Decoding the Gurus - Guru Right to Reply with Jamie Wheal

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

Today we are joined by Jamie Wheal, who comprised a full one-third of the subjects covered on our prior "Sensemaking Cubed" episode also featuring Daniel Schmachtenberger and Jordan Hall. Jamie has kindly taken advantage of our standing offer of a right to reply to all podcast subjects and here is our conversation in its entirety. As well as being a sometime interlocutor with Daniel and Jordan, Jamie is an author of books such as Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, Navy SEALs and Maverick Scientists are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work and Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex and Death In a World That's Lost Its Mind. He's the founder of the Flow Genome Project, an organisation that aspires to train ultimate human performance, and does leadership seminars and wilderness excursions with many famous organisations such as Deloitte, Red Bull, Google, Lululemon, Facebook, TD Ameritrade, Nike, and Goldman Sachs.So, the three of us get into it a bit about that sensemaking about sensemaking video, but pretty quickly move into the issue of making sense of things more broadly, as it's transpired with fraught issues such as COVID; both in the popular social media space, and within the 'blue church' of academia.From what we knew of Jamie, we expected to have a pleasant chat with him, and as you'll hear: it was a pleasant chat! Even if our worldview and understanding of things diverged a fair bit, there were a number of things we could agree on as well. A big thumbs-up to Jamie for taking our (relatively scathing) coverage of the infamous video with the best of grace and, in the best tradition of what the IDW purports to do, be willing to have a frank public chat with a couple of blokes who have been highly critical of some of the people and ideas he's (somewhat) aligned with.Our intros and outros are - as usual - quite indulgent, so be sure to take advantage of those bookmarks if you want to skip straight to the interview proper.Enjoy!LinksMike Duncan's Revolutions PodcastBeyond Synth Podcast (Chris is a guest on ep 342)Gizmodo fact-check on Elon's claims about AppleJamie Wheal @ Linkedin Feature on Jamie Wheal in the Texas MonthlyJamie Wheal's appearance on ConspiritualityCritical analysis of Rebel Wisdom & Jamie Wheal by Psymposia

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about. I'm Professor Matt Brown. This guy I'm looking at right now is Chris Kavanagh. I'm the psychologist. He's the anthropologist. This is Decoding the Gurus. Good morning, Chris. Top of the morning to you, as you like to say. How are you feeling? Wow, I'm feeling good. That had very morning zoo energy. I'm impressed.

You got the whole spiel correct. You added in personalizations, off-the-wall references. That was great. That was great. All the jigsaw piece puzzles were there. Puzzle pieces were there. Piece there. Puzzle pieces were there. Piece puzzles. It's finished now.

We're back to normal. No, but I'm feeling good this morning. I had my swim and I've been swimming pretty regularly recently. So instead of it just making me feel exhausted and old, it actually makes me feel enervated, gets the old juices flowing. And I've had like three or four coffees. I see. We're going to have a health off.

All right. All right. Let me hit you with some information, Matt. So long-term listeners, people who will care deeply about these kind of minutiae updates, people are dying to know, did Chris kick his sweet coffee addiction and in effect did he also only mention that in Patreon bonus material possibly possibly I don't remember now but I'm here to tell you I have stopped consuming sweet convenience store coffee as of maybe a couple of weeks now without any.

Maybe I fell off the wagon when I say without any. I may have had one or two, but one or two in the space of weeks and weeks. So that's gone. And the other thing I did, Matt, look at this. This is a very recent thing, though. Don't know if it's a full-time change yet, but I'm going to try. Snacking. You know, snacking you know snacking

the downfall of many weight management plans or healthy lifestyles that's one of my remaining vices was just i like my snacks and japan is good for snacks but you know what i discovered man i couldn't stop myself from snacking i saw all the stuff that people said about replace your snacks with a fucking piece of celery or whatever. And I was like, no, come on. Come on, that's not going to do it. So, but one of those pieces of advice was like nuts, nuts, eat nuts. Those are good.

They make you feel satisfied. And they're also like, they are like a treat. I've eaten nuts in the past at times, but I've never been a nut guy. I was feeling dejected one morning. I was like, okay, there's many packets of nuts constantly in the convenience stores in Japan. I was perusing the shelves for alternatives. I was like, all right, I'll give these nut things a chance. Fucking nuts, man.

Nuts are great. of it was like all right i'll give these nut things a chance fucking nuts man not so great i've been going a few days now without snacking except for nuts and i'm digging nuts i'm a nut guy now well that's that's good chris well but a couple of things first of all whenever i hear you talk about this stuff it's hard not to think about alan partridge's medical addiction to table rose because it's on the same level you don't know addiction my friend you do not know but the other thing you know be wary of nuts i love nuts too nuts nuts are great but they're dangerous man nuts it's like it's concentrated energy it's fat and it's oil no don't ruin nuts for me but they're better than chocolate or something like that right they got protein in them but that's probably about it i was feeling like a hunter galler you know with my little pack of nuts and they don't taste that good they're not good for you no they are good for you some of them are good

for you aren't they they have nutrients in them but they're packed full of fat i think if you look to like a weight for weight per hundred grams i'm pretty sure you'll find they're about the same as chocolate i'm sorry man oh no that's why they taste so good chris there's no way for things to taste good without just massive amounts of salt but i still have the basic heuristic that bad taste pain equals better for you generally speaking but i know what you're saying is true well by the way this is middle-aged men talk about their health and diets that's i'm sorry this is what you sign up for with intro. This is what DTG is now. But there we go.

So this episode, Matt, we should mention, it's not the Elon Musk episode, which everyone is eagerly awaiting to close out the Tech Guru season. That is coming, but this has jumped the line because we have a right of reply clause in our Guru contracts where anyone that we cover can request that we have a chat with them.

And unless they are soulless and evil, and even if they are, and we still think it'll go reasonably well, we might have a chat with them. But one of our sense makers from the Sense Making Cube episode, Jimmy Wheel, got in contact after hearing a bit of the episode and asked if we could have a chat about it. So that's what this episode is. It's a guru right to reply for people who haven't had that before. So we're going to be talking with Jimmy Wheelmy wheel but we haven't yet so we don't know how that went it's probably okay though right it's probably okay i'm sure it's going to be fine uh i just hope it's not going to be one of those situations where you like play back

me saying something mean and then i have to get some clips of you saying uh poor jimmy yeah so but you know we were we were quite nice about Jimmy. We pointed out that Jordan Hall was slightly bullying him on the episode, or from our perspective, seemed to be doing that with his policing of metaphors. So, you know, it'll be interesting to see how it goes. We'll find out.

But that's what the main segment of today's episode is. But on Elon Musk, Matt map i don't want to gild the lily is that the correct like i don't want to reveal the horse before put the horse before the cart whatever the metaphor definitely not gilding the lily, but go on, just go on. But I just want to note, there's two things about the, you know, he's on Twitter every day, he's Trump-like in his attention getting, right, tweeting out. But since we've been doing our research on him, we both have noticed that he has a penchant for lying in a remarkable way. It is Trumpian, where he just says things

that are not true, and then they just get lost in the mists of time, or it doesn't really matter. And I just noticed one before this episode that had the reference, because it just sums these things up so beautifully. Elon Musk was claiming Apple was about to kick Twitter off the app store. And he was also saying, oh, they've stopped buying ads for Twitter, right? They're pulling out. And there's a Gizmodo article that says Apple spent $84,000 on Twitter ads the same day Elon tweeted it mostly stopped advertising there. And they mention, they go on to mention that Apple had spent more than most other companies advertising on Twitter. So it's just like, it's just not true. Also, he said that Apple had

threatened to remove Twitter from the App Store. And this is what sent him on this war. And then just today, he tweeted out, thanks, Tim Cook, for taking me around Apple's beautiful HQ. Good conversation. Among other things, we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store. Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.

He tweeted out, Apple has threatened us to remove their against free speech, and he went on this week-long war, and then today he's just like, oh yeah, apparently that didn't happen. And it had a massive impact. Every bloviating chucklehead, to use your

term, leapt into this white knighting for Elon Musk. It was symbolizing to Eric and Brett, the institutional gated complex diving in to squash the heroic Elon Musk for his brave championing of free speech. And it was just all a fantasy. It was just all fictional. Somebody suggested it might be an automated message because apparently Apple sends out automated messages about like, please make sure your thing is in line with content moderation or it might be pulled from the app store so they might have you know just reacted to your standard automated notification

but in any in any case whatever the truth is it's just amazing it just seems like you can tweet out or say things and you know we're going to cover this in the episode and nobody cares right when it's proven to be false or the evidence just completely contradicts what he's claimed and the second thing that i want to mention which relates to this is this ecosystem which i know existed before but i really wasn't getting as much of an up close and personal look of it the elon musk stan ecosystem yeah fanboy bs it is something to behold like yeah it's quite impossible to overstate how sycophantic people are and you mentioned brettstein. Colin Wright, who is a figure who has a blog called Reality's Last Stand and is active in the gender critical trans debate. And he basically positions

himself as arguing for science and biological differences are real and this kind of thing. But he also made this very juvenile illustration of a political spectrum right it's like a little line with a stick man in the middle and then it shows the left running far away and the little stick man who was on the left at the beginning is now getting like closer to the right which has stayed still because the left has gone crazy. And as so many people pointed out, this is insane because it shows the right being stationary for the past 20 years, which is an absolutely insane point of view. If you just look at the right wing, this is the context of American politics, but Elon Musk retweeted that cartoon. And Colin Wright has taken that retweet

and he now, one, he made limited edition signed posters of the ad and talked about the historic day that Elon Musk retweeted his meme, like get your own piece of internet history with this. And he's become a kind of, you know, Musk responder, just commenting and musk is also occasionally patting him and various other right-wing accounts on the head with like kind of

good boy pats you know usually just smiley faces or 100 right but it's amazing and it's very much the same pattern that happened with james lindsey when he got retweeted by Trump. And he initially tried to play it off as just a joke, as if that's going to affect me. And then it became his entire personality, right? Like a MAGA Trumpist idiot. It's definitely a pattern you see with these second tier personalities that are competing with each other for the attention for people like Joe Rogan as well, or Elon Musk. These sort of big daddy figures that are sitting there at the top of the food chain. Or Gordon Peterson. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Here's another good example. And actually, this is connected to Sam Harris and another DTG related thing, because Sam Harris quit Twitter recently, maybe just for personal reasons. He just thought Twitter was stupid and a waste of time, which he's right.

It wasn't some sort of political jest just so much, but it was amazing, Chris, didn't you think? The reaction of all of the IDW web slash Elon Musk fan crowd, they took this as just this damning indictment of sam harris and elon musk did it too where i'm seeing a tweet from him here where he said that sam lost me when he said that any lies at all would justify trump losing and i remember you know where that comes from yeah yeah it's the hunter biden comment that like he wouldn't care if he had their bodies in his attic or basement whichever yeah little kitchen this has become an article of truth hasn't it on the more deranged He didn't care if he had dead bodies in his attic or basement, whichever location. This has become an article of truth, hasn't it? On the more deranged side of the IDW that Sam Harris has gone woke or something.

It's a deliberate misreading. But just the way they react to someone like Sam not playing along, not going along with their mission. I don't know. You know, he's in general presented as having Trump derangement syndrome. But, you know, I do think Sam badly worded things there when he was stating his position on that. But his position was completely coherent. He was essentially saying he didn't think the story merited the attention. And it's primarily about Hunter Biden in any case. But as far as he was concerned,

you know, the media were right to be cautious, given that previously when Trump was elected, they had basically been very credulous about any news story that appeared. So his position was he didn't think it was that big of a deal. And because it's about Hunter Biden, you'd have to have really strong evidence that Joe Biden was doing as terrible things as Trump was doing with all his family. That's a perfectly understandable position. It's not like this huge controversy thing, but yeah, the right-wing ecosystem went crazy over that.

I mean, he was already in the bad books because of the anti-vaccine opposition right and being critical about that but yeah so the victory laps that people have taken on various figures though it's always remarkable how much gurus make it about them or their particular relationship like gad sad released the podcast and Eric Weinstein was talking, oh, I emailed Sam and I can't understand his reasoning for leaving. It's all about how they inject themselves into it. And it's not a mystery. He's talked incessantly how deranging he views Twitter and social media and stuff in general like sam stance on it

whatever you think of it it's pretty clear it's pretty consistent him being on twitter was something that he saw as a vice a necessary vice and then he just decided it wasn't worth it like big big effing deal that's my point it's it's the making mountains out of molehills which seems to be the common thread running through all of this but um well they're going to keep doing what they're doing they are and it's it's presented you know like a battle for the future of civilization if free speech is lost even in america tyranny is all that lies ahead brett weinstein jumping in really appreciate that you're taking this battle on brave is a term that cowards have abused to the point of meaninglessness but you are clearly brave in the deepest sense win or lose hashtag got your back

it was the hashtag got your back that really i know made my head explode he's so cringe he's such a cringing toady and pearl clutching and hyperventilating about the system while licking the boots of a billionaire like he's just arbitrarily shit posting all over the place so ah god it is it's so annoying to see so anyway look forward to the elon musk episodes where we'll delve more deeply into Elon stuff and then hopefully not talk about him like he can recede into the background as far as I'm concerned and well he has yet to unleash the hordes of Milo and whatnot back into the Twitter sphere but we've already seen very recently from kanye's appearance with milo and nick forentes white nationalists on tim pool and various other platforms that if they come back people will just remember why it was that they disappeared in the first place so something to

look forward to there yes yes yes we'll do. We'll do the Musk episode, then we'll hopefully be able to put it behind us and not think about it too much. Right. So, Doma, one thing, a little advertisement to note, just a piece of content that people might be interested to hear. I appeared on a podcast called Beyond Synth. The clue is in the name. It's a synthwave podcast where they. The clue is in the name. It's a synth wave podcast

where they play synth wave music during the interview. I didn't hear it at the time, but the interviews interspersed were actually quite good synth wave music. And it was like a two or three hour interview conducted at 1 a.m. So my voice sounds like I've drank 12 bottles of whiskey, but it was a, it was quite fun

conversation. It was mostly about gurus and stuff, but we ended up randomly talking about a whole variety of other things, including like star Wars and pop culture and teenage mutant Ninja turtles and whatnot. So people might enjoy that or they might not. if if you ever wanted to hear my voice talking to white gurus combined with synth wave music now your time has come so beyond synth that's the name of it the podcast so uh yeah i'm sure you haven't looked listened to it yet but it's just a matter of time i might i might actually or if we're given recommendations, I'm going to pop one in too because I've been ravenously consuming a history podcast called Revolutions. I reckon many people who listen to our podcast already listen to this

because, well, he's much more famous and does much better work than we do. The guy's name is Mike Duncan and he also did, I think, the History of Rome podcast and some other ones. But he's just a stalwart, and he's so good, Chris. He's so good. It started off with the Glorious Revolution, the English Revolution, and French Revolution, American Revolution, and now I'm in the Haiti Revolution, which, let me tell you,

that's pretty crazy stuff. It's a pretty hardcore revolution, is it? It is. Yeah, yeah. But it's just so good. It's informative, it's educational, and just the tone of it is just so engaging. So, yeah, if you don't already listen to it,

then don't waste your time listening to Culture War podcast, except for ours to the extent that we are one. You can learn about nuts. You can learn nutritional information about nuts. You could listen to some weird synthwave thing and teen teenage mutant ninja totals or you could listen to revolutions you know all your courses yeah that's right that's right well on that note so let's head into our interview with Jimmy Wheel. So with us today, we have Jimmy Wheel, who featured in our Sensemaking Cubed episode. Jimmy, so for those who aren't aware, we offer any of the people

that we cover within reason the right to respond to any of the points that we made or discuss things that we said or that kind of thing. And people have taken it up before, Chris Williamson and Sam Harris and Jimmy reached out after the episode to suggest we have a discussion. So thank you for doing so, Jimmy. But before that, do you want to inform people a bit of who you are and your current position or background? I'll do a bad job of it. Sure, sure, sure. So I'm an academic refugee, so I was all but done on a PhD in history, ethno-history and anthropology, really. So similar neck of the woods to you, chris i would imagine uh at 22 and then i bounced and went into mountain guiding and a bunch of other things that led to a career in

fundamentally um i would say developmentally informed leadership in human development so everything from my wife being a montessori teacher and us having a you know working within the montessori community all the way through secondary and collegiate to mountain guiding and taking people to 23,000 feet on the north face of Everest. The youngest group of Americans to do that to working in the conscious capitalism space, which has all sorts of air quotes around it at this point. around it at this point, but working in management consulting to now for the last decade, founding an organization called the Flow Genome Project, which is basically a combination of kind of the neuroscience and developmental psychology of optimum human development and leadership. And we do that kind of stuff again in wild environments, backcountry winter environments, Grand Canyons of Utah, that kind of thing,

as well as front country situations. We work with all sorts of organizations from SEAL Team 6 to Deloitte to Google to Facebook to Disney to whomever. And I wrote a couple of books, one Stealing Fire and one called Recapture the Rapture, the most recent. So really, I mean, that's what I'm psyched to talk to you guys because right in the middle of both of your wheelhouses. one stealing fire and one called recapture the rapture the most recent so really i mean that that's what i'm psyched to talk to you guys because right right in the middle of your both of your wheelhouses right yeah thanks jimmy that's a very helpful outline and a one dollar question that i was curious about is so you know the way that our listeners will likely be familiar with

you is from the content that we covered in the episode with the sensemaking about sensemaking episode so how did you come to be involved in the sensemaking sphere or not necessarily that specific video but i'm talking you know more generally the sensemaking ecosystem would you locate yourself in that ecosystem or and like how did you get involved with that no categorically not i think sense making is a fucking awful term and we should just say making sense like any other solid solid englishman so no i i and i and i come here to to bury game b not to praise it um so i think you have mistaken me for another guy um but honestly i mean if the dear readers dear listeners if all you know is that solipsistic clusterfuck

clocking at two hours and 45 minutes that for some reason you guys bent out of your minds dredged out of the internet archives and spent even more hours on i mean hats off to all of you um because yeah i mean my senses i mean i hadn't even got the microphone off and i was telling david i was like this thing should never see the fucking light of day i said at best with ruthless editing you get maybe 30 to 45 useful minutes out of this so so it's an absolute hoot that that's the one you guys get to take the piss out of because i'm like i'm like we don't have a leg to stand on. Absolutely. But, and why I'm happy to chat with you guys today. And what a missed opportunity, right?

Because the, I mean, yeah, utterly ludicrous. And we can unpack game B and where I feel like it's parked itself into some goofy and avoidable corners as well. goofy and avoidable corners as well. But, right, you know, like if those guys were just quote-unquote galaxy brains and utterly ineffectual, then that kind of taking the piss would be just completely warranted. But they both have really significant and interesting bodies of work, as, you know, hopefully to some whatever extent I might also. And that was not the place to find any of it. So, you know, Daniel is a self-taught autodidact

who is currently advising pretty much every you know transnational three-letter organization and the the heads of those organizations around the world on actually applied existential risk and risk management you know jordan before he 30, but the billion dollar fucking company and got into Harvard Law School on a perfect LSAT, took classes for two years, was like, I'm over this, went to the dean and said, hey, I tell you what, I'm not going to come to class anymore. I'll just sit the exams and ace them. And then I'm going to go to the Kennedy School of Government. I'm going to go roaming the rest of the halls of Harvard and get the education I actually want. Harvard and get the education I actually want. So now that said, the premise for that specific event was, can we explain unrehearsed and not even desired by any, any of us was, can you explore collective coherence, some form of emergence, something or other, can we get to what, you know, Quakers might call a gathered meeting, right? Some sense of, is there enough resonance and affinity and novelty to be playing good jazz? That was it. And then Jordan opens with a minor modal seventh, you know, he's like late stage Miles Davis or Coltrane. And you're like,

oh shit. Okay. Wasn't planned, wasn't rehearsed. But since we are attempting to do this live experiment, right? I guess we're in that key for a while i thought we're going to going for a campfire strum along right and we ended up in some fairly abstruse and i was like this is gonna be anywhere impossible for folks to follow or track if you know what i would just say that full stop so what you guys took is me being a little brother to jordan what wasn't that at all it was like when when one guitarist is is is sitting his guitar on fire and playing with his teeth the best thing to do is play some vamping backup chords and maybe take the piss out of the situation deflate play the fool right on behalf of any poor beleaguered

listeners so that was the setup um and you know and and as far as well i mean we can take this any way you'd like. We can talk about group coherence, whether you believe there is such a thing, you can knock that around. We can also go over to Game B. I'm happy to chat about, you know, any of it that comes up. fairly skeptical of the kind of description you gave there, Jamie, of, you know, autodidactic self-taught geniuses who are able to... That was one. Right. That was Dan. Yes. And similarly, there's a lot of people that advise a lot of influential people who have impressive resumes, but say a lot of silly stuff especially in the people that we look in day in day out one of the things that's most impressive is actually their ability to kind of self-promote and if you listen to their account all of them are unrecognized geniuses and many of them are extremely wealthy and extremely influential like you know scott adams or nassim talib and also have genuine areas of expertise and knowledge like um dad sad for example i've just been i've just been seeing more of his stuff lately like

this week yeah yeah he's hard to avoid unfortunately, but the, but so our critique usually isn't that people don't have any expertise or influence, but one that those tend to be over estimated as signals of value. And two, that people can have a very good skill at promoting themselves in that way. And we've actually looked at other content with Jordan Hall in particular. And that's very much the similar impression from that other content. So I just say that we'd be skeptical of the kind of revolutionary nature, and not least because making a large amount of money in divx or

in paypal for example especially with the current ecosystem is not really an indication of you having a great analytical mind and and foresight it can also just be you were in the right industry at the right time during an economic boom and i can't spoken spoken like a spoken like a better lefty post-modernist well done well done yeah no come on you're being too salty out of the gates of that yeah no so i i just mean that like even you know setting aside jordan or daniel and the relative merits i think those heuristics could get you in trouble, right? Oh, for sure. The kind of status and the amount of wealth that someone has as indications of intellectual value.

Yeah, no, no. But all I was saying was extrapolated third-party verifiable metrics. So Harvard law degree, not that you can judge it or not judge it, but you should say outside there in the world. So you were just pillorying the guys as word solid gobbledygook know they're there and i'm saying hey there's a fucking there's a there is a there there absolutely and and and and and not that they made bank i don't give a fuck about that that he was one of the wizard brains behind innovating the entire thing so systems analysis just pragmatic

i don't care about market cap i'm talking about hard things done in the real world, right? And just to say they're not lightweights. Now, you can critique their philosophy. You can critique their impacts. Like Doug Rushkoff, right, is another fascinating thinker, a good friend. And he has all kinds of, we have all kinds of lateral and horizontal critiques of where everybody's showing up. Tristan Harris and his critiques on social media, lots of kind of extended friends. And quite often it's hammer and tongs. I mean, people are fundamentally at odds with how the other people impact or application in the world, even if we're

generally rooting for them as people and friends. I think Matt and I, because we're academics and you've been through the academic ecosystem as well so you come across a lot of people who one have phds um and two are impressive intellectuals in some particular domain james lindsey has a phd in mathematics he's an idiot promoting conspiracy theorists about globalists and you know the mar Marxist revolution that's underway. But he does have a PhD from an accredited institution. And in my particular case, I have a PhD from Oxford. And look at me, right? So, you know, I just, I agree with you that it isn't fair to just treat people as if they're people who have never achieved anything and have no expertise.

Most of the people that we cover do have expertise and have achievements, but part of our critique is what they use that as a signal of. Yeah, absolutely. Especially when it's cross-disciplinary like they're out past their domain of expertise but they're still talking as if they're subject matter expert right it's like scope creed of their punditry i think that's probably something we and i will also completely agree that you know we did select the sense making episode because it was particularly egregious about the, the kind of issues that we see in that ludicrous ecosystem. Yeah.

But it wasn't, we didn't take it like just to poke fun. It was more that it highlighted the issues that we had covered. We'd covered some other content from rebel wisdom and that kind of thing and it it encapsulates some of the issues that we have and and similar issues that we would have with people like eric weinstein who like you know you could highlight he's a manager do you want to do the psychology or the ontology uh well what do you want to what do you want to jam into like the psychology of the pundit and what you guys are doing in the IDW and everywhere else. And I'm like, why are we people's getting so wacky with hot mics or the ontology? Because Matt, you were just mentioning beforehand that I reminded you of a family member and you,

then you sort of asserted a certain position or believed worldview that you thought I had. So I'd love to hear what you thought that was as well. And we can kind of, you know, clarify. Yeah. What I was getting at with that and chris you weren't around to hear this and this i was not assigning his worldview to yours but that was uh i was seeing someone in my personal life who is a great guy he does does good work in the world and uh has an extremely different worldview to me. Has a spiritual worldview, kind of expansive metaphysics and talks about things like ontologies a lot, Jamie. And to me, none of it makes any sense.

It seems to have some sort of meaning for him, I guess in the same way that certain kinds of spiritual beliefs might as well. And I guess he would find it supportive in many different ways, but we would enjoy having a glass of whiskey together and sort of shake our heads at each other. To him, I would be this hard-headed,

obtuse, scientific naturalist type that deals with these concrete things and doesn't sort of understand these fascinating abstractions that he really loves. Well, I mean, here's a quick question have do um are either of you guys um familiar with psychedelics from a first person phenomenological perspective do you mean have we tried them have you tripped balls have you shot the life-surgent lightning yes sir yes have you sent it uh i have yes i don't think chris has my my is more of the psychonaut variety and i'm more of somebody who has experience of like

introspective traditions various buddhist traditions and meditation retreats and that kind of stuff so and and my original degree at university my undergraduate was in study of religions specializing in east asian religions for that uh because of that interest so i'm familiar with like the kind of contemplative introspective stuff and that a lot of you know david fuller and the rebel wisdom ecosystem is interested in but I'm not a psycho, no so psychedelics, no not a big part of Northern Irish life during the troubles

What was your question there, Jamie? Well, I mean just to state, if we're going to talk ontologies, then you ain't seen shit till you licked a toad so what is study of religion is not religiosity it's not christian experience it's not any kind of direct self-referential and again not abstracting to empirical truth claims just within that domain of reference the the testimonies of mystics through the ages what is that that goes you had an i it relationship with religiosity right it was an object you were studying right but the i thou experience right whatever its substrates are whatever its mechanisms

are actually leave all sorts of giant honking great question marks but that it is experienced and has been consistently with variations is legit as a domain and zone of inquiry then my question back to you matt would be um with your psychedelic experience did it did it inform infuse your worldview at all was your worldview impervious to it and just took it as oh this is just excited excitable neurons in a serotonergic system with 5-8-2-a receptors and interactivities you know creating the patronicity of these simulations of insights and ideas which were probably already within me and any externalization of that is anthropomorphization of the

You know basic cognitive perceptual field which I was basically making sense of myself anyway all the time. Did you do that one? I would just say you didn't do enough if you if you were able to pull off that sleight of hand and stay in your snug Harbor That was an impressive spiel. You're very loquacious Jamie That was an impressive spiel. You're very loquacious, Jamie. It's good stuff. Look, actually, like Chris, I was very interested in Zen Buddhism when I was younger and actually practiced worldview i don't think i mean i think i've got a conventional view of it which is psychoactive experiences you could include stuff like mdma for instance which people use for say couples therapy or even people that are terminally ill and it can be helpful certain kinds of perturbations through just the normal operation

of our biophysical functioning can be helpful in certain situations. And likewise, meditation can be deeply relaxing and calming and quieten the chatter in your mind, all that stuff. All that stuff can be good. Do I think it gives some sort of cosmic special perspective on things which is fundamentally better or elevated above just how I am now, which is basically caffeinated and little else?

No, the answer. Yeah. You know, I would agree. I mean, ultimately, I would say that I'm much more of an agnostic mechanist, like figure out the neurophysiological mechanisms of accident that prompt certain interiority right and then you just you just move those knobs and levers in a very agnostic way without any storytelling about all the you know all the imaginal and hypothetical so you just back out any faith-based untestable things whatsoever you create neurophysiological you know protocols put your you know eeg this state, do this with your vagal tone, increase endorphins, oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine, whatever you're optimizing for via

endogenous and exogenous mechanisms, and then see the fuck who's home. And then you start constructing a sort of N equals one, gather your own data, falsify all statements, be Bayesian as fuck throughout, and Occam's razor too, too right and you basically just steer that so that you have a sort of rational mysticism or an agnostic gnosticism like the gnostic part is like okay definitely something happens subjectively right to to a host of peak states that people have had throughout the ages you know all the stuff at madison with the you know mris and the tibetan monks and and matthew ricard and all right all those things you're like okay there are neurophysiological empirical correlates to the subjective interior may not be one-to-one we're probably only just kind of starting to figure it out but

if you do that then you just you completely flip the script on all the storytelling which i think is where you guys take issue right you're like all these just so stories right are kind of push it and and not really falsifiable so let's just back them out and then say we're going to be agnostic about the content you have but we're going to be specific and protocol driven on the neurophysiological setup go have your thing now come back now you pass it you make meaning of it and you can be bring it back into contextual paradigmatic rationalism you just name which lenses you're laying over it and then therefore what kinds of results would you expect to glean from that data set yeah um yeah i guess you touched on the other issue I've got with it. I mean, I don't feel like it's really meaningful to wax that lyrical on those sort of transcendent subjective experiences.

But yeah, as you say, the other issue I've got with it is that there is no reality testing. Like, it's not observable. It's fundamentally a revealed truth, right? So when a prophet... The interior experience that we have. Yeah, so it could be someone that's practicing zen it could be someone who's who's claiming that they've that they're running like i forget who it was running thousands of different paradigms in their heads simultaneously 70s different paradigms simultaneously oh 70 i was exaggerating

sorry who was that jordan hall jordan Jordan Hall. On a bad day. But the problem is none of that stuff can be tested. We have to take it on faith that these things are happening. So it's very easy to talk about it. When you say take it on faith, which things are happening? Well, say running 70 different paradigms. Oh, well, sure. That's true with any.

So, yeah, so that's why i don't subscribe to it as a something that one can talk about sensibly or disagree about i you know you either have to just accept that it's happening or not i i probably have a slightly different view on matt on that jimmy because like uh like indicated so i i do have an academic interest in the topic around ritual psychology and the biographical transformative effect of imagistic experiences, high arousal, dysphoric rituals, and that kind of thing. So I think there are ways that you can look. Did you say dysphoric ritual? Yeah, that's my particular area like unhappy ordeals uh yeah like fire walking or self-flagellation or extreme deprivation cold water immersion those kind of things so that's i i wrote all about that i wrote

about in my last book i wrote about exactly that the the penitentes and the flat and and the spartans flogging and right the law so that's my that's my like core research area and i've taken part in like misogi events and firewalking events and stuff in in japan as well not hugely involved but i have some experience of them and like a personal experience of training and in various martial arts which which generated similar experiences, dysphoric experiences through training. But one thing is to say that I'm not approaching the topic from like a strictly non-experiential approach. And particularly, you know, study of religion, it actually to a fault is phenomenologically inclined in a lot of ways but where matt is talking about i think what matt

is emphasizing is the claims made about introspective enlightenment experiences or appeals to special knowledge gained through introspection are inherently subjective and there's so many cases where people throughout history have claimed that, have even been recognized as like meditation masters and have in their personal lives and in various other ways been, you know, sexually abusive alcoholics and kind of cult leaders. empirical approach to quantifying what goes on in meditative states and stuff i think there's value to that but i also think that that is slightly oversold in the same way like neuro theology is oversold about locating the god particles or the like andy andy newberg's work yeah or or you know long back platinga and the the god helmet and you know the uh so like i don't think there's nothing there about like transcranial stimulation being able to present euphoric experiences that might you know seem similar to the kind of religious ecstasies but that isn't our critique

like in large part if people are into psycho, not stuff and kind of spiritual reflection, more power to them. Like it's not an art jam. We are like kind of empirical rationalists. But that's not the issue because there's plenty of people that I see do that, that I find interesting, take value from. plenty of people that i see do that that i find interesting take value from it's more the connection to the you know the kind of guru side of it and there it would be oh yeah things like to give a concrete example and let you you know respond um like a lot of the figures around what we would call the sense making ecosystem or the IDW or, you know, the alternative media ecosystem. They had a big issue when it came to parsing the evidence about vaccines and still now have a big issue with it. And to me, that's an illustration that for all of the kind of discussions about metacritical faculties and you know other ways of knowing and stuff that there's a fundamental just lack of critical

approach to things people didn't notice the issue with like brett weinstein um or address really the chrisms except david and david suffered for that and and even ivermectin or all those such things. So to me, it's kind of those issues where the rubber hits the road, you know, like the- That was specifically the Brett and Heather's position. Yeah. Yes. But like, so Daniel Schmachtenberger was doing updates on the pandemic with David Fuller, which I listened to.

And his take was not as anti-vaccine as Brett has become, but certainly very ambivalent about the evidence around hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin at a time where the evidence is not really ambivalent around those treatments. And the mainstream science position would be there's very weak evidence and you shouldn't be recommending at that stage and similarly jordan hall has in the same way like jordan peterson made various statements suggesting that pharmaceutical companies are inventing variants or may be involved with that kind of stuff so i would say that a lot of the sense making ecosystem is if not anti-vax uh curious they're certainly very tolerant of anti-vaccine views they've got they've got borderline oppositional defiant disorder don't they well to certain to certain

institutions narratives they're not very defiant when it comes to talking to Robert Malone and Peter McCulloch or anybody like that. Well, come on. I think that is specifically Brett and Heather, hasn't that been? Because I'm not aware of – Joe Rowe. I mean, Daniel is for sure comes up from a Vedic background with very different orientations to health, medicine, et cetera, et cetera.

So whatever he was expressing was probably as as he's been conceiving of it and they were also backing they were funding a meta-analysis of hydroxychloroquine well before it kind of blew up and went sideways in the culture wars and they and they had a panel of physicians and they were actually doing legit stuff so it wasn't just coming from the social media cesspool it was coming from you know, recent specific and dedicated research and analysis that professionals were conducting. And so he was feeding that up. But in that kind of case, would you say like Daniel or Jordan or anybody in that ecosystem is like well-placed to run clinical trials on the efficacy of vaccine treatments well i mean they have they have a nine figure um sign you know nutritional supplements company but

that's it yeah but that that would be the founded and have a team and budget to stand things up like that and have familiar protocols where they have funded double blinds on their products. That would be a really good example. So for us, Jimmy, nootropic area is a fertile minefield for shoddy studies conducted by companies with lots of money, designed with researchers degrees of freedom to get desired outcomes so like on it has run studies you know and they're useless they're absolutely useless and in general have you guys actually track them have you have you run down run independent ones to cross reference not run independent but or you just look at the study and

you just say oh i don't sign off on the study design. No, it's more like, you know. What's making you say they're crummy? Oh, because in both of our case, we're academics with training in assessing like methodology of studies and that kind of circles you learn to identify low-powered studies that have large amounts of degrees of freedom when when a company that is like selling supplements is finding research which is there's some motivated reasoning there right and and there's also a you know a whole bunch of end outcomes and then only the significant ones are reported and so there's there's like basic some happy p hacking in the mix and you're you're rubbish your mother's brain

so like the you know the the kind of not just nootropics but the whole supplement ecosystem is awash with like junk research and absolutely and that that's why people in that go sphere like they might have the money to run studies but but by and large, what they would be better off doing would be paying like an independent research lab that wasn't that like the cock, you know, not Cochrane, but something akin to that, like an independent research body that is ambiguous. That's what a neurohacker has done. Yeah, they work with third parties to oversee their stuff. But listen, I'm curious because so far it feels to me like we're sort of in violent agreement. Basically everything that you guys are concerned or skeptical about, I am also. I mean, I just wrote a book with a culty cult checklist, which is highly resonant with your guy's galaxy brain

sense of grievance like like your guy's checklist that's what actually clued me on you're like decoding the gurus i just wrote a thing about gurus and about culty cultic tendencies so to me you know and yes let's just let's agree that we have had different lived experiences different you know academic trainings perspectives on life, et cetera. And I mean, I'm the son of a fucking Royal Naval test pilot. I grew up hyper rationalist and remain that way. I just happened to start having some neck snappingly interesting life experiences, big mountain powder skiing, surfing and kite surfing and wind surfing, psychedelics, live music, and just being like, oh, fascinating fascinating here i am studying history and ethnographies and culture what the fuck is this and let me go and

hit the books and then try and unpack the the the rational academic understandings of what that was and then leave that in the realm of unfalsifiable imaginal experiential content but on the other hand it's where we live right we we only we our entire experience of our entire life is experienced via our interiority try and suppress it or deny it or mock it or ridicule it or marginalize it and be like wait a second that's fucking bizarre we're gonna privilege weights and measures we're gonna privilege you know fucking eegs on on screen as more real than actually our self-awareness and intersubjectivity in this moment like what the fuck doesn't that seem ass backwards well jamie i mean someone like myself

i'm not a behaviorist i recognize that people and animals have interior lives except me i do have my doubts about chris sometimes um but so it's not that it's it's more that when things are not directly observable, it can be a happy hunting ground for bullshit. Inflation, distortion, misrepresentation, so many shysters out there. So that's why I would say, so just don't ever presume to map it or cling to it as your reified interpretation. You just say, that's all just phenomena. And then just stay back to, you know, know i mean you guys know how to do this just this is just be running multiple um you know like korzybski and sort of reality tunnels at a given time you're like okay we tap on this window this is the world we're in right we're discussing interior experiences or we're

strict rational materialist we you know whatever it would be you just acknowledge the truth claims of the paradigm you're going to tap into and then work within. But you also have the ability to tap the fuck out of those and then be still, you know, in your, whatever, your balcony, your dashboard, the home screen, take your pick. But like you're there before you've clicked into. So, so then absolute truth of any of those specific reality tunnels or, or phenomenological frameworks, you just take as contextual and

provisional and it's like does it do what it says it does and does it shoot more or less straight and then you can sort of assess it and then you can use that you have a sort of utilitarian view on which tool framework perspective worldview gestalt whatever the fuck you want to say you're going to use at that given time but you have the ability to click back up to the level above all of them and still be self-aware in your time place and perspective taking and then also intersect intersubjectively like how are we doing right also having shared shared mapping of what the fuck's going on the trialogue um yeah like i think chris and I tend to give people a fair bit of leeway when it comes to that kind of very personal phenomenological stuff. So for instance, that's what I mean, like, shut the fuck up about your story. Like, I don't want to hear your story because it's unfalsifiable. Right. So just tell me the outcome. I want to clear I want to understand your patterns or your source code, not your fucking personal narrative.

source code not your fucking personal narrative yeah it's a bit like jordan peterson and his self-help books right i don't really have a problem with somebody writing a self-help book and creating a kind of framework whereby people can create structure and find meaning in their lives and whatever it's not really something where science and analysis and logic and reason is is necessarily the best tool for the job where i tend to have a problem is when someone like Jordan Peterson, he likes to live in that world where he believes genuinely and truly that underneath the material world. It's a realm of spirit or a keen light. Yes, exactly, which to him is actually more real

than the observable universe. And that can lead to some very strange places. So I want to go back to one thing you said at the beginning, and I want to concede something here, which is that Chris and I are not in a good place to throw stones for people for having long, indulgent conversations. Our podcasts are always way too long, and we are very indulgent. So I just want to concede that.

We do just take, and our format is to take a piece of content and almost use it as a demonstration or as an exercise. So I'll concede that the three of you guys are a hell of a lot more than was just going on in that conversation. And we did, that one i think did come across our radar because somebody had seen it and that this is wild you should cover this one i was mortified to see that it had like a hundred thousand views i'm like oh dear god you know like what are you people thinking so so yes um but but here's the other thing here's what i would um challenge you guys to, because I feel like it's yours to do, right,

is take the piss out of anything you see, right? Use and analyze frameworks, but don't get sloppy with the application of your model. Because I was super intrigued when I first started. I'm like, oh, shit, galaxy brain. Oh, wow, that's a great term. And here's the things and here's all the steps. This is really tracking with the kind of stuff I've been modeling.

And then it felt like you just blunt instrumented everybody and kind of taught him with very similar brushes and it was like look for this to work over the long term you've got to have real differentiation like the application of your model applies contrast that wouldn't otherwise be perceivable and the people are like oh shit no i'm seeing the ones and zeros of this whole fucking idw space right oh and and constructive critique even if it's not well on the one hand they did this other thing kind of nicely if you're going to trash someone fucking trash them well give them a clean execution but what would be your best suggestion so if we're talking about group coherence do you reject the notion outright are there better models is there different research on the other hand

devil's advocate that kind of thing because like to me that's what you guys are that's your fucking training and my god you'd be making a generative contribution to the broader conversations versus just be negging of it. I'd love to see that. Yeah, yeah, we do do a lot of negging, that's true. But, you know, we also, I do think, recognize a lot of differentiation. We don't lump all the people that we've criticized into the same bucket, nor do we think that they're equally bad or good in the various different ways.

We're very much aware, by the way, that these terms, like calling someone a guru, you can just use it as an easy slur, right? So we have to be really careful about that stuff. But when it comes to more substantive things that you guys were talking about, say, in that conversation, like putting aside the excesses perhaps or the indulgences.

I mean, you know, because I went on to do a lot of reading about Game B and coherence and all of these things, right? And, you know, like, you know, what you guys were talking about, you know, that's real stuff. It was much bigger than just that conversation. That's a whole program that a bunch of different people to different degrees are heavily invested in and you know there are claims that are made there for instance that you know game a i.e everything that's happened and is happening is is totally broken um so i think science was described as

completely useless at this point like a completely useless way to understand the world. And Game B was sort of treated as, it was taken as an assumption, really, that this is a fantastic solution for doing things better. But I guess I'd probably put it to you, like what evidence can you point to that Game B, as it's described, can improve on what's going on at the moment um look i think i think there's a bunch of well-intentioned people in and around and near that space some form of like proactive civilization read it so whoops this one seems to be self-terminating and not putting on the brakes

fast enough you know what is what are the lifeboats so in that respect hats off to everybody who's even attempting to give a shit. That said, I think plan B has got fucking so many structural issues. Just to start, or at least in the States, right? You're bringing your A game is the one you want to bring. Bringing your B game is not the one you want to bring. So just branding wise, I would have said that they're gimped right out of the gates. Branding wise, I would have said that they're gimped right out of the gates.

The next is that you essentialize all of human culture and all of civilization post this mythological east of Eden, out of the hunter-gatherer groovy time like Harari, you know, and into 10,000 years of patriarchy, agriculture, bureaucracy, priest class, taxation, all bad things. Right. And that's that. And then game B is nothing more nor less than the antithetical solution to all of those bad things well what are they exactly well we don't know yet it's emergent right like then you're just into a fucking cargo cult so there's no validating it and there's no steering and the moment you get a bunch of people who think they're all allies and confederates within under the game b umbrella and they get together and try and do anything in the real world together, and it will blow apart within months because no one has any fucking idea what the there, there, they all supposedly said yes to actually is in grounded application. It would be interesting to follow on there.

And I think we can talk about whether we see collective cohesion as like a reasonable goal or ways to achieve it. But one thing I wanted to respond to was your suggestion that, you know, it would be more productive for us to be critical, yes, but to like kind of highlight areas of agreement and, you know, and productive feedback right and i i think matt and i would probably or even better or even better propositions like it doesn't have to always be acknowledging that they did something right although that's nice if it's true but also what the fuck do you guys like triangular right give give us a synthesis of your antithesis yeah so i think there is probably where there's a like disconnect. You know, you were asking like areas where we wouldn't see eye to eye. I think I can identify some there. So, you know, you guys described on that episode, the Omega rule, right? The idea of basically like extreme.

Which I always say is we should just say, shouldn't we say benefit of the doubt, guys? Right. Yeah. Doesn't everybody already know that one? Let's just do that so you know the terminology issues aside like i would frame that as be extremely charitable to people and if you take that in a the mod or billy that whichever one is the easily defensible one it's just like oh don't be immediately dismissive of ideas sometimes wacky ideas can be useful and yes of course they can however a i think my critique of a lot of the sense making ecosystem is that

it isn't critical enough it's too indulgent of people's ideas and there isn't enough pushback and what matt and i are articulating is a different worldview one which is pretty mainstream in science which is be extremely critical of yourself of all the people and and usually the the actual you know the existing expertise and stuff the people who have spent decades on the topic they are often right about things more than the people who have just discovered, you know, about viruses in the past six months. And in the case of like war, that would come into actual focus as a difference. I watched your interview with Brett Weinstein. Now, I know in that interview, you guys basically didn't really discuss COVID and that kind of thing. However,

if I was having a conversation with Brett Weinstein in 2021, after he had been promoting strongly anti-vaccine rhetoric, one of the main anti-vaccine figures in the COVID pandemic, I wouldn't have had a conversation like that. And I would also because of the what i know about evolution and what i know about brett's view of evolution i think he's got a pseudoscientific view of evolution so that would be like places which which is the which is the pseudoscientific bit oh a lot of it but oh like the omega specifically the hunter-gatherer's guide? Like what's in there or stuff you said elsewhere? Well, both, yeah. But, you know, in a nutshell, there's so much.

But basically he and Heather would claim that basically anything that exists as a property of humans, human behaviour or physiology or anything, even something that exists in society, something that's happened historically, everything can be traced back directly to an evolutionary cause. So Brett famously once talked about, to Richard Dawkins I think it was, he talked about the German invasion of Russia during World War II and gave an evolutionary cause for that specific event.

Now that's probably at the extreme end. Lineage selection. Another one, like there's yeah there's omega rule but brett outlines the omega principle the hunter gallerist guide to you know the 21st century is just an extension of his worldview his worldview in general is skeptical of toothpaste and of vaccines and of you know very familiar to people toothpaste toothpaste or the right in toothpaste fluoridization you know 61 half dozen dealer but the um the so the but but the rationale is that it's not natural right that you didn't know but that that that so that thing like the omega principle is that if something has been around for a long time is costly it is likely an adaptation and that led

brett for example to say uh on rogan suggests that you know when people are hung and they ejaculate uh in the throes of death that this is an adaptionist thing because in some cases that might have somehow entered the adrenal cavity. That seems like a... It's a... It brought some unsuspecting maiden in the ear. Yeah. But that shows such a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution. So Darwin selected for dudes with boners when they die?

Like, we're really making this case like maybe the galapagos there's just this closeted full bunch of auto erotic asphyxiators and they're just elevating ahead of us this is this is loopy so so was your question though that you you you had seen an interview or a talk that we had you presume that it happened after he'd already been coming out publicly against ivermectin and other stuff i if you can tell me which one it was i mean so the one of the older ones we've been together in person we've had them um out to visit when they were here in town to be on rogan and we and we talked heart to heart and and expressed all you're trying to calibrate like hey where are you guys

hey what are you thinking like and actually no we're not even interested in talking about vaccines and coven and quarantine we'd like to hang out, fucking drink some wine, listen to some music, catch up on our families, like, you know, and hey, goddamn, if there's any way around it, guys, don't die on that. You know, don't, the fucking dead end, you know, like it may feel in the heat of battle, it may feel like it has to happen now, but you can just see structurally there is no defending. Now take the position of, hey, there's a bunch of off-label, off-patent, potentially useful drugs out there. And hell's bells, while we're sitting on our hands waiting for this brand new tested

shit, we should absolutely be screening and vetting regardless of economic incentives of Big Pharma. And that is their root position. And i support them in that so right once it came betting on specific horses to win i was like i don't know i have zero capacity to judge and make an informed assessment but i'm not going to take a public stand and get sucked into the echo chamber so that would be the that would be like a point that i would make so that particular conversation at the time that i seen at least as it released on youtube was in 2021 so i presumed it was you know within the past six months or something like that but brett started his anti-vaxxing stuff in 2020 but even

that so that's something that matt and i talk about we've talked about it with sam harris as well we have no doubt that brett and heller or or any of the figures that we cover interpersonally can be extremely nice people and can also, you know, be engaging people to talk about and may have expertise and knowledge about specific areas. But in that case, and this is the like a critique that I guess I have of you guys collectively, is that there's a half-hearted acknowledgement of criticism. But what Brett and Hillary were doing, it wasn't like it's a small part of their output promoting anti-vaccine. It was a huge thing. They were the people that introduced Rogan to Robert Malone

and Steve Kirsch and Peter McCulloch. And even now, Brett is very strongly claiming vindication. So by choosing not to address that or address it in a very, you know, slight way, that is to me like indulgent in a way that like... Who are you experiencing? Wait, wait, who are you experiencing doing that? So what you just... You're saying sort of accommodating...

Like what you just... Accommodating... Described. Things that should go more strongly challenged yes so that that would be you know the the thing that i would say would you be willing to say like that brett is openly anti-vaxxing because to us that's obvious and i think to most people outside of the sense making ecosystem honestly dude i i i don't i don't honestly really track all these substrates and different paths, you know, because then some people will say, I'm not anti-vax.

I'm asking for more research on novel vaccines, right? And they might split between the existing old class, the Johnson and Johnson's and that kind of stuff. Even though then, having said that, a majority of their public statements and definitely soundbites and tweets and, you know, lower context things start coming across in a consistent fact pattern closer to where you're describing. So that, right? And so, but, you know, so that's a tricky bit to be like, where exactly? One thing to be aware of, Jamie, as it happens, I have published on the psychology of vaccination, and I was researching it before COVID came along. And Chris, too, there's obviously,

researching it before COVID came along. And Chris, too, there's obviously, as you would know, there is a very long history of this as a cultural phenomenon. Oh, for sure. And it's just got re-skinned and repopulated with updated talking points. Yeah, that's right. And it's actually super interesting how the old talking points were just kind of recycled and rebadged. Yeah, that was the tell.

There was the linguistic fingerprints. Yeah, and one of the things that's just a constant that's well-known rebadged. That was the tell. There was the linguistic fingerprints. Yeah, and one of the things that's just a constant that's well known is that anti-vaxxers claim to not have an anti-vax. They just have concern about these specific vaccines.

So we're back into Russia. So my sense is Chris is just I honestly don't think we were talking at a time when it had been acute. That's one point. The other is, we're not journalists. If we're getting together as mates and friends to have a conversation about a specific topic that's current, present, animated, mutual, we're not going to be taking each other out to the witch formatively for the fucking recording later, we're going to be in a good conversation. So now that said, I had Andrew Cohen, the fallen guru on our program. And you can listen to it. I fucking take the piss out of him and absolutely hold his feet to the fire. And he didn't want his feet held to the fire, and we had fun with it, and it was mutually respectful, and we kind of bowed off the mat when we were done sparring and me throwing everything at him.

So it's just that kind of capacity is absolutely there. I think it's just content and consent as to what are we doing with each other and what's the highest and best use of the rare times we do get to carve out time to shoot the shit and maybe share it so there'd be like the divisions and lines right because like i would imagine in that case you would regard some of the stuff that he was involved in as you know beyond the pl or it needs to be addressed or you'd be uh you know it would be an example that comes from the you know actually somebody involved in the conversation so jordan hall had a conversation with a proper terrian uh oh yeah yeah yeah i watched what's his name

curtis do little or i don't know he's got a he's got a cartoonish name but in in any case like david david fuller spoke to jordan about that conversation and about the fact that jordan really didn't challenge him on anything and he didn't highlight to his audience about the context of why the guy was controversial, right? He's an ethno-nationalist. He's a neo-Nazi anti-Semite in the 20th century. That was exactly my feedback. Yeah. So that was exactly mine. I called him and I said, mate, he goes, what, are you going to tell me you know that i shouldn't have done i was like fuck no you should have done it you should have leaned into it and really gone someplace edgy and interesting that really put you know proof to to that guy's claims so absolutely so that i guess that is one thing is that the lines are different because like

for matt and i strong anti-vaccine stance is not something that we wouldn't mention if we had someone on for an interview like regardless of what else we agreed with them on uh we'd feel the need to address it in the same way of like hiv aids denialism like it wouldn't be something that we could overlook but the other aspect of that is that when challenging people respectfully, like David did with Jordan, for example, a similar argument is presented that, like what Matt and I are not saying is that

it isn't okay to have conversations with people that have extreme views or have different views to you and to not constantly be like tearing them a new one. That's not what we're saying. But it's more like Louis Farouk talks to a whole variety of people with extreme beliefs. Nobody is under any confusion about whether he's endorsing their perspective or whether he's critical of it. It's very clear in his content it's not always so clear in the content that is around the sense-making ecosystem and indeed the the message is more like that there's an avoidance of direct criticism

of a perspective in in lieu of like maintaining interpersonal relationships with influential people and that that seems like that's concerning well well and then that now come on and then that's inference at the end so you slip that one and everything else i was tracking yes so i would but i would take that particular critique not you know like for specific people, I think that applies. But I wouldn't say in general, it's just because people want to increase their influence. So I'm just, that specific point is more like,

I think that applies to specific people, but not everyone. No, for sure. I mean, I think I call it sort of the model train set, right? You've got a bunch of Asperger kids on the spectrum down in their mom's basement playing with their model train set. And they've got a badass fucking model train set. And they've a bunch of asperger kids on the spectrum down in their mom's basement playing with their model train set and they got a badass model train set and they've done the little trees and the hills and the tunnels and lake and the ducks the whole

shooting match and they do not like messing up their model train set to play with other peoples and so you end up with a fragility and a reactivity um basically of traumatized middle school bunderkins still playing out through many of the conversations and the interactions in the debate and then there's you know there's not just bypassing in some of the fringier communities but there's also just metacognitive bypassing there's such a level of dissociation and again lack of falsifiability because this is just pie in the sky word salad right and really it's just down to the persuasiveness of the rhetoric who say who holds the day so yeah i mean i i think i think all of those things are true and it would be fantastic if there was because i mean we do have this conversation offline we just don't fucking

film it but it's basically been like look guys i don't think any of us would back any any other persons flag they're flying right like each of us are hell-bent on having to do the thing we have to do as best we can but and i was like you know even though nobody none of us would follow each other we all would be like no i'm going to do my thing and i think it's better for me or for any any other assessment um i still want your flags flying at the end of the day so rooting for the success showing up to challenge each other and hold each other accountable you know because what you guys were leading to which is i think a super interesting uh passageway to explore is what are the psychological effects of being a thought leader in a globally connected you know like

limbic capitalism feedback loop yeah and what's happening there to otherwise because i mean it doesn't seem people tend to get crazier the more into it they all get for longer like it does seem to be a dose exposure to something and i think it's you know structural um structural narcissism mania um and and righteous aggrievement yeah I know, Jamie, you said at the beginning you've got a bunch of your own issues with Game B and Amiga principles and all of the other stuff that's kind of described there. So I don't want to

attribute you as to signing on to all that stuff, but I thought it might be helpful. The specific things that we talked about then, they really point at, I guess, why fundamentally Chris and I just don't like pretty much the whole kit and caboodle right and firstly there's a thing that you guys were talking about which is that mixing of the personal and the sort of professional it's difficult if you've got a crazy

uncle right he could there could be a crazy anti-vaxxer and stuff like that and it is sensible to say look let's just not talk about that we're having we're going to have lunch you know what i mean and encourage them not to talk about it right it's it's different obviously if you put on your professional hat you're going to a conference or something like that and and you are an expert on this so what we see and not just of the sense makers but also idws but also the whole alternative empathy we don't have a good word for it, is that firstly, ecosystem. They do mix, and we're probably guilty of this too. We, I'll say we, we mix, right?

The personal with the professional. And that makes it more difficult to actually deal with these issues rigorously. The second problem is that that sort of generalized sense-making concept, which is that if you have these sort of polymathic type abilities that kind of equips you with these meta skills or something to dive into any freaking topic, right?

I know for a fact it's just not possible. You need 20 years years experience in rocket science if you want to do rocket science. And the other thing too is just at the discourse level, right, you have this Amiga Dream Charity, basically that playing with ideas in an expansive kind of way, not cutting things down but rather building on them and exploring them and so on.

And I think that's a vibe I get, not just from that conversation, but more generally. And I'm actually strongly, I mean, that's fun. Don't get me wrong. It's fun to sit in a pot and drink a couple glasses of wine and have those chats. But as a mode of actually figuring out how the world works, that's actually a terrible way to do it.

What I like is exactly how academia does it, right? Which is, I'll give a manuscript to a good colleague of mine who wants me to succeed, wants my work to be good, and they tear the shit out of it. They try to find every possible problem with it, every possible criticism, fair ones, even unfair ones, because their criticism could be bad, but that would be the same kind of thought

that many readers of my article might possibly have. And the bad criticisms are good criticisms. unfair ones because their criticism could be bad but that would be the same kind of thought that many readers of my article might possibly have and the bad criticisms are good criticisms what what they don't do is hey wow that's amazing i love all that now let's take these things i mean come on yeah it sounds like you're just sad that we're friends with each other i mean i mean i mean honestly what you're presuming is that the only fucking conflict we would have we would have on fucking recorded, rather than that's the last fucking place we would have head-to-heads. We have head-to-heads all the time. We radically disagree about a ton of shit.

I actually, probably Matt, while you were doing your bit on anti-vax psychologies, I wrote, I was like, what the fuck is happening to all my friends? We used to be together, and even if we had wildly different perspectives we were you can meet on the same book and now we were just like drifting apart in the ocean i had on planning for what the hell was sucking people off the the the middle path you know of cognition right and it seemed to me that there were psychological four psychological types that leave you specifically susceptible to random whack-ass shit and conspiracy thinking so the first one when and it was generated from these conversations the anti-establishment rebel right who will always back the counter-opinion even because the establishment can never fucking be right right the next was the guilty liberal right the the vote for hillary masks or citizenry the whole bit then then the loyal foot soldier always just

looking for manichean light and dark and a good a good leader to follow. And so absolutely, we've all been wrestling with this. And I find it sad, basically, just to see different folks get pulled by different forces. And to your guy's point having both having contemplative meditative experience right my sense is is it is a degree of egoic inflation that people's psychologies were not wired to handle it and if somebody hadn't or at least to say they came up through an academic path and suddenly blew up in their 40s right they you know they might have not any exposure or practice with that kind of recursive feedback, intersubjective feedback. So what the fuck?

So many people caring about what I say. So in conversations with so many people, so many bad faith miscommunications, right. And then so much more as incentive to keep going back to it and stoking those fires. Like that's not healthy for anyone. Yeah. I understand.

I understand that principle in the context of social media because obviously platforms like Twitter are just horrible cesspools of bad faith, mean criticisms, and nothing can get off the ground. To me, as a heuristic, it's the kind of thing that's very appealing when you think of it in those terms. But when I translate it and think of, okay, now this is not social media anymore. This is not just a casual entertainment.

This is actual genuine research work about how does a vaccine work or how do vaccines work? Then I just like game A. I'm a game A guy. I prefer it. I think it's working pretty well. I think there's always ways to improve it we had uh philosopher liam brighton who was arguing strongly for getting rid of peer review and going for this post-publication open source peer review i could lots of interesting

ways if we talk about concrete things in which we could improve the way we go about epistemology essentially yeah um but it's the it's more the vague hand-waving utopian stuff that rubs the wrong way i think jimmy before yeah and should before you respond can i just layer on top because it's kind of the same point that matt wants to make that like matt and i are both advocates for like open science practices and reform in methodology as like more robust statistics and that kind of thing so you know stuart ritchie beng goldacres books which are very critical of current scientific system we'd we'd totally be on board with and and like willing to discuss those things and and have our own critiques of like journals and and all academics are to some extent you know there

might be some who are like slightly you know typically people who are tenured professors who have been very successful might be a bit more defensive um of the status quo but a lot of people especially younger academics are very open to reform efforts and those kind of things so to me that that kind of atmosphere that you find in academia which is like robust harsh criticism which is not it is taken personally on in various conferences and whatnot but like the value the the kind of guiding star is that that's what you needed to do to get published and work and in the alternative ecosphere there's a lot of talk and a lot of back padding about people having difficult conversations and hashing things out but by

and large and and this is an exception this conversation is an exception i would i would generally you know to your credit say that that usually people like us or anybody that would have like a strong critique is labeled bad faith right eric eric weinstein was asked by david fuller no no come on come on you guys were just taking the piss and i thought pretty good faith there were some places where it got a little redundant that kind of thing but in general i thought you guys were taking a fair crack at it so i i had a smile yes so i'm not i'm not saying you haven't accused us of doing that and the very fact that you're willing you know to have a conversation with us speaks to the fact that you think we are not operating just to be cruel and

to take the piss out of people. That comes up. It's more that you must have noticed as well in the alternative media sphere, there's a very thin skinness to criticism that doesn't come with a large amount of, you know, you know, you're a really great thinker and you've got this, but you haven't just considered this slight alteration to your approach. It's a very like, yes. And, and any criticism where you would be direct and kind of harsh, like Sam Harris, for example, recently, he is in large respect, excommunicated from areas because his criticism was direct, and he is accused of bad faith criticism. And it seems obvious to me that none of it is- In which direction?

So Sam's criticism directed at the anti-vaccine, at Joe Rogan, at Brett Weinstein, vaccine at Joe Rogan, at Brett Weinstein, is largely dismissed as being motivated by Trump derangement syndrome was the most recent explanation. But it applies across the ecosystem. Like what I was saying was David Fuller asked Eric Weinstein if he'd ever encountered good quality critiques of his position that were in good faith. And he couldn't name one and that's insane like to the there are people in academia that are like that and they're regarded as egomaniacs right like because there's there's always valid criticisms of your position so it's not it's not

like it seems there's a there's a kind of ideal presented of hard debates and openness to criticism that actually happens, but there's no evidence of it, or very little evidence of it in the public sphere. I guess that's it. And you here, now, I am saying to your credit that you are not demonstrating that kind of thin-skinned reactiveness. So that's to your credit, but you must have noticed that as well, right? Yeah, well, I mean, for sure, most of them are yanks, right? And they have no culture around just taking the piss out of each other, right? And there's joy and delight in the backing and forcing,

you know, so that part, they are rather self-serious right and so banter playful generative banter um is not necessarily i think a handy vernacular that's and so so to engage it goes more of a this is a conflict situation versus a tempering you know a mutual kind of hammering in tongues there is an element of that. We've noticed that in other gurus, right, Matt, that there's a kind of American cultural sensitivity to bigging up everyone and being positive. People wrote about positive cultures and negative cultures,

and cultures like Australia is a negative culture and American culture is a positive culture. Ireland as well. That's great. On Chris's point, it's just, I guess, in conventional academia, you know, we'll write a paper, and I've had this happen to me and I've done it to other colleagues, where I'll put something out there

and they write a public commentary, right, on my position that I've outlined my interpretation my results my methodology you name it and they will not hold back right they'll and we are friendly at conferences we'll have a drink together it's fantastic but they don't hold back at all and i welcome that and then i don't hold back again in the public sphere and like i think that's just a good approach for epistemics you know if you're talking about serious topics then you need it all sounds rather kinky you know it's just like thank you sir may i have another we're not this is the funny thing actually obviously it's not it's not kinky uh it sounds kinky when we

talk about flagellating each other but um and we're not even very good people right i i see these critiques of me on my stuff and i'm like oh that's a bitch you know he's wrong about you know how could he that's just stupid or whatever and then i calm down and then i write my best possible joined into it and you're proving my point you're proving you're proving my point precisely which is i think you're also you're both suffering from just a just a smidge of stockholm syndrome for the academy right and so and so so just so like just bear with me for this thought experiment i never thought in my life i'd be doing this but i'm potentially going to defend hypothetical for game b okay go for it so we're into trying to integrate this anti-vax skepticism right so so taken at the

level of fingers in your ears tinfoil hat anti-vax congruent with the last 30 years and jenny mccarthy and bobby kennedy and the whole right the whole shtick right you're like oh there's there's a long-standing pattern here might back all that out and just get to the whole, right, the whole shtick, right? You're like, oh, there's a longstanding pattern here. Might back all that out and just get to the place where you come to the kind of fundamentally civil cognitive liberties and a quasi-libertarian citizenship obligation, responsibility, and decision-making such that it could include people being like, I'm not sure if that fucker wiggled out of the Wuhan lab or not. I'd like to know more right i'm not sure a six month rush rush you know rush um testing and and approval process is enough for monkeying with these things i need to learn more right there's you know and

we don't necessarily want like i didn't take the i had the first two vaccines got completely sick the entire fucking public health model completely broke the moment people were three months in to that first first initial booster drop the world opens up everybody's free to be you and me bullshit right and and and it was lagging three to six weeks behind the published stats what what was actually happening on the ground epidemiologically right and it was a complete gave light all the things and the and the m you know the mainstream media including mainstream science i mean the lance it's been compromised. New England Journal of Medicine has been compromised. Everything is fucked these days. So for you guys to be solely in the tank for academia, for blue church academia, without acknowledging your own very equally serious critiques about the validity. I mean, the peer review process and how ridiculously politicized that is. The number of pay-to-play journals, the amount of corporate money making into and influencing research methodology, p-hacking outcomes, publications, you name it. It's a fucking dirty business also. Right? And so, as long as we're at that stage, then you could say, oh, because I think you set

up almost this moral conundrum. You're like, vaccines are generally safe and effective, overwhelming scientific consensus. These guys are outside beyond that pale, therefore it must be immoral. But what's actually happening is that Brett and Eric, I know for sure, and probably I'm presuming Heather too, would say, we actually take question with your presumed baseline. canon or gospel or verifiable peer-reviewed objective truth you know we're saying is actually riddled with subjective errors blind spots politics um captured interests and all sorts of perversions of the purity of that platonic ideal so you know back at you fellas so um and is there and is there a game b for instance that could come up with interesting innovative governance that would allow for all these perspectives? Like I said, I had the first two vaccines. I did not get the fucking boosters because by that point, it was like three variations passed and all the studies were going like sub 30% on efficacy. And I had absolutely had some expression of longish COVID somewhere in the middle of things.

And I wouldn't vaccinate my kid under six, maybe 12, maybe even 18. I would postpone that shit and let them ride things out naturally until we understood more. If we don't have the choice, the chance to make considered and responsible decisions as individuals, then we end up setting up, especially in this increasing surveillance society, increasing global cultures and economies, we run our risk of the panopticon. And so how do you preserve some version of, I fucking hate the term, but sovereignty. Like the ability to make my own free choices, balanced against civic responsibility, social responsibility,

and greater good arguments. And that has to be fucking navigated. And when you do like Taiwanese democracy voting system, you can navigate some of these things in ways that are tech enabled and proof of concept today. And what if we built, what if we started exploring? And there's parallel democracy movement. It's all throughout the US. We had folks from DC come to one of our trainings and programs. They're running, they're really standing up shadow fucking governments and different ways to start organizing post-structural break or interruption. So that to me, that seems, that would be super cool, right? And you can then reconcile where Brett and Heather were. They were saying, we are not actually on the same epistemic layer.

We've questioned that one and dismantled that one for our own decision-making and perspectives. dismantled that one for our own decision making and perspectives you're still there and haven't presumably interrogated it or or you have and you chose to stay double down on it versus shift stance so that's a that's a good articulation of the you know the counter argument jimmy and there's there's tons of like friends to pull on there to respond so i'll i'll pull a couple and then let matt pick up whatever i miss but like so first thing would be when it i think when it comes to having doubts and having questions about a new vaccine or like being critical about the authority's ability to get things right in like a you know a fast-moving pandemic that people haven't experienced it's perfectly reasonable to have questions and to have doubts.

And you should factor in always when dealing with institutions, academia included, that there will be errors, there will be misstatements, there will be imperfections, and there will be disagreements. That's the norm. It's not an unusual situation. But all of those things that you talked about with p-hacking, publication bias, the issues with the peer review system, the people who identified those issues, by and large, are academics. The people who are working to create alternative systems and to address them are academics. academics, most of the people that commentate on it, like Eric or Brett, they misuse those critiques and they don't even discuss or understand things like preprints and pre-registrations and how they're used. Whereas I like, take Matt, take me, we're published on advocating for people to pre-register studies because to reduce researcher degrees of freedom. And when it comes to looking at research literature critically, like we suggested at the start,

that's the default stance. So it isn't a simple non-critical acceptance of blue church doctrine. It's rather you have the ability to critically assess a literature and when you compare it to the way that people like Brett and Heller examine studies they show no ability to do that they don't even read abstracts correctly of studies they completely miss the boat on assessing the strength of literature the validity of studies and this is along the lines of not even like detailed methodological criticisms which they often get wrong but simple things like they are unable to note that a study claiming 100% effectiveness for all 2,000 with perfect follow-up and with default Excel graphs mislabeled is a study with huge questions, right? Many people are looking critically at that literature from inside academia.

So whenever things become like stronger concerns... Was that that Argentinian study? Yes, but there's an endless litany of examples with Brett. And as we discussed, you know, he doesn't have a track record of demonstrating that he is good at assessing research literature, quite the opposite. Eric also along those lines, he's claimed to have a theory of everything that will revolutionize physics, which has been shown to have like fundamental errors from the few people who have looked critically at it. and Eric for a tantrum at

their response. So their ability to parse the scientific literature, I wouldn't rate highly, and it is always the case in this situation. But why are we talking about this? It seems like you guys have built your entire worldview around Eric. No, no, it's just an illustration, because that's the actual, the point is there will always be people claiming that and you mentioned brett and and eric as examples of people that would have a different epistemological approach and judgment and they would but our argument is that's not just a subjective value judgment where people arrive at different conclusions and the evidence is completely ambivalent. It's that Eric and Brett are misreading the evidence on ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. And it isn't complex. Low quality studies that are positive in in vitro

studies and then small, low quality studies that find positive results. Are you... Dude, this is like picking a jury. This is like the two lawyers picking lawyers picking a jury right you have a whole bunch of people come in and then you guys each take turns chucking ones you don't like out until you're left with you know 12 angry men no no so like you have to do that with studies because because they're gonna because i mean just for some kind of common ground right you get to take the piss out of the ones you think are flawed and then they're like okay okay, okay, you're applying that standard, these fit that standard, don't fucking like it, but okay.

Now, here are the ones that we discount and don't consider in our own fact pattern. Because if you don't actually just check what's on your kitty, what's in your kitty, I don't even know what you're playing with. Until you get that sorted, then you're really talking to each other. Ideally, you find some studies you both agree on. Right. But you can have things, like you find some studies you both agree on. Right, but you can have things, like you can have conflicting meta-analyses that reach different conclusions

because of the studies that people put in and out. But the body of evidence with ivermectin is not in any sense of the world, like 100% effective prophylactic. And at best, it would have been, as you indicated at the start a possible treatment that we should investigate prior to having extremely effective vaccines and you have to factor in alongside these advocacy for hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin that there's a

very strong signal about the dangers of vaccines and what you said jimmy about not taking boosters and that kind of thing that that to me shows like that i wonder if they'd made a fucking good one yet but that's so that would be the point is that is to me that shows that you're misreading the what the studies are showing no i'm not misreading the fucking efficacy of the post-ormicron hypermutation in terms of the old ones that we're still getting stuck in terms of in terms of the cost the dangers posed by not being vaccinated versus the dangers posed of being vaccinated they're they're wildly dude i would say i would say look i mean that question look i mean a i

don't even know why we're talking about this this was neither subject to the recording you analyze nor anything i have anything to do with so so you know if what you're secretly saying is why don't you yell at each other on camera more you know all i got for you is right we're having these conversations and you can say ah there's footprints and whispers but no proof like what the fuck is these are our lives but but you know if but let's let's move on to something more interesting which is the bigger picture psychology of punditry yeah in the digital age and what are you guys seeing and what are you vigilant about and you know and and like and are there any patterns right or deeper structures that are impacting a bunch of

people congruently or concurrently we got you guys got bogged down with those examples, right? But remember, Jamie, you outlined a robust defence of a non-blue church counterculture alternative space. And Chris, you cited those things as an example, and Chris responded to those examples. But I think what we would say is that the scientific process is correcting inside the church, right? It starts off with a great deal of ambiguity. Like, I remember quite well, before we had a vaccine, before there were lots of good studies on ivermectin, it was treated very seriously in the blue church. It didn't just dismiss it out of hand. It was treated very seriously amongst the alternatives. And then as more and more evidence came in the people that were good at assessing evidence of regarding rcts specifically and there are people who are better at this than others i got me and

chris they've got a general background in statistics and so on so we have some degree of skill there are people who are better than us people are in the field another example is the lab leak scenario versus the natural origins of COVID. Where did you guys come down on it? My understanding is that the evidence currently is that it's very unlikely that it was a lab leak rather than it's a zoonosis. Yeah, that seemed like that sort of last three months. But there was a sea change for the sort of prior 12, right, where increasing potential evidence was going to be like and more important You know serious agencies and other people being like, okay

It's back on the table in some capacity We are so we are actually and a lot of compromised data because they wouldn't fucking let us into medic to see anything There were there was crime scene. Yeah, that's right. There was the difficulties by the inherent nature of the CCP But I mean one of the interesting things there, Jamie, is that the public perception, and this is probably a fault of science journalism, is that there was this kind of new evidence coming in which dramatically was changing the likelihood

of a different thing. That and the discourse. If you actually just ignored what was being written in The Guardian or The Times or some newspaper and just looked at the research literature, there were no sort of big back and forth revolutions in the evidence base. It was kind of a gradual increase in certainty, basically. Yeah, but come on, what about that Lancet one that got fully fucking discredited? And it was basically also conjugation. It was this kind of long wind up and throat clearing to get to the point where we do not see it would be

reasonably possible that the leak was a lab leak. And you're like, wait, you guys established nothing. There's no hard evidence here. This gets fronted in a prestige journal and then turns out to have been politic. I think that's a misreading. Here's my point. That's a misreading of that evidence. Here's a both end. But yes-ish. No. Right?

Like, here's the thing. Science is coming down with the collapse of the entire edifice of Western civilization. All truth claims, all power formats. I mean, this seems like sort of Foucault on a bender. Right? formats i mean this is this seems like sort of fuko on a bender right and and and like and science and scientism and the compromises the hijacks the replication crises the fucking the corporatization the ip the feudalism and serfhood of large universities like the whole thing is is teetering just like the church just like wall street right just like all of these things just like you know it's and

for you guys to simply go back to propping it up uncritically would be would be akin to sort of clicking your heels and and sort of wishing that you know that the dam hasn't burst on the rest of this cultural collapse like science is coming down too guys and and and and if covid showed anything right and 2008 and all these things there's no there's a bunch of fucking naked emperors the people have been absolutely handed a bill of goods as far as the american dream the world you know and imf and all the goody things of neoliberalism right and science has been a fucking patsy and an accomplice to some unforgivable shit along the way also so the the point i would make here like there's that there definitely are emperors who have been

unmasked in the covid pandemic but i think we identify them quite differently jimmy the way that you present us as like defenders of the status quo and the potential patsies for the blue church ecosystem like i have to draw i i have to draw uh no i know you guys think you're rebels no no but you're just not that yeah but allow me to draw a distinction right you give talks at goldman sachs and google and advertise your influence in those kind of powerful elite performance athletes so on matt is currently testifying against or helping that court case against the uh thingamajigger the gambling the gambling industry right and so the person there that is more in bed with industry and corporate management consultants and whatnot, it's not us. We are perfectly free to critique those people. We are free to critique scientists,

and we do. And we look critically at our own literature, at our friends's studies. But that is not the case in the ecosystems that you play in, where people pull the punches, and you are more invested in the capitalist kind of ecosystem than we would be. Oh, that you think I am. That you think I am. But you've said so. Would you like to hear what I told the thousand senior partners at Goldman? I tore up my speech. They had asked me to speak about peak performance and flow. And I'm like, fuck that, guys. I'm not coming in here to say that to you. And I completely went rogue. And I pulled up a stool with no eyes. I completely just winged it. I had a little notebook. And I was like, hey, one of your founding partners had said, be short-term patient and long-term greedy.

And that's been one of the mantras. And I was like, hey guys, here's the deal. How are you going to be short-term patient when there's no long-term? You guys have a choice. You can either be the vampire squid of late stage capitalism where you can step the fuck up and double down on your roots to actually move capital to seed innovation and entrepreneurship and improve general equitable distribution. There was a PhD, Princeton quant, who was on the Obama White House at the time, who was also a partner who came up to me afterwards and was like, fuck yes, this is the stuff we're doing.

And then a whole bunch of Goldman vampire squids. And I did not get invited back. But the person who had invited me was like high five i i'm glad you stirred some shit up that you know like like that's gonna that's gonna make some waves so i put put my head on the fucking chopping block and and consistently do i mean talking to seal team six a room full of fucking those guys and i had a whole and this was on neuroscience of peak performance flow states all of these kind of things and what's the cutting edge of performance training and also realizing you're training

the most lethal tier one special operators on the planet. And I forced 20 minutes of my hour was into the ethics of weaponizing consciousness. And everything from AI to the history to MKUltra to just like, guys, you're playing with real things here, and where this goes and why and how has to stay on side of impeccable ethical guidelines. So I do. The fact that I keep biting into places, I get back to a lot of those places, but I get biting into another interesting one.

And I don't know the why or the how of that, but I am committed to not go along with that. I don't want to be a fucking gadfly cassandra that's not cool um but i do absolutely want to have um the most heartfelt and sincere conversations um i like with the people doing important things in the world they're going to do it you know except the clarification jenny and i apologize if it was like slightly too you know like personal in that regards i mean it's it's partly, I saw. I want you guys to better get where I'm coming from is the, is the real.

Sure. Like where I think we're absolutely on the fucking same team. And I seen there was like a YouTube video where there were some in the kind of psychedelic space who had the same critique of rebel wisdom and you specifically. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Those guys, those guys are bad faith little

shit so they've got they've got again they've got too much too much student loan debt from their fucking recent phds and a fucking chip on their shoulder a mile wide yeah they're not helpful i'm not i'm not chris here are these people i i don't i it's a what do i know them no you you don't know them there there was like the the psychedelic community right broadly speaking had some there was a video put kind of critical of jimmy and rebel wisdom as like being but but i mean ludicrous like like like so hysterically reactive that to be like hey i'm on your team i don't think those guys are good either i've just written a book pillorying them mckinsey the whole fucking law facebook all of those folks and um let's actually talk about now can we get

can we refine right between our points of view some some fairly obvious mutuality and they were just having none of it and then and it's the same with um those conspirituality guys they they've become it's it's it's it's almost sort of like queer eye for the old guy well it's so they're just catty you know so i i think that where i would see an area of agreement is that we all appear to agree that you know it's important to have robust criticism in whatever field and this includes like academia and whatnot but i i guess i'm i i just find that there's like there isn't consistent application of critical approaches to things because like you know the supplement industry nootropics is hugely profit focused right it's a it's a multi-billion industry and and the studies there are if you have an issue

with the quality of studies when it comes to vaccine approval or that kind of thing the quality of studies when it comes to supplement evidence of efficacy is incredibly low but that that kind of stuff doesn't get focused on so much as what you are talking about blue church and stuff it feels very much like denigrate whatever is seen as the traditional authority and then usurp by that system having problems it by default makes the alternative better but it's not the case right the you know joe rogan illustrates yeah yeah yeah i mean I mean, I think the biggest question is, I think the spot you're going to occupy in the broader conversation, right? So saying, hey, there needs to be some rigor, there needs to be some consistency, we need

to sort of understand these. Because this is a relatively recent space, folks are post-institutional, they're even post sort of media, you know, so people are, you know, I think David Fuller was echoing Because this is a relatively recent space. Folks are post-institutional. They're even post-media. So people are... I think David Fuller was echoing some of your guys' points. He said, hey, there's very few checks and balances in this space. There's a lot of perverse market incentives. And there's a ton of echo chambers and algorithmic fucking warping

and a thousand other things that are all taking place to the quote-unquote conversation, which everyone is being had. And you guys are, I think, offering good yardsticks that are all taking place to the quote unquote conversation whichever one is being had and and you guys you guys are i think you know offering good yardsticks um and and i don't honest to god know what to do with it like it there's clearly this boom in podcast this boom and all these kind of longer form bigger think he often rambly kind of explorations there seems to be this voracious appetite for it i don't know whether it's because cable media and and you know conventional tv became so god-awfully bad yeah that they're just so it's just creating its market cultural marketplace of ideas that has all sorts of you know free capital capitalist market um perturbations well actually jamie i'm

like it's funny it's ironic almost in the way that I think that the criticisms like the ones you voiced before at institutional stuff are over-egged and a bit over the top. I also think it's worth reminding ourselves that an awful lot of the alternative media is freaking great. I don't know about you guys, but I listen to heaps of podcasts. I listen to history podcasts and space podcasts about neutron stars and stuff like that i'm absolutely loving the revolutions podcast at the moment i keep spruiking

it the very famous one by the guy did the history of rome learning all about the the revolution that happened in haiti that's the kind like it is it's scholarly it is informative it's entertaining it's just extremely high and i guess you know that's why just at a very personal level i get saddened when whatever you know i suppose i feel the same way about big brother or something reality tv that the people are watching so much trash on mainstream media and i just feel sad you know what i mean that people are spending their time watching joe rogan or listening to joe rogan talk shit with kanye west or something if we can steer people towards good stuff and away from stuff that's just wasting

their time and filling their heads with cutted surely we agree that's a good thing yes i think we should convert the entire great books canon into tiktok dance videos and then we'll right then we'll have something then we'll have a discourse you know then we'll have a discourse, you know? Then we'll have it. So yeah, guys, I mean, my sense is, is for whatever reason, time, space, and technology, you know, like what we have as far as a non-traditional intellectual media scape, right?

And it's all pretty novel, right? I don't think anybody's really, you know, this is like you guys said, all the checks and balances of your peer review system and the ac and academia as a as a feudal as a medieval guild basically right you guys are you know still identify as members of that guild and it has its arcana and its secrets and its prohibitions and you know and norms and then you've got a bunch of ronin galloping around like fucking monty python out there with no lineage no discipline no checks and balances no peer um buffering or dampening right and plus market

incentives so like yes those things that tends to that'll go bad every time i like that tongue and cheek characterization of the guild and the townsfolk and the the only ronin rampaging around outside the walls the only thing is is that I do think, Jimmy, that a lot of the people in the alternative ecosphere, they should pay more attention to things like the open science movement because those people were called data terrorists for being the people who critically evaluated the influential studies. And to me, that's a really good thing.

And it's an embodiment of the spirit that you're talking about, like a willingness to challenge the authorities and the institutions that exist, even like theories with loads of well-established, you know, like highly influential studies at journals. People look critically at the standard of the evidence and call bullshit but the difference is they win out in the end because the replication crisis happened and journals are critiqued and you're right about you know things like elsevier's influence and all that kind of thing is very distorting in in science and it can you the pharmaceutical industry deserves to be critiqued

it deserves like robust criticism of the what i was talking about flexibility with outcomes in the supplementary industry it's exactly the playbook of pharmacy and and gambling and so on as well so it isn't that like academia is good and anything out of outside of academia is bad there's there's it can be a shit just to sign it a reasonable golfing handicap right so you that's it it's just as we're right as we're calibrating our compasses like how much how much declination is there in our needle exactly just factor it in so i think we just like being critical is the i think that's the point that we do agree on that there's like this value to being critical and whatever our particular role in the eco sphere of like information is, that's possibly a slight difference is like Matt and I, although we completely acknowledge that we are in the same realm as you with podcasts and commenting and all this kind of things. But we're slightly object to narrative surfing and we're conscientious objectors in a way that like...

But hold tight, because you said theme surfing or idea surfing? Yeah. But hold tight, but hold tight, because you said theme surfing or idea surfing? Yeah. Is that people being fubarot? Because here you are, a psychologist and an anthropologist, and I've heard now from either of you about your subject matter and the interpretation of this conversation. You guys have been punditing your asses off also. Yeah, kind of. Yeah, kind of.

But my punditry about something like COVID involves injecting zero novelty or special insight into the evidence base or the interpretation of it, really. All I can refer to, and we do refer to, bona fide experts in those fields. I mean, yes, we can make fun of someone like Brett Weinstein when they dramatically misinterpret or fail to detect that a study is laughably bad because to some degree our general methodological background allows us to see that but uh yeah I don't think you'll find any of stuff that we've said is contributing

anything novel or unique in terms of these specialist areas. I mean, look, my sense is that I think we were trying to pass this, and I'm sorry to have to do this, but I'm going to, against my bad judgment, which is I'm going to mention him, capital T. So I think you cannot back out of the equation, the reality distortion field and utter psychosis of Trump as president and his management of that. And due to the US's outside role in CDC, WHO, all the other ripple effect policymaking, that we ended up in a schizophrenic double bind during a global public health emergency. And then the amount of

disinformation and chaos that was happening behind the scenes in the establishment basically broke the blue church, right? It started just shattered on its ruins. Like, no don't wear as much you don't need must but we don't have enough musty this is good to go no it's not back and forth like the the six feet was bullshit and made up i mean there was a university of virginia there was a virginia tech hydro engineer that broke that down and was like where was the original citation for that and went all the way back to like 1936 and the unreferenced fucking textbook textbook that had never been validated at all. Endless amounts of that stuff after the schizoid double bind left all sorts of people being like, oh, authority has no idea what's actually going on. And their efforts are so transparently self-correcting or

self-implicating that now we're going to double down on alternate histories, right? If the consensus will be it was creaking and groaning and a lot of people were spooked, right? I mean, everybody's nervous system was in hypervigilance, right? So the whole like high dopamine apophenic pattern, patternicity and hyper recognition. And I think it pulled a lot of folks. But you cut like the psychic, I think, impact of that specific human individual behaving in the way he did that was so wildly outside all norms and expectations, broke people's fucking brains and massively hampered coordinated global technocratic response. Yeah, I think there's something to that. And one way

in which you can see that is the contrast between the discourse in Australia compared to the United States. And a place like Australia, like we have our fringe libertarians or conspiracy theorists just like everywhere else. But what we do have is two relatively normal centre parties parties both of whom basically you know in in in public politician terms follow the science you know and take or rather take advice from their chief medical officers and so on and don't actually make it a political football i think you're absolutely right like people kind of forget but it kind of started with trump like he was he kind of kicked this thing off it became a partisan culture war football. You could see the response from... And remember, the public health authorities whose job it is to advise the public

in like a little 30-second sound grab, it's identical to the scientific consensus, right? It has to be simplified and made into a concrete kind of actionable action. Was this a formative event for you guys, the whole anti-vax thing? Because I'm just curious. We've ended up talking about it for a meaningful chunk of time, and I don't have a dog in this fight. No, no, it's not. Actually, you brought it up again.

Your last comment was to bring us back to Donald Trump and how it led to the institution under under covid oh yeah but that was a that was a deepening of why scientific materialism you know sort of the peer-reviewed stan you just quote mainstream science right that is part of the reason why they lost a shit pile of street cred with a ton of own goals that were needless and they could have been public messaging gaps they could have been pointless fucking reversals they could have been trying to transparently massage and manage public opinion which of course they should be doing they should be running good public health informed propaganda all the time right if you're trying to actually

move needle public behavior so then somebody's suddenly paranoid and freaked and it's like that's propaganda that's coercive edward bernays you know and you're like okay you're off to the races aren't you? Well, to answer your question, no, it wasn't a formative event for us, really, because in retrospect, it seemed absolutely inevitable that we would have all these conspiracy theories and a new round of anti-vax stuff going on. I actually thought the public health messaging was pretty good.

I thought the vaccines, they were amazing. Nobody was expecting them to be developed so quickly. So that was just a massive win. They got into production very quickly and the public health advice has been generally good. Was it always perfect? Of course not. It was a fast evolving situation with a brand new virus. I remember right at the very beginning, people were like spraying like boxes that came to the house because we're worried and surfaces, right? Because we didn't know, right? At the beginning, there was very little information, but you still have to advise people something. So, you know, that's the nature of public health advisories.

They're always happening on the run. And if we look back at how we've fared and a place like Australia has fared really well because we have actually just done what the public health people advise us of if you take compare that to a place like the United States where people have done so to a lesser degree a lot of people still aren't vaccinated a lot of people just sort of ignored the distancing rules and things like that they haven't done so well so and yeah I mean we we should we should get it off cover because it's not a special topic for there's one last is it there's a disconnect there's just one thing i want to inject jimmy that you know like when when it comes to masking in particular and i think it

it's a it speaks to a broader point so i'm not gonna argue about the the individual studies or that kind of thing all i want to say is like at the beginning of the pandemic when there was the debates around masks and various conflicting statements and countries were adopting different positions. I live in Japan. People wore masks as a precaution in general when they have the cold. So it's completely normal. People still wear masks here now. But when I looked at the literature, the studies, right, and as Matt says, it's not our area of expertise. I saw a generally not very well-developed literature, especially when you look at like cloth masks in public settings, mixed studies, you know, some overall positive and not, but like a fairly good case that could

be made for like a common sense if it's a infectious disease, which is respiratory, that wearing a mask will be conducive to that but when i saw that literature my immediate reaction was okay people can take different positions on this exactly what you were talking about you know uh different groups different institutions different researchers will take different assessments of that evidence and some will recommend i would say a mask would be generally more cut and dried than than you know, like a mask stats and performance under control conditions, I think should be more cut and dried and less subject to disqualifying than something much more complex like, but, you know, advanced mRNA, you know, most studies with masks prior to the pandemic were conducted in hospitals in controlled conditions. And they were looking at how things spread from doctors and patients. They weren't looking at people wearing cloth masks in community settings or in the context of a pandemic because we didn't have a global pandemic before.

So the quality of evidence wasn't very good. And all I'm saying is, you know, there were different perspectives. So when I saw different institutions, different countries take different stances and then more studies come out and people evaluate and change, that completely fit with my model of what would happen in this situation. And I can also see some institutions, it might just be some people in the institution who had a very strong opinion, which wasn't well supported by the evidence or they wanted to preserve masks, you know, as famously happened to try and reduce the run on N95 masks. Like all of those factors play in.

But none of that is surprising from my worldview, because that's low quality evidence that is a bit mixed. Public health authorities take different decisions. And then over time, there comes to be broader consensus on issues. But for people in the alternative ecosphere, and I would say people who are less familiar with assessing scientific literature, they seem to take this as like whiplash. Every week when there's a new article in the New York Times or a new article, Critical or Fauci said something, that was taken as this huge sea change of opinion. And that's how I experienced the lab leak as well, is that every

time an article comes out in ProPublica or Vanity Fair, or there's a Washington Post article, there's a big reaction amongst the online sphere and the Twitter sphere. Oh, yeah. But that's the social media algorithm. That's the hot take in infrastructure. Yeah. And you can't change it. But I think that's the part that you were asking where we fit in or where we see ourselves contributing. And in part, we try to say, like, consume all that stuff critically and also basics of, like, it's helpful to know the scientific method and that kind of thing. But, like, it is also the case that you cannot expect the majority of people to have spent time researching, study design and that kind of thing. Like, people don't have the time to do that. So the institutional mistrust that you talk about is very real.

But to me, that is not just caused by the institution's feeling and sending mixed messages, but also these actors who intentionally sow mistrust of institutions and in a self-serving way that sets themselves up as alternative authorities. And those ecosystems, which include anti-vax ecosystems, which include gurus and whatnot, they need to be looked at just as critically as the institutions. And that's what I see as lacking. There's strong critiques of institutions. Yeah. So basically a recursive critique. Yeah. I mean, it's totalizing. Yeah. So, you know, if we can, if we are all signing off on everybody should be being more critical, I'm, I'm done with it. I just, I wish I seen it applied more consistently. And I,

I realized that we've kind of badgered you. You've been a very good sport, but it feels fair to give you the wrapping up space if you'd like, or if you want to respond to any points, feel free. Yeah, no, fucking fun. I mean, a good way to spend some time. So thank you for all of it. No, it's great to get to hear and kind of understand the things you care about, basically. Sort of why did you build this thing in this way to address what stuff you're seeing? So I think that's cool. I think there is, for sure, there's this just right next door to this goat path we've been on. It's kind of a flowing river, which is way more fun.

And that would just be if you guys just loosened your ties just a bit, you know, maybe, maybe had a pint, you know, you know, and then allow for that you can stop the clock at any point. And as long as everybody knows all the coordinates and time, space, dimensionality and perspective, then you can keep playing, right? If somebody has lost the plot, then you've got to go back to your last known way point and recalibrate your instruments right and and it just becomes again much more sort of intersubjective jazz because i would say if anything fundamentally ironically the benefit

of the doubt it is that pesky rule omega that actually is the key to unlocking it because if we if because if we're engaging the hominids of suspicion we're always hitting the brakes and you're hitting the brakes right over the you know the rocky section or the or the icy patch rather than carrying speed over it until the next place that's good to turn. So if we do that together, we can still hold each other accountable, bust each other's balls, but it's done in a much more quick in and out dialectic to get to jazz. while we descend it to the point of caricature with everything from Taoism to Harry Potter and every other metaphor possible, it is fundamentally the way that can be named is not the way. So it is all via negativa, which is in some respects your guy's jam. So well done on shining a backwards light on the thing that you insist does not exist.

Well, that was good. It was both complimentary to us and also, I guess, a robust defense of your own position. And I think it's only fair that you should have the final word, Jamie. So just thanks for coming on. And I think that's an excellent note to end it on. Fantastic, guys. I look forward to checking this out when it drops fantastic cheers cheers jimmy

so there matt the interview is done i wonder what happened i wonder what happened well we're so we are recording this before the interview so we're not sure what happened did jimmy storm off in a like re-age over some insult that matt proffered or did we convert to game b and did we see the light did we come to some higher synthesis yeah were we called into sense making these are all possibilities that you you the listener will know but we don't so hopefully it went well and everybody ends up slightly more enlightened from the encounter or at least you know we just have a chat that probably would happen well i remember from watching that video that jamie will interpersonally seemed like a perfectly nice

chat so and we are a perfectly nice chap. And we are both perfectly nice. So why wouldn't we have a nice chat together? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I'm, what's, garrulous? Garrulous. Garrulous. You're garrulous.

Yeah. Yeah. You catch her in the right mood, you can be garrulous, I suppose. Yeah. Isn't that like good-bad? That's like grunkly but you're also friendly yeah yeah yeah you know you're being boisterous you're wrapping your arm around someone's shoulder and you're saying you're like a dwarf you're like a drunk dwarf yeah who's

garrulous i'm gonna give up saying that word. So, yeah. You know, Matt, there was when we were initially starting this episode, I did want to, I was thinking to inform people or have a discussion about guilt by association, that whole concept. But I've decided, you know, not this time. We'll leave that for another time we've caused enough confusion and and we've given enough information about the nutritional content

of nuts um or what elon musk has been saying on twitter at the time of recording so i don't want to i want to keep people longer we'll save that for next time yeah instead we should hear back from what other people have said about us in our review of reviews yes the good the bad and the ugly it's like getting student teaching feedback the roller coaster particularly insightful students that's it hello again your students have not been doing your duty because i didn't have a wide array to choose from so i demand that people leave us more reviews and give us funny content from their own labor or otherwise we'll have to think of a new segment and imagine that imagine that matt yeah come on everyone this is a cooperative enterprise

you know we've been it is give us another review if you've done it just change your review you probably wouldn't see it but um any family members of mine listen to this even if you've already left a review leave another one friends colleagues people who just heard beyond synth nice your time's your time. Now's your time. So we usually try to aim for a negative, a positive, or something interesting. I've got one that I really,

it's from a good username, Elegant Octopus. Very good. I like it. Octopus and an elegant one sounds fantastic. And they've given it a five-star love it review, so that's all right. But it's a very short request, Matt. And in mind they give a good review so you have to do this well it says

can you get matt to say war like crash bandicoot please and thank you what i don't even know who crash bandicoot bandicoot he's your national symbol and you do bear a kind of passing resemblance to him okay look i just i just googled this i've done a jamie uh i've got just imagine what he sounds like i've got i've got a crash bandicoot whoa is the title of the thing it's eight seconds so let me listen to this you won't be able to hear it. Okay. This is cheating, though. This is cheating, I feel like. Okay, Matt's face there was like an entire journey on its own.

But, Matt, we've done the preparation. We've got it ready. When you're ready. No, I'm not going to do it. What? I can't do it. I do a really bad job. Okay, at least you've got to show me what the bad job is.

So here you go. All right. He goes like in this one, he goes, whoa, whoa. And then he goes, hang on, whoa, whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa. And then he goes, hang on. Whoa, whoa. That's what he does. I think you went and looked at a compilation clip and there you got all the different intonations of whoa, whoa. He's probably only famous for like saying whoa

something like that well yeah it was a sequence of him doing a bunch of words so there you go look at that this is where i've come to i'm 40 i'm in my late 40s i'm a professor i have i have a have a distinguished track record and i'm here on air saying, whoa, like Crash Bandicoot. I like that. I like that. Thank you for that elegant octopus. That was a treat. Now, a negative review.

Hello, is it Matt? Because it's a five-star review and the title is Waste of Time. Is this one of the ironic satirical ones which we request you be the judge okay if you are an incel playing video games in your mom's basement this podcast is for you an annoying irish bloke and the guy from a penal colony gets mad at people who are cleverer than them plenty of insecurities and resentment to be enjoyed, but be warned, they frequently unfairly get angry at some guy called Brett Weinstein just because he is smart, a keeper.

And this is from Swart in the Netherlands. Okay. Well, so the question before us is whether or not this is... It's satirical. I'm firmly in the satirical. Nobody thinks Brett Weinstein is a... I mean, people do. People do, Chris.

They don't write reviews that well. The people that do that, they just say... No, that's not fair to Brett Weinstein's audience. That was a friendly troll. That was a friendly troll. That was a good troll. I was getting a little bit triggered. There's some hard truths in there. There is resentment.

There is speaking down to our betters. Those bits are fine, but come on. Brettweinstein that's gilding the lily matt that's killing yeah that's right he showed his hand there but that's good that's a good review um yep yep and that's that's it for today so what that remains for us to do is to thank our patrons. And I probably should have put this at the beginning. Maybe we'll mention

again next episode. But just to clarify for patron folk or would-be patrons, we have three tiers. They're mostly like a kind of legacy thing that we set up at the beginning. But in any case, we do have differences between them.

There's a $2 tier, which means that you get bonus content that we put out, which is like the Garometer episodes, or sometimes we do little bottled episodes, like we did a thing about Elon Musk buying Twitter, our thoughts on that, so we don't have to keep endlessly repeating them,

even though we did on this episode. Stuff like that. There's a big backlog of bonus content. At the $5 tier, you get that, but you also get this series that we do called Decoding Academia, which is where we look at academic papers or academic topics

and kind of do a mini episode critically evaluating them. Yeah. So it's like a university course in a podcast format. It's like a university journal club, but we're only two people allowed to speak and everyone else has to just sit there and listen.

Yeah. So good job on selling that. That is very much what it's like. It's more academic-y stuff. But if you're interested in the kind of things we cover, you probably would find it interesting. And then we have the $10 Galaxy Brain tier, which has all of these previous benefits.

Plus, should you so desire, you can come and hang out with us on the live stream once a month and ask us questions or insult us or whatever you want so that's what you get for that extra five or eight dollars so those are that we now you do what you want you don't have to contribute the podcast will always be free but if you want to it's there and that's what is available for those different tiers you forgot to mention the most important thing people get which is that warm glow inside knowing that they are throwing us a bone just giving us a little something that we can point to when we've spent our weekends editing these monumental multi-hour long episodes when i'm sitting there listening to joe rogan

for six hours i can say to myself you know this isn't this isn't for nothing i'm i might eventually get a few bucks for this you know i could buy myself something nice that must make people feel good to sort of know that that i'm sure it does i'm sure it does so um so we'll thank a few of them now and look i know i know this is a haphazard way of thanking people but just say we've got a bit of a backlog right i won't get into the numbers i'll just say that you know your shout out is coming so you know if you don't hear it this time, don't worry, it's coming. It's coming. Just hold on for that. So, first

of all, Matt, conspiracy hypothesis for this week. Cassidy Cade, Margaret Drennan, Philip Brookhart, David Walker, Peter Zavlaris, A.V., Brooke, Tom Marchbank,

William Jensen, Matt Condon, Aaron, Ruth Marshall, Pam Eberstadt, Joshua, and Mushcat. Those are all our conspiracy hypothesizers for this week. Yes, the entry-level tier, but still loved and respected. The foot soldiers, the Koopa Troopers of our empire.

Or Goombas. Goombas. The Koopa Troopers are slightly harder to kill. We do appreciate it, and look, I wouldn't donate more than two dollars for this podcast either so i get you don't worry don't neg the hired donators but here we go matt 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. Martin Wesseles. Yes. Again, just another shout out to a conspiracy hypothesizer himself nonetheless don't those clips just make you want to grab them those people and shake them maybe just a light

slap across the face and just say wake up to yourselves wake up you mean the people having the secret conferences that none of us are invited to? I wasn't invited to them, but they're there. Well, so we also have our $5 revolutionary thinkers, the people with us in the Decoding Academia Club. And here, Matt, we have Ben Makin. We have Oscar Henke. Probably. The money is in a different denomination,

so can't entirely tell. But River Pebbles. Sounds familiar, but nonetheless, there we are. Robert Chapman Smith. I said that as if his name was like, you know, the Chapman chapman smith but chapman smith um tim graubauk walter fotis etienne uh oliver daniel daniel barclay, Lily, and Natalie

Aardman. Revolutionary thinkers. I went to school with a Daniel Barclay. I wonder if it's him. Maybe it's him. These are the lieutenants and the non-commissioned officers.

They're the Coopers. What's a what's a cooper cooper trooper from mario from mario mario mario brothers the the the hip new game that all the kids are playing do you know mario i know i know of mario brothers but what's a koopa troopa is it like a turtle turtle yeah okay oh my god okay all right yep yep all right so that so that means the next tier is going to be gorillas in your framework no what gorillas are in boiser's army what are you thinking about that you'll you'll find out you'll find out um but those are the revolutionary thinkers. Okay. I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time. And the idea 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. I got that. They never stop being funny. Never stop being funny.

It gets funnier the more you listen to them. I like these clips better than our original clips. Don't get me wrong, Chris. You did a sterling job to get those original clips together, but these ones will make me laugh. These are funny. Yeah. Well, that's Martin Wesseless's, to his credit, not ours.

So that was the revolutionary thinkers. Now we have our galaxy brain gurus rarer matt harder to spot in a spreadsheet because there's less of them so let me just stall for more time while i find a couple um any anything good happening i've been studying the way these gambling companies operate online with these social casino games and stuff and they're all about converting lower value customers to higher value customers so i was just thinking how do we solve your problem chris and get how do we convert more of our lower tier people into the high tier you know we've got to think of psychological and behavioral manipulations that can apart from

flattery abject flattery um we're not not above that um usually you have to give them something that's the problem yeah then we have to we have to make it and organize it it's no well well i Is it? It's... No. Well, I found one of them. It's Dave with a W. D-A-V-W. How would you pronounce that? I don't know. Davwa. Davwa. Davwa.

Kyle S. That's easier. Tom Yasko. I like that. Tom Yasko. Aaron Doherty. I know Aaron from Twitter. Yeah.

A wise soul. William Resnick. Resnick. I like that name too. SM Jenkins. David Smiel. And Collapsing. Well, I appreciate it.

I mean, it is a nice thing to do, to donate $10 a month to us, Chris. It is nice. You're supporting the podcast for the umpteen billion people who don't subscribe, which is, by the way, totally fine. I don't subscribe to the Revolutions podcast, and I've been getting an awful lot of value about that. So what goes around comes around. I probably wouldn't subscribe. will subscribe but you know it's quite a lot because there's a lot of podcasts in the world and you know you can't give them all 10 bucks because it's crazy

unless you're really rich you could really maybe these people are just rich we shouldn't be thanking them at all maybe this is like they should be giving money back to more people like for 10 bucks there's nothing that's just like they use it to wipe their nose with and throw it in the bin. Could be. Could be. That's so. And you were wondering which Mario Rollers character

I would compare them to. I would say Hammer Rollers. Hammer Rollers or maybe Shy shy guys one of the three hammer are these like bosses at the end of a level not exactly bosses many bosses but yeah yeah they're not bowser level it could be bowser's children lemmy iggy roy these are real names i could be saying anything. But yeah, so that's where they are. You know way too much about Super Mario Brothers.

I watched the Mario Brothers trailer with my children. There's a movie coming. So that's on my mind. Yeah, I know the feeling. There's a while there that I could sing all the Dora the Explorer songs and do a pretty credible job of them too. After that Crash Bandicoot thing, I can well believe it. So here we are, you Galaxy Brain gurus. Thank you so much. Thank you.

We tried to warn people. Yeah. Like what was coming, how it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything. Considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense. I have no tribe. I'm an exile. Think again, sunshine. Yeah. Yeah. As always, I feel kind of sorry for Sam Harris. Feels like he doesn't quite deserve to be. He's an exile, Matt. He's an exile. That's fine. He's in the galaxy floating around um non-tribally aligned as always so we salute you sam harris and we salute you galaxy brain gurus and we will see you back next time when we have a decoding episode with elon musk and it won't be too long probably next week so i think it'll be kind of straightforward i'm not going to take three hours to describe what's going on there famous last words uh well note matt if you would the distributed idea suppression complex and accord the gated institutional narrative on your

way i have an entire wall of my house full of documents pinned up there and with red string connecting everything and the disc and the gin are well represented a nexus of little red bits of string connect to each of them i like that i like that all right so see you all next time and thanks jimmy Bye-bye. Thanks. See ya. this is but like yeah well what's the thing oh yeah This is... What was the thing? Oh, yeah. In Japan, you get this health checkup once a year where they take your blood,

they scan your... They do x-rays and stuff. Actually, relatively thorough. And it's very efficient. And you get it every year, and then they give you grades right like yeah about your health and generally i'm all right but this year some some results were just a little bit you know on the high side or a bit thing and a funny thing is i just i actually appreciate this about japan like

i i'm what 174 centimeters right five'9", and I'm 75. Just a little bit shorter than me. Right, and I'm 75 kilos, right? And I prefer to be about 70 kilos. A little bit more of a slider build than me as well. Yeah, so this is what I want. When I competed in jiu-jitsu, I competed at 62 kilos, which is a C in mine.

what i want when i when i compete in jujitsu i competed at 62 kilos which is a c and nine but the um in any case that so like that's not that's not you know it's not really hugely overweight or whatever by any standards but because this is japan and because the health check thing i got an email very friendly email from the nurse like saying you know some of these results a little bit out and your weight just went up a bit so you know maybe you need to get some exercise and you know and it was very nice and it was just like imagine in the uk if i put on like three or four kilos and my work please will be to say maybe you need to do a bit more exercise or stuff like people would be freaking out i think but i appreciate it it was i agreed with um the the notion they shouldn't

they shouldn't be evaluating you on japanese standards they need to be treating you on the the irish metric that's yeah by that standard of a god like so yeah um but but yeah but it's refreshing in japan i remember like there is no sense of um like it's okay to just tell people what's wrong with them especially if you're a middle-aged woman i remember like meeting people like acquaintances that are you don't mean it's okay to tell middle-aged women what's wrong with them they can tell you They can tell you. They can tell you. Yeah.

I remember meeting this lady, and I met her like two or three times. And the second time or third time I met her, she just looked at me and just pointed at my belly and went, you've gotten fat. Yeah. Some people don't like this Japanese culture, but I appreciate it. I do. It keeps me in check. Yeah, me too. And I was like, I already know. I do. It keeps me in check.

And I was like, I already know. I already know, man, okay? So, yeah. We have that in common. You know, we're driven by shame. It's the only thing that keeps us... Exactly. That's what keeps me alive. So, yeah.

So, that's just general health- waffle you get another in-depth update next episode no you won't we'll never mention the game for a couple of months