

early on. There was an ideological component of it. But then as time goes on, you read stories about Churchill going bankrupt and needing money, getting bailed out by people who shared his interests in terms of Zionism, but also his hostility. I think his hostility to Germany was real. I don't think that he necessarily had to be bribed to have that feeling know, I think he was, to an extent, put in place by people, the financiers, by a media complex that wanted to make sure that he was the guy who, you know, who was representing Britain in that conflict for a reason. Well, that's very reasonable of him to exclude Jewish financier bribery as a motivating factor for Churchill.

Oh, he didn't exclude it though. He said it like Churchill might have not liked Germany, but it's clear that he was put in position by financiers who supported his views about Zionism and other unnamed things. And the media, Matt, the media complex. Because Churchill famously adored the British media prior to World War II. They really were in favor. The reason I'm using this sarcastic tone is because, as historians have pointed out, he was not promoted by the media prior to World War II, and even post World War II, if he doesn't remain the prime minister. So yeah, just this presentation, as you heard, is linking Churchill to pro-Zionist financiers,

right? Yes. The dog whistles are whistling. I can hear them. It doesn't take very long. And that not being the primary motivation, okay, sure. But certainly clear that the things that send the metrics of contributing factors. Yeah, that's right.

And in the long thread that he made sort of in defense against some of the pushback he got from that interview, he does walk back that stuff a bit, just part of what I was thinking of, but not nearly enough. But do go on, Chris, do go on. particular interview. And this is just to highlight Tucker and his epistemic standards. Tucker throughout all of this is saying, you can't even question these things. And both of them are presenting it like nobody has been allowed to look at the history of World War II in any critical depth. Nobody's ever considered things from the German perspective, right? Which is an insane claim to me, given, as many people have pointed out, the History Channel, even the History Channel, side to side, all the books and things written is in large part comprised by documentaries about World War II and Hitler and all these kinds of things. And it is not the case that nobody talked about what caused the rise of the Nazis or why there was sympathy for Hitler's point of view in Germany and so on.

But anyway, that's just here. Tucker responded to one point and the level of epistemic seriousness that he brings here. And there's also peril in knowing the truth about things. I mean, if when we finally find out how President Kennedy was murdered in 1963, we finally find out what all these weird lights in the sky are at night, we really get to the truth of that. Will we be better off or not?

I mean, those are fair questions. I don't know the answer. But let me just say what I completely agree with you, particularly any unifying myth is important. I'm just highly distressed by the uses to which the myths about World War II have been put in the context of modern foreign policy, particularly the war in Ukraine.

But not just the war in Ukraine, so many others. Churchill's the good guy, Neville Chamberlain's the bad guy. You know, it's just, it's too, Pat, it's obviously quite the all, but it also has justified like the killing of millions of people since the end of the Second World War. And so I do think it's fair to ask like what, what really was going on? Hmm. Yeah. What was going on, Matt? What is going on? It's so banal, so hot to view Hitler as the bad guy.

Yeah. Like he liked cats he painted. He, you know, had romances. He proposed peace treaties. Um, and Tucker's just wondering, Matt, you know, what romances. He proposed peace treaties. And Tucker is just wondering, you know, what when we find out what happened with the Kennedy assassination, with the flashing lights in the sky, these are just questions, right?

But when we find out what's going on there, it's just that, you know, the conspiratorial mindset, like you said, roams across the different topics and it links them all together. And the general thing is whatever the official narrative is, has to be, you know, wrong. But it's again, it's only specific official narratives because he's quite open to the official narrative of the Russian stele, for example. Yeah, yeah, you know, it is interesting that he sees the sort of more

conventional, like conventional histories of World War II, of which there have been so many thousands. It's got to be the most written about and filmed and discussed topic in history of all time. It's interesting how Tucker's framing there is that it's like the conventional view of it is like a myth, like the founding fathers or the, you know, every country has their myths. And, you know, like, like with most lies, I guess there are grains of truth to that. You know, obviously popular conceptions of pretty much all historical events do

tend to be a little bit two-dimensional, but wow, I mean, he takes it to that next level, which is that, you know, it's all a lie, basically it's a fabricated story. The truth was actually entirely different. In fact, the opposite of what everyone fondly believes. Hitler is the peacemaker, Winston Churchill and Britain as the aggressor. Yeah. And also, I don't think it is that unknown, no, like that there were atrocities committed by the Allies, right? Or that there was acts of war that would be regarded as horrendous war crimes now, right? Like bombing civilian

populations or the atomic bombs, right? And what they did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These are all things that are not taboo to discuss or there's documentaries, there's debates, there's discussions, and there's been various critical historical looks at various simplistic portrayals. But that is not the status. And even with that, you have historians who paint more complex views of the history, but they're very clear about the role that Nazism and Hitler played and the atrocities that are on the side of the axis.

Yeah. They're very different things. You can take a critical view. There's a great space between some sort of simplistic good guys, bad guys narrative and this historical revisionism, Nazi apologetics that Darrell Cooper is doing. For example, you can point to the Versailles Treaty and the very harsh conditions that were imposed on Germany after World War I, and you can understand the causes, the economic crash, the worries about communism.

Like you can understand, you can look into the sort of understandable reasons why someone like Hitler would be appealing and understand the causes without justifying it and say, and essentially lying to pretend that it's all okay. This is the bit that just boggles my mind. I remember at A level in Northern Ireland, right? A level history, studying about World War II and the causes of World War II and whatever. I remember whole chapters about the Versailles Treaty and the unfair repayment schemes and the level of

resentment and all. This is presented that nobody has ever discussed the road to World War II and what motivated it. And I'm like, was I at this insane school of like contrarian heterodoxy? No, it was on the syllabus. And this was, you know, in the UK, like 20 odd years ago, or however old I am, no, like 20 or 30 years ago. So like, yeah, just it's- No, it's very true. I remember learning about this stuff in school too. Like, it's taught, it's not taboo. And in many ways, it's kind of funny, isn't it? Because this guy, I assume he's not just a straight up Nazi who's trying to reimagine

history to portray them in a better light. I mean, assuming he's deluded and lazy and mistaken to some degree, in many ways, he's got the wrong war. Like, World War I is a far better candidate for something that people don't think about as much, might perhaps be prone to putting it in a frame of good guy, you know, a good side or a bad side more like world war two. And I think it's generally a lot more complicated than people think, but it doesn't have the Nazis in it, I suppose, which maybe is part of the

reason for their, for their interest in world war two. Yeah. I think it might be slightly sympathetic given some of the surrounding evidence. But nonetheless, let's get to that. Cause we'll get to him offering some, you know, reinterpretations or justifications for what he was arguing or this kind of thing. So have you ever come across the libertarian idiot, Matt Dave Smith? No, no, I don't think I have.

He's a comedian and also a libertarian of the US variety. He's associated with the Mises caucus, which you may or may not know, but like it's the more insane fringe of the right-wing libertarians in the US, right? And another thing which might be worth noticing is he's often recommended by Joe Rogan as a good source to go to if you want accurate information. Now, he's actually also had a little bit of a horseshoe thing because in the Israel-Gaza conflict, he is firmly against Israel, critical of Israel. And so this has led to him being, you know, positively regarded at times on the progressive left. But let's be clear, he's like a libertarian

reactionary right-wing idiot. And just to illustrate that, here's him talking to Darrell Cooper in an interview after the controversy and all this. And he's just setting the scene about his response to this interview with Tucker. I knew you and Tucker were friends. And then I just saw on Twitter that you were on Tucker's show. And I went, yes, I'm going to love this because I love everything Tucker does. I love everything Darryl does. I'm going to love this.

This this interview. I watched it. I was like, wow, that sure was great. And there wasn't even a part of me that was like, this is going to set the world on fire So it's just it was kind of interesting to be like, oh, oh wow They really like, you know the circles I float in it wasn't that crazy of a thing To say it's like yeah, we all know Churchill is the villain I thought that was common knowledge, but did you like when you left Tucker, did you anticipate it was going to be anything like this?

No, of course not. Oh, they all know that, do they, Chris? Yeah, well, so you can take that as, you know, the view about people highlighting the colonial aspects and racist aspects of Churchill, right? I would say that has been more center in recent years than previously. Yeah, but that's not the issue, right? Like the issue isn't saying Churchill has plenty of things that you can criticize him for in his stances and things that he did. It's saying he's the cheap villain of World War Two.

And no, Deeb Smith suggests, yeah, that's, you know, I thought that was common knowledge. No, no, not common knowledge unless you're hanging around in very sketchy circles. Yeah, it always seems like opportunistic timing, right? Because, you know, Churchill's always, even during his lifetime, he was the subject of a hell of a lot of criticism and controversy. And since then, you then, there's probably, if anything, a growing kind of dislike of Churchill's being a monster on the progressive left. And it almost feels like it's opportunistic on the part of people who've got motivations to rewrite the history of the Nazis and World War II to sort of jump on this bandwagon because maybe they see more fertile ground at the moment for this kind of thing. And so Churchill's

the sort of link to normies to agree with this proposition. Yeah. Yeah. So there's that context. And now Dave Smith also is going to note that, you know, the normies, they got all upset because they heard some idea that was, you know, contradicting what they've been indoctrinated with. They just were, we just were freaking out for no good reason. And they didn't even notice that he added disclaimers. We talk a lot about strategic disclaimers. Here's somebody that absolutely thinks disclaimers make everything fine. Like if you have disclaimers, listen to this. I was thinking about this because for whatever reason, I don't know why this is what came to my mind, but I imagine... Have you ever read Democracy, the God that Failed by Hans Hermann Hoppe? Yeah. Yeah. So it's a fantastic book.

I highly recommend it. Whether you agree or not with the central thesis of the book, it's a great thought experiment and it makes you think it's a really brilliant book. But so Hoppe disclaims in this book, 15 times maybe, that essentially the core thesis of the book is that he's a libertarian who thinks the preferable legal order is a libertarian order, but he thinks monarchy is preferable to democracy. And he makes this very, very clear throughout the book. And I cannot tell you how many people have just told me, like, well, Hoppe is a monarchist. He said it in Democracy, the God

that Failed. And you're like, did you miss the 15 disclaimers in the book? And it is so funny that even as you in the clip, the clip that Pierce Morgan is playing me to get you, I'm like, but what about that part in the clip where he just said, I'm being hyperbolic or I'm not, oh, you'd assume if I'm criticizing Churchill, that means I must be supporting Hitler. But of course I'm not supporting Hitler." And they go, this guy's supporting Hitler. And you're like, did you? Is everybody just so hysterical that they're incapable of listening to what was actually said, even when they're playing the clip on their show? It's just

really wild. Yeah, he does like disclaimers. Chris, I think a lot hinges on the reasonability of a lot of the specific propositions that he makes about Hitler not really being the one who intended all of this death and suffering and war and occupation and invasions. Because I guess if the underlying stuff that he's citing, if the underlying thoughts that he's hypothetically entertaining is somewhat reasonable, then you can go, well, this is a legitimate thing to wonder about, to discuss. But on the other hand, if all of those things that he's citing are entirely wrong, and if he's misrepresenting the historical record, then it starts to look like Nazi apologetics. Would you agree? I would agree. And I would also add that he references a book, Democracy, the God that Failed, which is by Hans Hermann Hopp. And he talks about how that book has all this disclaimers and

people have said that that, you know, he's a monarchist and whatnot. And I looked into this claim and yes, there's good reason that people have argued that. And anybody looking at it critically and not accepting simple deflections when it's convenient would note that he has argued that monarchy would preserve individual liberty more effectively than democracy. And he's argued with people who have provided things, counteracting that, why they're wrong. And also this guy really seems like a terrible, terrible person. His version of libertarianism is arguing for one that can exclude people for their sexuality. And like, he's very popular in the far right end

of libertarianism. And of course, Steve Smith regards him as like a fantastic guy, unfairly vilified, you know, with really insightful ideas that only reactive people would regard feverably. But it just goes to show that these people, you know, they're the kind of people that fall for Brett Weinstein saying, I'm not advancing a conspiracy theory and then advancing a conspiracy theory and say, well, but he said he wasn't. Did you not hear him say that?

And just to support that, Matt, Alexandra Smarrinos retweeted by Daryl Cooper said the following, what people attempting to smear martyr me don't understand is that you sound ridiculous to anyone who's listened to his work for any length of time. Am I asking you to go and listen to 40 hours of his podcast before

you're entitled to speak? Absolutely not. Just informing you that the unanimous impression you give to anyone who's familiar with the man is that you're propagandized, clueless, and or malicious. It is what it is. So this is Alexandros who often falls for disclaimers. He's like a Pac-Man for disclaimers.

He just eats them up. But here as well, his thing is he liked some of his podcasts. So that means that the information must be good. Like if he produced good podcasts, he cannot be engaged in Nazi apologetics. It's impossible. Yeah. I think the other aspect of the material you're playing there is that, you know, when making a decision about whether to extend maximum charity to people

who might be making on the face of it pretty on the nose interpretations of history, I think it is reasonable to look at some surrounding context and to get a sense of their motivations. If they are one of the very small percentage of people who are in favor of monarchy or something like that rather than democracies in Western countries, then well, that's a red flag as well. It is consistent with a less charitable reading. What is also consistent with a less charitable reading of his interpretation or re-evaluation of history is some of his tweets. For example, this one here, which on the left has a picture of Hitler and a bunch of other Nazis in front of the Eiffel Tower, a very

famous photo after the fall of France, contrasted on the right there with a photo from the Olympic Games opening ceremony, which was also, you know, roundly hated in right-wing circles for being too work. And he says this may be putting it too crudely for some, but the picture on the left, the one with Hitler, was infinitely preferable in virtually every way than the picture on the left, the one with Hitler was infinitely preferable in virtually every way than the one on the right. And he's tagged in Cernovich to that, just for good measure. Mike Cernovich, conspiracy theorist.

Yes. So, so he's saying, Matt, just to be clear that it's infinitely preferable. The Nazi occupation of France was or is infinitely preferable to a France that could produce the opening ceremony where it featured the scene that conservatives didn't like, the bearded ladies or the potential thing invoking the last supper and whatnot. Yeah. And again, you can extend infinite charity and say, Oh, it's Twitter.

He's shitposting. He's exaggerating for effect and so on. But still, that's not the kind of thing that even anti-work people who really hated the Paris Olympic ceremony generally tweet. So, uh, yeah, it does tend to advise against the charitable interpretation of what he's doing, um, in this historical revisionism. Yeah, that's not his only tweets like that as well. It's which, uh, you know, so it's almost like there's a pattern of behavior

that might, one might discern right in the things that he tweets about and the stances that he's advocating for. And if you want to hear him attempt to defend that tweet, by the way, Matt, here's him talking about it with Dave Smith. I put out a tweet right after the Paris Olympic ceremony at the, you know, the last supper thing where I posted a picture of Hitler and his boys walking in front of the Eiffel Tower. And I posted a picture of that last supper desecration.

And I, you know, I said that said that the outcome of the picture on the right was preferable to the one on the left or something like that, which I took down after a few people who I trust to tell me when I'm out of bounds, like, let me know that they thought I was. But I told them, like, the reason that I did that is I was outraged by what I was watching at the Paris Olympics. And I was reaching for the most extreme example possible to show my out, to express my outrage

about this. And in our society, it's not the devil, you know. If I would have posted a picture of Satan, like, looming over the Eiffel Tower and said that this is better than that, nobody would even got it, you know. it just, it wouldn't have landed at all because Hitler's the devil. And the Nazis are the legions of hell and, you know, in, in Germany, that's, every society has a heaven and hell. Every society has a God and a devil. Right.

So it's just a coincidence that he's super into revisionist Nazi history, but he was just looking for like a metaphor of like the devil of the worst possible thing. And that's why he said the fall of France to the Nazis was preferable to the woke thing. Right. Yeah. And he was just looking to provoke a reaction, Matt. But the argument there, just to be clear, he isn't backing off what he actually said, right? He's just explaining the logic.

So his logic is, yeah, the opening ceremony with its taboo-busting stuff, that's much worse than the Nazis taking control of France and instigating anti-Semitic, racial hierarchical system, you know, just the whole Nazi program of the terrible, terrible thing. Genocide, genocide and all. Yeah, genocide, genocide and totalitarian control. That's all infinitely, but he's not looking that back, right? He's just saying he really dislikes the other thing and he wanted to invoke something that is bad.

Yeah. I mean, other tweets too, like some of the pushback he got was someone said in your read of history, do you believe that a unified continental Europe under Nazi Hitler rule would have been a better outcome than what actually transpired? It goes on a little bit, but basically that's the question, which I think is a fair question given that he basically blames Britain and Churchill for not making a peace after the fall of France. And his reply was, I can't imagine anything worse happening than what did happen. So it's pretty clear he's saying that

the continuing war against Germany that resulted in the downfall of the Nazis and Mussolini was worse than any other option that he could imagine including continuing Nazi totalitarian genocidal rule over all of Europe. This one clearly isn't like a shitpost or an analogy. He's not joking. He's just giving a straightforward answer, I think. Well, there we go. Maybe you know, maybe we're being unfair, Matt. So there was a long thread that he posted on Twitter in response to clarify. He said, you know, here's a Churchill thread, like following this, and it's about 50 tweets or so long. And various historians

have looked at that thread where he's, if you extend complete charting or like, look, he was just speaking hyperbolically and offhand in an interview, he was being provocative, but he's much more responsible than that. So he had time to craft this thread, right? And various historians have looked at the details he's posted in that thread and what he said in the interview as well, and have shown that it is absolutely full of historical inaccuracies, revisionism, apologetics. So it isn't that he made an offhand exaggerated comparison, it's that his fundamental knowledge on the topic is revisionist apologetic and relying on inaccurate information. Yeah, I would say more than inaccurate, like twisted,

distorted misreadings of the historical record. And yeah, historians have done a great job of going through that and showing that, look, it's not just that he's got a quirky, sort of high-level abstract, you know, different interpretation of what if. It's based on a whole bunch of historical details that are provably, demonstrably wrong. It's seven kinds of wrong laid upon one another. So yeah, I think that was very revealing because that was his chance to, and he took it, to sort of explain himself and make a very careful justification for why he said the things he said. And he actually demonstrated that everything he said was based on historical misinformation.

Yeah. Yeah. So there's a channel called The History Underground, a YouTube channel. They have an R52 video where you have a historian who's focusing on Churchill. And they go through the thread, not the interview with Tucker, and basically rebut all of the points and highlight where he's doing things like chopping up quotes so that they present Churchill as taking a stance that he was actually arguing against and so on. So it's not just misreadings, it's deliberate misrepresentations, right?

At various points. So that's a good one. And actually, another historian, Matt, that you may or may not know, do you know Niall Ferguson? Yes. A British historian or Scottish, you know, but he's pro-union. So a British historian who was invited on trigonometry in response for this. Now Niall Ferguson is a conservative historian as well. He, I think he does in general write good history books, but he's also, you know,

got a quite significant political slant to his worldview. I don't know the extent to which that influences his historical works. I think in general, they're well regarded. But he certainly is on the conservative side of the spectrum. He's not a bleeding heart liberal. Let's just listen how he characterizes the arguments that Cooper was making on trigonometry. For me, a historian is somebody who goes into archives and libraries and pauses over dusty documents and tries to work out what happened and then writes articles and books. And the books have book notes which tell you where they got the evidence from. And I don't really think you're a historian if you're not doing that.

So that was the first surprise. And the second surprise was, of course, that Daryl Cooper's views on Churchill and on many things appear to be those of the National Socialists of the 1930s and 1940s. So to have him described as the villain of the piece of World War II came as a surprise, especially when it became clear in the course of the conversation between Tucker Carlson and Daryl Cooper that in truth Hitler is the hero of World War II.

Now this is an unusual position to take, to say the least. I mean you criticize in church lives, that's common, we hear that a lot. But when you hear somebody criticizing church life in the exact same terms the Nazis used at the thing is he's completely clear that Darrell is just repeating the talking points of the Nazis and, and fascists. And he's a historian who's written about this period as well. And yeah, he's calling it out for what it is. Yeah, I think it's not that hard. I mean, you and I aren't going to rebut all of this guy's, you

know, historical argument, because we're not a debunking channel. We'll put links in the show notes to people that have done it well who are historians. But like anyone who's a bit of a history geek and has read any basic history books about that period will know that it just, everything he says smells to high heaven. The point is, is it's not hard. Yes, an expert historian can debunk it in detail with reference to primary sources and so on. But unless you're a conspiracy theorist who doesn't believe any of the standard histories of the time, I'm just talking conventional, popular accounts

like the sorts of things Anthony Beaver or someone might write. I mean, if you're just basically familiar with it, you'll know that nothing he said adds up in the list. Uh, so, uh, yeah, it's not hard. And it's good at least that there's consensus on this that the guy's full of shit. Yes, yes. And he talks a little bit about some of the reason, the motives that might be pushing this and like making it gain traction on the right and on social media. In the realm of podcasts, with all due respect, no such rules apply. There are no footnotes on a podcast, there's no fact checking, there's no effort in fact to challenge somebody unless you or the broadcast does it. And what's notable

about Tucker Carlson's conversation with Daryl Cooper is that at no point does Carlson challenge any of the wild claims that Cooper makes. He just agrees with them and sometimes amplifies them. Now, why pick on Churchill? I think it's partly in the American context that the older generation of American conservatives have long idolized Churchill. And you'll never really go wrong writing a book about Churchill in the United States and going on a speaking tour about Churchill. You'll always get an audience. So part of

this is the old, I'll call it punk rock position, that if something's sacred, you should have a go at it and it's bound to get clicks. And it certainly works in that way, sort of outrageous and provocative and daring and edgy to criticize somebody who's been idolized by previous generations. I think Ferguson's point there about the complete lack of pushback, the complete softball style interview

where there is no effort at all to challenge the interviewee on any of their points and there's only yes ending and amplifying. I mean, that applies pretty well more broadly, doesn't it? I think it applies to Trigonometry, it applies to Lex Fridman, it applies to so much of that, independent podcast sphere, doesn't it, Chris?

Yeah, yeah. And actually, the interesting thing was that trigonometry, Niall Ferguson was very clear throughout this about what was going on and what he thinks is going on with Tucker. And it clearly at times caused a little bit of discomfort for Constantine and Francis, right? Because, well, just like listen to this. My illusions have been completely shattered by the Poudin interview and now by this interview, because it seems as if Tucker is happy, is in fact eager to give platforms to people whose positions are a tissue of lies and politically aligned with real fascism.

And I use the term deliberately. The word fascist is overused. People are always calling people fascists or Nazis, as you said. But it still has a meaning. And if your positions are, as Putin's have become, or as Daryl Cooper's appear to be, clearly analogous with the positions of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists, then you are a fascist. You are in fact a Nazi. And that's the thing about these two interviews that I find troubling. I don't understand

why somebody who was once a highly effective conservative broadcaster has decided to become at least an enabler of fascists. Do you think part of it, because it's a dangerous thing to intuit motive, but if we look at it in a broader perspective, do you think part of it is we're sick of experts, we feel let down by institutions, we've been lied to again and again, we look at universities and we go, you know, they're pumping out all of this stuff, gender is a social construct, and we go, well, we can't trust you on this,

so why can we trust you on World War II? If you're going to talk nonsense about something as basic as gender, which we all know, well, we all know what the truth is, then why wouldn't you make up this stuff about Hitler, for want of a better word? I think that's part of the attraction of forbidden fruits on the right. The left has played so fast and loose with scholarly rules that it's almost as if the rule book has been thrown out the window and you might as well join in in this strange

game of distortion. But I'm not going to impute a motive. I don't know. It might just be that this is the way you get clicks. But isn't it somehow the fault of the woke? That's a general thing. And just there's one more clip from this segment dealing with the issue about immigration and the rhetoric that has been around there. And again, Niall Ferguson, I have significant disagreements with him, but nonetheless. He knows a Nazi when he sees one. You can...

Yeah, he knows a Nazi when he sees one. You can hear that. Yeah, he knows a Nazi when he sees one. And when talking about the recent rhetoric from the right around immigration, he says this. That's the background to my warning that if you start to believe this stuff, if you start to say, you know what, there might be something to this, there might be something to this idea of racial hierarchy. If you start saying, you know what, it's be something to this. There might be something to this idea of racial hierarchy. If you start saying, you know what, it's not just that these people have a different culture

and they're poorer than us and they do things differently from us, but they're fundamentally incompatible with our society, then you have to understand that the path to genocide is the path you're choosing. That's the lesson of history. That's what the book says. The book says the most shocking thing about the 20th century is that the Holocaust arose

from the society, Germany, where the level of intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews was highest in the world, the highest in the world. And we haven't fully understood why the great migrations of the late 19th century and early 20th century culminated in a genocidal regime in of all places Germany, which also was the place with the highest level of education and the best universities in the world. Despite my career writing about this issue, I don't think we've got very far down the road of understanding the German catastrophe and seeing its relevance for us. On the contrary, we are in the midst, I think, of making the early steps that were taken in the late 19th century by the early racial theorists down that Primrose path to hell again. And the only role a serious historian can play, I think, is to say, please understand this is how it begins.

It's pretty dire. And not the kind of thing you tend to hear. No, but trigonometry. Yeah, it's the woke that are the concerns. So saying he's seen the like pathway to fascism on the anti-immigrant right. Populist right. Yeah, I know. It is, that is not palatable stuff for trigonometry.

And we saw the response of trigonometry's audience was really quite strong. They hated what Neil Ferguson was saying, didn't they? They really thought this was awful. To be fair, there is parts where Constantine agrees and is very critical about Tucker and he's been arguing with him online and they chose to have Nile Ferguson on. Yeah. Right. But it's fair to say that the response to this, even though they did their best to provide pushback. Neil, but let me do something Tucker didn't do, which is challenge his guest even though they did their best to provide pushback. Neil, but let me do something Tucker didn't do, which is challenge his guest as robustly as he can.

The reason I said I don't think it's just a loss of principle, although I think your point is valid, of course, is that there is a very real problem, which is one of the things they talked about at the end of that interview, which is if you look at a place like the UK or Ireland, which is the example they used to, and you say, well, look, let's look at the government's own statistics. By 2066, British people are going to be, white British people are going to be the minority

in their own country. By 2070, Irish people are projected to be the minority in their own country. What is the same conservative answer to the fact that we've had two decades of mass immigration on an unprecedented scale? Shall we say, like, present the alternative perspective. If you look at the comments under the YouTube, or it is unbridled anger at Nal Ferguson and saying, you know, he doesn't understand and all this kind of thing. And in part, Matt, it is specifically because of this segment. And there is a kind of sense that there's levels of mass immigration combined with immigration from hostile cultures, frankly, just saying it out loud, right? What's the answer to all

of those criticisms? Because a lot of people would say, well, you know, I'm not a Nazi this, and I'm not interested in those unprincipled things, but this is a real problem, and I keep voting for governments, including conservative governments, that do nothing about this, in fact, make the problem worse. So what are sensible conservatives to think about this? Well, this is the central question, and this is why I say the principle really matters, and if you choose the dark side, the consequences will be dire.

First, let me put my cards on the table. I'm married to an African. We have two children. You know, we're contributing to turning the population of the United Kingdom slightly browner over time. So it would be very odd for me to say it's dreadful that there are more brown people in London than there used to be when I was a kid.

That would be insane hypocrisy. And it would be very odd for me to be opposed to asylum seekers when Ayaan, my wife, was once an asylum seeker. And it was by applying for asylum asylum she was a get out of an arranged marriage in what was the oppressive Islamic culture she'd grown up in. I'm an immigrant too, I emigrated from the United Kingdom to the United States and I'm a naturalized American, I'm a dual citizen. So how could we possibly have a power-lite view of immigration? That's the personal. But let me take you back to War of the

World. War of the World is not just a history of World War II, it's only beginning in 1939, end in 1945. It's actually a general theory about hatred that takes the story right back to the late 19th century and the great migrations of that era. history has been characterized by large scale waves of migration. You're no more able to stop those, by and large, than King Canute was able to stop the tide coming in. And he's going to go on to talk about, you know, there's always been migrations and there's always been reactions against it, but people do become integrated in the countries. And it's not always smooth and this kind of thing, but just like this is the reality of human history.

But like, obviously that message does not align with a populist, right, anti-immigrant sentiment. This is the way I think about the problem. We are, as a species, multicoloured. And there's all kinds of variants within Homo sapiens, but no speciation. We've stayed the same species all the way, and that is why it is perfectly possible for a Scotsman and a Somali to have two beautiful boys. And God bless them, and God bless all the children who are produced by mixed unions in Britain, in the United States, all over the world.

They're the future. And it's a beautiful future. Actually, it looked better on the whole than people of pure race with no disrespect to my white children by my first marriage. Also, very beautiful. But this is the future. We can't avoid this future unless we want to go extinct as a species. Why? Because population collapse is a reality for a whole bunch of ethnic subgroups.

So Constantine's and Trigonometry's audience have responded extremely negatively to this. And I would anticipate they will have someone on soon enough to write the Balance. Yes. Yep. Good prediction Chris. We'll see if it comes true Yeah, just a broader thought there is that it's interesting that distinction because you know, Niall Ferguson is a bona fide Conservative right lots of things you and I disagree with but there's a clear split there Lots of things you and I disagree with, but there's a clear split there between the way he looks at things and the way this sort of new online populist, conspiratorial, reactionary, xenophobic right looks at things. And it sort of parallels, I think, a lot of the split that's gone on in the United States

between this Trump-dominated MAGA movement and the old school Republicans. So many leaders from the Republican Party have come out against Donald Trump, famously Dick Cheney just recently, because they're not up for that kind of thing. And, you know, God, there's a big difference between the way you and I look at the world and the way that Dick Cheney looks at the world. But it's kind of sobering to appreciate that there is again this big gulf with this xenophobic reactionary right. But at least there's a slim element of comfort, I suppose,

that at least conservative or progressive normies can at least agree that we're looking at things the same way. Yeah. And you know, credit words drew Matt because we're about to look at another response, but the trigonometry's credit. They got a historian who was very critical about the conversation. Yes, you know, like a conservative figure, but condemned it in no like half-hearted manner and they put it out. So like in terms of the way to respond to what Tucker put out, I can't fault them that much. Like they're clearly

uneasy with various things during the interview and whatnot, but this is one of their better responses is to have sought out somebody with expertise who is going to annoy their audience. And I'm just giving credit where it's due. I think they are going to undo that credit soon enough, but yeah, in trigonometry, they surpassed the bar of supporting Tucker reflexively. Yeah, absolutely. And non-ironic kudos to trigonometry. And who knows?

Hopefully, you're wrong. Maybe they won't backpedal on that. We'll see. Let's see. Let's see. So that was a wide range of response. You can see it was add up. It was retweeted by people like Elon Musk, the original conversation. Then we've covered some of the responses,

critical mainstream historians have torn it apart, but the kind of alternative ecosphere that Nal Farkasam was criticizing there has responded positively to it. But you also see the history podcast that I mentioned on YouTube, that's alternative media. They did an extensive critical breakdown. So it's not a universal thing, but just on X, on Elon Musk's version of Twitter, there's a lot more sympathy for frankly,

the neo-Nazi and the anti-Semitic aspects of it. So we received well. I missed that Chris. Did Elon Musk retweet this original interview favorably? Yes, yes. I think he said something like very interesting or something like that and then he deleted it as he does. There's nothing shitty that he doesn't get behind. No, he doesn't stick his finger. Yeah, this is true. Now, Matt, to the final part of this Tour de Force across the Darrell Cooper verse.

So Sam Harris released an episode recently called Where Are the Grown Ups? And it was specifically about this. It's just from a couple of days ago We got a couple of people on Twitter tagging us in saying oh sounds like Sam You know has paid attention to various things that you've said so you might enjoy this episode it's quite harsh and Tucker and I think that is true for The first two thirds of the episode and then I think that is true for the first two thirds of the episode. And then I think something happens, which I want to discuss because I think it's related to guru dynamics that we cover.

But let's start with the good parts. Okay, so here's Sam doing his slamming on Trump, which he often does and is quite eloquent about them. So here we go, some bashing of Trump. Let me just make my view about this crystal clear. The claim that Donald Trump is so outside the norms of our politics, so as to put many of our institutions and even our democracy in jeopardy, is not a dishonest provocation hoping to incite violent lunatics.

It is in fact a sober judgment made by serious journalists and scholars of both parties about the consequences of promoting a malignant narcissist of this sort riding atop a personality cult to the presidency. None of those facts change because a madman or two make attempts on his life. We can't suddenly pretend that Trump is a different person or that Trumpism is a healthier political movement than it is because of these incidents.

The way to talk about Trump and Trumpism responsibly is to say what's true. And one truth is that the rhetoric coming from Trump's supporters is far more demagogic and irresponsible than anything that has been said by Democrats before or after these recent attempts on Trump's life. Yeah, reminiscent of Niall Ferguson there, I think, speaking clearly and forcefully, a little bit more verbose than Niall, but still good stuff, I think. A little bit slower. Yeah.

A little bit slower, unfortunately. But yeah, and this is in response to the second forwarded assassination attempt on Trump. So Sam is just saying this doesn't actually change the calculation on the criticisms of Trump, which is of course true. Right. Now, on Elon Musk, Sam is also pretty good. Apparently, Elon Musk, genius that he is, tweeted, and no one's even trying to assassinate President Biden or Vice President Harris, followed by a thinking face emoji. He sent that out to 200 million people before deleting it after

there was a backlash. And honestly, that's not even close to the worst thing he's done on X. The worst thing he's done is to repeatedly engage with and promote some of the most odious liars and conspiracists that exist on the platform, and thereby poison our public conversation about more or less any topic that is politically polarizing, all in the name of free speech, of course. Well said. Yeah, not a fan of Elon Musk,

not to get to the Tucker thing. So what does Sam think about Tucker? As I've said before, I think Tucker himself is a symptom of much of what currently ails us. He's an example of a person who has been driven out of the mainstream media, I think for good reason, and has grown increasingly radicalized by that experience. And he's worth paying attention to because he has tremendous influence in right-wing populist circles, that is, within Trumpistan and amid the wreckage of the Republican Party.

He had a prime-time slot at the Republican National Convention, you might recall. I've heard many people suggest that he might one day run for the presidency himself, given his popularity. And he's also taken seriously in alternative media. That's a pretty good case from Sam there about why we need to pay attention to figures like Tucker because, you know, they have tremendous influence, man. Now I just want to note, just for the sake of completion. The historical record?

The historical record. There was somebody that did have a conversation with Sam about the influence of Tucker on the right a couple of years ago, and his stance was slightly different than, baby, let's just hear it, just for the sake of the record. Let's go to the way back machine. Yeah, here we go. Doodle-oo, doodle-oo, doodle-oo.

The extreme left woke-ism isn't the fringe. It has captured our institutions. That's an asymmetry that still concerns me. But don't you... Some new concentric circles modeled with moderate to extreme Muslims. I think that applies with white nationalism as well, that the fringe of the fringe of neo-Nazis with its fastikas on their head. That's a tiny, tiny minority. But Tucker Carlson is not

a minor figure and he is talking to millions of people about great replacement. I haven't followed Tucker enough to know whether he's being slimed unfairly or not. I mean, maybe he is one of those concentric circles. But the problem is like someone like Trump and the attacks on Trump as a white supremacist and a racist after Charlottesville were so dishonest and so sloppy It's from every tribe. It's from every conceivable so-called tribe. But look, just to hear in this conversation, the point about Tucker, you said, you know, I don't know about Tucker. I don't want and you can just don't watch him. I don't watch him.

I don't know. I just know that you, you know, I would be willing to bet money that you were taken in by the good people on both sides. Hope. No, so I don't know if there's some analogous problem with the coverage of Tucker that I can't like their landmines everywhere here. But I can't sign a blank check against Tucker Carlson. You just don't want your condemnation of left wing media is unequivocal. And it's but it's talking about it. That's because I'm on the left and I care.

The only the only legitimate media for the most part is left wing media. I don't care about Breitbart Breitbart and Fox are not journalism because they're they are. I care. I care about them. No, no, you're reading me wrong. I care about them as destructive forces in our society, but they're not, they're pseudo media. I mean, they're pseudo journalism. Right, but they're hugely influential. The reason why I... So there was a young man there trying to get a word in and yeah, just trying to say maybe it's worth paying attention to figures like Tucker.

It seems that Sam agrees now that that is true. That's good to see. Yeah, well, if you'll vindicated Chris, you did that spot joy. I'm just saying Matt that, Matt, that I agree with Sam. It is important to pay attention to figures on the right who have a lot of influence. So it's nice to hear that that is his stance and that he has not paid enough attention to Tucker to notice that actually he's not being slimed. Yes, yes.

And it was, I think one of the things that hurt you is that burned your soul was his assumption that you would be one of those people that would fall for every bit of clickbait that makes Trump look bad. Every misquote, things like that. Is that true, Chris? Is that true? Yeah, that's me, Matt. Just, you know, everything on the woke party line.

I'm just at a dime off that. Just, just a little example. This is a, this is a side topic, Chris, but you know, it's been in the news recently, quite a bad sounding clip. And it is bad of, of Trump describing immigrants as animals, right? He's saying, oh, the Democrats will try to tell you these, you know, these aren't animals, these are people, but no, I say, no, they're animals. And it sounds terrible, right?

He mentions immigrants and he calls them animals. You know, I looked into that and I found out the context for it, which is clipped out of most of the clips that are circulating around, is that at the beginning, he's talking specifically about, you know, three immigrants who were, I think, raped and murdered. A woman, very terrible crime, very awful. And any fair reading of that is that he's referring to them. What he's saying is still bad. Don't get me wrong, because he's intentionally wanting to conflate these two things of a crime convicted by a few individuals and basically smear the entire category of immigrants. He does this

thing intentionally, but at the same time, it's true that the kinds of clickbait that circulates around does clip things unsympathetically. You know, both things can be true. And, you know, it was good to hear there in the most recent clip that Sam Harris spoke in pretty forceful tones about Donald Trump, but previously when talking to you, he sort of segued very quickly in terms of switching the topic to all the lies that are said about him and hyperbole from the left. Yes, he referenced that he is aware of this videotape of Trump saying the N-word and this

is how he knows that he harbors racial animus, but many of the things which are clipped are inaccurate. But I feel like the conservative and right-wing media have this tendency to leap on these specific examples and to hyperfixate on the good people on both sides. Actually, he condemned the thing moments before. But if you go and look at the surrounding context in detail, I believe there's an article in the Bullwark that noted liberal arts, which makes the case that actually the full context is not this vindication of him that he wasn't actually defending neo-Nazis. No, he was, and he often in general, stand by or stand aside and stand ready or stand

by and stand ready. All these things are shithole countries. There's just, there's so much evidence that Trump in general is somebody that harbors bigoted views. You know, he's probably not someone that is purely motivated by racism. He's somebody that is mostly motivated by narcissism, but has clearly all of these reactionary opinions about people of different nationalities, basically anybody not American and particular groups of people, Muslims and Mexicans, the whole shebang. Yeah, at the very least, he's just incredibly willing to

demonize these people in service of his own interests. So yeah, like whatever lies at the bottom of his heart, who cares? In a way, the outcome's kind of the same. Yeah. So hyper-fixating on like little examples and then using that as the kujo to like say, well, this is just completely unfair.

It kind of ignores the broader picture, which is the actual issue. Like, you know, even if there is cases where the media can be rightly condemned for overstating things or whatever, it doesn't make all the rest of it disappear. And this is just the common thing in the alternative media is they jump on some statement by Richie O'Mahdow or some throwaway line by Fauci in one interview and ignore everything else, right?

And just say, yeah, well, look, that's- It's kind of this world of binaries that you heard on trigonometry there. I forget the name of Constantine's co-host, but he said, oh yeah, I mean, but they will say something like, well, you know, look, the left-wing media said this thing and that's not entirely true, is it? So, you know, how can we trust anything? Maybe it's all a lie. And it's just, it's so simplistic. Like, of course, the left-wing media is not perfect.

Of course, there are annoying woke people on Twitter. Of course, this is not the point. Of course, public health officials sometimes miss these things or see things with too much confidence or whatever. Like, this is normal in the world of adults. You don't expect perfection at all times or media to always be right. And there are cases where you can criticize media for bias. But it's the steps that they take from there, which is the issue. But anyway, anyway, to return to Sam's response after that little John

through history. So in relation to the Tucker interview, Sam references some of the responses of people he considers friends. Many prominent podcasters who don't exactly share his views, or don't even know what his views are, have spoken with him recently and celebrated his success out on the frontiers of alternative media. People like Joe Rogan and Lex Friedman and the guys over at the All In podcast, which I think is now the biggest business podcast. Some of these people I consider friends, but they all have spoken to Tucker and declined to ask him difficult questions, and then effectively laundered his reputation in front of their own audiences. If it needed any laundering, I mean, here

I'm talking about audiences that are already fairly red-pilled, as far as I can tell. We heard some mention there that these people are Sam's friends, but, you know, they're uncritically platforming Tucker Carlson not providing pushback and it's fair to say Sam thinks that that's bad right it's not a good thing and when it comes to these debates around free speech and platforming and this kind of thing I think Sam also raises valid points here. So the admonition to just print what's true doesn't solve all of our editorial problems. And building a social media platform that preferentially boosts the most lurid and divisive

and misleading content, which is Elon's approach, isn't an answer either. None of this has anything whatsoever to do with freedom of speech. You can have all the free speech in the world. You still have to choose what to focus on. And you need to determine what your intellectual and journalistic standards will be. You have to decide what to amplify. You have to decide who to invite to speak at your conference. Do you invite Candace Owens to give her edgy take on how the Jews control everything?

If you think that would be a dumb idea, that doesn't mean you don't support free speech. It means you don't support Candace Owens. Once again, he's doing really well. Hardly agree with everything Zane's saying. Yeah, and I think it's an important point too, which is that things that are true can also be like bullshit, right? Because it's about the narrative you weave from them. The United States is a country of like, what, 400 million people almost? If you're the president and you're talking about immigration and you spend all of this time talking about one crime committed by one immigrant out of this thing, and you completely ignore all the crimes committed by non-immigrants and you don't care about any statistics, then it's not enough

for the things that you're talking about to be true. It's about the kind of narrative and the kind of leaps that you're encouraging your audience to take from that. So I think Constantine Kissin and his mate there on trigonometry could take note in terms of there may well be valid things to talk about, about excesses of work culture and so on. But if that's the only thing you ever talk about, then you are fundamentally working towards a certain political end.

Yeah. And even if it's, you know, 85% of your content that would still do that, right? Because Constantine and whatnot will always point to the exam. Aaron Bassani or somebody on right now, one part that we might disagree a bit more with Salma that I'll just mention before we get to the Darrell Cooper bet, because it's in the news as well as the Haitian immigration topic, right in the U S and I'm well or not they're consuming. Cats and dogs. Trump brought this

up in the debate, repeating online MAGA conspiracy anti-immigrant thing. And Sam introduces the issue like this. Of course, in the aftermath of Trump's remarks about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, X is now filled with memes about this, some of which are very funny. As a sidebar, it seems to me that the Democrats are far too confident that laughing at all this is a winning strategy. What's happened in Springfield is actually pretty crazy, at least on the surface, right? A town of 59,000 people has absorbed 15,000 Haitian immigrants in three years.

I mean, just think of that in practical terms. Suddenly 20% of the population is Haitian. I'm sure that most of these immigrants are great people who are just seeking economic opportunity and frankly fleeing the chaos of Haiti. But they are coming from one of the poorest and most violent places on earth, right? At a minimum, this is a picture of thousands of fairly desperate, traumatized people pouring into a very little city. 15,000 Haitians being dropped into a city like Los Angeles is

one thing. Into a town of 59,000 people in the middle of America, that has to pose some problems, whether they're being reported on or not. Yeah, so I think his framing there is a bit different from how we would frame it. On the other hand, the thing that I'd agree with is, yes, of course, when you accept refugees from a very different culture, there is bound to be some friction, some issues with the people already living there. Some of it may be legitimate, legitimate things to be upset about. There may be aspects of it which are not legitimate. Just straight up kind of, you know, who are these weird people that look different and talk different coming to my town? I don't like them.

Yeah, that's true. And it's certainly like a large amount of people to be absorbed into the area. But one of the things is like the cast of them being dropped in to that small town. It's a bit of a red flag. Where did they come from? And why are they there? And the answer is because the town of Springfield wanted to encourage people to move there because it was facing the same thing that lots of rural communities are,

that there was a decreasing population because of urban flight. So that's an issue. And yes, this is like a substantial influx of people, but the way that it's presented in Sam's streaming is like they've just come in, this whole group has just descended on the area. And actually, no, it's because of economic incentives that the time generated to encourage people to move there. And they probably didn't expect a whole influx of Haitian immigrants, but that's the thing.

It was the economic incentives that set it up. Yeah. And it seems clear that they're not carnival folk. They haven't set up an encampment on the edge of the town. They've moved there for jobs and things like that. It's a bit of a red flag because they weren't dropped in there. They came there. They weren't bussed in by some evil archival. But you know, to quote the Republican governor, he agrees there.

He says, look, when you go from a population of 58,000 and add 15,000 people to that, you're going to have some challenges and some problems and we're addressing those, he said. But he described the Haitian immigrants as a positive influence. People who want to work, people who value their kids, who value education, these are positive influences on our community in Springfield. Yeah, and he goes on. So note there, Matt, a Republican mayor, Republican governor, immigration that started in 2018 under Trump. But now let's hear a little bit more about Sam discussing this issue. Now who knows if anything bad is happening to anyone's pets. I did actually see a video of what purported to be a dog roasting on an open spit in someone's backyard on X. Whether

that was in Springfield or not is probably beside the point. It does appear that there was a tragic accident involving a school bus and a recent Haitian immigrant driving the wrong way that brought many people in Springfield to the end of their patients. But it does seem that most Democrats assume that every community in America should be enthusiastic about suddenly being inundated by immigrants and refugees from some faraway country. People who, however in need of living somewhere they might be, and however entitled to basic human rights they surely are, and however unlucky they were to have been born where they were born, nevertheless don't share the culture of the place where they have landed.

And in certain cases, especially when we're talking about people who are coming from conservative Muslim societies, and you see a lot of this in Western Europe at the moment, they might have no interest at all in adopting the norms of this new culture. One doesn't have to be a bigot to worry about the failures of assimilation that can follow from this. One doesn't have to be a racist to regret that the character of a city or even a whole country is being irrevocably changed by an influx of basic strangeness from elsewhere. And if you insist upon treating anyone who expresses concerns of this kind as a xenophobic asshole, then two things will happen.

The first is that only true racists and bigots will be thick-skinned enough to address the issue politically. And two, they will win. And then you will have actual racists and bigots in power in your society. I think I'll let you speak first, Chris, but I cut just a couple of little points from you before I forget.

Firstly, Sam should try a little bit harder to just look into some of these memes your society. I think I'll let you speak first, Chris, but I cut just a couple of little points from you before I forget. Firstly, Sam should try a little bit harder to just look into some of these memes that float around the internet about, you know, so-called evidence of cats, well, not dogs, roasting on barbecues or the provenance of a certain image of a guy with brown skin walking down the road with a duck or a goose. I mean, people have looked into them. It doesn't take long to find reliable sources which can thoroughly debunk those.

And I think segueing immediately from that and the huge brouhaha that's been made around that by Trump and Vance, which is undoubtedly populist and racist and based on fundamentally lies, not just those lies, but more of them. They keep saying them faster than we can keep up. One thing I haven't seen, and I've followed the discourse on it pretty closely, is I haven't seen, and maybe this is a factor of the new X, but I haven't seen any hysterical, pearl-clutching, left-wing people going,

how dare you talk about there being challenges of so many immigrants coming to this town? How dare that you even have an issue with that? You awful, disgusting, vile racist. That's what I haven't seen. That's what I haven't seen. I've seen a lot of people debunking lies, and I've seen people like this Republican governor, saying, yeah, there are challenges. Of course there are. But point also, the local people, even the people that were

originally involved in the propaganda, like the lies that have come out and said, I'm sorry, I was the mistake to say any of that. Please stop talking about our town. We're getting bomb threats and things like that. Like that's what I've seen. But well, Sam also said at the start, it was besides the point, whether the video that he saw was in Springfield or not, but surely it isn't besides the point. And not only that, but the video he saw, I believe is the video that Chris Rufo got when

he put a bounty out to request that anybody supply him with a video proving people are eating cats and dogs in their country of 330 million people. Right? So basic epistemic hygiene practices should come into play there. But also, as we noted, this whole issue around Springfield is happening under the watch of Republican mayor, Republican governor. So casting it as this is purely an issue for the Democrats and that they are going to face the consequence, it's kind of buying into the conservative narrative about it. And again, this presentation, as you kind of highlighted that there's only two

stances that are ever presented, which is you're a bleeding heart liberal who thinks that every society, every country has to accept unbridled immigrants from everywhere at maximum, or the other option that you have concerns and that they're legitimate and that know that there like there's so many different positions right up to the fact that there are ethno-nationalists you know stoking up hatred of foreigners. So yes there is a spectrum of different points of view but like when you keep presenting the left as the only position on the left is for unbridled immigration and pure acceptance of any amount of immigration from different places. That's unrealistic because that's not the political position of almost any mainstream left-wing political parties in power. But Sam presents

it as if that is the dominant view of liberals everywhere. And this issue, surely at very least you have to be concerned about the xenophobes as well as the xenophiles. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, the details matter about the truth of the claims that are being made. Like if you have legitimate concerns, and I've seen some of them around there not being enough language services, you know, there are people from Haiti that don't speak English very well, and that's actually imposing a burden. The extra people coming to the town means that, you know, rental prices and things go up.

So that's a downside too. You weigh that up against the declining population of a lot of American towns, just like in Australia, and how actually immigration, especially of young working-age people, is absolutely crucial to keeping agriculture and local manufacturing going. You incorporate that into the mix. But the point is those are legitimate discussion points about policy and pros and cons. What's not legitimate is making shit up about doing

weird unspeakable things, barbecuing cats, making up stuff about the spread of diseases like HIV and so on is another one of the lies that was said. These are tropes that xenophobes spread every time about immigrants. And I think that part is important. If you need to lie and speak to those sorts of things in order to get the discussion going, and you're not getting enough political impetus about a sober conversation about increasing rental rates, or maybe their driving skills

aren't good enough, let's look at the statistics on that, then clearly maybe you're not in the right. Yeah. Yeah. No, this is to say Matt, that this is like points in general where we disagree with Sam and we've disagreed with him face to face on this issue discussing like the Islamic takeover of London or whether or not it's real or Euribia and its likelihood, right? So this is a consistent point where we diverge from Sam.

But nonetheless, that's a point of disagreement., you heard a whole bunch of points of agreement, you know, like with his criticisms of Trump and this kind of thing. And just one more point of agreement before we get to the Darrell Cooper stuff. So here's Sam talking about institutions. Anyway, there's simply no question that we need institutions that maintain good professional standards. that we need institutions that maintain good professional standards, whether those are academic or journalistic or medical or scientific. There's no substitute for these things. And there's no substitute for integrity and competence. Silicon Valley might have competence in hand, but not integrity. When you have someone like Elon openly celebrated

for retweeting Pizzagate lunatics, integrity is no longer on the menu. Somewhere there need to be actual grownups in the room. And not everyone who is rich or famous or beloved by anti-establishment cultists is a grownup. And Tucker, for all his cultural influence, is definitely not one of the grownups. He's very smart. He's a great performer, right? That's really what he is. He's an entertainer and a very talented one, but he's a fraud.

Correct. Usually Chris at times like this, I just say, well said or agree or something like that. But this time, I'm like a meta reflection here. I was going to describe my feelings towards Sam as kind of ambivalent, like I don't know. But it's more like I've got a split personality because he's either extraordinarily good, extraordinarily clear and unambiguous, or incredibly frustrating. It seems to fall into one of these two categories. One of those extremes. Well, I'll just say that, like, I think that was spot on. And he continued in that vein as he talked about Darrell Cooper. Now he gets this to my mind completely right. Listen to this. Step the podcaster, Daryl Cooper,

to talk about many things, immigration in Europe and other topics, but the lessons of World War II above all. Now there's obviously a difference between condemning some species of evil and trying to understand it. And there's a difference between understanding it and exonerating it, to say nothing of advocating for it. And knowing where the lines are here can be difficult. And you might not know where they are until you've seen someone cross them. And Darrell Cooper certainly appeared to cross a few of these lines in conversation with Tucker Carlson last week.

I won't rehash or rebut what he said in any detail. I'll just say that if you're gonna make the claim that Winston Churchill was the true villain of World War II, and that Hitler's intentions have been widely misunderstood, that he actually wanted peace with England, and if you can argue that England should have let Hitler conquer Europe, and

you do this without even mentioning the Holocaust, but you do linger over your suspicion that Churchill was motivated by his private debts to Zionist financiers. Whatever your actual views about Jews, the world can be forgiven for thinking that there's something wrong with you. And many serious and semi-serious people have now blasted Cooper for what he said in that interview with Tucker and for what he subsequently wrote in his own defense on X. In the free press alone, you had Neil Ferguson and Victor Davis Hansen and so Rob Amari just take his head off. And Churchill scholars have detailed many of his errors.

No issues. Nope. Once again, falls into the satisfying and good category. Yeah, yeah. And he correctly highlights, you know, there are these issues about taking alternative perspectives, but there's a line and he points out some of the reasons why people can cross it. Right now, he references the free press, Barry Weiss's outlet, which is a conservative,

doesn't bill itself as that, but I would put it as a conservative outlet, and mentions free offers, including Nile Ferguson, who wrote very critical articles. Now, here's the bit where things start to change. Now, you talked about a split reaction to Sam's responses, right? But I actually feel here that I can pinpoint the moment where Sam splits. So up to this point, yes, the side point that we had about the issue around the Haitian immigrants and how that should be dealt with, that is what it is. But on all of the relative points about the Tucker Carlson thing and about the alternative ecosystem and institutions,

he's been pretty spot on, correctly highlighting the issues. Now, when he was reading the responses in the free press that were criticizing Darrell Cooper, there's one thing that he noticed that caused him to pause. So let's hear him describe it. And of course, it's one thing to be simply wrong about World War II or Churchill or even Hitler. It's another to be wrong because you harbor the same kinds of hatreds and delusions that produced a Hitler in the first place.

And that is what many people came away with, the sense that Tucker, shithead that he undoubtedly is, had platformed a Nazi sympathizer, if not an actual Nazi, and dubbed him the most important popular historian in America. But here's where my perception of this episode shifted. As I said, Sohrab Amari wrote one of these articles in the free press, savaging Cooper. So his perception shifted because of something he encountered in Amare's article. Yeah. And up until this point, he speaks at length and very eloquently about everything that's wrong with Darrell Cooper and Tucker Carlson. And I think apart from those quibbles about the how do you think he knocked it out of the park, I think, all the way. Yes. And actually, he also summarizes Amary's article talking about the rise of the barbarian right.

Right. I've never met Amary. From what I can tell, he's a former Trump supporter who supports him no longer. And he is a very conservative Catholic. Anyway, in one passage in his article, he wrote, in the realm of right-wing ideas, meanwhile, something far grimmer is afoot, the rise of a cohort of writers, pseudo-scholars, and shit posters dedicated to reviving some of the darkest tendencies in the history of thought,

including the idolatry of strength as cartoonishly personified by the likes of Andrew Tate, the notion of supposedly natural hierarchies, IQ-based eugenics, overt racism, and antisemitism. Call them the barbarian right. The master subject of this worldview is the Nietzschean barbarian, or quote, aristocrat of the spirit, who overthrows the egalitarian and essentially feminine structures

that have long shackled him, restraining his yearning for adventure and excellence. Nazi apologia is par for the course. Now, I basically agree with this. There really is a neo-reactionary thing happening, especially in Silicon Valley, among otherwise well-educated and wealthy people who should know better. All of a sudden they have new respect for Vladimir Putin, and they're inclined to regurgitate his talking points about the war in Ukraine. Or you have podcasters like Dave Rubin and Tim Pool, both of whom woke up a few weeks ago to learn that the fake business genius

who was paying them millions of dollars a year to produce their crazily skewed content is actually the Kremlin. And he even also references the Reuben and Timpul turning out to be useful idiots, right? So all still seeming okay. So he mentions all that. Then he says this. Anyway, I'm as worried about all this right-wing and populist cultural brain damage as Amari is.

But then I double-clicked on one of his links in the passage I just read around the issue of racism and eugenics. I was taken to a page on the Southern Poverty Law Center website where I find that I am described over the course of two paragraphs as the gateway drug to the racist, eugenicist cesspool of white supremacy in America. Now, how did this happen? Well, I talked to Charles Murray on this podcast, and then I got smeared by Ezra Klein in the pages of Vox.

Now, I'm not sure how a Murray, who's, as I said, a very conservative Catholic, missed the memo that the Southern Poverty Law Center has become a woke madhouse. But apparently he has, and he lazily linked to this page, which needless to say was filled with lies and half-truths. Incidentally, the Southern Poverty Law Center has been successfully sued for this kind of thing before. In any case, I'm now looking at the Darrell Cooper problem with fresh eyes, if only because one of the links in an article savaging him as a Nazi finds supporting evidence on a page

that savages me effectively as a Nazi. That link has since been removed, by the way. I reached out to the free press and they know what the SPLC has become, so they removed it. Anyway, if I'm also a Nazi for the purpose of this forensic exercise, who the hell is Daryl Cooper? Yeah, yeah. So he's referring to, I think, a 2018 thing, Chris, where the SPLC had an article on their website, which talked about people like him and other sort of influences by presenting people like Charles Murray and others in a reasonable

light, sort of is a gateway drug or whatever to Nazis. This is what he's referring to, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so he also mentioned about SPLC being successfully sued. And this was by Majid Nawaz for them referring to him as an anti-Muslim extremist. So the SPLC piece, Sam takes issue with, and following exactly what he says here, he was on board with everything. He was noticing all the things he's talked about, but he came across a citation in one of the critical articles that linked to an article that he disagreed with the portrayal

of him. And that made him think, well, maybe if that's wrong about me, maybe everyone else is wrong about Darrell Cooper as well. Maybe he's been unfairly slimed too. Yep. That was the logical steps there. I don't know. The logical steps is perhaps overstating that because if you had an issue with an article misrepresenting you and you thought that article was unfair but are the other articles unfair was now Ferguson's

article unfair was Amari's article misrepresenting Sam just seems to have taken the notion the SPLC said something about him that he didn't agree with. Therefore, we can't know if anything is true. And we should be questioning any, and you're like, no, that doesn't follow. This would be a different matter if it was like, the SPLC has produced an article about Daryl Cooper. But this is the free press. This is Barry Weiss's center right thing.

This is Niall Ferguson even. Yeah, like it doesn't follow, is it? It's a non-secretary. It's, you know, it does seem a lot like Sam Harris being triggered. He's well known for having a big problem with the work left and organizations like the SPLC. And I think it's not unreasonable to say that they sometimes get ahead of their skis and it's also not unfair to say that sometimes people do get accused of racism for instance, unfairly. That does happen. Yeah, it does.

But that does not imply that you therefore know nothing about anyone who gets accused of being say a Nazi Like regardless of all of the evidence that illustrates that they are in fact the Nazi Apologist yeah including things at some reference that historians have went through and critically assessed it The thing about it that was so weird is that right up until the turn there when he found the triggering the foot the article the footnote in the article to the to the other article that referenced him and called him a racist um you know he was very clear this was totally unambiguous and he did a real heel turn there because of this one thing yeah well so let's go on to see because after this turn, he describes his other things that

he put in place to try and get to the bottom of it and some heuristics that he applies that have helped them assess the situation. So let's listen to that. It's also relevant that in addition to his own podcast, Cooper also does a podcast with Jaco Willink, who I have tremendous respect for. And I seriously doubt that Jaco would be collaborating with someone who he knew to be an anti-Semite or a Nazi sympathizer, to say nothing of being an actual Nazi. So anyway, through Jaco, I reached out to Cooper and invited him on this podcast and

he politely declined, wanting to lie low for the moment, which I totally understand. So on the assumption I'll never speak to him, let me just tell you what I suspect happened here. Again, I could be wrong about this. I don't actually know who Cooper is at bottom, and perhaps Jaco's confused about him. But here's what I think happened. This is something that I've now begun to think of as arming the bomb in a conversation and failing to defuse it. There are many topics you can talk about where you can be expected to naturally condemn the obvious evil that's in front of you.

But the conversation you're attempting to have is one of understanding it. So you can often think it goes without saying that you don't support Hitler or the genocide of the Jews. And perhaps it could go without saying that you don't question the standard history on those points. But then you want to go on and talk about how culpable you think Winston Churchill was

for the fact that World War II happened. Now, whether Cooper was right or wrong about this, and it certainly seems to me that he was wrong on some important points, he was quite naive given the nature of the conversation to think that he could get away with arming that particular rhetorical bomb without defusing it. Yeah. So the thought process we're taking through there is that Sam Harris is friends with Jocko Willick. Jocko Willick wouldn't be friendly with a Nazi sympathizer. And we know that sometimes people like Sam are unfairly accused of nefarious, terrible things. So he takes an extremely sympathetic perspective on it, which is what's happened is that he's admitted to make clear some basic assumptions that are usually left unsaid and just wanting to tentatively

explore some of the details around World War II. And, you know, he may be wrong about those, but essentially the important thing is these motivations are fine, are pure. And genuine. And genuine. And like, I have to suspect that Sam has not, one, listened to the full interview that occurred there with Tucker Carlson, maybe not listened or read any of the many, many detailed historical debunkings. Rebuttals.

Yeah, rebuttals. Because I think if he had, I don't see how anyone would come to the conclusion that Darrell Cooper was in good faith, just making some errors in his investigation or just throwing some ideas around or indeed just having a quick look like I did on some of his previous tweets. I mean, you know that I don't put a massive amount of effort into podcasting Chris in contrast to you. So my standards of investigation are not particularly high, but if I can manage it and it's transparently obvious to me.

I don't know, I think Sam should be able to manage that too. Well first of all, it's maybe worth Sam reflecting on how often he's relied on these interpersonal heuristics and they've failed. Now, that's a different problem from Gad and Rubin. Rubin, who I think is unfortunately an opportunist. I don't know if he believes that these are his friends now, the alt right, or if he's just playing to an audience that happens to be supporting him and paying him pretty

well, you know? Yeah, no, I don't think, again, I think Dave... And I don't want you to answer that either. I mean, you can if you want. I don't want you to feel like you have to answer for them because you're not responsible for them at all. Well, no, but just insofar as I think you have the wrong idea about them. I think it's useful to say so because, you know, Dave seems to me to be an extremely ethical person who would check all the right boxes in terms of, you know, gay rights and

women's rights. Oh, no, I think you're so wrong about that. Okay. But I mean, so then that's something that I think you're wrong about. I wouldn't know how to resolve that apart from, you know, getting him on your podcast or you on his and you just have the conversation. Right. But how do you, why do you think I'm wrong when I've shown you like a list of the people they're with and refusing to call out?

Well, I just think he, it's what you're reading into the refusal to call them out. I mean, so there's, what could be functioning there is he has a very journalistic agenda or a much more journalistic agenda than I do. And I feel that Gad and Rubin have gone too far to the other side. Right. Well, it could be in terms of their public work. That may be the case. And again, I'm speaking somewhat from ignorance because I haven't seen even anything close to the majority of their interviews. But in terms of my interactions with them privately, that's not going on at all. So that's at least, and again, these are not people who I've spent a tremendous amount of time with.

But, you know, I've I've. It's just, you know, insofar as you can get the measure of another person's mind by having dinner with them, it's that's certainly my view of them. But that's certainly my view of them. He's argued with people that Dave Rubin was a responsible journalist. And you're misunderstanding his commitment to neutral objectivity. That's why you think he's being biased. He's not endorsing the people he's platformed. No, you were wrong.

Joe Rogan is not an anti vaccine or not a right wing polemicist. No, he is. You know, the list goes on and on of people who Sam has collaborated with or regarded as good friends, people that he gets on well with. And yet he seems to have misjudged their trajectory or not understood it, right? And Jocko Willink, does he have a history

of correctly identifying people who are leaning into reactionary content? I don't know Jocko's content that well, but from what I've seen, I wouldn't expect him to have really good judgment on that point. He's in the Rogan sphere. Right. They are generally not the most observant, unlike right wing rhetoric. And Jocko Willick may well be a nice guy, a standup guy. It doesn't make him a good litmus test for understanding other people's motives. And likewise, many of these people, I am sure are extraordinarily charming and extremely nice in personal conversation.

And yeah, I don't know. There's just a weird kind of naivete. Like Sam can be so good in analyzing and breaking down some pretty nuanced things, I think. But then when it comes to, I guess, that reactivity against wokeness and, you know, being canceled and that kind of thing, when that comes into play, all personal relationships, for instance, come into play, or personal relationships, for instance, come to play, you know, certain features, then it all goes out the window.

That seems to be the pattern. There's a pattern here as well. Because like what Sam then talked about when he realized that, you know, we might be making a history conclusion, what did he do? Did he go and do research into what Darrell Cooper's output was in the way that he misrepresented things? No, he reached out to his friend to try and invite Darrell Cooper's output was in the way that he'd misrepresented things. No, he reached out to his friend to try and invite Darrell Cooper to have a conversation with him. And following what he said, it sounds very likely that he would have allowed Darrell Cooper to reframe it as, yes, of course he's not presenting things that Hitler was a good guy. He's just raising legitimate questions.

And Sam seems to have this notion, which is, to me, incredibly naive, that if you get someone and you're like, are you a pro-Hitler Holocaust denial person, that they'll say yeah. And if they don't say yes, it means that everything that they've been accused of, it doesn't hold up. And you're don't say yes, it means that, oh, everything that they've been accused of, it doesn't hold up. And you're like, if not, where the standard then?

David Irvine, I think also isn't a Holocaust denialist because I'm pretty sure in various times when he was interviewed, he said, no, you know, like I'm not, no, he went on to be more overt about his stances and that kind of thing. But this notion in other circumstances, Sam is really critical of people who think that you can just podcast your way to like insight on topics.

But his approach here is that he could resolve this topic by talking to the Daryl Cooper. And he doesn't suggest that he would need to do a bunch of research into Daryl Cooper to have that conversation. It sounds like he was just ready to jump on the call like he was with Alina Chan and Matt Ridley without contacting all our experts. And the contrast here, Matt, is trigonometry. Got Nahal Ferguson, a historian on, as opposed to to maybe they did also, I'm sure they did reach out to that. But that that means that their approach is more epistemically rigorous than sounds and that should be awarding saying I feel.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, similarly with anti faxes. They don't say yes, I'm an anti faxer. I know. I mean, at the extreme end, you might find a few that do that. The vast majority of them will explain, you know, in great detail why they are not an anti-vaxxer. And rather they just have these very specific concerns. Um, yeah, now look, step one with this kind of thing, which is the step that you and I took is one, you familiarize yourself in detail with everything that was said, and two, you

then go and find reputable sources to check it and see the degree of reasonableness and so on. In this case, you know, I'm a history geek. I knew a fair bit, but I didn't want to rely on my own kind of impressions. As a, as a novice, I wanted to go to professional historians. That's step two. And then you're actually informed. You know, how much charity to extend to this guy.

And I think if Sam had just invested a bit of time, but I don't think he would be taking that charitable stance now. Yeah. And you know, this also speaks to this issue, the one that was in Alexandra Smarrino's tweet. This assumption that somebody could put out nuanced work or that some of Darrell Cooper's earlier material, for example, does address the issue of the Holocaust and present

the horrors that Jewish people fears or whatever. So that means he can't at all be engaged in what it looks like he's doing. And you're like, no, that doesn't follow. This is like a really common mistake that I see people make where if they enjoy something or they got value out of it, it's almost like an ego defense or something where they're like, they simply cannot accept that the person who did that could harbor like stupid views or be an apologist for Hitler. Right. And I've listened to Darrell Cooper's podcasts. I enjoyed them.

I found his takes like overall nuanced than that. And absolutely none of that makes me think, okay, he couldn't now be engaged in like apologetics for World War II. Of course he could. And of course his views could also shift to be more extreme like this. So that is one of the things that has changed., in this case, Sam hasn't done that,

right? But he is relying on like similar heuristics about like the reasonableness of people are talking to someone or, you know, the vibe that you get. And those are not reasonable heuristics. And they've led some astray in the past. So we might think that's worth reflecting on. But I think what you mentioned about being triggered here is really apropos. Because listen to him, what he then goes into.

Right? So remember, this was like Darrell Cooper and whatnot. Right? But here's what he gets fixated on. For instance, you take the defamation of me as a race-obsessed proto-Nazi douchebag on the Southern Poverty Law Center website. All of that could be forgiven if I had actually armed that particular bomb without disarming it in my conversation with Charles Murray. In speaking to Charles Murray about race and IQ, I could have just had the conversation

as someone who seemed to be avidly interested in the topic. Please, Charles, tell me everything about population-level disparities in IQ across racial groups. But that's not what I did. Had I done that, I think people like Ezra Klein could be forgiven for thinking that maybe I had some racist acts to grind. But in speaking with Charles, I made it clear that that wasn't my interest at all. My interest was, one, the fact that he had been violently deplatformed in the middle of a speech at Middlebury College for a book he wrote a quarter of a century earlier. A book which on closer examination was not nearly as incendiary as it had been made out to be,

and which I didn't read at the time because I believed all the negative PR about it. And my concern was not in disparities in IQ or anything else across racial groups. My concern was the social and political one that such disparities, one, must exist. It would be statistically miraculous if they didn't. And two, we wanted a politics and a style of conversation about facts of this kind that was sane enough and compassionate enough so as to not put anything we care about in jeopardy when we're suddenly ambushed by facts of this sort. So he's spending quite a lot of time relitigating the SPLC thing or in this case it's Ezra Klein and Fox and but he still doesn't actually really get it.

The criticism. I don't know if you're familiar with like, because Ezra Klein was the editor, just to say as well, like the actual initial piece that Sam objected to, not the offer, but he did go on the right other piece. But so Sam is saying I added this teamers that I'm not a racist and I'm not interested in that. So that should have solved everything.

I'm like, Sam, no one missed that. Nobody missed that you said you're not interested in this in any way and you're not a racist. And that Charles Murray has said the same thing. Nobody's missed that. What they are saying is that you don't pay any attention to the context of Charles Murray's work, his overall agenda, his other output, the bell curve as it was presented in the media and by Charles Murray, right, in various things. So Sam is viewing it as like, I added the disclaimer. So, you know, the objection is just, since that's there, you

can't actually have any issue with what I said. And it's like, no, the critique was, you don't do the research into the topic that you want to talk about. And for that reason, you're misled about what Murray's work is about or like what his agenda actually is. Yeah. Yeah, precisely. I mean, often those sorts of disclaimers are offered in bad faith, like with an anti-vaxxer or I'm not a racist, but, but you know, often they can be in completely good faith, right? Can be completely true, right?

Sam is being completely honest with his audience and he is talking in terms of his motivations in talking about that, as he described. That can be entirely true. And you can still have a big problem with the kind of, you know, less than critical platforming of Charles Murray. I mean, I don't want to weigh into that. I've just been, but I've been engaged with a lot of that race science stuff for one reason

or another on the interwebs recently. And I just keep seeing how that kind of just incredibly shitty fake, I will go as far to say, pseudo-psychological research gets abused and used by people who are racists. And even people who are not kind of like evil, slavering at the mouth, Nazi swastika on their forehead, they just want their country to be a nice simple white country with other white people that have no ill will towards people of other races. That's a fine, but they still like that material and use that material to support their arguments. Why, for instance, you mustn't let Haitians into our country because they come from a shithole country. Their IQ is so low, it makes them incapable of

building a decent country, as has been demonstrated by the sad history of Haiti. And if you let them in here, they're going to do weird shit like eat cats and dogs and run people over in cars because their IQ is not high enough. I mean, that's what it gets used for. And you can have a problem with that. Well, this is the bit that I find very frustrating because this topic again, a bit like the immigration one, the presentation is that there's only two possible positions. One is Charles Murray's, that IQ are different between national groups, between ethnic groups, and that this is, as he puts it, some combination of environmental and

genetic factors, but he is heavily leaning towards the genetic factors if you actually look at his meaning towards the genetic factors if you actually look at the career and statements overall. And on the other hand, you have people to say IQ is meaningless. The test does nothing but measure cultural knowledge. It's an absurd thing. It's only uses for pseudoscience and racist throughout history. And anybody interested in it is despicable. And both of those positions are not the only positions

available, and we've talked about this many times, Matt, but in psychology, there is plenty of uses for IQ measures, not least in education research and stuff with developmental abilities and whatnot. Yeah, the measure can be misused and there can be valid uses of it and there can be genuine research about it. And there are people that always overstep on the other side, right? Including people that are just, you've published anything that ever had an IQ measure in it,

well, that means you're a proto-Nazi. There are people like that, but Sam presents it as like the only other option is Charles Murray. And it isn't. There's people he's had direct conversations with, like Catherine P.H. Hardin, who is a researcher who has similarly been criticized for being overly genetically determinist. And she argued with him about why Charles Murray's interpretations are wrong and pseudo-scientific. She is not somebody saying that you can never discuss genetic contributions to personality or IQ factors or these kinds of things. So it's just that presentation that has to be like that, one of those two extremes. And that if you take the view that there is legitimate science and there is research findings about

IQ that can speak to differences between population groups or whatever, that you then must acknowledge that the real science position of people like Charles Murray, Emile Kierkegaard, Noah Card, all those kind of people, that they're right. They're much more on the side of, no, they're not. There's a whole infrastructure of crap science, bad measures, stuff which is very concerned about immigration and tied up with ethno-nationalist outlets and stuff, and it's absolutely fine to criticize that. It doesn't make you somebody that's scared of science and doesn't want to admit

the truth and whatnot, it's pseudo scholarship. And and Sam acts like that's not true, right? It's just all unfair vilifications of Murray. Anything in that area is just, you know, like it's it's kind of taboo. You can never touch it. And there's more nuance there. And it doesn't involve endorsing Charles Murray. And if you endorse Charles Murray as somebody that is fundamentally correct, accurately representing the science and whatnot, then you are sticking out of position that can

be criticized. Yeah. Yeah. We don't want to get into it too much, but I'll just point out there's a huge amount of genetic research out there, which has looked at genetic differences for all kinds of things, but including IQ and I'm going to emphasize genetic here, not race, because they don't put people in the categories. They'd look at individuals and individual differences in DNA.

And yes, even that is a controversial topic. It's very contested and all that stuff. But I reckon if you did a survey of those researchers doing actual solid research on that topic, you will find that very few of them, very few of them, if any, are on board with that Charles Murray, Emil Kierkegaard, that camp. So yeah, I think in Sam's mind, it's a contest between like ideological Puritan woke people here and just people that are just curious and interested in doing science and don't have any kind of agenda. And it's just incredibly naive. You can just look at their activities, look at all the things they're interested in, look who funds them, look at mankind quarterly. The political agenda is incredibly clear.

And yes, you can find research, like left-wing oriented research on the humanities and stuff like that, which is also politically motivated. All of these things can be true, but I'm sorry, Charles Murray is not the good guy. End of rant. Yeah. I remember there was one particular race scientist person

who is quite popular in those circles. And people were arguing about, you know, like that he's been unfairly smeared and all this stuff. Right. And I was looking into his output and work and all this because he had all these publications and then discovered that he accidentally had served on like a board as part of a neo-Nazi journal. And he kind of argued that this was you know just all of his understanding. But then you know if I had accidentally been contributing to the neo-Nazi journal allowing them to republish

my articles and I discovered that I would apologize profusely, condemn that I don't believe in any of that you know and his response the particular reassigns person was to kind of say, well, it's not a big deal, right? It was just a minor mistake. And there's many other things that pile up, right? But you're just like, okay, so like, you accidentally contributed the neo-Nazi journey, but that wasn't, you know, it wasn't a very significant moment for you. It was just a minor blip in your career. And you're receiving money from, you know, far right organizations. And you've made these comments about black people being too late

or whatever the case might be. Right. It's all these things pile up and then people present that, oh, you're just, you know, you're besmirching their genuine position as a scholar. They're just interested in the issue objectively. And you're just like, come on, come on. Yeah, yeah, I know. The challenge is to move away from these sort of binaries where someone's like, perfectly fine, there's no problem here, this is totally legitimate, or they're a slathering evil devil and if you make a slip of the tongue and you said something that somebody thinks is a bit,

you know, off-color, calls you racist, then okay, you're branded evil. No, but if you look at the weight of evidence, then there is so much of it. You can write off a bit of it as coincidental. Oh, that's a bit on the nose. Oh, that's a bit, okay, fine, he's anti-immigration and has made this tweet about blacks and whites people should be living apart. We should have a... But that's just his political views.

Maybe there's no connection with the race. You know what I mean? But you add it all up and I'm sorry, any reasonable person who does a little bit of work, can figure that out. Yeah. And so just two clips to finish with Matt. So this continues the point about like, Sam is you'll hear it here because it connects directly. He's talking about Ezra Klein and being misrepresented and how unfair it all is. And the fact that he added disclaimers in then

switches to Cooper and how, well, maybe it's just the disclaimers and he's been misinterpreted. And he actually addresses what we're talking about, these incidental things about these tweets, Matt, these tweets, which on the face of it might seem to suggest That it's more than just forgetting to add in enough disclaimers And for that Ezra Klein smeared me as a racist and published some highly misleading articles That painted the conversation I had with Murray as outside the bounds of mainstream science When the claims made in those very articles were what was outside the bounds of mainstream science, when the claims made in those very articles were what was outside the bounds of mainstream science. Anyway, I don't mean to relitigate all that here.

It's just to say that certain topics require that you make it clear what your reasons are for discussing them. Otherwise, your intentions and your unspoken commitments can be wildly misinterpreted. And that's what I believe happened with Cooper. The important thing for Cooper to have done at some point in this conversation, or subsequently,

and perhaps he's in the process of doing this somewhere or has done it on his podcast, is to have made it clear what sort of world he actually wants to live in. How does he feel about what happened during the Holocaust? What does he think about Nazism, past and present? I will certainly grant him that for the purposes of most conversations, all of that goes without saying

in polite society. But when you arm the bomb on those points, you have to defuse it. And that's something he didn't do. He also did many trollish things on X, whether he was joking, exaggerating, trying to get a rise out of people. Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows?

It's not like it suggests anything, right? Like we all just accidentally make tweets suggesting that we'd prefer to live under the Third Reich. Yeah, I often give that wrong impression. No, yeah, most people don't. So yeah, and Sam, if you want, he yeah, and Sam says that what he would satisfy him is if you sat down with Darrell Cooper and Darrell Cooper said at the beginning, look, first off, let me just make clear, I'm not a Nazi and the Nazis did a lot of bad things that I don't approve of.

Great, great. Now we can do, and people don't do that. People are more underhand. I mean, I actually not on board with the people that call Sam Harris an evil person, a terrible person, a racist, all these things. I'm not on board with that. I think he means well, but he's incredibly naive. His brain works incredibly differently from most other people. And I don't think he realizes genuinely that someone can just and proceed to, you know, keep their motives somewhat secret. I think that's what's missing. Perhaps, perhaps. Well, let's see how he finishes the episode, Matt, because he doesn't met

the, you know, perhaps he's been a little too kind to Darrell here. Perhaps I'm giving more than the benefit of the doubt here, but more and more I'm convinced that these platforms are both revealing people's worst selves, but also magnifying them, distorting our perception of them. Then everyone reacts to that, and then people dig in. Again, it's just a psychological experiment designed by Satan and creating a lot of harm. So in any case, our derangement over that topic that lasted for the better part of a week that received comment, I think from the White House and was widely covered in the media. All of this is a symptom of something that really does ail alternative media at this point.

So much of our politics and our worldview generally is now being shaped by people who are just flipping on the microphones and shooting the shit in contexts where virtually every academic and journalistic standard has gone out the window. And the only thing that's keeping me from being part of that problem is just my own inner sense of revulsion that I might ever be that sloppy, that irresponsible, that confused. And if I ever make an error of that kind,

I know I have just the sort of audience that will let me know and demand a correction. Thanks for listening. We got you, fam. Yeah, we got you. We got you. Just, you know, Sam talks a lot about self-awareness and detachment from ego and how people are caught up in this, you know, egoic view of the world where they're too

tribal and attach these things. What I see in this content is someone whose principles are very good, right? Like who decries people jumping on a microphone without doing proper research in the topic and just giving the positions based on their intuitions about what they think that somebody might have meant or this kind of thing. And then has the laxness of awareness

to note that that is exactly what you just did. You didn't do a deep dive into Daryl Cooper and his content. You didn't contact a whole bunch of experts or at least you've made no reference to it. And you have just for the last one third of the podcast argued that essentially people are probably misinterpreting Daryl Cooper

because they're overreactive, based on you being triggered by an article about you that you felt was overly critical. Like that to me is illustrating a very self-centered, grievance-focused approach to these kind of topics. And as we said, up to the point where he didn't come across that article, he was talking very clearly and coherently about the issues, noticing the problem. But as soon as it came to him being misrepresented, he goes to the interpersonal heuristics, he goes to the outrage and he starts assuming that Darrell Cooper has been misrepresented, inviting him on his podcast without doing research in his, you know, output.

So how is Sam not part of the problem that he's decrying here? How is he not, Matt? I can't answer that. I, I agree with you. I think his, I think his motivations are good. And I think, as you said, when he's good, he can't be that. I, I agree with you. I think his, I think his motivations are good. And I think, as you said, when he's good, he can't be good, but there's, as we showed at the start.

Yeah. Like it's really good stuff. I've heard him say lots of very true things and also very well said. And it's not just stuff that I like agree with about whatever Trump being bad, Musk being a piece of shit, but actually like the nuanced kinds of things he identifies, I think he does genuinely well. And then I get whiplash because it seems like we stumble into this great big black hole of lack of self-awareness where it's just like firing from the hip

and the work people and, you know, and extending like a ridiculous benefit of the doubt, not doing any research, not checking a bunch of things. I think the same thing applied not just to Darrell Cooper, but also the Haitian thing. On one hand, it started off okay. I think if you thought about it, his views on that would be okay, but he straight away, I could almost see his mind make the connection to Muslims not integrating in our society and bring- Yeah, conservatives.

Yeah, culturally inconsistent. He went, hang on That's it's okay to not be have a problem with that people call me a racist because I I think it's okay for you know And you could just see it happening in real time and it's like no, this is a different issue They're not Islamic. They're not you know, that it's it's an entirely different issue. Um, anyway, yeah, it was frustrating but um Um, anyway, yeah, it was frustrating but um, well and so this is you know Would like if I take us back to the start of the podcast you have this controversial Tucker episode right then you see that whip up the reactionary populist right-wing people because it it's Promoting ethno-nationalism revisionist stuff about Hitler like really dark shit

But you also see critical reactions amongst mainstream historians. You do see the alternative media ecosystem doing both things, right? You see them amplifying it and Dave Smith talking about how great it was, the conversation. But you see trigonometry grappling with Mal Ferguson, like tearing it apart. And then you have Sam Harris, who is someone that is for a lot of people, not in that sphere of like, you know, the reactionary group. But I still see the issue particularly around this triggering aspect of grievance narratives and the obsession about wokeism. Just being this thing which can lead people into bad heuristics.

And the bad heuristic that I'll just repeat is that my friend likes this person. I have been smeared unfairly. Therefore, other people can be smeared unfairly. And like, even if that heuristic is fine, the next step is, well, was he, was he smeared unfair purely? Yeah, like Check. Yeah, you can check. It's not hard. I did it and I I don't try that hard So I think Sam could do it. Um, yeah, I think the hero of this story is sorry everyone. No Ferguson He did he did well

Never Chris Oh, right. I thought you were going to say Constantine. No, no, no. Never, never Chris. No, I mean, he spoke well in those clips you played. I'm sure you could play other clips of his that would make me angry, but I like those ones. Yeah, this is true. So anyway, it's an interesting microcosm and tour around the Guru sphere. And again, highlights the ambivalent relationships that we say that we have with Sam.

There are definitely aspects that we're strongly critical of. I would say all of this to Sam. I have said all of this to Sam and different things. And it has had the impact that it's had. We heard the impact of Dr. Gartson, Clem. So maybe in a couple of years, Sam will agree with our general sentiment. Let's see.

But, um, yeah, I feel like we're inching together, inching together step by step. Are we? Yeah. Well, if he just doesn't read articles that mention him, that would seem to do it. But like, just, there's just gotta be that bit of self-awareness where all of the thing was trending in one way. And then I came across an article that was mean about me and my whole fucking beard was like completely flipped in its head.

And you're like, right, does that, does that not at any point like strike you as perhaps an overreaction? It's such a contrast because he gives the impression of being so careful at other times. So it's weird. It's a weird old world. Well, anyway, anyway, that was the complex rich tapestry of the interwebs recently, Chris.

Yeah, like you said, the big Nazi apologist drop fell into the ocean. The ripples spiraled out. Commentary was had by all, including us. And hopefully we'll get the last word. Well, we do because it's our podcast. Well, there, the last word is entered. We'll be back with a normal decoding

after this is a unique one, kind of just illustration of Guru dynamics across the thing. So that's it, a decoding episode of sorts, but we'll be back probably with, probably with Curtis Yavin. Yeah. Probably Curtis Yavin. We're leaning towards Curtis Yavin. That's right. All right. Well, God bless you, Matt. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we're sorry. Sorry.

We want to thank patrons, do we? I do have patrons. It's a decoding episode and I have it prepared, Matt. I have it on front of me. What was I thinking? I just want to clear a couple of people off. I'm still brainstorming a better way to do this. There has got to be a better way, but let's just go down a couple of conspiracy hypothesizers. Okay. We've got enough of them. So I'm just going to say to my here we go. Stephen Hassan, Evan Bingham, the Vogue Sphere poet, Noah Hamill, Campbell Barton, Will Oswald, K.K., Adam Urie, Chris Schultz, Gail L.

Chris Schultz, Gail L. Tall, Micah Piker, Josh Perlman, Antoine Landry, just the worst ever, William Andrew, Tom Drake, Ali, Douglas Rushkoff, Lenny Talerico and Oliver Bostridge. That'll do. Thank them all for being contemporary. I do thank them all. Thank you from me. I thank them. I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions,

and they've all circulated this list of correct answers. I wasn't at this conference. This kind of shit makes me think, man. It's almost like someone is being paid. Like when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. Just to be clear, we are not funded by George Soros.

We're not getting paid. We are totally audience funded. So this makes our thanks all the more heartfelt. Take that Joe Rogan. Um, I'm, I'm just going to mention just a handful of revolutionary thinkers, cause I see them in front of me. Matt, David M, George E M, Josh Lee, and can't that's it. Just those guys.

They are getting fine. They are revolutionary geniuses. Thank them. Lovely. Thank you. I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time. And it is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm.

I'm someone who's a true polymath. I'm all over the place. But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption. Now that's just a guess and it could easily be wrong, but it also could not be wrong. The fact that it's even plausible is stunning. It is stunning. One last little call, Matt, just to mention.

Matt is going to America soon. You want him to go to your state, you have to petition him. Follow him on Twitter, send things to our Patreon, do a lot. Follow him on subreddit, maybe make some friends about where he should go. And along with that, I wanted to say, give us some reviews. All right? You know, I like the negative reviews, but we annoy people who are fans of gurus. So we need the people that are reasonable.

You know, you guys are there. Just drop a couple of nice reviews and balance it up. Balance it up. You're all reading things fine, but you got to take the time to write the little thing, you know, the little whatever. Yes, we were mean about Dr. K or whoever, but you know. Now, look, if you're a Dr. K fan and you're a bit hurt about us being mean to him, now's the chance to show that you're the bigger man. And you'll still give us the thumbs up and the five stars despite that, which is just be all the more credit to you. Go ahead and do it. Everyone that responds, put your DOSHA in at the end, just so I know what kind

of person. Yeah, otherwise we can't really interpret what you said. It won't make any sense to us. It won't make any sense, yeah. And vatas only, that's the only thing. Oh yeah. Yeah, so, no, no. That's true.

Well there we go, Matt. Another day, another decoding done. Let's get out of here before we wallow in our own grievances for too long. OK. Sounds good. See you. Bye.

Bye. I'm going to be a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a Music