Decoding the Gurus - Interview with Julian Walker on Conspirituality, Conspiracies and (Global) Culture Wars

Episode Date: March 26, 2022

Another interview episode - we've had a flurry recently but don't worry, we'll be returning to a good ol' fashioned decoding episode very soon. This week we just couldn't resist the opportunity to have a chinwag with our podcasting compadre Julian Walker, an eloquent writer on evidence-based & conspiracy matters and co-host of the Conspirituality podcast. Julian's a yoga instructor and (maybe even) a spiritual kinda guy, but has long opposed the conspiratorial, anti-science, and exploitative guru side of the yoga & 'health & wellness' communities. In short, he's a science-minded guy moving in spiritual and yoga circles, who is now directly involved in countering the endless proliferation of pseudoscientific & conspiratorial nonsense. So, Matt and Chris take this opportunity to pick Julian's brain about what's been going on over on the crunchy side of the aisle, how it relates (and even overlaps) with the secular gurus, and the cultural moment we're in more generally. Due to the backlog caused by lazy elves in the DTG editing bay, some of the references to the trucker convoy and whatnot are a bit outdated, nor will you hear any mention of Ukraine. But don't mind that! Julian's got a lot of insight to offer and we hope you enjoy listening to him as much as we did!LinksConspirituality 90: The Convoy is an Occupation (w/ Elizabeth Simons). More detailed analysis of the Trucker ConvoyConspirituality 95: Aleksandr Dugin: Kali Yuga Chess. A recent episode by Julian doing a deep dive on Putin's alleged guru.

Hello and welcome again 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, and with me is Chris Kavanagh. Today, Chris, we've got someone to help us with some decoding. Well, we're not really decoding. We're just talking about stuff. We're chewing the fat. We're talking about the world in general, aren't we? Are we? We're decoding, Matt. We not really decoding. We're just talking about stuff. We're chewing the fat. We're talking about the world in general, aren't we? Are we? We're decoding, Matt. We're always decoding. Our minds are always running over. Every day, it's like deja vu. It's almost like our introduction. We've said it so many times. One day bleeds into the next.

I'm getting really good at saying the introduction. It's only after the introduction is over that my elocution tends to fall apart but that that first bit nailed it well i'm glad you say it i've tried to say it one or two times and it doesn't go that well you can't do it you can't do it no i don't have the enthusiasm welcome to the coding the gurus it's like a morning joe show um or morning zoo is that what they call those things so you probably like a good decoding the gurus fan are listening to this episode having listened to nothing else and done anything else except listen to the previous episode with josh zeps so this is another interview show we are going to have a guru decoding released next week with Algin Street. But, you know, more content, Matt. This is what people want.

Give the people what they want. Content, content, content, baby. I know. Burning the candle at both ends. Something's got to give, Chris. Something's got to give. That's my motto. Too much content.

I'm like butter that's been spread over too much bread. Oh, Mr. Brian. Mr. Brian, sir. Don't worry about that ring. going to give too much content i'm like butter that's been spread over too much bread oh mr mr brian sir don't worry about that ring it's it's such a burden such a burden you're making the reference the lord of ring and intentionally right no yes yes okay okay yeah i just i really shouldn't check whenever i think those things. That's the point of references. You don't say, so yeah, sorry about that, everyone. But you know, it's a reference to the Lord of the Rings. So Matt, on the subject of content, there is something I want to mention.

You know that we have a Patreon. Have you heard of that? I have heard of Patreon, yes. You've heard of us mule about it. Mule for donations on previous episodes. Yep. Big cajole threaten. You know, use whatever.

Yeah, so we're not going to do that. We don't care. You know, if you don't want to be a Patreon, that's fine. It's your own business. Do what you want. But I do want to tell people that we've made a slight revision to the different tiers that we have. We have three tiers. We have a $2 tier, which is conspiracy hypothesizers.

$5 tier, which is revolutionary geniuses. And the $10 tier, which is galaxy brain gurus. And now, Matt, the $2 tier is all you need to get the bonus content, right? tier is all you need to get the bonus content, right? The interviews that we do, little short episodes that we release that we don't release on the main feed. And we release interviews as soon as we record them, usually a couple of weeks in advance. So if you want access to any of that, you want access to any of the Guru clips or to hear information about what we're doing or whatnot, you can go in at that tier you get access to all that stuff you're following so far excited about that i think so um yes what a deal two

dollars my unbelievable well i'm happy because i i subscribe to my own podcast i'm a ten dollar patreon of decoding the gurus because i have to be in order to my is one of our tough contributors because that's the only way we can bring them on to the monthly call-in so yeah is this how to make money online i'm not really sure but am i doing it right i don't know but it's a it's an interesting model we are pioneering so we have a middle tier which is revolutionary geniuses and you might ask well what do they get that the other people don't and And this is what I'm here to tell you about today. We have a series which is called Decoding Academia when we look at subjects related to academic topics,

academic papers related to the kind of things that we cover on the podcast or that we just think are interesting. And we've covered things like the iterated prisoner's dilemma or beliefs being like possessions the most recent one was about person-centered morality approaches but these are a bit more you know like geeky academic style things so that is the extra content that you get if you are a revolutionary thinker so you get get all the bonus things, but you also get those little decoding academia series. So if that sounds interesting, that is for $5 and above patrons.

And we're going to try to get out at least two or three of those a month. So, you know, for that extra few dollars, it's just a bargain. It is true. And we will do that, but that's what you can expect. So that's on top of all the other bonus content. And then the Galaxy Brain Gurus, apart from just helping us and being kind people and all that kind of thing, a bit morally superior, they also get to come and attend live hangouts once a month, talk to us, abuse us, do whatever. Or they can listen after they're recorded. That's their benefit for the additional amount as well as all

the other stuff from the other tiers. And we're going to think of some other little nuggets of goodness for, for those patrons. Oh, there's one other thing. So if you're in the $10 tier, you're going to be able to vote on future gurus. We'll set up some polls and the galaxy brain people, you know, we don't operate under a direct democracy.

We're more of a Republic. So they can vote, but the others cannot. That's right. If you're a member of the selectorate, you know, the inner circle, then you get to say, it's a little bit like Russia, you know, the oligarchs and your Putin. Brilliant, brilliant comparison. It's beautiful, Matt. That will really entice people.

So there you go. But we're not enticing, right? Just to be clear, this is all voluntary. You join if you want. That's the offer. We don't mind. You can listen to everything else for free. We put it on free for you.

So, you know, this is just if you want. If you like it so much that, you know, you want to hear more, then, um, this is how you would go about doing that. And we're not going to mention this again. You know, we mentioned the patron shout outs at the end, but we don't really talk about the patron, but this is what you get on the patron. So there you go. That's your, your six monthly update on the patron. six monthly update on the Patreon. All right, Matt. Now that we have self-promoted,

promoted goods and or services, sold our souls for 30 pieces of silver and online kudos. Sweet, sweet silver. It's time to cleanse our spirit. Time to be in the spiritual Ganges of conspirituality with our fellow podcasting friend and decoder of the conspirituality sphere uh julian walker let's go julian hello everybody 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, with me is Associate Professor Chris Kavanagh and sometimes, just sometimes, we have friends, fellow travellers, kindred spirits to come on to help us figure out what is true, beautiful, and real in this crazy mixed up world. And today, who is that person, Chris? That person is Julian Walker from the Conspiratuality podcast. So we've had Matthew Remsky from that podcast on back in the early days, but it's been quite a while since we checked in. And Julian is one of the lucky people that has a dark episode that we have recorded and then never got around to finishing. So this is possibly the most extended interview. I think it's been like nine months in the making.

So it should be good. And Julian, before I make you respond, I will mention that you, alongside the podcast, you have written extensively on cults, gurus, and conspiracy theories. And I always get this wrong, but I can never remember whether you're currently involved with teaching yoga or that's all in the past and and over and done with now so i'll leave you to inform whether you're currently a yoga instructor or not but you have been in the past and yeah so so thank you thank you for your patience and for coming on that's great to be here with you guys. Thank you. And Julian is also originally from

South Africa, maybe a while in Zimbabwe, I think as well, but has lived in America for two decades or so. So your accent, is your accent American or South African American? We need to talk about accents here. Yeah, yeah. I probably sound to most South Africans like I'm American. And Americans occasionally wonder if I'm from somewhere else. But yeah, I've been here probably 27 years now that I think about it. It's like one quarter of Matt's lifespan.

Yeah, yeah. You sound pretty American to me, I must say. It's got a lot of the rough edges polished off it there's the the conflict of growing up in a society that my family including myself did not identify with and then getting out and then unlike many immigrants that i know and many south africans that i know who are expatriates not spending a lot of time with South Africans just hanging out with Americans and talking for a living over time you know it just just kind of changed I don't really sound like I'm from South Africa anymore but you can do it if you choose it's a choice the thing is that's very similar to me Julian I used to have a northern irish accent but it's kind of very hard for people since i yeah it's barely discernible yeah you sound like you have the transatlantic thing now right yeah sometimes people are like are you a rich english aristocrat and like no no just

very well spoken so so yeah i know i i have the same issue matt on the other hand is just he doesn't go out of australia he's an australian nationalist so that's why he sounds like that he's the root of all this fascism that we're seeing eh oh yeah i did have that thing from living in japan where you get used to speaking very very clearly and enunciating things properly. That's right. I don't know how you survive. This is why you had to learn Japanese, Chris. Enough jibber-jabber, Chris.

Enough of that. Let's ask some pointed questions. How's Conspiratuality Podcast going generally? Is everything cool over there? Are you still having fun? What's the deal, man? Yeah. I mean, I think the thing with the subject matter that we cover is that it goes through phases of being pretty depressing, somewhat intense, but it's also engrossing and it can be exciting and peeling back the layers and really finding out what's going on. And I think for all

three of us, that can be rewarding and interesting because we have spent a lot of time in the yoga and wellness space, but we spent a lot of time there feeling critical of it and having a lot of skepticism and feeling like we're basically surrounded by people who believed some very odd things and that we were in a way set apart from that or just had a more critical, skeptical perspective on that. There's a way that everything that's been happening the last couple of years has been strangely vindicating in a way that is, you know, it's depressing and upsetting and all of that, but we're not as surprised by it by a lot of people that we talk to about it, you know, and we get media calls from time to time and are freshly reminded again and

again, oh, this is new. This is new to the person we're talking to. We've been swimming in this for so long and they're always kind of shocked and trying to make sense of, well, how could the yoga and wellness space and alternative health and alternative medicine that's supposed to be so kind of chill and, I don't know, gentle, soft. How could it get wrapped up in something like QAnon or Q adjacent conspiracy theories and far right wing politics? So, yeah. yeah and julian on that topic it's hard sometimes to remember that people don't have the the context right especially when you are immersed in this stuff day in and day out so i would assume the vast majority of our audience already know about the conspirituality pod and and what you guys do but for those that may not i might not have heard the original interview with Matthew.

How would you, in a nutshell, explain what you do on the podcast and the topic that you cover? What is conspirituality? Well, conspirituality is the product of Derek Barris reaching out to Matthew Remsky and I early on in the pandemic and saying, are you seeing all of this crazy conspiracy theory stuff in your social media feeds from all these people that we have in common? Are you also observing this? And then we started talking about it and we each started writing a little bit about it. And Derek had his own podcast at the time called Earthrise, which is related to his music projects. And so he said, why don't you come on my podcast and the three of us will have a conversation about it, really to talk about that particular aspect of what was emerging in the pandemic, which was this demographic starting to talk about 5G is really what's causing COVID or this is really all some plan to impose tyranny upon us or some of the more outlandish stuff about a great awakening,

you know, that we're going to enter the fifth dimension of light and love somehow, this is all the prelude to that or what have you. So as we were tracking this stuff, we had one conversation on his podcast and it was well received. And so we did another one. And by the time we did a third one, we said, you know, why don't we start our own podcast? And we were aware, through our research, just digging around and seeing what was out there, we were aware of this term conspirituality, which had been coined by two academics, Charlotte Ward and David Vawash, in 2011 on a paper that they had published specifically about this. So going back to 2011, talking about, oh, there is this interesting point of overlap. And what's crazy about that is that Charlotte Ward, who's one of those two academics who coined the phrase and wrote about it in that paper, during the pandemic has become a full-blown conspiracy theorist, full-blown QAnon, you know, pedophile, sex trafficking, blood drinking, reptilians, like she's down the

rabbit hole, whatever her version of that actually is. And so as we continued talking about it, we just had this strange realization that week after week, it wasn't going anywhere. You know, in the same way that everyone's been having this experience with the pandemic of like, it's just going to be a couple weeks, it's just going to be a couple of weeks, it's just going to be a couple of months. Oh, maybe by the summer it'll be gone. By the same token, we were just realizing, wow, every week there are new stories, there are new characters, there are new twists and turns in this conspiracy stuff and in the ways that it's showing up in what we refer to as the yoga and wellness space. You could call it the new age space or what have you. So maybe that's enough of a basic intro.

So why do you think the spirituality and wellness space is such fertile ground for conspiracy theories? So I think there's a few different angles on that question. One of them is that people who are drawn into yoga, wellness, alternative healing, tend to have a holistic mindset. There's an open-mindedness and there's a sense that very often there's more to life than the mainstream culture understands. And we're going to find out what it is. And we're going to achieve our potential by

being explorers of uncharted territory, right? And some of that I think is very positive and I definitely identify with. But there's a component there that has a tendency to believe in the paranormal and the supernatural that would tend to be drawn to someone who says, hey, do this cleanse, eat only apples for three days, drink olive oil and grapefruit juice or something before you go to bed. And in the morning, you're going to poop out all your gallstones and then your energy is just going to be incredible. And this has been shown in these underground studies to protect you against cancer. So there's already this kind of alternative medicine tendency to want to believe things regardless of

how strong the evidence is. There's a tendency to be very convinced by anecdotes and to want to believe things regardless of how strong the evidence is. There's a tendency to be very convinced by anecdotes and to want to feel like we are part of a special select group, right? It's that mindset that in its shadow side becomes very cultish. The insiders know they've had the special revelation, all of that kind of stuff. And so I think it's fairly apparent that there's an overlap there with conspiratorial thinking. And one of the strong pieces of that is if you want to believe a whole list of unevidenced alternative health claims, then one of the ways that you protect against having those beliefs challenged is to say, well, it's being suppressed.

It's being suppressed by big pharma, right? It's being suppressed by Western medicine that wants to keep you sick so they can keep selling you stuff. So I think there's always been a built in vulnerability to that way of thinking about and explaining the world. Yeah. And then there's another piece to it, which is that especially in America, and I'm sure this is similar in other parts of the world, but it has a particular to be very entrepreneurial and it's tended to be outside of any sort of safety net. And so when you have a whole group of people sitting at home already over the last maybe 10 years before the pandemic conditioned to be on social media, because being on social media is part of how you enact your entrepreneurial, the way you build your community online, right? And build your business, whether it's yoga or being a coach or whatever the things are. And then on top of that, there's this temperament

that is rebellious and does tend to want to explain the world in these conspiratorial ways. And suddenly you can't work. And suddenly you can't get together and do the things that give you deep meaning, breathing in spaces together, singing, moving, sweating on one another, right? All the things that give life a sense of meaning and a sense of community and are also the ways we're generating income. And when you can't do that, it's kind of dire straits, right? There is no safety net. kind of dire straits, right? There is no safety net. And so not only is there this tendency to now want to explain all of this in a conspiratorial way, there's also an urgency around saying we need to find a way out of this. And I think that that added stress on top of the stress that everyone else would have been feeling just feeds into the equation that ends up taking people down some very dark rabbit holes. Yeah. A lot of what you say is concordant with the academic research that I'm aware of. And in explaining something as complex as the intersection between conspiracy theories and

wellness, the answers are always going to be complicated. So you touched on many things there, the anti-establishmentarianism, the sort of holistic kind of high openness to experience, cognitive or personality disposition, and tendency to believe in that sort of hidden world or something non-material thing, which all gels quite nicely, obviously, with conspiracy theories. So they call that the biopsychosocial model in explaining these things. And it's consistent, for instance, with the big overlap we see between

anti-vax and complementary and alternative medicine beliefs. Something I've observed myself, the correlation between those two attitudinal things is like 0.65 which is pretty pretty big for for something in the social sciences yeah and you know in addition to all of those things that that research that you're citing and those aspects of temperament right and demographic tendencies there's also the the problem that a lot of acupuncturists and chiropractors, for example, would actively tell you not to get vaccinated, would have materials. I mean, I've been in plenty of offices where as I'm waiting to go in for my appointment, there are binders on the little end table next to the chair with horror stories about babies and children being injured by vaccines and why you should never do that to your child. So it's, it's built in.

I remember Julian, I'm, I'm a paid up patron of the Conspiracy Authority. Appreciate that. Yeah. And you have a bonus feed where you do these deep dive investigatory pieces or personal reflection sometimes on various figures or your own experiences and how they relate to the topics you cover in it. I really recommend if it's an area that people are interested in. The main episodes are great, but I get a lot out of the bonus episodes. Oh, I'm so glad. Yeah. And what I'll say, Chris, is that the main difference between the main episodes on our open feed and the bonus episodes is on the bonus episodes we each take turns doing it doing one by ourselves and we just cycle through every three

weeks it's it's one of us doing it yeah and i'll actually want to talk about that in a bit about the kind of different voices that you each have and the the dynamic that creates. But you guys, and I think you, Julian, I think some of the pieces were by you, were covering the march against the mandates, right? The so-called anti-mandate march. But also Aubrey Marcus, the Onnit founder. And I can't remember the guy he was having a conversation with. Charles Eisenstein. Charles Eisenstein. Charles Eisenstein.

Yes. And then the thing that resonated for me about those episodes and also that topic is it fits with what you're saying about this overlap in worlds. Because, you know, when people are looking at the conspiracy landscape or that kind of thing, people like Joe Rogan or Aubrey Marcus get bracketed off from yoga moms and that kind of area, right? But when you break down the themes that are in their content and also how it connects in with the kind of tech bro space, right? Jack Dorsey and so on. It seems really clear to me that there's a huge amount of cross-pollination going on there. And in many respects that like, you don't need a different kind of analysis to understand the advocacy for supplements from the advocacy for

Ayurvedic healing or Reiki, right? It's all the same kind of logic. And I find that kind of despairing, but I think it's something that people overlook because they bracket out the supplement industry, maybe because of the, you know, the like more masculine aspects of it. But I think if you want to understand on it and you want to understand RFK Jr., looking at the conspirituality topics that you cover, it's really fundamental. So I know it's not much of a question, but I guess I'm just saying that those parallels you draw seem really important to understand. Thanks. Yeah. I mean, there's multiple Venn diagrams there, right? And I think you're highlighting one that's really important, which is that the kind of biohacker tech bro obsessed with physical fitness, obsessed with testosterone levels, obsessed with keeping the blood sugar in a certain zone, right? Tim Ferriss really capitalized on that. And then Dave Asprey came along.

There's a whole bunch of those guys. And then Rogan and Orby Marcus founded On It Together, I believe, and owned it together until they sold it just last year for a lot of money. And so much of that is like, it's the male version of having a special edge, right? This supplement is going to make you able to work out harder and it's going to help you to build muscle mass and increase your hormonal vitality and all of that kind of stuff and and so it's like building a social media and a podcast and youtube presence around those kinds of themes and then finding that extra layer of monetization that has to do

with selling supplements and selling supplements that are not based on evidence you're already you're already in the venn diagram. And then a part of that is that the biohacker dudes, they also have this openness to new experience and they're very often drawn to psychedelics. So they have these psychedelic experiences. They're not necessarily like disciplined spiritual seekers, so to speak, you know, like someone who might go on long, arduous meditation retreats or something like that. But they will go and do a weekend retreat where they take ayahuasca on two of the nights. And then they come back and they go, Oh, dude, I had this amazing experience. It blew my fucking mind. And now I understand what the shamans are really talking about. And now I

get it. And now I'm qualified to talk about it right matt and i were talking about this today actually because he noticed somebody promoting a study on ivermectin on twitter who was doing violence to basic concepts about statistical significance and how to interpret randomized controlled trials and you see this often like the on it studies for their supplements are a semester's worth of material on how to p hack results to get significance and one of the guys that we interact with on twitter lorenzo stokes i think is his name is he's talked about this thing which he dubbed cargo cult science where you have people who provide long threads it could be, purporting to take apart studies and kind of show, okay, so here's how I look at these figures from this study

and so on. But the cargo cult aspect is that they're just lacking fundamental knowledge. And it is very much like ideologically driven, right? To promote like ivermectin. But in those cases, from the outside, and if you're somebody without expertise, it looks like the real thing, right? It's got statistics, it's got graphs, it's got that kind of thing. And I wonder in the areas that you look at, do you see a lot of that?

Or is the scientism aspect kind of secondary to the insights from psychedelics? Are they all mushed together? Or I'm just curious. I think it's both. But the experiential, spiritual revelation, trust your heart, listen to intuition peace is is stronger in terms of how the psychograph is laid out right and so that so within the culture that's the tendency is we gather we gather with people who are like-minded we have these profound experiences we reaffirm these intuitive downloads and then we like maybe go and spend time by ourselves and really check

in with spirit like all of that kind of i've been around that stuff for 30 years and I've, and I've always found it just completely maddening and annoying and superficial, but that's, that's definitely the vibe. That's the culture. But then when you apply pressure to it, like the pandemic has done when, uh, you know, I've been saying since the beginning of the pandemic, this is all going to end up being about vaccines, right? Because there is already such a susceptibility to anti-vax propaganda within this subculture. When you apply that kind of pressure of saying, okay, now we want everyone to get a vaccine. Okay, now we're talking about masks and social distancing and all the rest of it. the rest of it then maybe what you're calling kind of cargo cult science comes into play where it's like i found this study it's the thing where maybe you you go to a website and the website is is a clearinghouse for all of these different pub med links and all of the pub med links are to like studies of questionable robustness and and who knows when they're from and there's just there's no sort of discernment it's just like like, these are just all the cherry pick data points

that prove whatever argument I'm trying to make about how you don't need vaccines and masks don't work. And, you know, social distancing is bullshit anyway. And it's never actually been the case that a virus caused an illness. It's really about terrain theory, right? You know, the clearest examples of that that I can think of recently are IVM meta, like purported to show meta-analyses of the ivermectin studies, right? And various people have done takedowns to that.

Maybe we'll link some in the show notes so people can have a look. But that was a really good example. And there's a person who Matthew interacted with this morning, Alexandros Marinos, who's an uber fan of the Dark Horse podcast, Brett Weinstein's podcast. And he makes these massive threads, you know, hundreds, hundreds of tweets long, which purport to do exactly that. But yeah, it's like empty scientific calories. Like there's nothing there.

So yeah, there's no there there. It's a lot of like structuring something as if it's's no there there it's a lot of a lot of like structuring something as if it's going somewhere but it's not going anywhere and i just want to remember the cargo cargo cults it's kind of a reference to something that would happen on on in remote places where people hadn't seen advanced technology right and maybe a plane crashes or a radio washes up on the beach from a shipwreck or something. And then people turn that into an artifact of some kind of spiritual significance. Cargo cult, it's probably politically incorrect now, but it referred to these, I can't remember the location, but basically were indigenous societies that met the technically advanced

societies and they were getting cargo drops i believe it was during world war ii and they recreated like a you know a landing strip and and that kind of thing and and control towers but without the technology obviously in the hope to get cargo to come oh okay so so boxes of stuff were being dropped presumably for soldiers but it would end up falling into the hands of these other people who just happen to be there yeah so the the idea with the analogy is when one goes through the form of something without the function you know but but obeying the form so you know we seem to see that a lot with the gurus and the fans of the gurus, which is that they all believe that they worship science, right?

That they're rational, you know, logical, evidence-based people and they'll create these great big threads. And of course, what they're doing is a whole bunch of cherry picking and a whole bunch of motivated reasoning and not really understanding what they're reading and not putting it together in any sensible way. But because it follows the form, that seems to be enough for many people. Yeah, so you've got the elements, you've got the ritual,

you've got the things that should represent some kind of legitimacy. It's funny, we were on a thread together yesterday, Matt, or last night, and it branched off in different regions where we're talking about the scientific consensus. And it got to the point where I often get to with some of these folks when I let myself start debating a little bit, where they say, well, who's to say your quote-unquote science is true and their quote unquote science is false well we actually oddly enough have a way of figuring that out yeah yeah there's a lot of ironically post-modern sentiments that go into modern debates around science from the people that are claiming to, you know, represent robust, critical engagement with science.

And it's maddening. It's maddening because I wouldn't mind if they acknowledge their endorsement of that mode of thinking, right? That it's all down to subjective assessments. It's all down to your interpretation. But at the same time, they will reel against that. I've never heard this word so often as I have in the last two years

from pseudo skeptics and people on the right, which is narrative. Everything's a fucking narrative, right? It's all just your narrative. For me, I associate that so much with a kind of post-modern lens which of course has you know a lot of value to offer but when applied in this way it's just awful i used to not like post-modern approaches very much and i've become increasingly sympathetic

to them before we were at the internet era and dealing with like the COVID contrarians and stuff. I think in many respects, they were right. They were just too early. What they were talking about, you know, because people reflexively commenting on things, constructing alternative systems for endorsing, producing scientific knowledge and so on. Like, I think they nailed it about the about the internet era and before they had some legitimate critiques about the social construction of science and that kind of thing so it wasn't all bad but yeah sure yeah yeah yeah as a as a diagnosis rather than a prescription um so going back a couple of steps julian um you know a lot of that stuff that you described

which i in my mind i associate with california rightly or wrongly yeah yeah oh yeah um and um it makes me wonder so a little bit for me and chris it's like we're sitting here in our respective foreign countries and we're peering in from outside and we're aware that it's getting filtered through the crazy funhouse mirror of the internet. I'm just wondering, to what degree do you reckon a lot of this is like a sociological phenomena that is unique to some parts of the United States? And if so, why? Do you mean what we've been talking about with regard to conspirituality specifically? Yeah, with regards to conspirituality and the overlap. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, I think it's something that's happening all over the world. We track it in multiple countries where people speak English, just because we can understand what they're saying. I think that within America, so the wild thing is that, and it sort of relates back to what Chris was just talking about, you have this sort of horseshoe effect, right? Where, and I said before that a lot of people in encountering this phenomenon for the first time and learning about it are surprised. They go, well, gee, how is it that these very chill, lovey-dovey, hippie, crunchy granola folks would get into far right-wing conspiracy theories? And I think on both the left and the right, you have these, you might call them fringe groups, who tend to be very religious in their way of approaching the world and i mean religious perhaps in a slightly pejorative sense there's a feeling that life has

some grand metaphysical purpose and there's a battle between good and evil happening that you can get on board with the right side if you if you believe certain things and you engage in certain practices and it seems like those two groups on the left and the right have converged with one another in the face of this common enemy that is telling us what to do or quote-unquote trying to instill fear in us, right? And so there's a unique perhaps American sensibility that some people have written about. I really like Barbara Ehrenreich's work about this, you know, the positive thinking, prosperity gospel kind of stuff, where it's like you can be happy and wealthy if you just stay positive and you believe the right things. And the universe will provide or God will provide if you're being a good person. And we see how this is a poor

substitute for a government that would really be taking care of its people and for living in a society where you felt that there was some kind of safety net. So yeah, there's that piece of it, which is the religiosity and the, I often think of it as shadow denial, the spiritual bypassing kind of avoidance of anything that creates too much tension or vulnerability in the name of like, I'm going to be my best self. And if I'm being my best self, then I'll get everything that I want. Again, when that comes up against the pressure of a global crisis like this, I think you get some of these outlandish responses. Yeah. So I guess the United States is famously both very religious among the Anglosphere countries and also very independent and entrepreneurial compared to other places. ideas around Calvinist predestination and things like that feeds into it.

But the thing that strikes me is that thing you touched on, which is that horseshoe that is going on. There turns out to be a surprising amount of common ground between the people who are highly sceptical of the establishment, of the system, of the orthodoxy, of the so-called experts, and doubt that the system has their best interests at heart. And they can cast themselves in a left-wing kind of mold of being the resistance or so on, or being the dissenters and the freethinkers.

The politics always has a role, but if you take out the politics, there's an awful lot of common ground. That's right. That's right. And I think the other piece that we touch on on the podcast quite a bit from time to time is that specifically like the yoga world that Matthew, Derek, and I all know each other from over the last 10 years, there are a couple of undeniable pieces about it. One is that it tends to be a fairly privileged group of people who have the time and the resources and can buy the leggings and pay for the membership of the yoga studio and all the rest of it. Go on the retreats, take the teacher training courses that cost thousands of dollars, even though you're not

ever planning to be a teacher, just to quote unquote deepen your practice. There's a whole economy in place there that it does take a certain amount of resources to engage in. So there's that piece. And so it's the white, fairly well-off person who is engaging in these pursuits for the most part, not overwhelmingly. But then the other piece has been a kind of abdication of politics. So I often talk about this because I'm so interested in psychology in terms of what has been called a spiritual bypass by psychological theorists like John Wellwood, where you're engaging in spiritual pursuits as a way of bypassing, you know, perhaps dealing with some of your unresolved emotional experiences or traumas

or what have you, being perhaps psychologically honest about your life. But there's another dimension to that too, which can also be political, right? Is that if I am on this quest to become enlightened, to be non-attached, to discover the true self within, which is deeper than all separation, deeper than all identification, then that very often turns into an abdication of any sort of political responsibility or participation. I've known so many people over the last couple decades who say, I don't watch the news, I don't read the newspapers, it's negative. I don't want to feel those feelings. I don't want to deal with that stuff. They're creating a reality that I don't sign off on.

I'm creating another more beautiful reality for myself and the people that I love. creating another more beautiful reality for myself and the people that I love. And so, again, I think that then results in a very, perhaps politically naive demographic overall, right? That's sort of a common denominator, where then very savvy digital propaganda can have its way with people who, as we've said, are rebellious, do think outside of the box, are open to believing all sorts of novel things, and perhaps have been checked out from politics for a long time. There's a great parallel, I think, related to that, which we noticed with Russell Brand. But

just to say at the start that, you know, in terms of surprising ideologies which go together, but which people tend maybe not to think of in the same grouping, from what you and Matt were both saying, I couldn't help but think, you know, prosperity gospel equals the secret, just different frames to say you are rewarded because of spiritual power or God's love. But in both cases, you just will it into existence. And I think with Russell Brand, he's definitely somebody that's on that track. He's open to the secret, maybe less so to the prosperity gospel. But we covered his material back.

I think it was like our second or third episode. And we noticed there was just this one segment where he was talking about he watched a talk at the Oxford Union given by Steve Bannon, right? And Russell Brand's comment then was, first of all, he was really impressed with the theatric nature of Steve Bannon's presentation, right? He came in and he had a rain splattered Mac, you know, a kind of Columbo look. And then Russell was saying he found it surprising

that he found so little to disagree with Steve Bannon until the end when Bannon, you know, kind of got into immigration, but he was like, but you know, most of the stuff he said about the elites and so on, there was no, it was all right. And I was listening to it going okay so we know that russell brown's trajectory was already heading in the right wing direction

at that time but i i think that segment it gave this really clear uh illustration of the point that you're making that russell saw what steve bannon was doing as not really politics, right? It's like this neutral slamming of the elites. And it feels that that's something that so many people now regard as like apolitical, even when it's coming from, you know, Steve Bannon, openly right-wing Tea Party political strategist pushing an agenda. wing tea party political strategist pushing an agenda. But the fact that Russell and all the people can't see it, they kind of then treat it like it isn't there. And I think it's the fact that they can't detect that that's a political agenda that makes them susceptible to it.

I think that's exactly right. And it's so difficult, right? Because I really value the approach to life and to information and to ideas that says, you know, let's look at things on their own terms and see if they're coherent, see if they're logically consistent, see what their implications are, play them out to their conclusions without automatically putting things in boxes right away and saying, well, I don't agree with this whole thing because obviously you don't check all my boxes, right? I think that that's really, really valuable and something that's deeply lacking in our culture war discourse. But the thing that you're identifying where there's just this complete ignoring of glaring

realities in terms of what someone's ideology is and what their agenda is. Now with Steve Bannon, it's really fascinating. And I find Russell Brand really fascinating too. We talked to Ben Teitelbaum who wrote War for Eternity, which is based on like many, many, many hours of interviews with Steve Bannon and learning about his life. And then Teitelbaum, who's a professor, I think of musicology, doing all of this deep background in terms of learning where Steve Bannon's, actually his spiritual worldview is coming from. I don't know if you guys listened to that episode or if you know the book. It was a great interview. Yeah. I mean, it was an amazing book to read and he was an amazing guy to talk to.

So for someone like Russell Brand, who considers himself a kind of spiritual dissident, he refers to himself as a, what does he call himself? Like a libertarian socialist or an anarcho-syndicalist like he has these different terms that he tries to use he really thinks of himself as this outsider who's pushing the limits and who's kind of enlightened in a certain way and we know that he's very involved in yoga especially kundalini yoga which is a very specific kind of i don't know i i won't say too much about it but there's a cultish mentality there, more so than a lot of other communities. For him, listening to Steve Bannon, he's going to hear references to a deep sense of spiritual values and a way of wanting to restore the world to to living in accordance with those

values he's going to hear this populism that says that the elites are the ones who are fucking everything up and we need to bring power back into the hands of the ordinary people which of course is really what steve bannon wants to do, right? It made perfect sense to me when I saw him saying that, where he just said, well, you know, this was great. You know, it springs to mind, Julian, that I know that for some people, they tend to hesitate whenever they're imagining that Steve Bannon would have some links to like a Hindu cosmology or that kind of thing. But I would strongly recommend people check out the episode, the interview or the book that you mentioned.

But another example, which is really contemporary and obvious, and I think speaks to the same kind of ignorance, was Joe Rogan sharing on Instagram the four quadrants. Like, I can't remember what it is, but it's basically the right hand side is difficult times lead to hard men and the liberal side is weak men leading to soft times or weak people. Hard times, yeah. And that's all tied into a cosmic cycle, which Joe probably doesn't know about, but that's where that meme was from. I think so. You know, I didn't spend

enough time with the meme. I remember seeing it and just sort of rolling my eyes at it. But yeah, that does make sense in terms of the idea of the four yugas, right? The bronze, silver, and golden ages, and then the dark age, that these are part of the eternal cycling stages of cosmic time. And this comes directly from Hindu mythology. And so that now we live in the Kali Yuga, which is the dark time. And during the dark time, what are referred to in the caste system as the slaves are the ones who are on top, the common man, the person who doesn't have any nobility or dignity or spiritual kind of shine. And that actually someone like Steve Bannon sees himself as trying to wreak as much chaos as possible to bring down the structures that are maintaining order in this particular way. Like it's a different kind of order.

He's obsessed with the traditional order, but to create chaos and destruction so as to bring about a return to the golden age. And so that four quadrant thing that Joe Rog rogan shared uh yeah i could see how it would have a direct reference back to that i actually i just looked it up and the great it's not even the subtext because the label that joe put under it said we are in kali yuga the age of conflict all of the chaos we're seeing right now was predicted in Hinduism. Oh shit. Okay. That's right. That's right.

Oh yeah. But he doesn't really know what, what he's really gesturing towards. It's just like a, like a yoga reference point. That's, that's a good example. Cause I'm sure Joe likes, you know, the esoteric framing of this thing that fits with his political preferences and the, the, the other associations with like where the Kali Yuga stuff comes from the very real far right connections to it. That would seem, oh, that's just, you're just layering stuff on top and it's not, it's

transparently there, but you have to look at it. And it's what makes people susceptible to Steve Bannon type rhetoric. And you know, the arc that you talked about that makes Russell Brand interesting going from a narco libertarian to where he is now, which is pretty much leaning towards reactionary right wing, but with the conspirator the gloss to it, it reminds me, and it's not a flattering comparison, but Stefan Molyneux started out as an anarcho capitalist, I think or not libertarian capitalist. That was some description and ended up a white nationalist and people would always reference. He can't be right wing. He's a a he's an anarchist he doesn't believe

in the state and ended up being a trump apologist so i think people take the politics in some sense as like there's weird duality where it's not taken seriously and on the other hand it's taken as russell brown can appear in a video and list off five things where he has a left-wing stance. He believes in social health care or that kind of thing. And that means all of the accusations are false that PN Tim is right-wing. It's weird because they are in some way treating those categories as if you cannot cross them if you simply identify in certain respects. So you can pump out endless content demonizing left-wing politicians, promoting right-wing narratives, but you can't be right-wing

because you think the NHS is good. And it's like... Yeah, I mean, I think it's so tricky. It's so tricky because if we just explore that a little bit, like if Russell Brand were to say, my end goal for society, right? My idea of where things should end up if I had my druthers politically, would be some kind of version of a socialist paradise, but with anarcho-libertarian freedom from anyone interfering with you just doing your own thing man and then he would say well no that's very different from a repressive say american evangelical right-wing moralistic big government telling you that you can't get an abortion and gay people can't do whatever the hell

they want in the privacy of their home etc so he would say well you know where i want to get to is radically different from those people so i don't sign off on their beliefs. We just happen to agree with each other on all of these other things that have a more conspiratorial, you know, fight the power sort of mentality. Like, how would you break that down? Well, my view is that although it's possible to identify maybe quite extreme right-wing or left-wing elements in a bunch of these figures, and they can be this weird mix and they can be smuggling in arguably right-wing stuff under left-wing stuff or vice versa, I think to a largeishing feature is that they are utopian, hypersceptical, anti-establishment revolutionaries. And once you go far enough in that direction, then it becomes so weird that it becomes very academic, whether it's left or right wing.

So utopian populism taken to an extreme, you do end up meeting the two sides, right? But we're not saying that it's apolitical at that point. We're just saying that it's susceptible to the worst ideas from anywhere along the political spectrum. James Lindsay and that little video from this week where he was talking about communism inside of fascism and fascism inside of communism. And I said to you, have you heard of turducken, which is this dish from New Orleans where my wife is from, where they stuff a turkey inside a duck inside a chicken and they cook it all together. James Lindsay is the gift that keeps on giving. And in that rant, it's so unhinged. His brain has been absolutely shattered by the culture war. I don't know how good it was beforehand, but he lives in a world that it's so ironic that these people like James Lindsay, who have become obsessed with the globalists and their nefarious schemes and the new world order. And yet they live every day in this system where everything has to be fitted into this binary system. And his binary is now so fucked up that it has no contact with the actual world, right? He's talking about communists. Race Marxism.

I mean, what he was saying was that the Western powers, like America now, is a fascism with a communism stuck inside it. Whereas the communist system in China is a communism with a fascism stuck inside it. And it's like, it's so stupid. And my head point was that they have designed it because those two elements are going to make communism flower. Like, you know, it's the gatekeeper and the key master or whatever from

like the ghost masters yeah they're gonna merge eventually and and as he's saying it it's like this is his thesis that he's come up with this week and glenn beck is just like yes yes i couldn't i couldn't tell from like glenn play is such a slippery political character. Like I remember when he went on that apology tour and people were treating them as sincere, you know, when he started wearing the cardigan and talking about how he helped polarize people and he was sorry about that. And it was so obviously, you know, like an act. And in this video, it's really hard to read this expression of Ilo being

holy shit, like this is extreme even for me. Or, man, this is good. You know, this is the stuff. Why didn't I think of communism stuffed in a fascist? I couldn't read this expression. This is it. This is the sausage stuffed crust of the pizza that I've been wanting that I didn't know I needed. But did you know that James Lindsay, I think he had brain surgery sometime in the last two or three years. that like in 2011, he mentioned that he had a traumatic brain injury.

He fell when he was using a pull-up bar and he apparently like had severe injury from it. Now, he's pointed out that people highlighting that are just, they're using it to dismiss him. And I, you know, if that is the explanation, that's lucky for him because if it was due to an injury, that kind of gives him some escape. But I don't think it is because the penis hoax thing, if you ever see the interview he did with the very bad wizards, which it was probably after that, he's perfectly sharp and able to have a conversation, but it's the same personality where he cannot recognize

any limitations about he got an article published in a pay-to-play journal right which completely invalidates anything about the critique sure you spend you can get anything published but he he refuses to accept that in that interview and he gets very belligerent and they're they're sympathetic like The Very Bad Wizard guys are somewhat critical of the overreaches of wokeism or postmodern in academia. And yeah, so I think he's just an unreasonable person and always will be. Yeah, well, not to ensnare you guys too deeply and to psychoanalyze any particular individual,

I do think as I listen to you that it's an interesting potential case study of what happens as a result of getting a ton of social media exposure and controversy and pushback and going through whatever kind of academic whipsaw he's been through. Because as much as you might say, yeah, look, we can see these personality traits have always been there. Something happened where it's expressed at such an extraordinarily intense level now. Yeah.

We have an episode coming up with Aaron Ravenowitz where we look at him and O'Fallon, and there's been a clear descent from the initial episode that we did, which was a couple of years ago now. So I'm not somebody that says James Lindsay was just always hiding his power levels or that kind of thing. I think he really has spiraled. And the dynamics that you talk about, about audience reinforcement, or one of the things we analyze on that episode is the influence from a mentor. Michael O'Fallon is kind of a bad copy of Steve Bannon, but you can actually hear in that interview, there's parts where James is talking and O'Fallon will respond and say, and of course that's, that's related to the globalists.

So who don't want national sovereignty and James, James then, you know, riffs on that. And then you hear O'Fallon say, Ooh, James. riffs on that and then you hear a fallen saint oh james it's like it's star wars in the the real world with actual consequences so less entertaining but uh there's definitely something there yeah well i mean speaking of psychoanalyzing these people i mean our ongoing theory is that narcissism plays a pretty strong role in motive and we can't prove that but it seems pretty clear that to fulfill that kind of role you have to have unreasonable confidence and self-belief in order to tweet something about communism being inside fascism you know you have to have this unwavering self-confidence and the feedback

that's that's given whether from the dark emperor or from social media validates and fuels that and you know it's a spectrum and we're all vulnerable to this to one degree or another but it struck me that this sort of relates to the things you identify in conspirituality because that kind of self-improvement, self-optimization, hyper-individualistic mindset you see coming through. Even in someone like Rogan who at many points you sort of see how much he despises people that are weak or fat or unable to have that kind of self-discipline. It is verging on a kind of ubermensch thinking. Yeah. And that's the American piece of it that we were referring to earlier. I feel like in the more kind of yoga slash spiritual world, it's like you can be healthy and happy and get everything you want out of life and manifest abundance, right?

Which means don't worry about money. If you have these beliefs and you have this sort of positive attitude and you're loving and you don't entertain resentments and you don't allow yourself to get stressed, you just zap away that negative energy. And on the sort of Rogan, maybe biohackers, bro side of it, I feel like that's also then infused with this kind of macho attitude, which says, you know, pain is just weakness leaving the body, right? No pain, no gain. You have to push hard. Don't be a pussy. Don't, don't give in. It's the giving into the fear. It's the giving into the weakness. It's not being willing to go that extra mile and

train harder and push yourself into becoming who you are meant to be which is this powerful ripped virile confident alpha guy like that that's just such a and it's two sides of the same coin really whether whether you're trying to be an enlightened kind of um you know sitting on the top of the mountaintop with a little smile on your face type of figure, or whether you're trying to be the real strong, fierce, macho Ubermensch. It's two sides of the same thing where the cost is, to some extent, the cost is your humanity. It's your vulnerability. It's your empathy. It's your willingness to be imperfect. It's perhaps the opposite of the narcissism you were just invoking. You guys, Julian, have highlighted a point that I think is really perceptive and relevant for the

current situation we're in with the coronavirus and the response to the vaccines that if you take a figure like Rogan and you take his vaccine hesitancy or, you know, anti-vax, whatever position you take on what he does. There's this weird dichotomy whereby Rogan pumps himself full of supplements, human growth hormone, testosterone, and he goes through these severe bodily rituals, which are not shown to have health benefits, like taking lots and lots of saunas or cold ice baths, right? These are things which certainly have a physiological effect, but the evidence for what the things that Rogan says they do and that the advocates say they do is just not there. It's very weak if there, and there's no problem with people doing that. But

the point is that they're willing to accept all these relatively low amounts of evidence and do quite extreme things to the body. Yes, they're willing to structure their lives, what they do each day, how much they suffer, how much time they invest in things on these very sort of low evidentiary standards. Yeah, and the contradiction is that the vaccine is a thing that you get in one day,

which has a large amount of evidence for efficacy and which has a large amount of efficacy, low chance of side effects and a clear benefit, which is established. And yet, because it's been framed as the state is doing it and you're having your bodily autonomy pierced, right? That it engenders this really negative reaction. And you guys have highlighted like, like a very visceral response to your autonomy being

violated, being triggering. And it is, and you know, it's the same way that Rogan says, everyone is scared. Everybody else is this weak-willed person who won't stand up for what they believe in, but he's terrified of a vaccination which has been universally proved to be extremely safe. And yeah, that dichotomy, it interests me. I wonder if you have any thoughts about it. Oh, I think it's very interesting. I mean, on the one hand, you're also then dealing with the conspiratorial mindset, which doesn't accept the data that shows that the likelihood of an adverse reaction is incredibly, incredibly small. And even if you have one, you'll probably be fine. But the other piece of it is

that there is something about the self-concept. There's this concept of spiritual materialism, where you go around trying to accrue through experiences, things that are accoutrement for your ego, essentially, where you feel better and better about yourself as a spiritual ego because you've done these different things. I feel like what I was hearing is, unless it comes at the price of an ordeal, unless there's some ritual that you're putting yourself through, unless you have to suffer for it, it's not really going to be good for you. It's probably unnatural. It's probably suspect. It's probably the easy way out, right? And I've known many, many people.

And in fact, I used to be in this camp. I changed my mind about this in the last 10 or 12 years, where there can be this kind of attitude towards something like antidepressants, where you say, well, are you really depressed? You know, are you just taking the easy way out? Is it really just that you haven't dealt with your grief? Or is it really that you're not willing to face your anxiety like a warrior and sit there and and process through it and be in the fire and come out on the other side a stronger more integrated authentic human being you're taking a pill that's that just masks the very real process that nature and maybe the universe is asking you to go through, right? Yeah, I agree with all that.

And it's concordant with some of the evidence on how well placebos work. You know, if you make it a more intense experience of delivering the placebo, then the placebo has a stronger effect. But I guess the other component of it too, because I've also found it very mystifying, like why are things like masks or vaccines so triggering when it's not fundamentally different from all of these other alternative contrarian treatments that are, you know, and I mean, all I've got to explain that is basically that one of these things is coded or implies a kind of communitarian passive mindset.

Yeah. One in which you do what you're told. Everybody gets the same thing. Nobody's special. We're all in it together. And the other one is obviously this individualistic, bespoke, validating treatment. And it's so crazy to me that these two entirely politically neutral things, whether it's monoclonal out of antibodies versus a vaccine, it has no political valence whatsoever, has these layers of meaning just

added to them. Absolutely. And the other piece of that too, is when we start talking about children as well, right? One of the things that I keep noticing is that the parents of kids, especially very small kids who are being asked to wear masks, you know, at school or at preschool seem much less bothered about it than their parents are. Their parents think this is a horrible, traumatizing, terrible thing that's been forced on their kid. And the kid is just like, I'm wearing a kitty cat mask. Kids will literally wear a Spider-Man costume with the head completely covered in a balaclava and they seem to be... I've got evidence of that yeah there's Julian I want to make sure to ask you about this I think it's

it might be veering into inside of baseball for podcasters but you know what are we, if not podcasters, talking in long form format? So I've noticed, you know, Matt and I are dynamic politically. We are very much simpatico and we're similar, you know, when it comes to science, when it comes to a lot of things. The only major disagreements of ours, really, that Matt's wrong about consciousness. In a way that in a way that's entirely obvious to someone like yourself it's easy julian it's easy he's a there's no julian he's he's a p-zombie don't listen to him he doesn't know i think i might be actually agree with that but so you know i don't want to exaggerate and say you derrick and math you are

you're massively dispersed across the political spectrum. You're all left-leaning people, trendy towards progressive. But it is clear, however, that you have differences in political perspectives and maybe other things attached to that. And Matthew, as you mentioned in the introduction where we were talking, is an open Marxist,

whereas you and Derek, I think, are not. And I've always been interested when I heard your conversations that you had a more sympathetic take towards the figures in the intellectual dark web and Rogan and stuff like you, you kind of understood the appeal more because you shared it in some respect. So I'm interested, given your format, where you have these main episodes that the three of you do together, and then you have this separate part where you take individual essays or reflections.

And they often are intensely personal or speak to political views and that kind of thing. So I'm just interested about how you guys navigate parts where maybe your political takes don't align, or you might see that an issue has a political valence that the other ones don't necessarily agree with. What that looks like editorially or, yeah, I'm basically, I'm just very curious how the sausage is made. Well, I think that we try to learn from each other. We argue a lot with each other behind the scenes.

When we come up against something that we have differing views on, we hash it out as best we can. And sometimes that goes really well and other times it doesn't go so great. sometimes that goes really well and other times it doesn't go so great. But I think there's a basic level of trusting one another's intelligence in such a way that we can be curious and sort of hang in there at the best of times in terms of really trying to discuss something. There's also a respectful kind of working relationship where if any one of us comes up against the hard line where we say, you know what, I just cannot do that. I can't have us take that position or have this person on as a guest or, you know, something like that, then the other two, you know, or the other one, whatever the case may be, tends to say, well, okay, you know, if that's a hard line for you, then we can't cross it.

And that's fine. And that's specifically sort of with the public episodes. With the bonus episodes, we each very much just do our own thing. And sometimes the bonus episodes end up being, to some extent, responses to one another. Not in an overtly dramatic way, but we'll riff off of one another. We'll say, you know, I heard Matthew or I heard Julian, I heard Derek say this thing, and here are some thoughts I have about that. And I think when we do that, we tend to do it with a tone that is not like, he's just wrong and I'm going to come hard. It's more like, well, here are some other perspectives about that, right? But I think it's good. I think it keeps us honest in a way that would perhaps not be available if we just all were in lockstep on every issue.

Yeah, we come from somewhat diverse backgrounds. I mean, we often get it pointed out to us that we're three tall white men who are Generation X. But, you know, Derek grew up in New Jersey. Matthew's Canadian and from Toronto. I'm not sure if that's where he grew up. Jersey. Matthew's Canadian and from Toronto. I'm not sure if that's where he grew up. I came from Zimbabwe and South Africa. We have our own cultural and political backgrounds that play into how we're going to see different issues. And with the intellectual dark web, that's been its own odyssey, as you know, over the course of the pandemic, is just watching people who have presented themselves as these figures of rationality turn into barking mad conspiracy theorists and people willing to regurgitate right-wing talking points. Yeah, it's a topsy-turvy time. Just to say, Julian, from someone that consumes

it, that is distinctly the impression I got. I know there is the episodes where you are directly conversing about a topic, right? You do it on the main episode, but I think you had an episode where you and Matthew had a, like an extended conversation specifically about political point of view. It was rare because I heard an interesting discussion with people with different points of view and it was fine and it wasn't presented as earth shattering, which was, you know, it's the nice part, just a conversation amongst friends, which is a normal thing. And I actually think that that kind of tone where somebody will cover a topic and in a couple of weeks that it will be touched on again. But maybe another element that's highlighted, which, you know, adds a complexity to the earlier one.

I think that's a really great way of dealing with it. So again, you know, I know I might sound like an infomercial but it's really good your bonus content so uh so yeah matt you should be signed up you go on well i'm just envious because we lack both demographic diversity and political diversity so we got we got nothing but we do have the skin tone diversity. You're luminous orange and I'm like alabaster white. I'm representing the orange out there. Oh, your privilege.

Your privilege is showing. Be careful. Yeah. Well, actually, I think that's maybe a nice tangent related to that, Julian, is that one of the things we were interested to talk to you about is you've been in America for a couple of decades and you're dealing with topics that very much address the culture war. You know, recent episodes on the trucker convoy and on the anti-vaccine mandates. particularly in your case, that having grown up outside America, that it has lent you a certain detachment, one which I think Matt and I would say that we share as non-Americans who still cover the culture war and are involved with it. And I wonder how you feel your experiences in South Africa or your background. Like one question is, does that keep you detached from things? And a related question is, being in America, is it at all possible to escape the culture war or is it as all consuming as it

seems online? I think it's not as all consumingconsuming as it is online, just off the top. I think that it's possible to be consumed by it, especially if you're a very online person. And of course, during the pandemic, people have been more online and there is more of a cohesive sense that we're all going through the same thing. I really miss the feeling of living in a relatively cosmopolitan city and feeling like everyone's got something different going on at the same time, right? So yeah, the pandemic has certainly amplified that sense of the culture war being ever-present to some extent, but I think a lot of it is online, and I think it's easy to get sucked into the perception that the way it's happening online is sort of like generalized to the rest of the world, to everything that's not on to the offline world.

In terms of my background, it's so complex because I grew up idealizing America. I grew up under apartheid, wanting to bring about an end to apartheid, really struggling with the guilt of being someone who had the undeniable, you know, the privilege of actually being treated like a human being under a political system that treated non-white people as sub-human and just with such brutality, which I know was a reality in the United States until not too long ago and is the reality in most colonized areas of the world until not too long ago. And it's the reality in other places stillized areas of the world until not too long ago and it's the reality in other places still to this day but just based on different vectors of discrimination and and oppression right northern ireland

but uh i grew up idealizing the woodstock generation idealizing america as this this idealizing America as this idea of a free society, of a great experiment, of a place where everyone could have freedom and opportunity and equality. And so I came here thinking that I was leaving this absolutely retrograde, horrific, oppressive place that South Africa was to come to the ideal that I have had of America. And I was disappointed almost from day one. So that's been interesting just for me personally, navigating all of that. Can I just mention like in passing, but you were also, when you were in South Africa under apartheid, you were actually involved in efforts to oppose that, right? Weren't you in a band that was kind of... Yeah, so around sort of the end of high school, beginning of university, I was in an anti-apartheid protest rock band that had some success and played around festivals and big outdoor concerts and stuff like that.

played around festivals and big outdoor concerts and stuff like that at a time when that was essentially bordering on being illegal to do like protest was was not permitted large gatherings of people openly saying political things against the government was was not allowed uh the head of the sociology department at my university was assassinated by the government on his doorstep you know it was that is that kind of. Student organizers would disappear from campus and come back a couple weeks later having been tortured. So it was pretty brutal. I was a conscientious objector, which meant if I stayed in the country, I would have been put in jail for six years. It was the sort of mandatory sentence. I knew kids that I went to school with who were serving that sentence. So it was, it was very, it was very immediate, shall we say. And of course, all of that at the same time that, that every single black

person in that society had it much worse. It was a much more grave danger than, than I ever was, but nonetheless. Yeah. So I was, I was certainly involved in, in wanting it to end, but not really hopeful that that would be possible. Yeah. So I think this is interesting and I wanted to highlight that because sometimes it gets presented that if you are not on the kind of cutting edge of the progressive politics in the US, you're not on board with everything that's been advocated there,

that you're essentially opposed to political progress and and and protest and i i think your background but that is not the case although i i think you would still identify yourself somewhere on the liberal progressive side of things oh absolutely yeah yeah but it just speaks to me about you know the kind of distorting effect that American politics has on the way that we interpret everything, at least in the English speaking sphere, as we're all revolving around the issues that are central in America and often for good reason, but the dynamics often aren't the same or they, you know, that they, they don't export the same kind of way to

other cultures. And, uh, yeah, I, I, I've had the same experience. I think the thing that really struck me and I won't go too deep into a bunch of biographical sort of reminiscences here, but you know, I voted once in an election in South Africa. I was old enough to vote right before I left. I didn't want to vote because it was a sham. Only white people had the vote and they made up 10% of the population. But my father sat me down and he said, you have to go and vote today. I'll drive you there. You're voting for 10 black people. You're making the most progressive choice in a way that you're having your say on behalf of people who otherwise don't have a say. And it's your responsibility to do so.

And then I came here, went to music school, then lived in england for a year and i got to vote in england because i had a british passport and i saw what the what the political process was like in england where you have two weeks of campaign no no campaign finance everybody has to sit in front of a hard-nosed political analyst who like rips the shit out of your positions and asks you the most difficult questions and then you have the election right and then i came here during the election i moved finally to california what would that have been 92 and i and i arrived and i i had jet lag and i was in the little dingy apartment i shared with my girlfriend and i watched the republican national convention. And there was Pat Buchanan talking about the culture war, that we're in a war for the soul of America. And that was the beginning of the slide toward where the Republican Party is at now. And I formed the impression then,

and it has stayed with me ever since, that American politics is so much more theatrical, so much more about the grand gesture, so much more about the posturing. And maybe there's a kind of cargo cult quality to it as well, right? Where it's just so much of it doesn't really have anything to do with people's lives. It has to do with these identifications and these grand narratives and these ways of positioning us versus them very intensely, so as to gain power. And coming from somewhere where everything did have such political immediacy, I have at times struggled to take a lot of that stuff seriously. I'm taking it seriously right now. And maybe some of that was also a level of privilege where I felt like,

it doesn't really affect my life, whether we have John Kerry or George Bush, although of course, or George Bush, you know, although of course it probably did. But yeah, the American news-tainment political theater landscape is really bizarre and it's really dismaying that it has such a huge influence on the rest of the world. Yeah, I know what you mean. I mean, one gets the impression that, well, there's a couple of things. One is that in some ways, American concrete material policy seems extraordinarily difficult to change. Like in Australia, they basically snapped their fingers and instituted these gun bans. Even in the UK, yes. They kind of snapped their fingers and brought in a national disability insurance scheme, which is massive. national disability insurance scheme which is massive so in some ways it's extremely dynamic and the issues that people vote on and that the politicians talk about are very pragmatic real

issues like they don't campaign on personality and culture and values quite so much right i'm exaggerating a little bit to make the effect there'll be lots of australian listeners who go no no no you know the liberal party is evil or the labor party but but in in relatively speaking i think it's true um so i guess on one hand there's relatively little sort of substantive material changes going on but at the same same time, what they call a culture war, or if you like the discourse on divides in values and worldviews is huge compared to a place like Australia, where you've got these political parties, the people running the cabinet, the various party leaders are a bunch of big fat idiots in stuffed shirts, blowhards. And know, and that's just kind of normal. Nobody, very few people feel super passionate about either. Yeah. Yeah. And that's something that struck me around

progressive politics to some extent over the last few years as well, is that I'm very often the person who's saying, okay, I agree with a lot of these positions in principle. What's the policy that you want to change? And how do we get that legislation done? Because otherwise, this just feels like a lot of posturing to me. It was a... Virtue signaling, you know, to use the term. There's the trucker convoy, Julian, which you guys covered. I actually want to talk to you about, but it's been an interesting example because I

think the first thing to say up front is like you guys established quite clearly, and I've seen many other people reporting on it. There are clear far right connections. Many of the organizers have very shady politics and agendas and the level of support for the convoy from actual truckers and trucker unions is very small. So all of the critiques, all of those criticisms are valid. I'm not in any way downplaying those because I agree with all of them. But the part that has caused me a bit of mental frustration is that given there's been a focus on the disruption and the inconvenience that it causes for people's lives, taking children out of school, blaring horns and blocking roadways. But lots of people acknowledge

that that is okay as a tactic, as long as it's employed by the correct groups, then these tactics would not be seen as beyond appeal. They would be seen as, yes, it's an inconvenience, but that's the point. And I found that I was listening to a podcast. I really like Knowledge Fight. They do a really good job deep diving. And then they were saying about the trucker convoy and they were highlighting all the far right connections in it. And then they said, and look, the things that they want, right, their demands are unspecific,

they're unrealistic, they're utopian. And this is how you know it's not like a legitimate thing. And I was thinking of the Occupy movement and the demands that were contradictory, that were utopian. I really don't think that people would use that as an example to say, so that movement was completely illegitimate, right? And I'm not doing this to both sides the trucker movement i mean it more that it's there's this frustrating component to the

american culture wars where i then heard on the fifth column those guys were talking about the trucker convoy and for their points because they're libertarians and so on they need the trucker convoy it's better for them if it's a representation of the frustration of the people. So they ignore all the stuff about, they kind of mention it in a hand-waving way about the lack of support it has from overall truckers and that 90% of truckers are vaccinated, right?

So it's not even that relevant for them. And they instead present it as that the right- wing connections are a distraction from actually people are protesting legitimately about the state and the mandates. This is the issue. And it felt like in each case, people are taking their politics and it's blinding them to a certain set of facts that are inconvenient. And I think you can look at the trucker convoy as somebody, like to some extent, detached from that situation. And you can see, yeah, there are obvious right-wing connections.

Anybody denying them is just, they're not doing a good job of critically assessing what that convoy is. But at the same time, the unwillingness to see parallels with when we accept that inconvenience is a legitimate part of protesting. And it could be that a small minority point of view is seen as, well, you know, that doesn't mean that it's wrong. I find that stuff, it's frustrating because it feels like as I consume content from America, that I'm just getting a huge dollop always off the political spin. I mean, even when I'm sympathetic to a particular political spin, it kind of annoys me. Totally. Yeah, no, I'm right there with you. I

think it's two things about that. I mean, one is that I think for the history is such that people on the left have tended to be the fight the power people that we're going to disrupt shit people. We don't care that it's inconvenient for you, for you privileged bastards. We were standing up for the morally correct point of view. And in a lot of cases they've been right. And so the right wing has tended to be identified more with the establishment, more with top-down control, more with keeping things buttoned down. The incredible shift that we're going through is that now you have these protest movements that are equally anti-authority, and yet they're coming from a political point of view, maybe not all of them, but they're infused with a political point of view that people who are more on the left find absolutely repugnant.

And so whatever they do is sort of seen as invalid and not okay, even if what they're doing is very similar to what people on the left were doing last month. It becomes this thing where it's legitimate. And this is really hard. And actually, this is something that I get into discussions and debates about fairly frequently, because people on the left will take great umbrage if you're ever to sort of point out that some tendencies amongst progressive political circles will tend to push people who are moderates further to the right because they just see hypocrisy or they just see something that doesn't add up or seems dishonest, right? It's like the CNN reporter standing in front of the neighborhood on fire saying the protests have been mostly peaceful.

It's like, well, maybe they have have but do you not get the glaring cognitive dissonance of what you're doing right now and how anyone who has any reason to doubt your sincerity is just going to throw their hands up and go i i can't you know and and then they're going to be they're going to be vulnerable to the right-wing spin that says well the mainstream media is uh is in the bag for you know for the libs and you'd end up with a with a discourse that has lost a sense of perhaps honest self-critique and i i see that as a big problem yeah and look just for the record i think all three of us here think that the the trucker convoy protests are stupid and they shouldn't be doing it yeah oh yeah oh yeah and it's yeah and it's you know it's it's stupid it's annoying it's it's an occupation of those people's

neighborhoods they're riddled with white supremacist anti-immigrant you know horrific q anon i mean actually we're i interviewed someone just a few days ago for our episode this week uh who is uh sarah aniano who is an extremism researcher and she's hanging out she's camped out on telegram just like following all of the trucker discourse and it's like oh my god it it is as awful as you might think so yeah not to not to both sides that at all or to or to endorse it in any way yeah no i think what we're talking about is that there are basically two objections one could have to the trucker convoy protest and that is you can either say this is the wrong thing to do because the motivations are wrong yeah but the way in which they're doing it you know being disruptive being destructive

whatever there's nothing wrong with that in principle alternatively, you can say, no, you have a minority view and in a democracy, though the means are not legitimate, even if your objectives were different. I don't think there's an easy answer to that. I see some people grappling with that directly, but as you say, for the most part, I tend to see people taking implicitly the point of view that basically that kind of thing is fine if it's the left doing it and not okay if it's done for the right. In other words, if it's for a good cause, then these things are a good idea. hard not to have like a moral sympathy with that just from an intuitive point of view because it's like well if the cause is noble well then well then maybe i'm more likely to to accept behavior that is unruly right and if the cause is not noble well then you're just a bunch of fucking hooligans get off my lawn it's it's it's rough i i for myself a lot of the frustration comes from inconsistency because I don't mind it where people

outline that. I mean, they say, okay, it's disruptive protests that are targeted towards legitimate causes, which are not racist and exclusionary are okay. I think that's a logical position to take. You can agree or disagree, but that's coherent. The bit I just don't like is, you know, people, when they don't do that and they refuse to acknowledge any parallel in, like, that you could have an article where you're extolling the necessary for protests that make people inconvenient and which set people on edge. And then the following month have a column saying stopping supply chains and causing inconvenience in a major city is not the way that we do things in a democracy. And you're kind of like, that's, that's the, I find frustration in the contradictions.

I also feel sometimes that this is my partisan point of view. I feel like the right is really good at propaganda and they've spent a lot of, they have amazing think tanks and they have intellectuals who spend a lot of time, you know, having meetings and talking about this stuff. And they have a generation of young activists that they have been training from a very specific point of view in terms of how to win the game. And they have to do that because they're not the majority in the country. You know, Biden won by 7 million votes, but they figure out whether it's the gerrymandering or the propaganda or the moral panics, you know, all of these different strategies work for them. And I sometimes feel like on the

left, we play into their hands through some of these sorts of things, some of the inconsistencies, some of the, you know, whatever we've been talking about for a while now as my brain turns to mush. But the sense of sort of playing into the hands of someone who can easily spin it in such a way that, for example, like what just has been happening in Canada and the right-wing talking points are that this really is tyranny. This really is fascism. You're going to freeze these bank accounts. You're going to trample these old ladies with horses, which maybe didn't really happen. You're going to arrest all these people. And then we'll say that it was at gunpoint, even if it wasn't. The terrible, gnawing feeling that I have as each month goes by under these conditions is that

the people who really want fascism are succeeding by telling everyone else that they want fascism, by making everyone else react to them in a way that reinforces the sense that they're actually the fascists, that these other people are the fascists, that the left is the fascists, that Biden is actually a fascist, right? That Trudeau is a fascist in such a way that we grind ever closer to them, especially in America, eroding the possibility of democracy continuing. And when I see the left playing into the hands of that long game, like the Steve Bannon game, it makes me quite nauseous.

It makes me think, you know, Julian, that sometimes when people regard the focus on fascism as hyperbolic, that they aren't looking at people like Nick Fuentes or even Alex Jones and what they're doing in their content because it isn't hyperbolic. Or Peter Thiel. Yeah. To regard them as, if not openly promoting a fascist agenda, to be very, very sympathetic to like an extremely restrictive state with things that treat minorities terribly. And I also want to second the point that while I am being critical of inconsistencies and stuff, I think there's too often, and the IDW are guilty of this, as are other people in the heterodox space, that they fixate on things

like that, like the flaming fire behind a reporter, which there's legitimate stuff to criticize. But what they tend to do when they're talking about that is ignore that that image was not just in a report. It was all over right-wing media. And there's this huge media ecosystem, which is mainstream, watched by half of the country that you live in. And, you know, exists all over the world. half of the country that you live in and, you know, exists all over the world. There's lots of right-wing outlets, which also have much more, and in my opinion, I should say much stronger

deceptive narratives and double standards. And when people talk about media bias and that kind of thing, they're generally only addressing it with like, they only referred, you know, CNN or left-wing media, the Guardian, and they don't address that you have entire opposing ecosystems, which are purely there to pump out strong propaganda. And when people highlight that, they say, well, everyone knows that's bad and it's not reliable. So I don't really need to talk about that. You think that's a thing which hundreds of millions of people consume and they don't all think it's unreliable and not relevant so yeah i i do want to really strongly emphasize that why i think it's a problem i don't think it means that it's therefore everyone's

equally as bad and we don't need we should be just as concerned as what like the New York Times does as what Breitbart does. No, Breitbart is much worse. Yeah. So Julian, I feel bad because after having a nice discussion about conspirituality, we dragged you into the culture war. I need you to issue hot take after hot take about the trucker's convoy. So we're probably all doomed now but i appreciate that and i think it's uh you know there's a lot of good example because truckers convoy is not here in

japan it's not in australia and yet it's all that people can talk about same with with joe rogan so we're all living in that world now and uh matt uh do you want to apologize to julian we've kept them long enough how do you think would we would be kind way to let them out of this purgatory i've got one more thing for you julian so we've talked about you know problems and bad things the world's full of problems it's all very bad um but you know by your lights what good things are going on and what do we want to see more of and how do we encourage it? So just how do we solve the culture war? Please, just a couple of minutes. You have two minutes to answer.

You got it. All right. Yeah, I actually have something prepared. I have a written statement right here. I wish I knew. I wish I knew. right here. I wish I knew. I mean, there's a positive I feel that comes out of times of crisis, which is that, you know, I live in LA. We had a fairly bad earthquake in 1994. I live in the United States, you know, 9-11 was a big deal in 2001. There is something that happens when people

go through a crisis together, where I do think it's an opportunity to sort of reflect on your values and reflect on how you want to love people, what kind of communities you want to be involved in. And right now, all of that is kind of on fire and it's having kerosene thrown on it. But I do think that there's a potential for really digging into that a little bit and saying, you know, what are some, in some ways, there's something about this kind of crisis that almost asks us to go back to first principles and say, look, where have we gone wrong? wrong, not only where have other people gone wrong, but collectively, like what's going on here that we can maybe step back and simplify and say, okay, here are some first principles that I'm committed to. For me, those are not things like body sovereignty and trusting your intuition above all else and being loyal to your tribe, no matter what they fucking do.

It's much more about saying, okay, what does it mean to be interested in truth in a truly skeptical way that wants as best as possible to be unbiased and wants to really examine truth claims and examine my own beliefs in a way where I'm trying to become more honest and interact with others in such a way as I'm trying to be tolerant in that I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and wanting to hear out their positions whilst maintaining that sort of commitment to what I see as a really healthy skepticism. And alongside that, you know, I'm still someone who at heart has certain ideals about the value of compassion, the value of fostering really trusting relationships, and the importance of inflammatory nature of conspiracy theories and that kind of material or sort of cultish dynamics and just be real people. Appreciate the beauty and really

connect with the people that matter to you and really keep digging into the activities and the topics and the literature that really speaks to the deeper questions. That may be a kind of vague and milquetoasty kind of answer, but it's where I land. Taking the wide lens, and you referenced Pat Buchanan, you know, in the culture wars in the nineties, when you moved to America, I know about the different brand of culture wars that was in Northern Ireland when I grew up between Protestants and Catholics. And you've talked about the South African, you know, the very real, not just culture war, but brutal repression there.

And I think even where there really are things to be concerned about in America, you know, January 6th happened, a global pandemic is currently raging. It still does help to take a wider lens at times and realize that there's a lot of culture wars going on around the world. They've been raging for a long time and they're going to be raging long after we're dead. And there's things which recur and repeat and some things which are new. So I think taking a sense of perspective is beneficial, even if that perspective lends you to believe that the most important thing is to, you know, go full

bore in the activism, it could lend lead to that, but, but just having that wider perspective, I think it's beneficial. So yeah, I don't think wishy-washy is, is correct. I mean, for me right now, I have a, I have a daughter who's almost four years old. And just whenever I get the opportunity to remembering that having really connected quality time with her is an essential piece of what is going to turn her into a human being who can make a beautiful contribution to the world, that that's a priority. Well, okay, folks, you heard it here first you know what to do get out there get out there

touch grass reconnect with your inner child subscribe to conspirituality that's right check out conspirituality we'll have fully automated luxury gay space communism before you know it uh thank you very much, Julian. Thanks for staying up so late to talk to us. It's been really good. It's been a pleasure. My pleasure.

I'll give you my wife's number so you can text her and thank her. I know all about the tolerance of significant others. Yeah. We buy at the feet of those tolerance masters.

Yeah. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thanks, Julian. Bow at the feet of your significant other. I shall. Well, now, Matt, Julian, what a man. What insights.

All of those things he said, spot on, right? Each one of them. All of those things I said, spot on, right? Each one of them. All of those things I remember precisely that he said, I was just like, yep, that's right. Yeah, yeah. And you made some very good comments and or banter during that. That's right. It was all, it's crystal clear.

You know, it just happened a moment ago. So I've got it all very clear in my mind. And yes, so thank you, Julian, for coming on and all of those good points that you made. Now we have just one last Conspiratuality host, Derek Berers, who is in our sight for the future. So you're not safe, Derek. We'll get to you.

That's right. He's the remaining Pokemon. We'll get him. Yeah, We'll get to you. That's right. He's the remaining Pokemon. We'll get him. Yeah, save the best to last. That's my motto. So yeah, but NIMA, it's tradition. It's part of the fabric of society that before we finish, we address reviews of the podcast and we in turn issue our review of them.

What do we call this? What do we call this? We call this the review of reviews. Yes, the review of the reviews. I just like to hear you say it. You didn't say it quite usually. I know you do. Yeah.

And today, Matt, today, I have an interesting selection. Again, we're doing so well. We're not getting many super negative reviews. So I've got a three-star review and the five-star review. The three-star review. The title here, and this is by Chris O. The Rivers. It's not me.

I didn't leave this. Indiscipline makes for missed opportunity. Could be an inspirational poster. It says, important subject, smart and informed hosts, and some great guests. Could have been a recipe for an unmissable podcast. Indeed, this one seems so when you first try an episode. Should I stop there? I don't like the direction this is heading, Chris.

But 100 minutes in, you realize this isn't so much a podcast as a live stream of a couple of smart guys down the pub. Like all pub conversations, it's enthralling for the participants, briefly amusing for overhearers, but ultimately a bit of a bore. Too long, too indulgent, worth subscribing to though for a fast scan for interesting bits. That's from Chris of the Rivers. That's, that's being damned with with faint praise, isn't it?

It's, you know, horses for courses, horses for courses. But Jesus, I don't know what conversations he's having at the bar. Let me just play this clip for you and get your reaction. But I think there's a kernel of truth to that. But then, and I don't, you know, we put the little chapter things and stuff so people can scan through. That's fine. Good. Yeah, I understand that.

I can't really rebut that. I think he's basically right. I mean. He's nailed us. He's nailed us. Yeah. If you want something tight and polished, then listen to NPR or something. Yeah, that's right.

Listen to professional people or people with teams that help them out. Yes. That kind of thing. And that's not for any of the people that help us on the podcast. I'm just saying we're not. Our only complaint is there should be more of you. That's right. We need a team to make us sound more eloquent.

So that was the semi-negative view, but, you know, pretty fair review. The next one is by Tim Kreps, and it is titled No More British Spunk, Please. Interesting title. This is an OK podcast. But this is five stars, Matt. As a field academic, now stacking shelves, I have enjoyed the odd laugh out loud. However, I am currently listening to the one about Douglas Murray. Please put a content warning on the episodes that feature embarrassing impersonations of the great Sir Patrick Moore reciting twee poems.

That Pasternak reference had me sick in my mouth. Otherwise, entertaining. Murray has that effect on people. So, sorry. I thought it's a very specific, you know, it's a very specific review about a very specific topic, but, you know, I like it and I appreciate the five stars. So thank you very much to King Craps. Thank you for the five stars.

That's a good review too. Yeah. There was some truth. There was some lessons learned from both those reviews. I think we've taken them on board. We're going to process them for a bit. We're going to, we're going to sit with them. Yeah.

Mull them over. But the other thing that we're going to sit with Matt, we're going to swivel on them, is our patrons. We're going to do so while thanking them for their generosity and donations. So we have this week, Matt, Galaxy Brain Gurus. See if you've heard of any of these guys. We have Anders Masoval you know him friend no not a friend or a relative um that's good it's good sam hard photography that's not a relative

a business corporate we've got some corporate support it's good yeah possibly yeah that could be a name maybe that's just his name. We have Kirsten Greed. Kirsten Greed sounds like a villain from a Batman movie. But yeah, Kirsten Greed. And Demostics. Domestics. Demostics. Domestics?

Demostics. Yeah. That could be a Greek name, right? Is it a Greek name? Or is it just the way you say it that sounds Greek? I think it's a username, just a username. Don't take things on the internet too seriously, Mark. I never know whether or not these are people's real names or whether they're a joke name

or a totally made up name. Or a mispronunciation. So I don't know whether it's okay. Or a mispronunciation, that's right. So I'm trapped in quantum layers of indeterminacy. And I don't know whether I'm allowed to make fun of them or not. Not that I was going to just then. Just say, thank you, Mark.

Express your gratitude. That's, play it CF. Okay, thank you all. You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard. And you're so polite. And hey, wait a minute. Am I an expert?

I kind of am. Yeah. point and hey wait a minute am i an expert i kind of am yeah i don't trust people at all next map a couple of revolutionary geniuses the kind that can get access to the decoding academia content and for example this would include people like Scotty Parkett, Christine Jenkins, Brian Nass, oh no, sorry. I'm doing Brian Nass a disservice. Brian Nass is a Galaxy Brain guru. Sorry, Brian. I take that back.

Replacing Brian is Erin Hidge, Derrick Bears, Derrick Bears Bears future guest Conspiracy ULD podcast host and Cameron Horskamp that's the other one so these are our revolutionary geniuses for this week okay I'm not going to comment thank you Horskamp Cameron Horskamp

Matt that's his name don't you laugh very sorry Cameron he's just culturally insensitive sorry about this Cameron Horskamp. Matt, that's his name. Don't you laugh. Don't you laugh. Very sorry, Cameron. He's just culturally insensitive. Sorry about this. There we go. It's the way you say them.

It's the way you say them. Is it? Is it? Thank you all. And Derek and Aaron and Brian, you too. We'll get to you, though. You'll get a Galaxy Brain shout out. Hold your horses, Brian.

Let's just chill. We'll get to you though. You'll get a Galaxy Brain shout out. Hold your horses, Brian. Let's just chill. Maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking. What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know. Okay, Matt.

Last ones for this week. Last ones. Is it Brian's time to shine? No, no. We went the other way. We're descending order. So we have our conspiracy hypothesizers now. And this would include people like

Goodneum, people like Andrew Goff, Kevin, no, Catherine Walsh. Not you, Kevin. You're out. You don't get a thank you. I'm not going to say your last name. You'll have to read it.

And Bradley Wall. Bradley G. Wall. Thank you all. Beautiful people. Thank you. You're beautiful. You're good looking. You're charming.

People love to be around you. Every great idea starts with a minority of one. Every great idea starts with a minority of one. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. That's it, Matt. That's it. So more shy nights will come.

What do I know? Well, you're playing Brett's voice there and it's just being reminded about him and his conspiracy hypotheses. He was right about that. He hasn't stopped. He's been advancing conspiracy hypotheses day in, day out. He's still doing it. 12 months on.

18 months on. It hasn't got old for him, at least. But for the rest of us, we're a bit tired with him doing what he's up to but but that's all right it's not our conspiracy hypothesizer's fault so yeah no I'm gonna put Brett back in my memory palace and forget about him now I'm gonna forget you said anything Matt and I'm gonna go and have a nice remainder of my day. You do that. You do that. And meanwhile, I will go and what will I do? What am I going to do? Maybe you'll go ghost hunting.

Go ghost hunting with Tamler Summers. That's what I'm going to suggest this week. I'm going to go solve mysteries with Scooby-Doo. That's it. A hint for future content. Maybe Tamler Summers. Who's that? Very bad Wizards?

Crossover? Could be happening. Who can tell? Anyway, we'll catch you on the flip side. And yeah, have a great day. Yeah, exactly. Live it as if it could be your last. Make it count.

Make it count. That's right. I won't be. I'm going to be faffing around and maybe having a lie down don't say that matt let's say that that's it seize the moment do it cup of diem bye Thank you. Now, Matt, the music has stopped. There's something I need to say at this time. You know, normally I give you insight into the world of Northern Ireland.

I take you on a ethnographic tour of my culture. One phrase at a time. This week, I'm not going to do that. I've lured you in with the promise of Irish morsels. And I'm going to batter you over the head with a Weinsteinian tweet. It's a secret. It's a secret Weinstein content that people don't know. We're smuggling it in at the end. Yeah.

On the down low. And you won't have heard this one because it's brand new. It's brand new. It's Eric Weinstein tweet. It's very, very high caliber. Okay. It's a rare one, Matt. Rare one.

You're building this up because his bar is pretty high. He tweets some amazing shit. So if you think this is special, I'm going to hold on to my seat. It's a tweet that has a screenshot, which I can't do. It's a screenshot about various news stories, but I don't think it's that important because Eric's words paint their own picture of the content. So allow me to read. Controlling for outlet bias in hedonically adjusted substrata as input to a modified Laspere's low index in a cost of living framework, meant to something something substitution bias through

superlative drift free shadow pricing. So you know that 0.9% precision is spot on. Winky fierce. Wow. Yeah. I'm not quite sure what to do with that chris that's that's those are some words my god yeah that's it he's he's complaining about the rate of inflation being presented at 7.9 and this is his contribution to helping people understand that moment it's clearly not an effort i feel to illustrate his knowledge or

you know to make himself look uh well informed and knowledgeable he's just communicating with people he's helping he's sense making he's helping people understand what's going on with inflation i feel like i understand inflation much better after hearing that yeah i feel i've really got free shadow pricing. So, you know. Yeah. Yeah. That clears a lot of things up.

I was wondering about that. Yep. So thank you, Eric, for that very insightful tweet. And I'll leave it there, Matt. I'll just let it, you know, let us tweet out the air in the sun. Yeah. Just let it slowly waft away throughout the window. Yeah.

That's where they all go. All right. All right. That's enough Weinsteins for today. Bye bye.