Decoding the Gurus - Interview with the Conspirituality Trio: Navigating the Chakras of Conspiracy

Episode Date: September 19, 2023

Back in the early days of the podcast, we tried to take a rest from the wearisome repetition of polemical partisan gurus by covering JP Sears- an alternative-health self-help coach with a sideline in 'comedic parody'. Sadly, we soon discovered he was a red-pilled Roganite 'just asking questions' about all the usual right-wing partisan topics, but with an added dollop of pseudo-profound, self-indulgent spiritual blather.JP Sears wasn't an isolated case; he exemplified a disturbingly prevalent trend. One that was supercharged during the pandemic and can be observed clearly in figures like Russell Brand, Aubrey Marcus, RFK Jnr and a whole slew of QAnon and anti-vaccine influencers.To help us disentangle this quagmire and the dynamics at play, we are joined by the three co-hosts of the popular Conspiritualty podcast: Matthew Remski, Julian Walker, and Derek Beres.We've spoken with them many times over the past few years about a variety of topics but in today's conversation, we explore the contemporary state of the Conspirituality sphere and discuss broader themes they have observed (& how they relate to the gurus we cover). We also examine whether they view activism as core to their podcast, how they handle attacks or engage with legitimate criticism, and how they feel about their own place in the ecosystems they discuss.We hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did!Also covered in the opening segment is a cursed guru-sphere crossover between the Triggernometry guys and our old favourite, Scott Adams.LinksThe new Conspirituality Book!Our recent appearance on Conspirituality to hear the tables get turned!Review of Conspirituality at Science Based Medicine by Jonathan HowardNY Times: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Coalition of the Distrustful'Why I quit the Conspirutality Podcast' by Be ScofieldMedium article referenced on the Defamation caseTriggernometry: Trump Must Win to Avoid Prison - Scott AdamsOther LinksOur PatreonContact us via email: [e-mail] DTG Subreddit

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about. I'm Matt Brown, with me is Chris Kavanagh. As always, it's the middle of the day, I've done all my meetings, we thought it's time to record, we're going to record. How are you doing, Chris? I'm doing all right, I'm doing all right. It's midweek. No, it's not. It's the end of the week. Oh, God, I've even forgotten what day it is. I've counted down the hours. I've got a bottle of whiskey with my name on it. This is, again, the kind of thing that we always say you shouldn't do because then people know.

I don't understand why people shouldn't know why why shouldn't they know so they they feel that they're part of the eternal present of the decoding the guru you know and that's the reality guys you're listening to the future this this is the past i can stop you like the bill and ted time traveling guy just go back and undo what you've done but yes so matt we have an interview episode today with the fine folks over from the conspirituality podcast and we were on there recently and they grilled us relentlessly about our obsession with secular gurus, and we returned the favor by asking them, Conspiracy, what's the big idea? We did, we did.

That's right. And it's not just a gratuitous cross-promotional thing. No, no, no. Not just. It is that. It is that. But, you know, we are kindred spirits. We are fellow travelers.

Our podcasts came up together, grew up together. They subsequently became much more successful than us due to doing a lot more work and producing a much more finely honed product. But nevertheless, we think of them as our brothers in arms, our bigger brothers, our more successful brothers. That's it. So, yeah, like kite goblins, we must teach to them brothers in arms or bigger brothers and more successful brothers that's it so yeah like kite goblins we must teach on to them and extract the crumbs from their audience that we could get

now just just we you know we like to chat the people like good public discourse uh combatants yeah so there we go we'll talk to them in a little bit. But before that, Matt, before we get to that tasty treat, I have some news from the gurusphere. It continues to rotate. It's vacillating all over the place. It continues to be a target-rich environment. There is no shortage of choices out there. And you get to choose.

You're the decider. I have so many things forthcoming that are on the docket to do. I haven't forgot about Matthew McConaughey. Sam Harris is coming up. We have Brett Weinstein and the UFO people. And we keep having random ideas. Like I see good ideas on the Reddit and I have my own ideas. Like, oh, we could do Destiny.

That'd be interesting i want to do destiny huberman and atia did a thing about reading a paper and there's so many things the red scare ladies we got a lot to do but we'll get there we'll get there today though matt I'm just dipping my toe into a toxic pool of gurury because there was a cursed crossover between trigonometry and our old friend Scott Adams, the original sneak-like guru from the early days of the podcast. Yeah, you were telling me about this i haven't heard any of this yet but like you i think i remember that scott adams was really bad so he was up my spine i remember my my reaction viscerally but the actual content the actual specifics of the

stuff that he said and how he said it it's's kind of faded away. I think my mind has blocked it out. And you, I think, had the same experience. You'd forgotten how bad it was. Yeah, I just, I think I had vaguely, you know, I had the flashbacks where I woke up in the night, no, Scott, that stuff. But I also thought, well, you know, maybe we covered him quite early in the podcast,

so maybe if we had more experience with worse gurus we wouldn't have found them quite so terrible right yeah that's right like maybe it was just a contrast effect or whatever and maybe we've become hardened and actually he's just one of a crowd but is that the case chris is that the case well i i'm going to show you. So, shall I play your clip? Before you play the clip, I need to tell everybody about my dream. I know people like to hear about you and your peanuts and your green drinks. But this one is apropos because in my dream, I was trapped in the backseat of a car with Russell Brand. And Russell Brand was talking to me incessantly. He was like staring deeply into my eyes and he was waving his hands around and he was going on and on think about vaccines and governments and

the new world order and stuff it was like a stress stream because you had canvassed the possibility of us covering so another cursed crossover i think sam harris spoke to russell it wasn't even me that suggested that matt that was the subreddit people so you were just i think sam harris spoke to ross around it wasn't even me that suggested that matt that was the subreddit people so you were just i think you were just reacting to the mere possibility i was i was and in my dream i was i was saying to him just please shut the fuck up please for the love of god stop talking and he wouldn't and then i eventually woke up in a cold sweat that happened at 2 30 a.m in the morning i could not go back to sleep chris i could not go back to sleep and it ruined my entire day afterwards and then sometime after i saw in the subreddit somebody had posted a thread about telling russell brand to shut the fuck up. They wanted Sam Harris to just break down during the interview

and yell at him. So isn't that cosmic? Anyway, it's all connected. This is what's happening to me. It's interfering with my life. This is the stuff. Yeah, that's the crystalline structure of resonant patterns of thought that you're experiencing there, as the sense makers have taught me.

And maybe Inegrigore is involved in some respect, but the clear takeaway there is we don't need Dr. Freud or Dr. Jung. It's obvious that you're terrified about what I'll make you listen to. So that's what we should take away from that. And on that theme, Matt, I'm now going to make you listen to this.

Scott, I would ask you this. You're watching what is happening with Trump. Now, I'm in agreement with you. To me, at a very surface level analysis, it doesn't look legit. It looks targeted. It looks political. But doesn't that make you worry that come election time, which is literally next year, things are going to get very ugly?

Yeah. So here's the warning that I try to give everybody. It does look like there might be some attempt by the Democrats or whoever's running things to get the Republicans to overreact, running things to get the Republicans to overreact. Because if they can get another January 6th kind of reaction, some kind of a mass protest, then once again, they get to say, well, look at all those white supremacist insurrectionists, Trump's the devil, you know, he's the one who caused it all. So they can just recreate the same op and people are already primed to fill in that frame with whatever new confirmation bias they give. So I don't want to say, if this happens, there'll be violent acts, because then I would be part of maybe encouraging people to think in those ways. And I don't. I don't encourage any violence. Instead, I'd rather say that we're creating a situation which has no predictability.

In other words, if Trump were to lose again, let's say worst case scenario, he runs against Joe Biden, which looks to be like that's going to happen, at least some people imagine. And Biden continues to degrade until it's just obvious there's nothing there at this point. But imagine if Trump lost under that situation. Do you think that his supporters would say that was a fair election? They just preferred the guy with no cognitive ability over Trump? Would you say that? Or do you think they're going to say, well, there's proof. First time we weren't positive. We were

suspicious. But this second time, he was running against an empty suit. If he loses then, that's unpredictable. Now, if I were to advise people how to act, if they were sure an election had been, let's say, not completely fair, definitely wouldn't be with guns, definitely wouldn't be with violence. But the same thing I would recommend if Trump spends a day in jail, everybody should show up. Everybody. You should just walk off your job and just show up. Get a couple of million people standing around the jail, and you don't need any violence, right? At some um peaceful uh energy can be as big as violence and more productive so i think something massive in terms of physical action short of violence would

be the right play but i don't know exactly what that looks like so there are not a lot of options if we reach that point does that bring back fond memories yeah he he slips and slides and twists and turns doesn't he so the original capital riot was was an op it was an op it was it was yeah it was obviously like a kind of trap set for trump right like by the democrats they they wanted that to happen to justify, because you remember Scott thinks that the election was also stolen. Or he doesn't know for certain, but just there's no way to tell that the election was fair and blah, blah, blah.

So the MAGA people were maneuvered into accidentally storming the Capitol building. And if Biden were to win the next election against Trump, then that would be just clear and obvious evidence that it was stolen. Right? Yeah. And if he were to advocate violence, that would make him a target. So he's not advocating that. He's not advocating that. But if everyone were just to do some form of mass protest,

if that were to happen, if they were just to shut down the country, wouldn't that be something, right? Yeah, like you said, it's easy to forget that he is like a like a rank conspiratorial partisan operative and that's kind of all there is to it in some respects well let's let's hear another clip to see maybe you're being unfair to him you know maybe he's a bit more nuanced than than all of that yeah i look i agree I don't think there's a lot of options. Do you think that this has damaged Trump's chance? I think he's going to win. I think he's going to win the nomination. But do you think that's actually damaged his chances of winning the election as a whole,

the fact that he's got all these indictments against him? I think there are only two things that could stop him. Well, maybe three. One would be a rigged election that could stop him. Two would be if he keeps talking because, you know, things he says, they take out of context. So if he says a new thing, they can take out of context. You know, they've got a whole new weapon. So if he plays it cool and doesn't say much more than the things he always says, he should just coast into the presidency. Now, the other thing which has no scientific basis, maybe, is the idea, Elon Musk says this, and I like to say it as well, that reality tends to be biased toward the most entertaining outcome, not for the people in the story,

it might be all bad for them, but from the observer's point of view, the most entertaining outcome. And by far, the most entertaining outcome, if you know a standard three-act movie play, at the end of the third act, the hero of the movie is in such a bad situation, you can't even imagine how they would get out. And somehow they do. Here's what the perfect movie would look like. I don't predict that. I'm just telling you, if that way of predicting works, this is what it would look like. Trump is either, you know, on the risk of going to jail or even maybe spends a day in jail. risk of going to jail or even maybe spends a day in jail. And somehow, at about the same time as the election is nearing, proof of election irregularity in 2020 is provided. It actually comes out of nowhere. I don't see any. Let me be clear. I'm not aware of any election irregularity

that I think is credible. But that would be the perfect movie if the thing that most people have discounted at this point, I don't think there's going to be any smoking gun. We're not going to find anything if there is anything. It would be the perfect movie to sweep him into office based on finding out that was true, and then to clean house and take care of as much business as he needs to. Now, at this point, I think it's an existential risk to Democrat leadership. I think they're looking at jail. They're not looking at just losing an election. And I think they know that. Yeah, that was confusing, Chris.

That's astute analysis, Matt. I don't know what was confusing there. So Elon Musk has said, you know, the thing that's coming despite the fact that he has said that in content that we've covered before and he will go on to say that in this very episode but but he's not saying that and he's just saying that would be a perfect ending and then the democrats know that and it's an existential risk to them that they will go to jail because why why does he think it's all the election they stole the election from trump so trump won't go to jail and they will well no scott's not predicting that

he's just saying that would be funny yeah yeah just what do you do what do you do with that what does any of that even mean uh yeah now matt the here you're gonna hear you heard francis whose main contribution in this is to say yeah that makes sense scott yeah i think you're right yeah you know it is politically targeted and whatnot. But now you're going to hear Constantine come in with a bit of balance, you know, bring in their centrist cred. Because once you say, you know, Trump, we're going to put you in actual jail, and we're trying as hard as we can to do it. The gloves are off. There's nothing to keep Trump from saying, all right, if I can find any ridiculous reason that you broke a law,

we're not going to play the old rules where if it isn't a good reason, you don't pursue it, because that's not the way they played. So in a way, I think he may have brought it on himself, his very first statement about Hillary Clinton should be in jail. I feel like when he started talking real jail, then politics changed. And they said, if you're going to talk real jail for us, we're actually going to put you in jail. And it looks like that's what's happening. So if he wins in this third act, you know, miraculous, you know, don't expect it, but who knows, you know, find something about the election that sticks, then a lot of people, I think,

you'd try to jail. And I'd be in favor of that, actually. Well, if you think about your scenarios in part three, I mean, him winning as a result of election interference in 2020 being revealed, if there is any, I think is unlikely given what we've seen in terms of, you know, the Hunter Biden laptop that got suppressed a few days before the election. So even if there is anything, which, as you say, there's no evidence that we have that there is, I don't know that that would get there. But what I'm curious to ask you, Scott, is a bigger picture question, which is what you've described is actually a very sad downward spiral for your country. And the question, I suppose, is this. I am old enough to remember

when Al Gore lost the election to George Bush. It was very close. The Democrats fought, but eventually conceded that he'd lost and George Bush became president. When Hillary lost to Donald Trump in 2016, she took a long time. And in fact, I don't know if she ever fully accepted that she lost. She called him an illegitimate president. I believe he knows he's an illegitimate president. He knows. He knows that there were a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out the way it did.

And I take responsibility for those parts of it that I should. And so it goes on. turned out the way it did. And I take responsibility for those parts of it that I should. And so it goes on, like Constantine pointing out that actually Hillary Clinton is the one who, the Democrats, you know, they are the one that brought this on. And Trump is really just responding to a general trend to deny the legitimacy of elections. To not concede elections. Okay, chris so your memory is better than mine did hillary clinton concede no hillary clinton notably conceded on the night of the election and called donald trump up to congratulate him and although she did then go on to talk about the role of the russian campaign to support Trump and various other campaigns.

That is not the same as refusing to admit that you lost an election. Alleging in very clear terms that the count was rigged. That's different from saying that foreign disinformation campaigns and stuff like that, which led to people voting for the other party, it's different to say that the actual ballot machines were tampered with and votes were stolen. That's quite a different thing, isn't it? Yeah. And people like Constantine would point out that some Democrats did believe that Russia had hacked election boxes or whatever. But the point is, it was not the mainstream position of the Democratic Party. And they did not attempt

all these maneuvers to get people in positions of authority to make that claim. That's the difference with Trump. He actually tried to pressurize people to lie about results and to get people in positions of power to claim that yeah yeah so that that's completely different and that's why he's been indicted right for various things because what he does is less ambiguous yeah and just a small point perhaps but um in terms of this trend of all the democrats refusing to concede elections barack obama had what the transition to trump that doesn't matter but that's that was also he was reluctant if he didn't look happy he didn't look happy right also that bit where you know that scott says you know well we didn't have evidence about the election being rigged.

And Cunningham says, you know, yes, that's right. But like, let's bear in mind that the media suppressed effectively the Hunter Biden laptop story. So even if there was evidence, we wouldn't know. But let's be clear, we don't have evidence. But they would suppress it if there was. don't have evidence but they would suppress it if there if there was it's just it's the two snakes of the bush wiggling around like wrapping in each other's little stories i it's so obvious and it goes throughout the whole interview in this being like everything that is brought up is the democrats are doing this and trump is being persecuted. And there's occasional throwaway lines

about, oh, Trump isn't the best candidate or that kind of thing. But like 90% is just always, always endorsing the claim that the election was stolen and things were rigged. And this specific clip, Matt, the last one, I think you will recognize the kind of motif that we often hear from other gurus, including Constantine, including Eric Weinstein, about the failure of institutions and the doubt this sows in things like democratic processes. They can check their vote, but nobody knows who they are. So then you can do a random sample and say, okay, did these 10,000 people, did they check and their vote actually was recorded as they voted or not? You wouldn't have to check everybody. You could check 10,000

randomly. So there's probably a whole bunch of things you could do that would get you to full transparency, but I don't really see an effort anywhere. Well, that's really interesting. And that's exactly what I was going to ask you while you were talking and you bring up the point of not seeing the effort. Why is that? It can only be because there's not enough benefit to all the people at the top. My suspicion is, all right, let me give you the worst case suspicion. Suspicion is, all right, let me give you the worst case suspicion. Every single one of our large entities we've seen is corrupt, you know, from the FBI to the DOJ.

And I'm not talking about every person, but at least leadership elements. We've seen that our Congress can be corrupt. We've seen that the CDC, basically everybody's corrupt once you find out what's really going on. The exception, we're told, is all 50 separate elections for a national election. All 50? All 50 of them are all good, but everything else is corrupt, but not those 50 things? So here's my speculation, pure speculation. No facts to back it up. In some states... That's what we like, Scott. That's the basis of every claim about reality online. It's just my speculation. You're just

honest about it. He'll go on to explain, Matt, that the elections are shams and whoever's in control is basically just manufacturing the outcome that they want that little bit of the introduction was like the tail end of the extended thing about how we don't really know we've got no means to verify the results of elections in the u.s it's all unknown and people aren't really making any efforts the fact that people who spend their careers doing this say that actually the u.s has very robust election procedures it's all scott saying you know we don't have two cameras on

every ballot being counted and why don't they let one person from each side observe every ballot and so on yeah the logic seems to go well they haven't implemented scott's random idea about drawing a random sample of 10 000 votes or tracking them to voters or something and scott also knows that every major organization and institution in the united states is totally corrupt so if you put those two things together chris it's obvious that the elections have to be stolen, right? Yeah. It's that layering of premises, you know, like you say, where he says, we all know these are completely corrupt institutions, the CDC, everything is corrupt. So he's got that premise, which is just his premise. Then he says, and now you're saying that all of the states,

50 of them, are robust and not corrupt really are you that innocent and you're like no that's again just all the slimy sneaky inferences where you could say systems are imperfect there are issues with institutions but not that allow them to be inherently totally corrupt and actually like there are procedures in place to make sure that elections are fair in the u.s and they're taking quite seriously but scott is just this like sleazy inference and then constantine and francis just doing their bit to say well you know you know, Scott, you're just being very reasonable. At least Scott's being honest about it. Yeah, I mean, the sad irony is, of course, if you define corruption in a very broad sense, in the sense that the institutions are

people not operating in exactly the way that they ought to or envisage to, but rather operate, at least to some degree, as a function of other incentives, you know, interest groups, lobby groups, things like that, then, you know, the sad truth is, of course, there's some truth in all of this, but it's not the weird cartoonish conspiracy that they portray. It's really quite obvious. If you just look at how these systems work, you could spot them and you could actually do something about them, but they never focus on the real stuff that

is happening right no and they also have that issue that when there is documented corruption on the republican side for example right like when trump you have trump on audio saying find the extra votes and they have the records of him conspiring with people to subvert democratic processes they're not interested and they say that's all targeted it's all this is unfair prosecution so they've no interest in like ensuring democratic processes they just well it's all taken out of context like he was saying earlier on and i just laughed at myself thinking of like how do you take find find the votes for me yeah it would be very bad for you you know people are gonna say that you counted big votes this would be very bad for you you know my lawyers are telling me what's that implying scott that's you know

in context it's just advice mark it's just helpful advice from trump such as life yeah yeah it feels like joe rogan set the set the mold here right because he's the he's he's the big kahuna who also positions himself as just just a guy not particularly politically partisan it's just an average joe trying to figure stuff out. Let's have some people want to talk about interesting ideas, right? The trigonometry guys are following in that vein and they're doing exactly what Joe Rogan's doing, which is rabid, partisan, conspiratorial, fantasy.

Yes, I'm thinking. Yes, I'm thinking. I mean, because they will change their tune a little bit when they have different kinds of guests but that's like brogan like they just kind of mirror but the lean in the susceptibility to conspiracy is quite clearly right violence but anyway matt let's turn to some people who are less inclined to conspiracy thinking the conspirituality guys yeah let's go okay so we have with us today three familiar faces the guys from conspirituality hello julian matthew and derrick it's been a long time it's been weeks at least.

It's great to see you. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, so I suspect our audience are already very familiar with you guys, but just in case they're not, you are the co-hosts of the Conspiratuality podcast, which cover figures that are related to the gurus that we cover but subtly different in mystical ways that we'll get into and you also wrote a book recently with the easy to remember title of conspirituality and that so the the subtitle

that's actually gone out of my head now but i i imagine that one of you three remember what the subtitle was well it says how new age conspiracy theories became a health threat and can i just say that we went back and forth for months over that subtitle uh we had so many versions of it um and it's funny that i think in still in certain places uh online it says became a public health threat which which was an earlier iteration and it was eventually decided that that was that was it was too it was too commonwealth it was too canadian uh it wouldn't play as well to a u.s readership but it's kind of funny and i kind of like that it's an artifact still on the internet because it really is that we are covering how the influencers that that we

followed were really launching a campaign against the notion of the public per se you know in general and so yeah but we took a long time figuring out that subtitle yeah i uh i might have came across the the alternative versions in in some of the material i saw but i also the your book came out in the middle of the year, right? June of this year. Yeah. I think like for all of your cases, you've been, you know, you've been covering this topic specifically for, I guess, four years or so since the podcast started, maybe three, but three and a half years, three and a half.

But you've been covering this emerging area for decades now, personally, and in various previous work and also, you know, just your personal life. So I have a feeling that the book, reading it, because you detailed your personal experiences as well, must have been a little bit cathartic to release all of that pent-up knowledge plus frustration i guess at observing this phenomenon for coming to culminate i mean i would say when when the podcast started we each had our own kind of working models that we'd been you know trying to tell anyone who would listen about what some of these problems were within the yoga and wellness and new age spirituality kind of space. And there's something about getting to do the work that we've done now on the podcast and

on the book that just took that to the next level. We were primed for it. And yeah, it was definitely cathartic and also strangely validating. Like, yeah, it turns out this actually is a problem. I'm not just, you know, crying wolf. I think timing is everything because we collectively, the three of us were working on a similar but less evolved project beginning in 2012 that had a very small niche audience because people didn't think there was any problem in this industry. And so that I agree with Julian, that it's validating. It's all about timing because when the plandemic documentary dropped and we started this project based off of anti-vaccination disinformation and everything else that we now eventually cover, it was like, we've had years of being skeptical about these

things. And so we just kind of slid all of that right in, whereas most people were just trying to make sense of where it all started. We kind of had a headstart in that sense. So it is fortunate that we, it is fortunate that the wellness community went completely batshit at the beginning of the pandemic so that we can begin this project, I guess. You know, and I'd like to add to that, um, you know, we did start working together parasocially first in 2011, 2012, maybe even a couple of years before we were aware of each other. But, um, the seeds of what we individually bring to the podcast now were there back then. Um, I think Derek was always really hawkish on pseudoscience

as far as I remember. And then he had a long writing career at Big Think reading scientific papers and, you know, examining, you know, supplements and, you know, health claims being made in the wellness industry. And then Julian and I appeared as co-authors or co-essayists in a collection of essays put out in what year was that? 2012. It was called 20th Century Yoga. We can actually locate a, you know, non-theistic, but also, you know, new world and Americanized root of yogic praise in life and embodiment. Yeah, kind of secular humanist nature spirituality. Yeah. That actually that was what we were looking for in the first place with the counterculture movement where we grabbed on to these Eastern traditions as if they were that when actually if you dig a little deeper, they're a lot more traditional square dualistic religion.

Yeah. And then my essay in that volume was called We Won't Have a Yoga community until every yoga studio doubles as a soup kitchen and and my point was you've always been concise yeah really concise and my my point was that um there was a kind of false sense of solidarity that was being marketed by yoga and wellness spaces, the word community was being used and perhaps overused in ways that didn't reflect the honesty of these are very commercial enterprises that have to do with, you know, selling aspirational products. And but at the same time, they're trying to or they're purporting to fulfill religious and spiritual needs like traditional churches would. And at the same time, they're not really doing any social work while pretending that they are progressive in nature. And so, I mean, all of our themes are there going back a decade.

And I think it was really kind of cool to feel them crystallize with really sharp you know angles and and and uh shards over the last three years to crystallize yeah because it's evolving and we're evolving with it and our understanding of how it's mutating right now yeah we'll get into like some of the specific details um and threads that you guys are bringing up up in more detail in a bit but i just in case because we often don't do this in case there was anybody that doesn't have you know the broader picture of the area that you guys are focusing on related to your book the so the conspirituality space i'm sure you've been asked this a million times but how do you guys define it and i might ask in a like a follow-up about compared to the secular gurus that we focus on whether you see us detailing a portion of that space or a separate space or how they connect.

Two big, broad corrections, I realize, but whichever one of you want to fill in the blanks. I can do the first and then maybe one of you guys can do how our stuff relates to the gurometer, for example. But, you know, we've really defined conspirituality as a mainly online social and religious movement where conspiracy theories become spiritual in nature. And especially the sources are New Age we mostly look at, but there's also Catholicism in there. Evangelicals can become conspiritualists. Sometimes Orthodox Jews are getting involved. And all of that gets shaken together in this cocktail of cults and pseudoscience and leanings toward right wing extremism, often unconsciously to begin with. And people wrapped up in it are convinced that terrible things are happening in the world. They have good reason of authority and elite actors. And they believe, this is the interesting part, they believe that becoming aware of the corruption of the world is part of a spiritual awakening. It's a dark night of the soul, that by going through it, they will heal the world together somehow. There's not a lot of particulars about how it happens. There's not a lot of particulars about how it happens. It's very online, as we say, right?

But they want to accelerate that process through meditation, through doing the practices, through mantras, taking institutions, be they government, educational, medicine, journalism, block true spiritual growth. Those institutions do not know you or your reality or your soul, and so they cannot help you. Yeah, the institutions are mistrusted because ultimately what they're trying to do is disconnect you from your sovereign truth, from your capacity to tap in to your own inner knowing. You see this focus on the self project and on developing into a higher version of yourself taken to this extreme where then you have this epistemological claim that the only way to really know anything is through your personal embodied intuition through get tuning in on the downloads from spirit and then that's related to the thing that I imagine Derek wants to touch on now each of us covers a

different area because we bring our own areas of expertise. And actually, on the second part of the question about how it intersects, I think Matthew could speak to the cult research aspect and how that draws in communities. Julian might chime in about the philosophy. I come more from the health aspect. And because people think that the sovereign self is the gateway to enlightenment and perfect health, they often eschew any sort of system or anything that will tell them that anything that is not quote unquote natural is by definition false. There's a bit of metaphysics involved because they think things like the power of their thoughts can heal themselves and of course as you guys have identified most recently on your your huberman huberman x you kept saying huberman i think and i'm trying to huberman i don't actually know which way is it what's his actual name andrew huberman human. Yeah, you were saying Huberman.

I think it's Huberman. I think you'll find that Chris said a lot of things incorrectly. Huberman. But then again, he probably thinks we do. I'm from New Jersey. So if you've ever watched The Sopranos, how all words become one word when people speak in sentences, it took me a long time to disentangle syllables.

So I have the same problems. But with the health stuff, they think that they're their own best doctor. That's something I've heard in yoga studios dating back to the 90s. No one knows your health better than you. You're your own best doctor. Only you can heal yourself. And now we're seeing what happens. So when you guys cover the health misinformation aspects on the podcast, there's a very strong correlation to what we do, because it's about identifying people who are not following the

science who are definitely not doing their own research, but they're capitalizing in some capacity on their followers ignorance of the topic matter that they're putting forward. have people who are simultaneously leveraging each of those different variables. I don't have them all memorized, but there's the kind of fatalism, the Cassandra complex, the heavens are falling. I alone know how to save humanity, but I've been disregarded because the mainstream has a sort of vendetta against me and my family and people like me who dare to tell the difficult truths about the world. that's not that far off from what we see with more spiritual cults and spiritual charismatic kind of gurus, where there tends to be the sense of I have access to special knowledge, and the mainstream is only

ever going to lead you astray because they're unenlightened, they're impure, they haven't had the initiatory experiences that I and this inner circle are able to give you. And so come trust in us and you'll find the way. In a way, that language of initiatory necessity was baked into what we, the three of us heard over the last 10 to 20 years, whenever we would start to ask about, well, what is really meant in a modern yoga discourse when an Iron Age philosophical concept is being used or is being commented upon? And the response that we would usually get to the attempt to have discussions about the details of texts or ideology was, you know, this is an experiential practice. And if you haven't had the experience, then there's really no point in talking about it. And I think that in our sphere, the leaders that we follow tend to do that explicitly.

And I think that in your sphere, it's a lot more implicit. They don't hold out a kind of ritual carrot per se. I think they enact it anyway, though. Yeah, thanks for those answers, guys. I'm actually glad I didn't share any of my questions with you beforehand because you touched on virtually all of them in there so it's nice confirmatory validation there so it's i can take my pick really on which one to follow up i think i'll choose the topic that's most interesting to me which is like it's true that there's so many

things that play into it like matth, you mentioned about the revealed experiential truths and the rituals and so on that you tend to see in conspirituality more. But while you were talking, I was thinking about how much of what you said is so similar to that old philosophical idea of the Rousseauian state of nature, where all of these systems and civilizational orders that we have are all interfering with our connection with being whole and being fully human. So to what degree is this phenomenon that's going on? Is it just an old thing, these old philosophical ideas floating around in a new form? Or to what degree is that in modern culture, we're setting higher and higher expectations for us,

perhaps these old existential concerns around death and around health and higher expectations for ourselves in terms of living to 100 years in perfect fitness and having ultimate optimization and being fully productive. What's the balance, do you reckon? I mean, the thing now is that you're a little bit leaning into the territory of the bro scientists, right, and of the biohackers and the human optimization. And I think that is the case, that there's a sense, I mean, it's this overlapping thing, right, where we have the kind of technology now where anyone who is interested in the secrets of biohacking can have a podcast. And, you know, if they do well, they can have all manner of very high profile guests on to talk about those topics. But at the same time, as you're saying, it's this preoccupation with getting back to a primal natural state. And I think there's something really interesting there in terms of the intersection of the people you guys cover and their ideology and the light-filled, more optimistic human potential. We are turning into something where it was almost transhuman but then the transhumanism can have this other aspect of it which is like we need to go backwards in order

to go forwards or we just need to tap into the spirit realm, right? And there's some way that they complement one another where what we saw on our end was a lot of people who were light and love New Agers become increasingly paranoid as a way to make sense of a difficult time in the world and become increasingly libertarian and increasingly right wing as a way of trying to make sense of, oh my God god i'm being told i have to sacrifice for the first time instead of just focusing on me and my sort of heroic narrative of how i'm going to become the best version of myself but with a lot of the people that you cover instead of having that more spiritual idealistic starting point they They seem to have found their way into the idealistic sense of possibility through the door of paranoia, through the door of terrible things are happening.

There's an attempt to control us all in this authoritarian way and take away our freedoms. But by the way, have you heard about homeopathy? You know, I think of like Brett and Heather and the journey that they took where every now and again, when I would look through their YouTube feed, it'd be like, oh, here's a video about chiropractors. Like what is going on here? Or here's a video about how there are all of these natural ways to take good care of yourself that you're not being told about. Yeah, I think you're right. There's a yin yang there are all of these natural ways to take good care of yourself that you're not being told about. Yeah, I think you're right. There's a yin-yang.

There's kind of two sides of the same coin, isn't it? Matthew? Well, I wanted to say to your point about do we see in these movements a resurgence of older naturalistic ideas and the idealism of Rousseau's portrayal of the natural world, for example, I would say that we probably have always noticed that the discourse and the communities and the demographics that we cover are deeply, painfully, and naively nostalgic for a world that they have to perpetually recreate, reconstruct, usually with sort of scavenged materials and a lot of misunderstanding. I mean, the yoga that the three of us grew up practicing and inherited, we were told from the outset was

4,000 years old or 5,000 years old. Or if we went to a Kundalini class, we were told that it was 35,000 years old. And I think the three of us probably knew that was bullshit, but I probably bought the 5,000 year thing for a while. And none of that is so like the actual postures that are the skeleton of the modern physical yoga class are probably at most three to 500 years old in terms of their basic forms. But then they went through this huge transformation as they met with physical culture at the beginning of the 20th century. But the conceit was always, this is ancient, this is timeless. This comes from a period in which we were not violated by the industrial age, by global

wars, by the changing of the environment. It comes from a time in which we knew who we were when men were men and women were women. And so- But hold on a second, hold on a second, Matthew, because there's something that happens in there, right? Where that new age romanticism for the past, to me, it always had an idyllic, utopian, almost progressive sense that like, you know, there was a time when we lived in peace. There was a time when men and women were equal. It's not the same as the fascist initially, as the fascist romanticism.

It's imagining that the better world that we know is possible through some kind of genuinely enlightened political progress existed in the past and it's just that we've gotten away from it because it used to be there as inspired by sort of spiritual ancient wisdom and that to me is so interesting because they sort of exist alongside each other the more traditionalist longing for a conservative you know when men were men and women were women and we all believed in the correct God and we all had rigid kind of ways of enacting our, you know, way of being in the world alongside this other utopian sense that's very hippie-ish, you know? Conspiratualists are really good at romanticizing ideas but not at studying history. The 5,000-year-old reference was to an archaeological dig

in a site called Mohenjo-daro, where they found a small coin with a man sitting next to a line that looked like tatawi or dreadlocks, and they attributed it to Proto-Shiva. And they said, oh, this must be when yoga started. And that's it. That's where that myth comes from. That's all they had. That's all they had. And yet it's put forward as this notion. One carving, one seal. But it looks like he's kind of sitting in a yoga pose.

I've said for years, when I used to do teacher trainings, we talked about the Bhagavad Gita, which is considered one of the founding texts of modern yoga. And I would say, you know, this was written as part of a larger text called the Mahabharata, which is about all of the founding texts of modern yoga. And I would say, you know, this was written as part of a larger text called the Mahabharata, which is about all of the wars going on, the tribal battles going on in what became known as India much later when the British colonized it. And people would seriously think, oh, but that's all just metaphorical. There weren't wars. Like that's just a metaphor for your own internal battles. And I'm like, read a history book. No, it's not. That's not what was going on in that era.

Yeah, we weren't there to learn history, right? In fact, we were there to, on a personal level, we were there to cleanse a kind of, I don't know, the karma, the psychology that we'd accumulated through daily life. There was something discontinuous between practicing what we were practicing and actually learning about where it came from. Like if we learned where it came from, it was going to actually derail the potentially rejuvenative process. I think, Chris, I've heard you talk about your initial interests in Buddhism being radically changed when you actually began to study Buddhism,

that as you began to understand that actually texts were historical and that people argued about them and they came from different places and none of the questions were actually resolved, that you were no longer the same type of practitioner and let me just let me just tack on to the end of that too that that part of what you're pointing to matthew just to say it really explicitly is that within the subculture that we all came up in as young adults there was a profound anti-intellectualism. The intellect is in the way, and science is in the way, and people who think that science and reason tell us things about the world that are more important than mystical truths that can be gleaned through contemplation and

intuition don't get it, and in fact, they're your enemy. And outside of those walls, Francis Fukuyama is telling us, or the rest of the world, that history is over. Yeah. And so there's a larger cultural context in which the neoliberal sort of religion of yoga and wellness unfolds, which is that, well, nothing really matters anymore. You know, liberal democracies have won. Capitalism is the best of all possible worlds. And so what are we really what are you gonna just you know just do your stretches man like you know optimize you can become the best person now

because the world because history has ended so there was a larger context there too and those two things are sort of we're gonna start going on as well right those two things are running side by side and weaving together right there's the self-optimization of like just do your stretches and don't think about it too much but then there's also like let me teach you all about the chakra system let's let's like memorize these passages from patanjali's yoga sutras like there's there's also that piece of it it's just like don't be analytical about it actually be much more religious about how you just take it on because if you're not religious about how you take it on i won't have

much to sell you in my course, actually, because I'm going to teach you how to do the chants, and I'm going to teach you how to do the rituals, and I'm going to teach you how to do the sequences of postures, right? Those details are important. History might be over, but the details of your practice for forgetting fucking history, they're still going to be really important. So, one thing was that as you mentioned i had an interest and retained an interest in buddhism and introspective practices but one that as i ended up studying about the history of buddhist countries and buddhist traditions as part of my university degrees i found the actual history more intriguing and multi-layered and and complicated but

also like yeah less of an less what's what's the word satisfying because you know there's there isn't a simple story or there isn't a secret at the heart of things. There's just like a messy tradition with lots of historical contingencies swirling around. But I understand that that might not be compensatory for what other people are looking for from the traditions. And that relates to something that I was curious with you guys talking there. And it's probably a criticism that you have come across of the podcast and your

approach in general that given your experiences and the characters that you deal with that your approach is going to invariantly be a bit negatively tinged towards the yoga and health and wellness world you know if you're dealing with charlatans and people that are just focused on self-development over all else it's going to change the way that you approach that and so i wonder on the one hand do you feel that that has occurred that since you've started the project that you've become more negatively valence towards the whole area and related to that given all the issues within the yoga world that you guys have documented quite extensively do you genuinely think that you would recommend to people that they can practice yoga and that it will be beneficial

and helpful to them you know as it as a good thing like do you guys in general still see a lot of good going on in that world or do you see it more at the edges i'm just curious i think it's wonderful i practice regularly both yoga and meditation. I don't take as many group classes, honestly, but I've always, for decades, when teachers say those little truths about existence, I've always tuned them out. So it just gets annoying sometimes. But I still think there's a lot of value in it. I also came through yoga through the studio system,

most predominantly two studios in New York City, one called Jiva Mukti, which definitely has cultish qualities around veganism and some other topics. But I taught at a gym for 17 years, which was my main occupation during that stretch. And the difference about that culture is that people aren't going, like yoga is just part of whatever else they're doing for the most part, whether it's spinning or weightlifting or other things. And you get a much different crowd in that environment. So I feel very lucky because I was around people who were doing yoga because they were inflexible, or maybe it just helped calm them, but there wasn't a lot of the metaphysics. So I didn't have to teach that way and they weren't expecting it. So I'm very

skewed in that direction towards yoga. If people came in because they're like, I just want to be tighter or I tighter like muscularly or whatever, I'd be like, cool, you're not chasing enlightenment. If this helps you in some capacity, then it's useful for you. And I still find a lot of value in most of the practices that I used to partake in. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a totally valid question and a really important question. And my answer is, you know, not at all. I have not become more negative about the world of New Age spirituality and yoga through the course of this podcast, I always had these critiques. I always thought, oh, this could go to a really bad place at some point. And the fact that it has and that I've had an outlet and a way to sort of talk to experts and read a lot of books and have all the interactions I've had with Matthew and Derek as a result

has really just been an outlet for me. If anything, it's reduced my negative tone. I still teach yoga. I've gravitated towards both colleagues and friends and students within the yoga community for 20 years who, you know, thought that all of the stuff that I thought was problematic was problematic as well. And none of those people got red-pilled. None of them got sucked. I mean, maybe there's one or two, but we were never that close. But for the most part, I mean, maybe there's one or two, but we were never that close. But for the most part, you know, I have the same community of people around me who value these practices. And we value using the practices to sidestep some of the types of confusion and vulnerability that I think made a certain percentage of people within the yoga and wellness space susceptible to things like QAnon and anti-vax rhetoric. It wasn't everyone. And I don't think it's, for me, it's not a community that's just completely run through with toxicity.

You know, it's such a great question, and I'm really glad that you answered it. And I think that for listeners of our podcast who believe that we are too negative, I'm really glad that you answered it. And I think that for listeners of our podcast who believe that we are too negative, I'm really glad that we didn't start the podcast 10 years before, because I think we were all a lot more sour then. And for me in particular, I can say that I have warmed up to the value of yogic and religious practices in a way that I hadn't before, because I came to this project from about five or six years of doing investigative journalism into yoga and Buddhism cults. And that is pretty harrowing work, and it can give a very sort of negatively biased view, especially if, as I do, you identify as a cult survivor and you have a somewhat activist streak in you.

And so you have this feeling behind your work that you're going to try to help improve something when I'm not sure that investigative journalism actually does that rather than provide a clear picture of something that actually happened. And so I have actually been more, I think I've been, in relation to the critiques that we've done, I have always had this niggling feeling that there is something about the communities that we point atstein or Kelly Brogan or how they lie about science or how of families, that consist of people that are forming relationships with each other. Really, it's the backbone of religious experience for many people that is behind all of what we can identify on the surface as grifting. And I'm trying to be warmer towards that. I'm trying to be more curious about it. And I'm also trying to recognize that in my own development as a cult journalist,

I have often, I think, simplified the problem of religious communities into a kind of black and white schema that I think I can do some more work on. And part of that is, I think this is really timely because I just actually finished an audio essay for, I don't know if it goes on our bonus stream or whatever, but I actually opened by talking about the three very, very special yoga teachers in my life who taught me incredibly valuable lessons, including the guy who said, as he was teaching me postures and stages, and he was teaching me how to teach other people that, you know, if somebody is progressing towards something that's difficult, you have to offer them support. And if they have to offer them support.

And if they have certain forms of support in a posture, if they're using a block or a bolster or a blanket or a strap or something like that, and they're trying to get to the next stage, and you feel you want to challenge them by taking something away, you have to make sure they have some form of internal support. And I think that the deconstruction process and the debunking project that all five of us are engaged in, I think we have to take real care that when we are talking about subjects that might, I don't know, impact how a community functions. If we're talking about an idea that a community of people finds very valuable, not because it's smart, not because it works as an idea, but because they have bonded around it. I think we have to be really mindful of what kind of support the ideas of Charles Eisenstein gives

not to the internet, not to his book readers, but to the community that forms around him. And so, in that sense, I feel like I'm trying to be a lot more warmer and curious towards those communities of practice. Yeah. So, as you guys said, when you first started doing this, it was partly a way to sort of blow off some steam, right? Talk about the frustrations and so on you're having with with the community and the practices that you actually quite like in many respects so how has it been for you like you guys have written a book you put a lot of work into the podcast it's it's it's obvious to see it takes a lot of time and to the extent that this has shifted from being a hobby to being,

I'm not even sure what it is for you guys. Do you think of it as a part-time job or a full-time job? Full-time job for me. Right. Right. How about you other guys? Julian? Derek?

I would say for me, it's a very demanding part-time job because I have other jobs that I do. It's at the moment full-time. I've had full-time jobs for most of the time that I was doing the podcast, meaning I was working 70, 80 hour weeks. But I've been let go of two different media tech jobs this year because that's what's happening in the space. So I'm actually enjoying being able to focus on this,

but I do have some other projects that I'm always simultaneously working on, including a pretty cool one in AI, which might interest you, Matt, but I don't want to move it over into that direction now, but that's something else I'm focusing on. Yeah. And in terms of the question that you were asking, like it's been surprising and amazing and stimulating and, you know, dismaying and exhausting to get neck deep in this stuff over the course of the last three and a half years and also like, wow, this is great. We're doing this and we have people listening

and it's turned into something that's a little bit of a job, you know, like a way of being in the world so something all five of us are focused on is the problems in conflict of interest with people like andrew huberman for instance so you know when you guys are in a situation where you're making money from from doing a job i talk about something like have you identified conflicts of interest for yourselves ethical issues you have to be careful of what are your principles and how do you manage it matt is your ethics review board just consider him here that's awesome be very careful what do you say it's always fair to ask that sort of question and it is a situation where in America, right now, we have a writer's strike going on. And one thing that is being talked about a lot is the fact that

writing is an occupation. It's a long time occupation. It's a hard one. And not compared to the people who can do it, not a lot succeed. But if you value the writing, then it is something worth paying for. And I truly believe that. I was a full-time journalist and magazine editor for years where I was paid. Just because I'm one of three bosses in this company doesn't change that configuration because I'm doing the same level, I think a higher level of work because my editorial oversight is Julian and Matthew. And we get to really bounce around ideas. Whereas when I started journalism in the 90s and the number of editors and edits I had to go through

to what it's turned into with a lot of internet companies, not all of them, but some of them, where it's just churning out content, there's very little oversight. So I personally believe that it's something worth paying for. So I have no problems making money off of the labor that I put into this. Yeah. And I'd say too, in terms of the, you know, the time we live in and the, and the sort of

cultural circles that, that we all move in together, you know, one of the, one of the, the catchphrases or the buzzwords right now is audience capture, you know, in the sense of how, as you, as you become more successful, as you build an audience, as you start getting paid for your work, as it starts to turn into something more serious, that there is this phenomenon where you can find yourself leaning into what is getting you more clicks and more likes and more ad revenue and those sorts of things. And I think that for anyone who's professionalizing whatever it is that you're doing, but especially in the realm of ideas and cultural criticism and like political, you know, analysis and all of those sorts of things, it's a very important thing to reflect on. that one has to stay aware of why am I doing what I'm doing? Is the topic that I'm suggesting we cover right now something that I think is worthwhile to cover because of my own interest

in it and because of there being something valuable there to dig into? Or does it start to be something where you're just churning out content that you think people will like and will continue sticking around for? I think what we've, you know, the people that we all criticize, including you guys, tend to take, you can track the arc where it becomes increasingly more extreme, increasingly more conspiratorial, increasingly more outlandish and not based in evidence i i don't i don't see us having taken that arc but if someone could point out where we have i definitely would be interested to uh to take the reason conspirituality branded supplements coming down the pipeline or not till 2024 never 2024 when we announced the greater reset you know i think that julian and derrick can both validate that about every six months i have some sort of moral collapse and i'm i'm in slack a crisis of conscience say some sort of crisis where i'm in slack uh you know at five o'clock in the morning on the east coast which is three o'clock in the morning on the East Coast, which is three

o'clock in the morning there. And you know, I have to say that I there's these long like fucking text messages that they get, and they probably wake up just to my brain. And I want to apologize for that in public. But anyway, what the crisis is usually about is like, am I spinning my wheels? Is conflict of interest that i i have generated a discourse that i am going to keep juicing because it has found an audience and it's been monetized and if i'm doing that how can i get out of it and and a couple of things for me happened um and i'm not and i'm'm not saying that these are right or wrong choices, and I don't think these are technical conflicts of interest, but in the larger moral

question of, are you actually helping things? This is what disturbs me. I think that, I don't know, maybe a year into doing the podcast, we had had this segment called The Ticker, where we were doing news stories, you know, this week in conspirituality. And I found at a certain point that they were repetitive, that the influencers that we were covering were almost indistinguishable from each other. And then we had on a guest who you are very familiar with, T. Nguyen, who said, oh, yeah, you're anti maskers fucking up, you know, public health COVID policy, how am I using that to generate online heat that is feeding back into the the the sort of hamster wheel of this content production? And and is it doing any good? Right.

And then, and then usually the, the upside of my sort of moral collapse is okay, well, I'm going to find people who are doing really good things adjacent to this space. You know, I'm going to see if I can talk to an expert in,

in trauma therapy, who is actually resisting the fact that, you know, that discourse has made inroads or has joined or has brought the satanic panic back into our mainstream, you know, news. Or, you know, I'm going to try to interview Dorothy Fortenberry about like, whether or not climate disaster has been caused by conspiracies or not and and so yeah i i guess i guess that's my that's my conflict of interest question is yeah there there is no end to the bullshit it will not end there is that it will bury us we will die underneath it and and i'm always wondering like what better what good thing can i find and and platform and celebrate can i just say there too that i i think that we we all sort

of have a version of that i would say every six to eight months on the podcast since this existed we've done an episode where we sort of reflect on this and we talk about what we're thinking about it and how we want to move forward. I think a lot of people who levy some, some of the criticisms at us that, that I've seen aren't really listeners of the podcast. They, they maybe just have an idea of what we're doing. And, and so they, they want to go at us for it. They've, they've turned us into some sort of avatar who represents something that they want to push back against, which is fine. I mean, we all do that to some extent.

But I think that if anything, over the course of the existence of the pandemic, we've become less angry, less needing to vent, less outraged, less seeming perhaps at times to be punching down or being really snarky because initially it was so intense and we were getting oriented and the stakes were so high and we're just like fuck these people and oh my god this is so ridiculous that they're saying these things and now we're familiar enough with it where we're like yeah this is this is that thing again that we've been talking about for a while here's here are the layers that we understand about it yeah but here's still some of these people yeah totally but that's your job derek derek you're always

going to be the fuck you guys people on tiktok with but if anything i think we've we've leaned into having more more and more empathy and being more solutions oriented over time whereas a lot of the people that we cover who who have increasingly red-pilled, it's the exact opposite. They keep needing to find more and more dramatic reasons why the world is going to end because of the woke apocalypse of vaccine poisoning. We'll get back to the topic of bad faith critics in a little bit. But I do want to follow up there because last time i can't remember it was maybe when we were talking with you julian but when you were previously on we discussed the nature of the podcast and you know you three guys having broadly uh simpatico political perspectives but

diverging in in various areas and you've had episodes on the podcast previously where you've discussed differences of opinion and approaches. And when we recently appeared with you in your podcast, Julian and Matthew, you discussed the role of ideology and extremism. And it's clear that while there's a lot of overlap, there's also differences in opinion. So that's clearly a part of the podcast. But the question I have about that is, so you guys release episodes on the main feed and on the bonus feed that are individual essays at times. Sometimes it's the three of you discussing a topic and sometimes it's the individual investigation or interview and like Matthew has said in this conversation there is definitely an element a potential activist streak inside some

of the content that you put out like the episodes that you did they're a bit older now but with Aubrey Gordon on fat acceptance and anti-fat bias and that kind of thing. So the question I have is, it's a two-parter. One is that issue of the interpersonal dynamics and that despite that you clearly have differences of opinion, you are united under a brand or a podcast, whichever way you want to look at it. The conspirituality brand is you free guys.

So what get put out by one person ultimately reflects on the other. So one part is about navigating that. And I guess very involved slacks is part of it. But I'd be curious for any other elaboration on that. part of it but i'd be curious um for any other elaboration on that and then the the second and maybe this is something for each of you is how core to what you do that you view uh i don't want to frame this so this is just my attempt to do so but you can reframe it however you like but genuine social justice advocacy like i heard recently, Matthew, on your review of Naomi Klein's new book, you talked about the need for embracing a kind of intersectional

approach and genuine systemic critiques of the capitalist systems in order to make yourself less susceptible to what the conspirituality people are peddling or the conspiracy theorists. So I'm curious for each of you, you know, how core you see that to the mission of the Conspirituality podcast. And yeah, and how you navigate if there are differences in those perspectives. Oh, yeah, there are differences in in those perspectives oh yeah there are uh from my perspective the individual voices is really important to keep very early in this stage i've referenced it as a band that i'm a huge fan of wu-tang clan whereas they can't they come together for their projects but they all have their individual

projects. And I think that that also is embedded in our own projects. So I've gotten criticisms being like, you said this, and I'm like, no, that was Julian and I'll tag Julian so he can field it, right? Which I think is important. On terms of the activism side, I'm currently working on a media literacy project, both in terms of being a speaker, but also a book that I'm working on. And as I'm researching the history of media, you only have purely objective media appearing in 1850s with the New York Times, which is a response to other tabloid papers with a bunch of journalists who said, response to other tabloid papers with a bunch of journalists who said, we want to take it straight.

But it's still, even that concept is truly difficult, true investigative journalism. Even the idea of chasing a story starts with some urge that usually has a personal affect. And we try to distinguish between when we're doing reporting and when we're doing advocacy or editorializing or doing more opinionated pieces we'll say we're switching over to this now not you know it's not always so explicit but we try to make it clear when i'm covering andrew huberman about this study i'll reference the studies and talk more journalistically and then when i'm talking about him and his fucking mouth jaw thing and talking about ugly people who are mouth breathers, that's going to come across as more opinion, which I'll push back on. So I think advocacy and social justice

are all built in. We're all left of center for sure. And we have varying degrees of what that means, but we're all united in don't be an asshole to people and don't be a grifter who lies to people to make money. That's the same. Yeah. I would say that I also value the diversity of our political views. I think being the farthest left, I think, on staff and the Canadian and the person who therefore is right is something that it's natural for me to hold. It's natural for me to argue at length with both Derek and Julian about specific topics and whether or not we're going to go this far towards a culture war territory or not

or how we're going to approach figures like Joe Rogan, or there's a number of places where our sparks can fly. in arm-linked lockstep with my colleagues on political issues because I think that we come by our politics honestly, first and foremost. We just come from different places. I grew up with a certain type of leftist education and did a certain type of reading in the literature that's now being sort of pilloried as woke when I was in university. And that's just different from where Julian and Derek came from. And so I've never felt like it was a matter of, in order to achieve some sort of solidarity in this project, we're going to have to agree. But, and I also think that arguing as hard as we have about it's also made me more i don't know just uh open to the fact that it's really good to be able to work with people that you don't absolutely agree with and in fact you'll learn a lot by doing that yeah i'd say there's you know

there's very few things that we've really had to go to the mat over and really been like, Jesus, how are we going to get past this thing? Like, it just seems really stuck. That's hardly ever happened. For the most part, I think we have differences in style, differences in which context we think is most important on particularly charged issues. And yeah, we work those out in our in our private conversations with one another and sometimes that gets heated but i think we've built a lot of trust through that process particularly around around really tricky topics of the day but you know this idea i mean are we a brand yeah we're a brand it's a it's a it's the name of the podcast you know it's we we like the thing i think we're a

brand in as much as we we agree on the certain core aspects of what the podcast is about and that's why we're working together on it but then part of part of the brand i guess is that we uh we have slightly different angles on things that sometimes you know will come up and and and we might even talk about on the mic and that that's fine that's part of that's part of the the exploration yeah it's a brand that's a media platform really and i i don't think we have i don't i don't think we have a kind of umbrella statement for how that works but but we do have some processes we should just say technically that like we have a vetting process for interview subjects we yes right uh and and we have we we also like consider very carefully whether or not what the what the what the sort of power level is

of the particular person that we might criticize? Yeah, yeah. Like we decided fairly early on that we were going to avoid punching down. And that's a subjective call, but sometimes it has to do with follower count or just what kind of social power does this person have? And that's going to be an intersectional question sometimes, often. And then we also have had, you know, good discussions about, well, how can we broaden our perspectives reporting wise and analytically? Like what kinds of views and positions can we bring in that are unlike our own or that will inform in ways that will surprise us?

I can sympathize with all of you for being held responsible for your co-hosts' bad gigs. Occasionally in comments, people are like, like you said, Derek, that, that oh remember when chris said blah blah i'm like that was mad that was mad said that i would never say something so silly so the struggle is real that's that's all fortunately we don't disagree about too much because you're as stubborn as a mule you're a debate bro so it would totally break down if we did this is true um we were doing video versions of our podcast for a while but honestly i do all the production on on the back end and finalizing and it was just too much work but i think that would actually help because you guys do more video we don't we very rarely touch

video except for individual stuff now but i think people have a hard time distinguishing voices whereas when you attach a face to a voice maybe they'll remember what matt actually says if if people can't distinguish our voices then they're not we can't help them but can i just pick up chris there was a part of your question that maybe we didn't address which is which is like how important are our sort of own political values when we consider what we're going to put forward. And I think that having been recently Naomi Klein pilled, I can say that I want to look a little bit more closely at how, for myself, the deconstruction process

of this work, of the journalism, even though it has come from a left perspective, it has not necessarily walked the best line between criticizing the incorrect interpretations of neoliberal power that are put forward by Steve Bannon and others, and the problems with the institutions that they're actually bringing up, right? Like, they're not wrong that we're, you know, tortured by techno capitalism, they are not wrong that the pharmaceutical industry is filled with perverse profit incentives.

And I think that to me, it's going to become more politically valuable to look very directly at the scrambled problems and analyses that our subjects bring up and say, okay, what are you really getting at here? And where is it actually true? And how can we separate out the feeling of getting fleeced by the state or by, you know, late stage capitalism from the facts of how we could actually address it together, right? Because the thing about conspirituality analyses is that there's no real political solution that our subjects offer, but they tend to scoop out attention

from that demographic that hasn't been properly served by the, I don't know, like by social democracy. So yeah, I think that that's going to become increasingly important for me is to say, there are values that are being presented by these populists and sometimes conspiracy theorists that are not entirely wrong. So how can we sort that out? Because they're speaking into a vacuum and, you know, maybe it would be better to stand in that vacuum instead of just sort of be ironic about it. Yeah. Yeah. We've also experienced on our end that tension between what you might call sort of the more empirical science-based academic backgrounds,

which again, rightly or wrongly, tries to separate out those two things. In psychology, for instance, we have this ideal that there is this dispassionate investigation of natural phenomena that just happen to be people, that is the phenomena we're studying, and we separate that entirely from our values and opinions. Which is itself a value position well i i know you go around in circles don't you i'm attempting to justify that yeah because like matt i i think the division that you talk about is is real but disputed by various sectors in psychology and in various fields right there are people who who would argue that actually that's a that's a problem right adopting that but i don't agree with them but nonetheless they exist yeah look i mean it comes up in very specific ways it's not always

about sort of advanced rarefied politics like even in my field of gambling research you have these different factions i suppose you have people that are kind of in the pocket of industry very comfortable with very liberal policies towards gambling and sort of centering on the problem with being people some you know some people have have mental problems which which cause them to have a problem with gambling right and then you have you know more activist people it's more associated with the public health approach where you say you've got a predatory business model here and you focus on that and and you have researchers who who clearly are are activists at the same time and are advancing an agenda to basically reduce penetration of gambling as

much as possible and then you have us wishy-washy people in the center that are trying to do empirical research but fooling ourselves obviously because that's impossible i mean do you think do you think it's the case that where that becomes a problem is along that line where your commitment to your ideology and your values propositions mean that you start fudging data you start ignoring contradictory data you start saying anything goes against what you believe to be the case must be part of a conspiracy uh without providing you know good evidence of that like to me that that that's really the the crux yeah yeah and it also comes down to how you structure your investigations you can set up a study such that you're almost guaranteed

to find what it is you're looking for, or you can set it up where the evidence could come in either way and you could be proven to be wrong. Chris? Yeah, I just, on the recent episode we did with Huberman, I was hypothetically complaining about Big Natural Park, right? Citing of studies that forest behaving would be beneficial. And I posed the hypothetical view in a study that showed there was no benefit,

whether that would be, you know, promoted with the same vigor. And obviously it wouldn't. But I think that always... Chris, I'm going to interrupt you here because I've got a bone to pick with you here. I introduced that always- Chris, I'm going to interrupt you here because I've got a bone to pick with you here. I introduced that. I introduced that topic about both the ABC and the, you know, Parks in Australia talking about forest bathing in a very positive sense. I introduced that with the intent of showing how bad more mainstream outlets are.

And then you dived in and spoke about it very vehemently as if i was like okay with it and like it was proving that now everyone thinks i'm pro-huberman i'm pro-big park it's totally unfair the reason people think that you're pro-huberman is available on the tip i hate to say it but i actually actually think you misunderstood Chris at some point, which derailed the conversation for about a half an hour. So, you know, that was an interesting take, but I got to, sorry, I got to give that one to Chris. This is a more strong environment.

Look, Matt, as I recall that thing, I believe you were introducing that. Well, many people do have this habit of like presenting things like here. Look at, you know, the natural parks and Australian stuff. They are tidying the same studies to which my point is, yes, yes, they're all doing that. yes, yes, they're all doing that. And that's kind of the point that I would raise here as well, is like, to make it a more relevant example, if there was studies conducted that showed there isn't a penalty to being an ethnic minority for applications for some position, right? You know, the kind of FEMA studies where they email in the same resumes, but they have different names or different identity signifiers. And there have been studies attempting to replicate some of

those findings, which I think have not held up so well when they've been pre-registered. But in that case, that would be one where I think that your beliefs or your political views could make you more reticent to promote or be interested in the study that finds that there isn't discrimination or that there's more discrimination against, say, white males, right? I'm going to sound like an IDW person. But I just mean that, like, obviously, if that happens, if your commitment is to reporting the data as is, right, then that would suggest that you put it out and say that. And if your commitment is to fighting discrimination and whatnot that you might not have documented in your study, but you believe is there, I feel that people would be more reticent to that. So like,

is there, I feel that people would be more reticent to that. So like where Matt and I believe for would be, you always have to publish the data, even if it completely contradicts the thesis that you would politically want to support. And I think a bunch of scholars do generally support that, but I think there's a lot more hesitation around that being a naive point of view as well. And there's been some critiques about, you know, the open science movement in this respect. So, yeah. You're also taking into consideration or you need to take into consideration that most people don't know how to read a science study. Right.

So when we're having these conversations on social media, the idea that the people actually read and ingested the study, for just one example, the FDA study that approved ketamine for clinical use, the company Janssen Pharmaceuticals, two people during that trial committed suicide after they came off ketamine therapy because there's no tapering protocol. Now, Janssen argued that it was because of their prior suicidal ideation. And once they quit ketamine, that caused them the spiral. But the reality is they never had suicidal ideation before they started the ketamine therapy. That passed FDA approval process. And you can find that. You can download that paper and read it. And it's in there. And that's an example of how people do not understand even even getting them into the the introduction and understanding the the basic relevance of it is a challenge so when we're talking at at this level about understanding science we live in a culture that literally just reads headlines and they're usually just using the headlines of the influencers that they follow, which they then take in as

truth. And so my challenge is how do we get past that first barrier where you can even have nuanced discussions in communication networks that don't allow for those types of discussions? Yeah, really, I think this is a really difficult sort of topic that a lot of conversations end up circling around right now. It's this tension between being so invested in a worldview, in a set of ideological commitments, that you're unable to consider in good faith and with a kind of intellectual openness

and really looking at the evidence and the quality of the arguments anything that disagrees with something you're so heavily identified with and i to me it's really important to strive to be able to do that but there's this phenomenon that has emerged within the heterodox space which is that there are all of these people claiming to be doing this and And this is a callback to Nomi Klein, Matthew, right? That there's this pretense at being that, at being the people who are willing to have the brave conversations and to look at reality squarely

and to consider the things that the mainstream doesn't want to look at, to consider the uncomfortable facts of the matter and the data that's being covered over. But it ends up not being that. It ends up becoming increasingly less fact-based, less backed by evidence, and actually more conspiratorial and more based in charisma and vibes and actually an identification with this group. You can list all of the different people who've gone down this road. Most recently, people like Barry Weiss and Matt Taibbi and Schellenberger and, you know, it's just like, wait, this is supposed to be some journalistic intellectual dark web,

atheist, we believe in science and reason, kind of, we're going to find a way forward, which I actually relate to as having some important values propositions within it. But something goes terribly wrong. I want to say that I personally am not immune to the charisma factor when my values are being validated. And one thing that has recently come up, like 95% in bad faith, are the growing attacks now on the council or the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the work of Imran Ahmed, who has been our guest about three times, maybe four times on the show. Four times. I was extremely compelled by just the pluck and the vigor of his company's research and also his framing of the influence to some of the influencers that we follow, like coining the term disinformation dozen, which of course goes all the way to the White House and winds up in Jennifer Psaki's mouth as she's standing at the podium in the press room.

her Saki's mouth as she's standing at the podium in the press room. And we leaned heavily into that research and into that material. And I personally have to confess that I do not understand his methodology. And Derek and Julian are probably better equipped to do so. But and as far as I know, as Elon Musk, you know, threatens to sue him, or is launching a lawsuit against him and his organization, and as he might be hauled up before Congress by Jim Jordan, as some sort of like, I don't know, hostile, you know, anti American influence or whatever uh all of that censorship industrial complex yeah all of that bullshit is going to happen and i still have to go back and do the legwork to figure out okay what was the methodology here and does it sync up And did it give me the reasonable firepower to say things like these disinformation purveyors have blood on their hands, which I said many times. I don't disbelieve it.

I just don't know whether or not it's like he had a particular handle upon a kind of knowledge production and a facility with statistics. Yeah, he was finding a way to quantify something that we already have plenty of evidence is real. We just don't know how to quantify it. And he made it look good to a guy like me who doesn't know what the fuck he's looking at most of the time when it comes to that stuff. fuck he's looking at most of the time when it comes to that stuff and so my honesty is i've got to go back and figure out whether or not i lean too heavily into something that may not have been as strong as i thought it was i haven't seen any evidence that that's so but i got to do it i think the important thing is like it is exactly what you highlighted the Matthew, of being aware of whatever the limitations might be, whether in journalistic or like statistical competence or whatever it is, because,

you know, we're all humans, we're all influenced by our biases and worldviews and things that we want to be true, and also charismatic individuals, right? So you you wouldn't it would be a very inhuman existence to not have any to have everything based on you know that you first rigorously fact check everything that everybody ever tells you no one does that no one does that and so the main thing is like being aware of your limitations and then you know trying to to examine like in greater detail when you have time or those kinds of things. I think that's important. And I think in the case with something like, you know, Elon Musk's comments around the ADL recently, the issue that often comes up and

Julian and Derek, you've both been highlighting this as well, is that there are criticisms of the ADL and its potential overreach, right, and how it characterized criticism of Israel and so on. But in the context of what Elon Musk is doing and what Twitter slash X is promoting, when you look at the hashtags about the ADL, it isn't this high level critique from deep investigative journalism. It's base anti-Smitism and elon musk is not someone i think that has digged into the details right he just he finds anything that can support whatever he wants to say and then he just like spews it out and then there's a whole network dedicated to promoting that and you will get the think pieces from, well, in this case, you probably won't get it from

Barry Weiss's outlet because of her particular support for Israel, right? So this is the one instance where I think you won't see it, at least in Barry Weiss's case, but you will see all the other things immediately jump on. Here's the problems with the IDL and going for it, but not looking at the very visible rank anti-Semitism that's there. So I completely understand that if you release a podcast about the intricacies of the ADL, that in some sense, you can be diverting the issue and following the lead of somebody like Elon Musk. But it is important to be able to criticize, you know, institutions and stuff. So it's a really hard balancing act, I think. And like, I'm not sure

there's a precise line to walk. But I know that walking the line that like trigonometry, or the free press follows is not where I want to be. But yeah, this is where Matthew is a good example where Matthew and I kind of diverged because when that came up with Imran and we started hearing about the data, I truly believe he stayed up at night thinking, turning that over, which there's nothing wrong with because I think the methodological approach is important. And it's also important to note that they released reports, not studies. So you can't even find all of the

proper data laid out as you would in chart form in an actual study. It's all reports with screenshots and things like that. So it's a different ballgame he's playing. But one thing you'll hear, you'll read in Naomi Klein's new book, and Matthew's interview with her comes out this week, she really hammers home the point that the right gets the facts wrong, but they get the feelings right a lot of the time. They get the facts right. And then they argue over those facts. And I mean, this happens everywhere, but there seems to be a real lack of drive and initiative of just doing something like what Imran does, which is just take a mirror and say, hey, you are doing this. Maybe I got the numbers a little bit wrong, but this is still happening. And I think that putting aside the pure objectivity of

factual data in this sense is important if you're going to create a movement of people to push back against a whole cohort of people who don't give a shit about facts at all. How are you going to play in that field? There's a bait and switch that happens here a lot, right? In these kinds of discussions, especially online, where the insistence on the empirical data that there's sort of like different levels of conversation happening at the same time, you know, and it's like, you might make an argument that you don't have a specific study to demonstrate the truth of every sort of premise in your argument. That doesn't mean your

argument is flawed. And vice versa, you might make a completely fallacious argument say about the dangers of vaccines and have several links to PubMed studies that you can use to back up what you're saying, but you're still wrong. So it's like the levels of analysis, I think, get really jumbled. And especially when you're talking about conspiracists and people engaged in bad faith argumentation. And then you have the other piece, which you touched on, Chris, we're back to Teen Win, and this recognition that you can't absolutely fact check every single thing. You have to delegate some of that to experts. And so then the huge question becomes, on what basis do you decide which experts to listen

to? And that's one of the crises that we're in right now in terms of the information age. And I'm glad that you're there, Julian, because I want to say that I agree with Derek's position around the moxie and the gumption and the storytelling power of Imran Ahmed's work. And it's not that I'm disquieted by the numbers being a little wrong. It's more that I'm disquieted by being charmed and seduced in a way that belies the fact that I criticize that same seduction when it happens on the other side. And I think this came up early on that this is a hard line to walk. Among the three of us, This is a hard line to walk. Among the three of us, I suggested that my attitude towards public health information and medical research was quasi-religious.

And that's a problem because we often get the criticism of being invested in scientism, right? That somehow we have turned science into a religious pursuit. It's a bad faith critique. But on a personal level, I interact with medical data, with scientific studies, and with expert opinion in many cases on the basis of trust and identification. When I don't actually have either the brain power or the skill or sometimes the patience to fact check the facts, right? So the background, I don't have the background for it.

And so I realized that I am embedded in a community and a network of trust, right? Who do I trust and why? And that's why the social markers that are provided by an amazing scientific instrument like the grometer are really important for me because they are descriptions of behaviors that are trustworthy or non-trustworthy. Well, they're non-trustworthy behaviors, right? If somebody is galaxy-brained or Cassandra-complexing or persecution-complexing all over the place, I'm not going to trust what they have to say. But if they are a bog-standard, boring, bureaucratic public health official in Canada who doesn't have good rapport at the podium,

and they stand up and say, well, it seems as though masks are effective in these circumstances, and we think that the vaccine is coming at this point, and we really have to pull together and try to figure out how to get along together better. That is going to signal to me trust more than how that person communicates the scientific data that I can't read. And so I have always been bothered by that particular, I would say vulnerability. And I've tried to respect it or I try to identify how I carry it. And it mirrors the vulnerability of the people in the communities that we often criticize or we empathize with. Because we're like, oh, you got taken in by a charismatic named Kelly Brogan or Christiane Northrup, right? And I got to look in the mirror, really.

I have to say, have to say okay well how did i establish trust i do believe that i'm on the right side of vaccine science and masking and all the rest of it but i really have to ask some questions about how well and in a way too it's not just on what basis do you decide which experts you should trust but it's also on what basis do you decide which experts you should trust but it's also what might those experts do that would lead to you losing trust in them and i think that's very important too yeah like it's great that we have open science and it's great that everyone can use the internet and access the primary research on any issue that fascinates them but i think that in many ways it's been a bad thing because it is simply not practical for a non-specialist to like ideally we would all like to work from evidence and then come to beliefs

from that evidence in a perfectly rational way but it just isn't practical to become well enough acquainted with the literature to understand all of the relevant background such that you can absorb all of the primary literature on a topic like climate change or vaccine efficacy and come to this rational belief about it. You actually cannot do that in practice. I've been a professor for 20 years and I cannot do that outside of my very narrow realm of expertise.

So I very much believe that the advice to give people even though like we do do episodes on how to read literature and how to have a critical eye and evaluating statistics and things like that really what you need to do is to figure out who to trust and that is the problem of the modern era right and as you said matthew were and chris like we're all just human beings we all respond to people and we use these interpersonal markers of who is is trustworthy but i i do believe that there are some pretty simple heuristics you can apply that actually will steer you right more often than not if you can just apply them consistently like for instance if you want to know did the virus

originate from a lab in wuhan or did it come from natural causes well good luck in understanding the technical details there what you can do is look at the people who are advocating those different positions and you and you you can you can notice a few things right some of them have track records of 20 or 30 years in that specific area and have been doing the research and have essentially eminent scientists in that area area and have been doing the research and have essentially eminent scientists in that area and others have parachuted in last week what do they really know though yeah but what's what's tricky about that so often right is that the the conspiracists like you see this with anti-vaxxers all the time they'll trot out robert malone and they'll say

well this is a man with an incredible track record he's incredibly pedigreed and he did this, that, and the other thing. And whatever claims they make about what he's invented and what kind of posts he's held. And it turns out that's not actually that good of a basis, right? So Julian, one thing on Robert Malone, just the one point I would make is that you're right. You know, there's a lot of indications that he's a reliable source if you go by like a traditional checklist. But there's also a load of warning signs that he's not right. Even just things about who he's on stage with alone should give you warning.

But, you know, all the things about claiming to be a persecuted lone voice and invented so many things, not just the mRNA vaccine, but so many other things. So I think a general other point that is a corollary to what Matt said is that you want to be able to try to distinguish general consensus,

but you have to also consider that there's always insane freaks. They don't walk around with bags of chips on their head or whatever. That's why they're able to get followers. So any big discipline will always have outlier positions, will always have people that, even if they're not crazy, just have a minority view. And I think that's one of the real problems is that, like, you know, same thing with, it's the adverse with 9-11. And you have genuine, you do have some genuine experts who sign on to the conspiracy theories,

but the vast overwhelming array do not. So that scale would be useful for people to learn, but I realize it's hard. Can I say too about how to trust and who to trust is that I think the diversity of our trio is, it might be a good model because when Derek says, there was a point where the book was going to end with the three of us are going to sort of give our final statements and that kind of changed into something else. But Derek's final statement was, well, I want to do a section on scientific

literacy. And it was great. I think we still have the draft of it somewhere. It'll go into something else. But it was very characteristic of him. And if I have a criticism of it, it's like, And I have that if I have a criticism of it, it's like, you know, it's individualistic in the sense that you're asking people to do a lot of work. And that might be inaccessible to them. Right. So I kind of have like an educational accessibility feeling around that. But at the same time, he's right. Right. Like you can learn more you can do better

at media literacy but on the other side i'm saying we really do also have to look at the mystery of how we form our trust bonds because you know that's that's going to be a factor for everybody um now i did have a question before we return to sunnier pastures that i i wanted to to raise with you guys and it is actually i think dealing with this issue about like epistemic networks and and how to deal with you know the need to be self-critical because a lot of the people that you've covered, a lot of people that we've covered, all of their critics are bad faith. They've never encountered good quality criticism in their life. They want it so badly, but it's hard to get there. And in you guys' case, because you're being critical of the health and wellness space, you're obviously going to get

strong pushback from those communities. And I saw recently, there was, I think it was a Medium article by B. Schofield or an article somewhere, announcing why she had quit the Conspiratuality podcast, right? And she wasn't actually a member of your podcast, but good of her to quit. But she took some issues with your approach. And I think in that case, we've talked about the kind of reaction about you guys being too dismissive

or too materialistic or this perspective. But I want to talk about that, but also more broadly, the way to deal with critics because of that ecosystem that you guys exist in and you get such strong feedback, how you don't end up with a kind of bunker mentality. And related to that, and Matthew, I don't know details here except for like a couple of blog posts, but I came across a couple of years ago, I think, that you were involved with a court case about somebody for defamation where they'd written critical stuff on Facebook. And I only know the details of that from a rather long blog post from a lawyer kind of arguing the merits and demerits of the likelihood of the case. So I'm curious about that and the potential for legal battles to get in with the people that you cover or you yourselves being defamed and how you manage it. So realize that's a big cloudy question but any parts that

you want to grab a hold of well let me start with a last part first so there yeah there is a lengthy medium article that describes a legal action that i elected to take that given the settlement i can't really say anything about at this point but i guess i can say that it was about whether or not the base the core structure of a book that i published in 2019 was fraudulent or not. And my argument was that it wasn't. And I really wanted to draw a line in the sand. And it was the only legal action that I've ever been in uh involved in i feel ambivalent about having pursued it and yeah but but i mean from that what's what's what's strange is that to have that in the public record now has led to a story or an impression that some people have had that somehow I threaten critics legally on some random basis. And that's just, it's not true. I felt with regard to the particular claims at the time that the core of my work that my livelihood was sort of hinged upon

at that time was really being questioned in a significant way. And I felt that I had to do something. So because my basic approach to criticism is to really try hard to see what merit it has. And, you know, sometimes there's a completely bad faith element to it in the sense that it's being generated by Hindu nationalists who want to say that our research on the yoga world is somehow defaming an ancient culture. Sometimes it comes from spaces that aren't well-researched, but nonetheless, somebody's reacting to something. And I really try to make it a practice to look very carefully at what that is and how I can learn more about my own impact on the world and what my research is doing.

Yeah, and I would say as well is, to me, the point is, you know, the general stance that people take on those kinds of issues. So the topic of how people moderate spaces, you know, we've been critical of Lex Fridman, for example, for policing his subreddit with an iron fist, which apparently he doesn't do, but he has a team of suspicious Lex ship moderators. But the, yeah, so like, there's lots of different ways that people react to it. And it sounds like the paraphrase is, if you can correct me if I'm wrong, but you're saying that you would be tolerant of criticism and welcome it in so far as anybody welcomes criticism but in specific cases where like there's a strong allegation of fraud as a component of your work or something then you felt compelled to defend it though you might not be so

compelled to go for another legal case because I imagine they're not fun. 100% not fun, very, very unsatisfying all the way around. There was some moral feeling that I had about, you know, this really shouldn't happen. It's not fair that it happens and I don't know what else to do. I was also advised by various people to go forward that i trusted uh i didn't sort of i didn't really do it alone um so yeah yeah yeah there's a lot of stuff there yeah i also didn't mean to like focus specifically on that but i appreciate anyway the clarification so what about you derek or julian Is there anything you would add about that?

One thing that is always apparent, and admittedly so by some of our critics, is that they're on our social media feeds, but they don't listen to our podcast. And our social media feeds are essentially just mini ideas from episodes or thoughts that we have. We don't police each other on them. We share our own thoughts as related to the field that we have. We don't police each other on them. We share our own thoughts as related to the field that we study. And it's very difficult to get into a conversation when somebody does not listen to what you have to say and unpack because long form podcasting actually is a good medium for expressing big ideas, which take time and nuance and complexities to get

through. So I see it often as an uneven playing field trying to even engage with people. I generally don't engage. I will say that I have responded to good faith criticism. And sometimes I come to a different conclusion than I originally did. Sometimes we just disagree, but we lay out our points and that's all fair. And I actually like that process. But I've noticed that sometimes when I've jumped in and responded to someone, you'll initially get something like, oh, you're mansplaining. Or when you're trying to actually engage in a debate with someone, which requires some level of rigor and intellect to do so. And that process

is frustrating because I actually, as we've said earlier about our own internal process as a podcast and how we come at each other, I like the rigor of debating these guys. It makes me sharper. It makes me think about what I'm saying more. And unfortunately, it's very difficult in the environment of social media to accomplish that. So in rare occasions, it's very difficult in the environment of social media to accomplish that. So in rare occasions, it does happen. For the most part, I just think that I need to not engage with that. So I don't. And in terms of the issue of defamation or things like that, it is also baked into why

we don't punch down. We only punch up and we bring receipts to everything. So if we're making a claim, we're going to back it up. There are so many things that we've received DMs from people who've worked with some of the influencers that we cannot say because we do not have receipts. We only have one person saying it. So we never go live with that sort of stuff because it's dangerous. So we know it's tricky territory with a lot of- Yeah, hearsay sucks. Hearsay sucks. Yeah. So we do try to be careful. We think about that often. And we do have... We actually have a

page that has been up since very early in this project about social media hygiene on our website and our rules of moderation and how and when we engage and don't engage with people. And I know a lot of people don't think about those things, but we did very early on and we've tried to abide by those rules ever since. Yeah, I think some of it too is the problem of scale. The more people you start reaching, the harder it becomes to keep up with all manner of communication that starts coming in, whether it's in the form of social media comments or emails or direct messages. I personally am open to criticism. I'm open to debate. I prefer it when direct quotes are being used. I prefer it when the argument feels like it has

some substance to it as opposed to being a personal attack or something that feels more sort of stereotyped or just, oh, you're one of these kinds of people. And I'll say that there have been over the course of the last three and a half years, there have been several occasions in which someone has corrected a mistake that I've made and I've said, oh, thank you very much. Yeah, I got that one wrong. We haven't experienced that. One thing that I'd like to say about a type of criticism that can be difficult to manage is that sometimes, in my experience the criticisms from an identitarian standpoint and embedded within a

culture war discourse especially on the left reflecting upon you know your positionality for example can be really hard to navigate, to listen to, to not be personally insulted by. as a white cis male have in general been extremely valuable for me personally in trying to understand better what my blind spots are. And that's not everybody's experience. There's a really problematic kind of energy that can be very self-destructive and sabotaging within that kind of discourse. And at the same time, I think if somebody is very angry at you for some kind of content blind spot or political, I don't know, insensitivity that you hold and they attribute it to your positionality and you haven't considered that before, that can be a really incredible moment of recognizing your general place in the world. So I just want to say that too. Okay, guys. So I just want to hit one more topic before we let you go to bed. And I want to use Andrew Huberman again as a bit of an exemplar here because we've covered him recently and listened to you guys cover him. You made the point on your podcast how he's a little bit exemplifying this 2.0 version of the

original generation of health influences the original type might have been far more into the spiritual side of things much more into the experiential revealed truth kind of thing whereas people like hooberman seem closer to secular-based influences that we tend to cover and rely more on their credentials and are talking the language of science. And if there's a problem here, and we all think there is, it's that they are very much on the bleeding edge of new technologies and supposed scientific breakthroughs,

so much so that it ends up being scientistic if not pseudoscience now that's the first part of the question about whether or not this is an important shift or whether it's just an isolated thing and the other thing is whether or not you see i guess a theme of scientific hipsterism in these people. So, I noticed with Huberman, for instance, when he's talking about sleep, he very quickly discounts people taking melatonin. And melatonin is pretty cheap. It's widely used. GP is very happy to prescribe it to you. So, obviously, it has to be wrong, right? And instead, what's really going to be good for you is this highly bespoke cocktail of little known obscure supplements in some case.

So, we see this on the Joe Rogan podcast as well, whereas the bespoke hipsterish thing is always better. And it also ties in, of course, to the grifting, right? Because an awful lot of them do seem to endorse if not sell supplements so this is a two-part question following the grand tradition set down by chris kavanagh what do you guys think about that the term revealed knowledge came up before and alan watts used to say that everyone likes to think they have the secret sauce i'm'm paraphrasing, but something of that nature, where people are drawn to the idea that there is a revealed truth. They have a piece of it because whoever has told them this thing that must be true, they now know that and then they now can live in such a way that

fulfills that expression. And I think that's one through line between the communities we're talking about right now. Well, let me say this. In the episode where we talked about Andrew Huberman, I was suggesting actually that he was a 2.0 bro scientist, where the earlier version of the bro science influencer, I'm thinking here, Joe Rog rogan but also like tim ferris dave asprey these are people who weren't really credentialed these are people who were saying i am an n of one and i'm engaged in this self-optimization process where i'm hacking and i'm trying each of these different things and i'm learning how to very rapidly acquire skills and you know change my change the data that is being given to me by my glucose monitor or by the blood

test that I'm doing, that kind of thing. So it had a science-y kind of vibe to it. It was spiritual only insofar as it was about self-development, right? Hacking your mindset, hacking your habits, getting your sleep on point, figuring out how to be all that you can be in a way that i think the commodification of a lot of spirituality there's a lot of overlap there right a lot of resonance i see humerman as when i refer to him as being 2.0 i was saying it was more like okay he's doing all of that stuff that i just described plus he has a lab plus he has you know whatever the phd or the the degrees in neurology and

ophthalmology and what have you so yeah if there's anything in common with with more of a traditional spiritual guru model you know if we if we roll it back to people like many of the guests that oprah would have had say in the 90s and the early 2000s. I think it's that there's a zone of the commodification of self-development that was created and crafted that had something in common with the spiritual guru kind of routine, but more and more was about selling books and about selling supplements and about enrolling people in workshops and trainings and in a whole alternative worldview, which gave birth to the secret, you know, that Oprah was involved in promoting and things like that. qualified bro scientist an important shift i think so yes because it continues to invest this sort of alternate reality with more and more of a sense of legitimacy and credibility and that's one

of the things i think people are drawn in by that like oh this is this is really the cutting edge real science that the normies don't yet understand because they're not ready to take responsibility for themselves. But we're going to get up at dawn and we're going to stare at the sun and we're going to do the smoothie and the AG1 greens, whatever those things are, right? And we're going to participate in these arduous rituals of becoming, but it's all backed by science. Do you know, I have to plead ignorance on Hubberman because I wasn't on the episode. I was invested in, I was probably buried under a pile of books about RFK Jr. And I didn't listen to yours, Chris and Matt, but I think that might be an advantage, especially as we talk about what's happening to the religiosity in the bro scientist 2.0

sort of scene. And I guess I just want to say that not knowing as much about him as you do, he still presents vocally and visually to me as somebody who is embodying something. He's performing something. This is super subjective, I have to admit, but he presents some kind of Greek Greek stoic god in his affect. And there's something there that I think the people that you are studying who are self-consciously secular are still pulling on that's quite primal. I think it's difficult to see. It's difficult to describe. It's not just about fashion. It's about affect the person who's coming to mind now for me is heather haying who i i can't watch more than what bad stats posts on twitter

right like like a minute and a half of heather and brett sort of you of conferring about something is just enough for me. But I think it's enough for me because her posture, her facial expression, her kind of faux humility, it looks Catholic iconic to me. There's something sort of pious and I would say faux introspective. And it's almost like they're chewing together on avoiding the language that would point in that direction. And I wonder who's studying that. I wonder what that is. I can't be the only one who's seeing that. I don't think I'm making it up, but I think they're doing something. I would say too it's a sublimation it's a sublimation of a of an explicit religious instinct and an affect and it reads it reads hot even even with your lack of engagement with with the subject matter i i have yet to hear a really thoughtful critique of huberman that doesn't touch on exactly this like this is this is something that people note about the presence, the aesthetic, the presentation.

There's a very deliberate thing going on that has, you know, in addition to the science and the self-optimization that has garnered him a massive audience in a very short period of time, right? Zach Bush, to take the example that I'm more familiar with, and whose pseudoscience I'm a little bit more literate in, he presents as some kind of icon, a moving wooden statue, who is glistening in the right way. It's not just about styling. It's not just about how 4D your camera is. There's something else going on. And it comes from, you know, his father was a preacher, you know, he was raised in a very religious background. I mean,

he is explicitly talking about Jesus and so on. But yeah, I'm just really interested in the non-ideological and non-verbal religious indicators that we're all sort of, I don't know, trying to navigate and understand. I wanted to just add a note then. I think this is a common trajectory that like a hard agree with everything that you're detailing about the scientific pose or story rationalist pose that not just huberman but like we've commented many times on brett and heller's ability to inner intonation and postures and and the words that they use sound like they're being so reasonable while they say absolutely outlandish and seen things. I'd also add, and I think that this is an interesting component that like most of the

people that we cover, although we refer to them as secular gurus, right? They often want to be clear that they do not dismiss religion in the kind of traditional atheistic perspective. And they see that as limited. And Huberman recently spent quite a while on the Lex Friedman podcast detailing his developing faith. And it was a very Jordan Peterson-esque approach to it. But this is common, and you hear Brett and Heller talk about, from an evolutionary lens, the view of religion. And I'm somebody that's active in the field of the cognitive science of religion,

which is no problem, talking about the evolutionary role of religion. But I don't see the way that they approach it having the same aspects to it. But it's that kind of ability to conjure the impression of depth and consideration from tone. And one thing that's really surprised me in looking more at Huberman is that he's a scientific advisor for Athletic Greens, AG1, now, right? There are very, in terms of the amount of science that they put out, it's rather limited. But the other thing is that he has some branded supplements, at least

which he endorses. I can't tell if it's like specifically him. I think it goes through another company, but you know, it's Huberman branded supplements. But the thing that you hear from his fans a lot, and this includes people who would cast themselves as not able to be, you know, bought by conspirituality type gurus, that he didn't want to make the supplements. It was his audience that kind of forced them to it because they wanted good quality supplements they could rely on. So he, you know, produced them and they say, you know, he didn't want to do it. So you can't really criticize him for producing it because, and I was like, oh my God, sell you another bridge. But the thing is, I think packaged right, that becomes a very appealing thing.

Whereas people can easily see through Alex Jones, when it's somebody that looks like Huberman's with the credential of Huberman, they would see my take as inherently cynical and dismissive. Yeah, that he's the reluctant and benevolent millionaire. He was dragged, kicking and screaming into making any money off of this. Yeah, it's very unfortunate. He tried not to, tried to stay out of the limelight. But, you know, what can you do when your public is wanting? And, yeah. I think this is an excellent point to finish up on because, like,

Matthew Renske, you said how you're coming at Hoobman Fresh. And just going on appearances is sometimes helpful. And like you, I know nothing about Zach Bush. Not a thing. Have no preconceptions at all. And looking at his website here, Zach Bush, MD. MD is important. Anatomy of the Soul.

The visualizations are stunning. It could be the website for a religious cult if you just didn't look at the text. Mind you, the text does say stuff like, The Journey of Intrinsic intrinsic health a revolutionary eight-week health transformation learning journey and immersive community i could go on but yeah i think this really illustrates that point which is influencers like this have a massive power because on one hand the content like you said is purportedly all about health, yet the vibe. It's about them.

Is thirst trap. It is maybe, you know, it's not only I've got supplements for you, but maybe I'll also send you patches of my cut up jeans or something. This kind of thing points to why our podcasts are often talked about in the same sentences, rightly so, because this is purely what we care about with the secular gurus, which is these are people that present themselves as doing one thing. The content is purportedly this, but the vibe and the appeal is totally this other thing. So, yeah.

I also just want to say, rounding off to let you guys escape the Kooning the Guru's black hole, is that, you know, I think our podcasts are complementary and have, you know, different emphases which are productive, I think, because, you know, people will appreciate

different kind of approaches to things. But the one thing that I definitely, because, you know, people will appreciate different kind of approaches to things. But the one thing that I definitely have to thank you guys for when you're here is that by publishing the book that you've had, you've now made it easier to refer to the concept of conspirituality without necessarily referencing that somewhat problematic original paper, which may have... Yeah. Yeah. So, because I... Oh, poor Charlotte Ward. Oh my gosh.

Yeah. But I do think you guys have really, I know you've never claimed to, you know, originate the term, but I definitely do think your approach has made the topic your own. And that whether people agree or disagree with individual episodes or whatever perspective you guys take on things, I think it's very valuable you're documenting and approaching this in the depth that you do. So just to say, we appreciate that. And yeah, just don't end up selling supplements or becoming-nazis please because we'd like some people

that we interact with not to go down that path well i'm about to have one of my moral crashes like in just a week or so so that's usually a limiting factor that'll steer you on the right course yeah so always what one final question to finish up on do you guys take any supplements any any at all it's not a trick question what's your regime most people do right so it wouldn't be crazy if you did it's like no i think apart from viagra penis enhancement pills i'll tell you we all we're all on that that's great yeah a boatload a boatload of those i you know. I take my antihistamines to help me with my allergies.

No human growth hormone? No. I take baby aspirin every day because I had a deep vein thrombosis about seven years ago now. And apparently that decreases the risk of recurrence from 10 to 5 but also i don't i don't know if i'll ever get on an airplane again so that probably also eliminates a lot of the chance yeah i don't i i don't have any time to fuck i don't i'm like, you know, can I, can I, can I get, can I make basic food for, can we, can we make basic food for the kids on time? Can we put the lunches together? Can I, like optimizing?

Are you kidding me? Like I can hard, like I don't have time to think about my, I don't even have shoes that are like functional. Like I don't, I don't, it's, I'm a, I'm a total mess. I don't give a shit. Like, and I, and I also like, I used to be into that stuff and it just completely melted away. I have no interest whatsoever. In fact, I have these jars of herbs that I used to, I'm sure they're all like past due, they're totally stale or whatever, but they're like on these shelves and I'm like, oh, maybe I should like smell them to see if they're off or whatever. Maybe that would help me. Maybe, oh, I have this mixture called meditation aid. Maybe that would calm me down. I'm like, yeah, whatever. I just can't get around to giving a shit anymore. And you know what? That's echoing something that a very good friend of mine

from when I was in a cult said to me once, which is, I don't even care how I feel anymore. Sometimes I'm happy. Sometimes I feel like crap. I just don't care. And yeah, so that's how I feel about optimization. That's a positive note. Matt usually catches people on this question by getting them to finally admit that they're on ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. So you're a skier. Congratulations. This is what you do. You get us really tired and then you ask the gotcha. Yeah. And I will just add a very, very brief quote, I swear, to say that I noticed on the

Huberman Reddit today that people were saying on the recent episode Hooper Man was saying that he avoids turmeric like the plague because it causes his testosterone levels to create it. So, you know, just a free tip for everyone there. Stay away from Indian food. Sorry.

Yeah. It's been a pleasure having both of you and you for people who aren't here. It's also been a pleasure to have Derek, but he had to leave because we struggled along for so long. So yeah, thanks, Derek, as well in absentio. And yeah, it's a great pleasure. We here with you guys thank you so much for your questions and your and your discussion and your uh your engagement with with what we do and bringing us into your world yeah it's a real pleasure thank you so much all right keep up the good work uh stay safe out there and uh yeah we'll see you next time all right so that was a enjoyable interview that winded here hillar and deader and now we are here matt in the tail end of the podcast where we often end up looking at reviews yes the rump of the podcast my favorite part right i've got a good review and a bad review. And it correlates

with their positivity and negativity about the podcast. So this one is following on from our Huberman episode and it says, the problem with this podcast dot dot dot, but it's five stars by Obi Juan. After

listening to Christopher confess to her preference for sushi restaurants run by robots over a walk in the woods in the early release of the huberman episode i realized something christopher is terrible so i still give this podcast five stars but they are all for matt no sharing him with chris yum yum yum that's i love that i love that you're quite right that's not what i said that's not what i said. That's not what I said. There's a red flag to me too. Yeah.

Odd, but what can you do? What can you do? I've dug in too deep. I've been doing this because for too long. It's too late now. I can't find a new podcast host. It's like getting married. I'm too old to get married again.

I'm stuck with him. So I'll just have to write this thing out and see where it goes. That's right. Now, the other thing, Matt, is that we have, you know, we sometimes trigger people with episodes. The Chomsky one was notable. The Huberman one did its thing as well a little bit. And I think this review might relate to that. So the title is Two One-Sided for Its Own Good, and it's by robot lord good name though the premise of this podcast is great and i had high hopes going in i actually enjoy chris and matt as hosts they're well educated have good chemistry and humor and don't seem to take themselves too seriously

the end well that was good we should we should quote that we get that blurb when we write our book we're gonna put the quote on. Sorry, there's a bit more. The problem ends up being that they are too like-minded politically, and it just creates a fairly uninteresting left-slanted echo chamber type of critique discussion. The net product is effectively a full-throated, snickering, cynical take on any person idea they disagree with politically, while conversely handling people

ideas off the left with a very gentle almost cowardly approach it's pretty cringy i guess this is a human nature to a certain degree but not having half of the commentary come at least a bit from the other side of the aisle is a missed opportunity for a much more interesting podcast so that's interesting because you know like the valid part of it is certain that you know there is an element where you're kinder to people who you feel more inclined to their point of view or see them as like less heinous characters right so that's definitely going to play a part but like the left thing we just did chomsky you know i don't know what where huberman would would fall um in that category but the d'angelo, did we endorse their point of views?

Brene Brown, Rutger Bregman? Like, I don't really feel like that we did. So, yeah. Yeah. Well, I want to say, I mean, you know, we have a laugh at many of the negative reviews, mainly because of the expression and just the level of lurid hyperbole in them.

But this was a good negative review in the sense um i reckon that and taking it seriously rubber lord really should pay attention to what the people that are much further left than us how they see our criticism and stuff right because because it balances out where because i do sympathize with someone who is centrist or right-leaning it could be irritating to hear us always doing anything and if you're still listening i actually respect that you can just like i respect the hardcore marxists that can still hold their nose and listen to us despite our manifest political failings. But, you know, like, it's on both sides. So, like, how can you make people happy is what I'm saying.

Yeah, but also, I just also think there's a little bit of false equivalence there because, like, it isn't just that we're more sympathetic. It's that a lot of the gurus that we cover that are, like, genuinely on the left they aren't doing a whole bunch of the things that you see with the other secular gurus right it's so they might be doing things that are bad in a different way but they're not doing the guru thing right and actually you can see that because in general people are not sharing

around clips of their content or whatever like they are with jordan peterson and it's because they don't have that much content the exception is you know online shows daily shows like uh the majority report or you know streamers left-wing streamers hashan or this kind of thing which are people that we i think will look at relatively soon but in the case of people like candy or whatever like when's the last big debate like video that that candy had jordan peterson does crazy things every week makes all these statements candy he does say things but you know he's pretty consistent and he's pretty one note about what he's arguing for so like it's a different kind of thing you know like it's so there are qualitative differences across the spectrum

and there are just more of them i think on the right hand side those populists like kindies and d'angelos they do exist and they still tweet and if we but they can't i don't understand how somebody can listen to those episodes and think that we didn't notice if we didn't have problems with them yeah i don't know either i mean i guess look the other thing i want to mention chris is that i think people who have different politics than us and are frustrated that we're not doing X or we're doing too much or Y, they should take note, I think, not just that we're criticizing someone who's left or right, but rather look at what we're criticizing them for. And I think if you listen back to those episodes, like we would not criticize a right-wing person because they believe in traditional family values free markets or free markets or just that you know people should work hard and be self-reliant like value type things just just like just like i wouldn't

criticize chomsky for for wanting a more equal society and more you know less international inequality and stuff as well you know again value type things we tend to criticize them for errors of fact and errors of of rhetoric or use of rhetoric and reasoning so you know yeah that's my defense but you know i think that was good faith negative criticism chris so i applaud robo lord for it yeah yeah i agree you know, I think that was good faith, negative criticism, Chris. So I applaud RoboLord for it. Yeah, yeah, I agree, you know, to some extent. But he's correct. He prefaced it with some very nice compliments.

Oh, yeah, that bit was accurate. That bit was accurate. No, no. I liked all of it. Yeah, it was grand. It was fine. Now, Matt, I'm just going to do something a bit different here for the Patreon shout-outs.

I'm only going to shout out conspiracy hypothesizers because we've gathered quite a crowd of them. So I'm going to read a bunch of them and dispatch them in one go. So here we go. We have Tori Bova, Jordan H, Jelham Deshpand, Priyanka, Shane,

Jake Fisher, Felix, Alan Dvorsky, Christopher O'Brien, Adam Kearney from Edendary County, Offaly, Cheese Mask, Charmi, Albert Flores, Dries Tanguy, Mark Allen Smith, Josephine Patricia, Becca Thomas, William Haller, Zach Scheffler, Scotty MFG, Ryan Nesseldraht,

Daniel, Robert Adams, Andrews, and Aaron Burke, all conspiracy hypothesizers. I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions. And they've all circulated this list of correct answers. I wasn't at this conference. This kind of shit makes me think, man, it's almost like someone is being paid. Like when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. Wow.

Thank you all. There's obviously not enough time to make a funny comment about every one of your names or an interesting comment. But these comments of mine, Chris, they're not funny or anything really they're just little facts and one is priyanka i that's a very pretty name actually and i know two priyankas in real life so i just wanted to mention that shami another indian name i think we know a shami on on twitter he's very cool it is that shami hi shlie hello we've we've done a we've done live cooking together um live streamed cooking an exciting new concept in social media and felix we had a felix in there felix is the name of my dog and he's a boy he's a boy dog called felix not a cat if you're

a girl or any other gender sorry but matt's dog is a boy he's a boy he's a boy just to be clear actually actually that's irrelevant it's a cat's name it's not a dog's name it could be a boy or a girl cat so gender is irrelevant sorry for bringing it up sorry to inject yeah you do inject your gender politics into everything but just edit it out usually Matt, it's been a pleasure. Let's go and get to editing. Yay. All right. By the time you hear this, we'll be very tired.

Bye. Bye-bye. Thank you.