Decoding the Gurus - Interview with Timbah Toast on his Tim Pool Documentary & Scooby Doo Partisans

Episode Date: April 23, 2022

This week's episode we have an extended interview with an independent decoder, the YouTube documentary maker, Timbah-on-Toast. A kindred spirit in many respects Timbah is perhaps the ultimate form of the 'I can't come to bed, someone is wrong on the internet' meme. He makes detailed videos analysing the content of a variety of internet pundits, especially those who are posing as something they are not.If you have not experienced one of Timbah's documentaries you should go do so now. He has an excellent 3-part series on Dave Rubin's interview techniques and another 4-part series breaking down the career of the propagandist founder of the Veritas Project, James O'Keefe.His most recent series, however, is looking at self-proclaimed milquetoast centrist fence-sitter, the eternal beanie wearing Tim Pool. We compare notes, delve into what makes Timbah motivated to do what he does, and discuss his Scooby Doo narrative arc.So join us as Chris meets a kindred consumer of irritating content and Matt continues to ponder if it's all just cloud castles and narcissism.Also featuring... a Weinstein World update, the standard banter quotient, and an abusive Patreon shoutout segment.LinksJordan Peterson's 'Smug Judge' TweetBret Weinstein & Jonathan Pageau: Ancient Wisdom, Modern WorldTimbah's Series on Dave Rubin: Battle of IdeasTimbah's Series on James O'Keefe: 10 Years of TruthTim Pool: Chaotic News AnalystTim Pool: Fence Sitter

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about. I'm Professor Matt Brown and with me is Smug Judge Chris Kavanagh. G'day Chris. You Smug Judge you. Hello Matthew Brown or whatever your name is, whoever you are. Who is Matthew Brown? everyone is asking this question yeah so we are we are poking fun at our twitter misadventures where brett weinstein said you should reconsider your life or what you're doing right my matthew brown or whoever you are and in my case jordan peterson recently retweeted me

and called me a smug judge shocking shocking shocking how dare he matt how rude i don't know how anyone could think that about you such injustice i know and i mean that's terrible it's not that's just so inaccurate there's there's not even an inkling of truth there so um yeah yeah but uh look in your little exchange it did raise some little issues there because you know you were taking a couple of pot shots at jbp jbp did yeah yeah you know this is right after we said on our previous episode that jvp is too far gone we can't criticize him anymore it would be punching down we can't do it thoughts the problem jordan is you know

like i've listened to a bunch of his content i think he is emotionally fragile so there is an element where i think i would withhold some of my more caustic takes for him. But at the same time, you know, he rampages on Twitter, throwing tantrums and threatening people with impunity. So, like, if you're going to dish it out, you can handle the occasional critical comment. And in this case, I didn't even make a critical comment directed at him. He just didn't like that I made a snarky remark about the this guy jonathan pageau and his appearance with a bunch of idw sense maker superstars right james lindsey and brett

weinstein and jordan peterson's wife i was just saying that these appearances you can draw reasonable inferences from or is it guilt by association? That was my frame of my question, but I did appreciate my, it gave me a chance. It gave me a chance when he called me a smug judge to respond by saying, to be honest, mostly I'm just preoccupied by my quest for revenge against God for the crime of being. I did enjoy that. I have to say, give me satisfaction to quote that fact to him. So, yeah.

So we all had fun. Yeah, fun was had by all. And you took the opportunity to link him to a previous criticism you had of his lectures, which you described as including references to psychology, finger waving about how we don't really know something, references to myth and literature, complaints about the modern left, crying about something, comparison to animal,

conclusion, Jesus and the Bible, how's ultimate truth? Which I think is probably a fair summary. I mean, it's really just a description of his lectures, not so much a criticism. It is. No, I mean, you might read it as a criticism, but it's an accurate description of the majority of his content. And it was based on listening

to his recent talk at Cambridge, which featured all of those things. So, yeah. There we go. Just, you know, truth hurts. Truth hurts. Yeah. And in your defense, he did receive an ovation, did he not, at that talk at Cambridge. So he is not some kind of enfeebled invalid. He is taken extremely seriously by a lot of people. punches, so people, Matt, the fans, the internet hoi polloi. No, that's the opposite. The rabble, the internet rabble and the hoi polloi. They've been asking us to, they've been begging us to return to the Weinsteins. They've said, what are those guys up to?

What are they doing? They've said, what are those guys up to? What are they doing? And, you know, we will get back, I'm sure, to a Weinstein episode at some point in the future. But we thought instead we'd do a little mini update just on what they've been getting on to. We used to do this, right? A check-in on the Weinsteins.

So haven't done that in a while. So what have they been doing what have they been up to the brother's grim i don't remember you tell me okay so we have we'll deal with the eldest first so eric you know he's been rampaging around giving his hot takes on twitter that's what he does but i think the most notable thing that he has done recently is that he went to give a talk about alien survival and Bitcoin with Avi Loeb of the Galileo Project at Harvard at a Bitcoin conference. Harvard at a Bitcoin conference. So he's combining aliens and Bitcoin and reference to prestigious institutions all into one event. So I feel like Eric has emerged from his chrysalis as a UFO

inclined Bitcoin guy. I'm down for this. That's a better arena for him to operate in. Yeah, that's a good end game to be playing. I like that. But what's the connection? Why are they organizing a conference that's bringing together aliens and Bitcoin? Will Bitcoin or NFTs be the currency when we have developed an interstellar civilization? Will this be the only things that aliens we value of each other coins and nfts yeah well i i'll be loeb lab i don't know how to pronounce his

surname but he's a legitimate um theoretical physicist working uh i think he's now based at harvard university so there's credibility there matt Don't just dismiss it as NFTs and Bitcoins. This is important stuff. They're just hopping onto a community which is hot right now, so hot right now, and trying to get them interested in potentially finding out what extraterrestrial life. What's wrong with that, Matt? Why are you scared? I'm not scared. I'm all for it. We should do more SETI. We're going to find them. They're out there somewhere. It's the buzzing around in UFOs across Montana.

That's the bit that I'm skeptical of. I want to see more SETI. I want to see big radars, big telescopes pointed in every conceivable direction. But like I said, I think this is... I'm much more comfortable with Eric operating in this space than, you know, giving his takes on the pandemic or COVID or how we should run government. So UFOs and Bitcoins, that's fine. Yeah, that's fine. I mean, basically any take you have on Bitcoin is basically fine.

Who knows? It's not like a vaccine. It's different. Yeah. So the other brother, Brett Weinstein, well, it'll surprise you to know that he's been continuing to push

ivermectin, anti-vaccine talking points. His podcast is now over 50% just platforming anti-vax people and talking about the problems with vaccines and their alternative medical takes so he's not really even disguising it anymore like there was a defeat the mandates us.com account which was promoting some defeat the mandates coast to coast event and it's it's got a four sets of speakers and it's, it's got everyone,

Mickey Willis, Judy Mick of it's Dale Big tree. Now me wolf, you know, just all the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists people. And Brett was saying the resistance gallows tomorrow in LA grand park. Right. saying the resistance gathers tomorrow in la grand park right so i just again i think it's the reaching the end point of his trajectory into he's he's now recognized i i think should be recognized by most reasonable people as an anti-vaccine advocate and yeah that doesn't surprise because overall that fits in with his, you know, naturalistic fallacy heavy worldview and kind of crunchy perspective on stuff.

Yeah. I see that Pierre Corey and Robert Malone are at this event too, naturally. But it is odd, isn't it? Like these anti-mandate protests continue in dribs and drabs all over the place. They're continuing on in Australia too. And most people are a bit baffled by this because I don't know what it's like in every part of the world, but it's kind of over here. You know, it's done. Like, this ancient history, man. For a start, I don't believe there are mandates.

Are there? In America, there are mandates are there in america there are mandates for specific areas like specific professions and that kind of thing but i don't think there's a national mandate for vaccination so i guess well i guess you know they they still don't want it so that's what they're going on about but but actually, it's just anti-vaccine. As we know, all anti-mandate marches are just completely full of the anti-vax superstars of the world. So theoretically, the two issues are independent, but they're a reliable predictor. The anti-vax community has latched on to the COVID thing and have correctly seen that the public disgruntlement over restrictions and mandates was the perfect opportunity to leverage clout and influence. So it's not surprising that they're going to try to milk it for as long as they can, even after the cow is dead, man.

It's no longer here. I mean, and you see it in Brett Weinstein's weird theory that the Ukraine situation is some kind of manufactured event to distract people away from the fact that the vaccines haven't worked or are dangerous or something. And it's so transparent. you can see that he's just unhappy that he feels he sees the the limelight shifting and that impetus that has been fed into this anti-vax movement is vanishing like dreaming away like a dead cow yeah yeah it is like a cow that has been experimented on by an alien probe and is now in the field without a uterus so yeah that's brett that's what he's up to the other thing he did was he had a three-hour conversation with a jordan peterson clone theologian sense maker called jonathan pajou and they did a three-hour conversation about religion and science and ritual and evolution which is very related to my research interest. So if you were looking for a conversation

featuring one of the Weinsteins that we may cover in the future, this might be a fairly safe bet. But in any case, that is not today, Matt. That is not today. We've got other business. We may well be looking at Peugeot and Weinstein at some point in the near future, but that day is not today. We've got other business. We may well be looking at Peugeot and Weinstein at some point in the near future, but that day is not today.

No, sir. No. Today, we're looking at another scholar, a towering intellect. Well, really, I'm not talking about we're interviewing Timber on toast, and this is not an insulting introduction of Timber. We're discussing with timber his new series about tim pool noted internet beanie wearing commentary person towering intellect that that man is concealed under that beanie is a head full of ideas it's amazing it can be

contained in the head of one man but timber on toast is a towering intellect is a very interesting guy. Um, and we have a nice discussion with him now, one small point of correction or clarification needed. So Timba in this interview mentions he was disappointed that Sam Harris, somebody who he respects introduced Joe Rogan to the idea of having Tim pool. On the podcast, the kind of interrogate Jack Dorsey. Now, it subsequently emerged when we tried to locate this clip that we can't find it. So it may be the case, can't say for sure, but that Timber was just misremembering and it's actually

somebody else or it's just Joe Rogan who suggested Tim Pool so we may besmirch the good name of Sam Harris but the comment is made in the context of Timba kind of saying how much he likes Sam's output so I don't think it's that bad but I just wanted to clarify that that we subsequently looked for the clip and weren't able to locate it. So, might be, you know, somewhere in one of the various interviews, but it doesn't appear that Sam Harris was the one that recommended Tim Pool to Joe Rogan, which is good.

That's a good discovery. That's a good thing. Yeah, and that's fine. Sam wouldn't mind anyway. He wouldn't. No, he wouldn't. He wouldn't take you know, he wouldn't take exception to such. He's bigger than that. That's right. So, this is just for other people who might take exception that we're not spreading misinformation and timber mentioned you know just sticking the correction at the start of the next episode so there we go done there we done all

right let's get to it let's talk to him so before i introduce our, I'll just say good morning, Matt. It's an early morning. We're glad to see that your old bones made it. Yeah, good to be here, Chris. The things I do for this podcast, the things you put me through. That's right. That's right. Matt is sacrificing his bodily health for his art. That's a commitment. But the guest is Timber on Toast, who I suspect many people know from his YouTube channel of the same name, who makes short documentaries, analyzing a whole bunch of people and the kind of rhetorical techniques that they use in the video, somewhat similar to what we do, but with much more impressive production values and insight. Welcome Timber.

Timberlake Gansler Yes, yes. Very nice to meet you boys. Yeah. I think broadly, I always go to the description of I make YouTube videos about politics and culture and leave it at that. I think, I think it's very difficult when you get into describing your own field of what you do, because you get all expansive in trying to make it super broad. I think that grabs it fairly well.

Timberlake Gansler Yeah. There was a podcast interview i did a while back with someone and they said oh chris has a podcast about podcasts who's like okay that's a pretty succinct that is it yeah it's actually true and you don't need to get into like politics or anything to describe that it encapsulates it really well. Yeah, it was. It was. To give credit, I think that was Megan Dome. Timber, your videos, I think the first time I came across them was with the Dave Rubin video, which is like three years ago since it came out.

It feels like it was only yesterday. As I say, yeah, for me, it doesn't seem like that long time has passed since I started on the YouTube channel Be Right. It was, Donald Trump was president at that time. Oh God. Yeah. Although the good old days. How much we miss them.

But so the, you had a three part series on Dave Rubin, the battle of ideas, which I think a lot of our audience know about. But if if they don't, we'd highly recommend that. And the more recent series, though, we'll talk to you about today as well as the earlier ones is your Tim Pool series, which you've now produced two episodes on. But the Tim Pool chaotic news analyst and Tim Pool fence. And is there more to come with Tim Pool or are you done with him now? So this is something we'll probably go into during the podcast. I could express this, but basically it's just a lot of work, those videos. I did want to make a third one and I still might, but I feel like I'm

going to have a little break for a little bit, doing some videos about other stuff and come back to it. Yeah. So that's a solid maybe of a 13-point video, basically. Yeah, it's definitely clear how much work goes into your videos. Like, they're carefully put together and you collect a lot of, I guess, evidence or material to support the argument. So one quick question for me is what drives you what makes you feel like you need to give yourself this extra job on top of your day job um what got you into it

oh are you allowed to swear on this podcast yeah yeah i'm a massive fucking nerd so basically it all stemmed from arguments with people online. And then you feel like they haven't accepted the arguments you've put forward. And you're like, ah, if I could just express it in more words, I could literally lay everything out for you. That's how I started making the ribbon one. I just made a video addressing the things that I was constantly hearing in regard to this political figure that I didn't agree with. That is what drives me, basically. There's some perspectives that I feel, for good criticism, need to be articulated well about these people because of often how multifaceted they are in the way they present themselves

for different things they talk about. And I feel like it sounds really big-handed,, I think cause I can animate videos and do stuff with music. I think I can lay it out a lot more compellingly than I generally see other people doing, but obviously that's completely down to my own subjective taste. Well, your motivation sounds exactly the same as Chris's, which is to prove somebody wrong on the internet. That's literally that. Yeah.

I feel a kindred spirit Tim timber and when i watch your videos and it has a a pretty cathartic quality because what you describe as your motivation is how it's received because it feels like whenever people would make accusations about ruben's content or whatever they can just refuse to see it for for example, debating it on Twitter. But when you have the video evidence presented in the way that you do and kind of consistently break down the techniques that he's using, it seems like it's much harder to deny. In a way, somewhat similar to whenever we are making a point about the gurus that we cover and we play a clip of them demonstrating that they do do this it's it feels like that is harder for people to ignore

they do try but it definitely works like it feels like it would be very hard to refute a lot of the points that you raise. Well, this is the biggest difference. It's like the big form of critique that you'll see on YouTube and on podcasts is necessarily what people have to do. You take one video and then you respond to the points that are made in that video and you do some research around the edges. And so by the end of it, you're like, so I've proven that what they argue in this video is, is wrong. Or it's, it's like misinformation.

But the problem with that is it's one video. So no matter how good you broken it down, it's one thing. Like people get things wrong. It doesn't really imply anything about that character or imply anything about that overall approach that you've managed to do that, even if you managed to do it really well. So my friend described it as it's like like you want to debunk their whole life. And I think that's the approach I'm going with.

It's like, well, don't even stop when you've got like a mountain of evidence. Keep going and going and going until the points that you make in the video, you've got almost like 60 clips to prove it. And at that point, the idea is that it becomes really hard to argue against because it's like, well, if your point is that they were doing it out of misunderstanding the issue or you're very hard steel manning them to the point where you're over favorably representing them, how come they made that same mistake 60 different times over the span of two years, um, like that, I think it's when

you've got that, that it's actually as persuasive as it can be, in my opinion. But obviously that takes so much work. Yeah, yeah. For the people who haven't seen your videos, although I think most people would have, your format is a bit different from ours. Like we're much more casual. We'll take a particular piece of material and just focus on that,

mainly because we're lazy and we don't want to do all the work of having to cover all the stuff they've ever done and we're more casual about it but what you do is is as you say build up a really broad selection of evidence from all of the material to really firmly establish just probably a small number of points, but like totally backed up. So maybe you could summarize for people who haven't seen, say, your Tim Pool episode. How would you describe in a nutshell those main theses that you develop in that? Okay. So video by video, I guess. The first video is more the point that Tim Pool doesn't have the journalistic competence to be reporting on the issues in the way that he does. So in this one, it's actually mostly about the way he interprets data.

It's the way he reads articles. It's kind of all the foundational skills of what you would expect a professional reporter to be really good at. skills of what you would expect a professional reporter to be really good at. And it's lively about that, that those fundamentals that you would kind of expect from a seasoned reporter, he doesn't do very well and then towards the end of the video, the next conclusion is that he doesn't do it well on purpose. That it serves the purpose of audience validation. Now the problem with this as like a punchline or like a twist is that it's the same in every single video I make.

You go in, it's like, well, assuming they're doing badly, but at the end, it's like, oh, they just want to validate their audience. So yeah, you will find if you watch my videos, that's the conclusion of every single one of them. And the interest, I guess, for viewers is how I get to that conclusion, how I show it. That's a, that's a Sco could be do like school of purpose yeah yeah it's like let's find out why they really did it ah they're biased yeah again again that's the reason again and then in the second video uh which is the one i put out like more recently this month it's titled tim pool fence sitter and it's about the proposition that tim paul is someone who fundamentally if you look at the way he speaks and if you take clips from different video

you can find him arguing to diametrically opposed points and what this does is it means that it's really hard for anyone to fundamentally charitably characterize positions in any way. So I go through the whole video point, I lost different examples of this. And then again, towards the end, it's like, I then show how this is not Tim being undecided or Tim genuinely being like on a fence between two different positions, but rather Tim aggressively selling one side of a narrative and then backtracking enough to give himself plausible deniability. So if anyone wants to call him out on these things, he can and does say he'll throw out a non-sequitur. Like in that video where you said that I am implying there was fraud,

I explicitly said that I didn't think fraud had been committed and it's like but the whole video is about election fraud to go on to that I think this is the best way I can describe watching the way that Tim Paul operates like let's say I've got a neighbor right and this neighbor he comes up to me one day and he's like you know what I could have sworn I saw like a metallic object in the sky last night and I's like, hmm, you know what? I could have sworn I saw a metallic object in the sky last night. And I'm like, oh, that's kind of crazy. He's like, yeah. I'm not saying it's a UFO. I believe in UFOs.

Obviously, they're fake. It's kind of weird that I saw that, right? And I'm like, yeah, I guess so. And then every day after that, he comes up to me with different stories about metallic objects in the sky. He's like, oh, that's weird. There's been more reports coming out of other parts of the country about them. Hmm, strange. strange obviously i'm strictly agnostic on the issue of whether they exist or not obviously and then i see him like amassing like a group of people who are all very

avidly into ufos like they've all got like ufo merchandise on and they're all like sitting on his lawn listening to speak about ufos and so at some point i'm like okay technically he's always said that he's agnostic on the subject but i have to at some point I'm like, okay, technically he's always said that he's agnostic on the subject, but I have to, at some point his whole behavior contradicts that. He's clearly somebody who believes in UFOs and doesn't matter the technicals of what he sends on this issue. I can tell that this guy is somebody who believes in UFOs. But similarly, Tim would kind of deny the end result of all of his reporting and behavior. And I think that's the way I described it. It's like, at some point their words don't really matter their behavior tells the whole story that you

need to know to understand where their motivations are the the interesting thing about that thing is we've noticed that this is a very very similar thing we refer to it as like strategic disclaimers it's a little bit different than what you outlined in the video because the kind of like shouty animated endorsement of the conspiracy theory or extreme version and then the like softly muttered disclaimer in the content of uh heller hayne and brett weinstein for example they can spend like 20 odd minutes essentially marshalling the evidence that the whole virology community is full of like bad faith individuals who are just out to make money. And they're afraid to tell the truth. They're lying about the side effects of vaccines.

We know this because the pharmaceutical industry has been doing things for decades and so on they'll marshal like 20 minutes of like unbroken evidence about the corruption of the virologists and the international scientific community and then they add like a less than 30 second often disclaimer to say no are we saying that's true we don't know that's true and we don't say anything but it's amazing how many people then when you say well they were advancing the conspiracy theory that they're like no did you miss you know they said they're not sure and you're like right but they just spent 20 minutes telling you like telling you quite clearly that they are sure and it's it's this weird thing because i feel like in everyday life that you know that doesn't work like if you have a

you know a used car salesman or whatever like people would would get that right that like they've they're being manipulated but there's this weird thing where it works really, really well online, like surprisingly well. I think, Matt, we've even talked about it being a magic spell that if people just say, of course, I'm being reasonable and I'm not making conspiracies, it's almost like there's a portion of the audience

which is like, well, he was being reasonable and not making conspiracies. Brett Weinstein, I've noticed, he's a big fan of the prepositional phrase, if this is true, so he'll be like, if this is true, what we're seeing here is true. That we are witnessing the biggest, most horrendous abuse of human rights in the history of humanity. And it's like, well, you've prefaced it with, if this is, that's not the kind

of thing you say, if you're not sure about something look this is true of so many of our gurus like jordan peterson is another perfect example he'll say that he's speculating and that he's just built like this massive cloud castle from something that he himself admitted at the beginning was a speculation but look i had a slightly different take on your thing like i agree about the strategic disclaimers and there's that similarity between your analysis and ours. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you were getting it more than that. Because, you know, in the fence sitting, someone like Tim Pool claims being super duper precise and that they're going on and on and on and flipping backwards and forwards because they're delineating exactly what it is they're saying and what they're not saying and i think one of the points you make really forcefully that's not what they're doing

at all and again jordan peterson's another good example he's you know super big on preciseness right purportedly but in actual fact um what they accomplish with all of that backwards and forwards is is that you can it's almost either it's a set of tea leaves or a Rorschach diagram. Even though they are pushing, as you say, a particular line, they want you to come away with a certain conclusion. As well as that, they can almost claim to have any position. You can take a wide variety of interpretations from what it is they say.

So there's just something very deceptive about what they're doing. Well, that's it. Basically, it allows the audience to take it in whatever way they need to. And this is the other thing. When you're speaking to someone who habitually watches Tim Pool, it's really hard to identify the people who are genuinely taken in with Tim Pool's arguments and the people who are deliberately obfuscating what they know he's getting at because it's a stronger argumentative position.

So especially on the election fraud stuff, if you watch Tim Pool's videos between November 2020 and January 2021, all the way up to January the 6th, to be honest. Tim was pushing back the date when Joe Biden could legitimately be declared president. And I think people have said, well, this is what I've heard so much. They say, well, Tim's explicitly said he doesn't think there was widespread fraud. He just said there was lots of irregularities. And it's like, yeah, but he was talking about the irregularities like every episode, all day. And on the basis of those irregularities, he was saying that he didn't think

the election should be certified because there was too many irregularities. So at a certain point, how is his argument any different from the people who think there was fraud? Like, he thinks there was irregularities to the degree that he thinks the election shouldn't be certified

in favor of the person who won. Yeah. But you don't know with the people you're talking to, who knows that's the case. And they're just arguing from the position of, well, he wasn't saying X and Y because it's a stronger position to put Tim in. Or whether they're genuinely bought in with his rhetoric. Yeah. I mean, one way to describe that, I suppose, is the kind of modern bailey stance yeah where you can have this spectrum of arguments from or positions from very very extreme to to only just

very slightly extreme which you can take depending on the level of resistance you're getting or depending as you say is on the audience right like with the anti-vax stuff that we see, for instance, you can see that it works for people that are on the whole spectrum from just slightly vaccine skeptical to the hardcore conspiracy theorists. But I just want to touch on one more thing. Sorry, Chris, I'll pass it over to you, which is that I think another point you make is that, Which is that, I think another point you make is that, again, similar to many of our gurus, it's very much preaching to an audience that likes to have a self-image of being not politically ideological, not strongly committed to a particular position, but middle-of-the-road, open-minded, intellectual-type people who approach things in a very rational way

so that's obviously a self-image that a lot of people like to have about themselves but it provides that but it also provides the sort of emotional gut punch the extremely satisfying red meat type propaganda they get smuggled in so the listener gets to have their cake and eat it too in terms of thinking that of themselves as a very reasonable not ideologically committed person but also have all of their ideological buttons pushed is that a fair description yeah well this yeah this is part of it is that tim is essentially two different people he's one character essentially when he's banging his fists on the table he he's shouting at the camera, there's like spit flying out of his mouth. And he's like, they want to fuck you over.

They want to fuck regular Americans over. But it's like one person. And then he'll come out at the end of the video. And he's like, all I'm saying is we need to have a rational discussion. We need to talk about things. And it's like, you would not be rational just five minutes ago. Like flashback to five minutes ago, you would be at a different person. It's like, there's two different people.

One of the things like visualize video is there are two different people living in tips head who have different levers and neither of them can retain full control over him. So he's either one or the other. I see on Twitter, a lot of lefties, they like sharing videos of Tim when he's like going off the rails. When he delivers these very, very long, actually really, really good fear A lot of lefties, they like sharing videos of Tim when he's like going off the rails. When he delivers these very, very long, actually really, really good, fierce monologues.

And I mean, good in the sense of not that they're true, but amazing political theatre of the sort of type that you would see from Alex Jones. And that's the only other person I can remember who does it as well as Tim does where he's fully passionate. He's in a rage and he's, it's like he can coherently deliver 12 points whilst maintaining this level of aggression. Um, and it's amazing to watch. It's like, whoa, this guy is so passionate about this stuff. And I think the lefties share that clip as if, oh, look how much of an idiot he's been, but that's exactly the kind of spread of his content, which I think gets him more viewers and that's the Tim that his fans like.

And that is for me, that's the Tim his fans like actually gravitate towards. That's the pull of his content is hearing someone say to the establishment, fuck you and say really, really precisely and clearly and for a long time, because that's what his videos are. He says, fuck you to the establishment over and over and over again. So you're saying that the reasonable and thoughtful Tim Pool is there to provide plausible deniability? Yeah, and the other side of Tim, I don't think anyone would actually draw to that version

of him, but I think it just comes up handy in these situations where suddenly they have to defend why they're watching someone with a delusional Alex Jones-level hype around him. But, you know, you look at that in isolation, like, why would you trust this person? Then they'll pull up,

but look, he said, this reasonable take on this, he said. And he always looks at things rationally. And often the fact that he's going crazy is used as evidence that this is the average guy. This is how much the establishment have pushed the average guy to the edge. Like, he's going crazy is used as evidence that this is the average guy this is how much the establishment have pushed the average guy to the edge like he's the most reasonable amongst us and

yet look how mad he is the interesting thing about that is that it heard the guys on knowledge fight talk about this issue as well right but when the clip goes viral of alex jones like freaking out about something and going on one of his unhinged rounds, that it tends to do the rounds and get shared and they feel like somewhat ambivalent about that, if not negative, because they think that it can downplay what Alex actually does. Right. That's like the crazy dramatic Alex, but his content is quite insidious, like the

worldview that he's promoting. And with Tim, there's like this paradox, like say Tim Pool Clips, who I know helped you a lot for the research for the video and is a great account in general. And he made this like excellent edited video of all the times that Tim Pool was predicting 40 state landslide or whatever. Outstanding, that compilation, outstanding. Like it's become a foundational text in Tim Pool lore very quickly. Yeah, and the version with the little crabs dancing,

that's my favorite version of it. And I think that video was really effective as well. So I'm not saying this in any knock on the Timpo Clips account because I think it's great. But I saw when you were in your new video highlighting that some of the ways that Tim tries to discredit those videos, he basically says, well, look, they're just taking these edited snippets of me saying things. And they don't take the fact that I include disclaimers and the fact that I'm much more reasonable. And I thought that's why your video was really good, because it does show that,

and it shows how that's a rhetorical technique. But there is one issue that, say somebody watches some critical clips of Tim Pool, and they say, well, this guy looks like an idiot. And then they go to his video and they see a random video. And in the video, he comes across as much more, oh, he said some extreme stuff, but he walked it back and he also added disclaimers and all that. It feels like he has the possibility to basically say, well, the people taking the extreme clips,

they're just selective editing. I think in full context makes it weirder because it's like, you've got someone predicting a 49 state landslide for Trump and in the same video, they're saying, well, part of me is worried the Democrats will win though. And it's like, this is bipolar disorder. You've got two completely different statements there. So you could say that you've taken it out of context by just putting one, but look at them both together. It's completely conceptually impossible.

I actually think this is why people could say, why spend any amount of time on Tim Pool when he's such a vehicled human? Even if you think that Tim Pool is doing like shock jock daily political analysis or just reading headlines and reacting in a manner similar to Alex Jones at the same time, Alex Jones, Tim Poole and Dave Rubin, all of such figures, their content might be very skewed and like partisan, like the way you described with the UFO guy, right? Just constantly. If you look at Tim Poole's channel and they're very clearly skewed

but the techniques that they use and that you illustrate in the videos they can be actually rhetorically quite sophisticated this yeah it's smart yeah so like your breakdown of tim pool i think is actually highlighting that for all his limitations, he actually has a very slick way of presenting things. And like, when you bring it down and point out what he's doing, when you stop his sentences and say, okay, so he said this, and then in the next sentence, he contradicted himself. And then the one following that, he's back on the same point. I think it's very helpful because it lets people see, oh, right. Yeah.

This has the image of reason, but it's the opposite. It's mostly rhetorical. As you said, it's the stopping and summarizing that points it out. Cause I think it'd be really easy to miss this if you're just listening. Especially because I think the way in which most people consume Tim Pool's videos, I don't think people sit and like avidly watch Tim Pool videos. I think they've got them almost as podcasts where they go to work and they've got like Tim talking about the news of the day to them. He's like, who's the guy that blew up the Bill Clinton sex scandal, who was really beloved by conservatives until he turned against Donald Trump. Do you know the guy?

Oh God, it's on the tip of my tongue. The Drudge Report. Drudge. The Drudge Report. Yeah, yeah. Matt Drudge. So I think Tim Pool's channel, because he releases so frequently, he's like a Drudge style, not even a figure.

He's like a Matt Drudge service. He aggregates all the conservative news of the day. If you listen to his show, he does it midday and his podcast at night, you will hear about every single conservative hot button issue that's been out there. So that's very useful for your conservative. You're going to know everything that conservative is talking about. So I think people have his videos on in the background. And if you're listening to it in that way, you're not going to catch, for example, him

saying something and walking it back because it's really subtle the way it actually happens in the video. It's only with someone going stop right this is the argument he's made and pointing out to you the argument he's just made i think you have to do that in order to understand why it doesn't make sense because it does make sense in a roundabout way when you're listening to it yeah what you say there is interesting because it just parallels so closely the thoughts we've been having in this stopping and breaking down and being clear about precisely what is being claimed or what kind of logical argument is being built up, that's a very particular mode of treating text or speech, right? And there is another mode, right? And you talked about if you just let it flow over you without paying close attention, then

it can all slip by you. And this is true of so many of our gurus. Like for some reason, I'm citing Jordan Peterson a lot today, but I'm going to cite him again. When I think of myself, when I was first listening to Jordan Peterson, I didn't really notice any issues. I thought he was pretty sharp. If you just let it flow over you, it comes across really, really well. I've

come to realize, I'm probably listening to so many gurus, that what they're doing is a kind of impressionistic poetry. And it's this scattergun thing. You mentioned with Tim Pool, he'll say this thing about, I'm very certain that the Democrats are going to win the landslide. Then he'll say, but I'm worried what's going to happen if the Democrats actually do win. And then he'll say, but we just don't know because the points contradict each other. It's not internally consistent, but a little bit like poetry, that doesn't matter. If you just let it flow over you, then the impression that is created is extremely effective. I'm going to rep someone that I feel like your listeners probably don't like very much called Sam Harris, who I love. He's one of my favorite commentator centrist I've got a point to make about something left doing wrong. And basically hit his podcast by episode.

I mean, it was mainly criticizing the right and he was very forceful. He was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing.

And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing.

And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very clear about what he was criticizing. And he was very make about something left doing wrong. And basically hit his podcast by episode. I mean, it was mainly criticizing the right. And he was very forceful.

He was very clear about what he was criticizing. He was like, we've got a sitting president. Who's basically spurned on the campaign, not just the speech, but the campaign that caused this someone, and he kind of cheered it on. Right. And he called that out very harshly. And he's like, now I've got something to call out on the left. And he was like, people are saying that this is an example of racism that they didn't shoot the protesters. And he's like, now I've got something to call out on the left. And he was like, people are saying that this is an example of racism,

that they didn't shoot the protesters. And he's like, obviously that's not the case, but I can come away from that. And I, I know the two arguments he made. Yeah. He called out the left for, for a thing. And then the thing that he called out the right for was a complete different thing. So they don't contradict each other. He wasn't saying now, I think this was the most serious, horrible event ever,

but I also think it wasn't that bad. And people are going too mad over it because that's the analysis we got from Tidpool. This was a horrible event. People shouldn't be violent, but the left are blowing this apart. It's like, well, if you think it's a horrible event, then surely how could people blow a really, really horrible event out of proportion by saying that it's horrible? And that was Sam, like Sam Harris is clear in separating the two things he says. And even though he's super verbose, which he is, and he's super artsy-bartsy language where he'll go on these very wordy sermons where sometimes it's very descriptive and it does get a bit hard to him, but I definitely agree with you. I wouldn't say that he does the same kind of impressionistic scattergun. He does do his best to be pretty clear and

logical and achieves that goal more often than not. What do you reckon, Chris? Yeah, so I think Timber probably our audience is 50 50 split on their attitude to sam and when people took a poll on our subreddit it was around like an almost 50 50 split and then in my case with sam i i think that he does do what you are saying often, which is he does very carefully construct arguments and clearly delineate points that he's making, right? In a way, which is not characteristic of a person like Tim Pool. The only kind of pushback I would offer to that, because I have to, is that I think Sam

can, on occasions, when he wants to argue for something, his arguments can be contradictory. Not when he's giving his prepared monologue on this podcast, but in the sense when he's talking to you and saying that he's very concerned about like X and then will downplay the extent that say the right wing extremism is a substantial problem. But then, in other contexts, acknowledge it. Yeah. Well, I think he did that all the way up till the later years of Trump. I know that was a point he was making before. It was like, well, the threat that we have for right-wing extremism,

it's got to be so much lower down the scale than Islamic extremism, which I definitely strongly disagreed with at the time. I think he's changed that. Now, he said in the podcast, like, you consider it upticked from what I said before about right-wing extremism. I think there's more of a problem now. There are points I fundamentally disagree with him on, but just in his style of speaking and the way he presents things, I think, yeah, I broadly, I'm a supporter.

Yeah. speaking the way he presents things i think yeah i broadly i'm a supporter yeah and i i think like for my disagreements with sam there's a lot that we actually i agree on but there's something that i find peculiar and i think it links to tim pool and a lot of the figures that you cover so with dave rubin your analysis of him quite clearly showed the kind of obvious partisan bias in his content, right? With Tim Poole, it's also evident if you spend any sort of time with his content. And yeah, whenever people are talking about the deficiencies in the online media or ecosystems, especially like folks from the intellectual dark web area, they tend to be very clear on what the problems are with CNN and so on.

And they might hand-wavingly make references to the existence of Fox and we all know that's a problem. But where they seem much less aware and also to have spent almost no time considering is the TMPL or Dave Rubin for that matter, where Sam was a defender of Dave Rubin for a surprisingly long time. And even with Tim Pool, there was a point where Tim was interacting with Sam on Twitter and Sam was kind of reinsuring Tim. Sam was the one that recommended Tim to Joe Reagan for the Twitter episode.

Yeah. Like look, I'm not, the worst, the worst crime he's ever committed, in my opinion. Yeah. That's a,

he definitely deserves some very like, he deserves. Yeah. He deserves a, like a social justice cancellation for that one. And I would be part of the book. The timber on that point though, I'm curious what you make

of that because I feel like there is this strange thing where it's either the people are not looking or they're like, there's a legitimate blindness to Sam interacting with Timpool. That's fine, interact with Timpool.

But he didn't seem aware of what Tim Poole fundamentally is trying to reassure Tim that we're both on the same side against the woke and I was like Sam you don't want to be on like Tim Poole or Paul Joseph Watson side when it comes to these kind of issues these are not the kind of people you want to be reassuring that you're both working together. But there's a blindness, it feels, around the kind of centrist, rationalist side about what a lot of these characters are doing. And James O'Keefe would definitely fall into that. A lot of people seem to be like, well, he might have a bias, but he's revealing real issues. But he's revealing real issues.

So, yeah, I wonder what you think, maybe like Matt, you're somewhere around the left leaning centrist spectrum, but there does seem to be a pathological blindness. Matt Therese. Matt Therese. Yeah, I would say so this is the last point I'm specifically on Sam Harris, before we broaden it, I think certainly with that Tim Pool recommendation, that was at a time you've got, and actually this is something that strikes me as just very interesting now. If you look at my video about Dave Rubin, I think it was the third one. I make a point where I say that Dave Rubin has had this meteoric rise to be the top

conservative commentator, which he was in 2019, or that time that I made the video. And I show, I'm like, he's been so much more successful than every other commentator in this space. And I show some other conservative type commentators speaking out against the wunk and I include Tim Pool as part of that montage and I say, he's so much bigger than all these people and I include him as always someone who just hasn't made it that big.

Cause he hadn't at that point. And that was around the time when he was recommended for that podcast. I genuinely think Sam Harris hadn't watched that much of his content, but even if he had, he wouldn't have found anything as bad as what exists about Tim pool now in his content. And even if you look at my videos, the kind of things I'm criticizing Tim for, where the videos go back to 2019 or 2018, it's about him, like he's talking about his willingness to blame for obesity, which it's a point that's broadly anti-left, right?

But it's in that space where it's like, well, it's not a serious appointment to make, or I don't see how anyone's going to come away from this with this crazy vindictive feelings against the better countrymen who happen to be Democrats. Whereas you look at his more recent videos, I can totally see how someone in Tim Poole's audience would hate anyone who's a Democrat with a passion. And obviously, Sam Harris hasn't talked about Tim Poole since then. And I feel like now he would slap past himself in the face for recommending him to something like that.

The way I originally came across Tim Pool was when Paul Joseph Watson funded him to go to Malmo, right, in Sweden to do a special report. This is the kind of thing I think that a lot of rationalists or so on think is a legitimate signal to detect. think is an illegitimate signal to detect. Because when Paul Joseph Watson referred to Tim Pool as his favorite balanced journalist, my alarm about, oh, this guy is very unlikely to be a balanced, reasonable journalist went off. And then I looked into Tim's history and saw the Occupy movement and saw that he had a sort of legitimate claim, but he was promoting that he was a candidate for Times Person of the Year. He was put in the category of journalists of the Occupy movement kind of thing. movement kind of thing and and i feel there is this business tendency where within the the sense making and rationalist community and so on that they don't like you saying oh paul joseph watson recommended them and and that triggered a warning sign because they see it as like well that's guilt bias association but it it's proven to be, those kinds of things tend to be actually very reliable signals.

Like if you're being consistently recommended by terrible conspiracy theorists, the chance that you are actually a very balanced, you know, non-partisan journalist is very low. I'm just saying that I think with Tim Pool, although the signs were less evident, I think if you looked critically, they were always there, even if its content was a lot better than what it is now, like where it's descended to now.

I don't think its trajectory is depressing, but it was predictable in a way. Like it would be more surprising if he had ended up actually a rigorous balanced journalist. Or do you think that's unfair? I think we're massively overestimate the amount that Sam Harris would have looked into Tip's content. I genuinely get this impression that the fact that he defended Ruben for a long

time, I don't feel like Sam was like watching Ruben's episodes and being like, no, he's actually really good. I think Sam was just ambiguously defending a friend without knowing anything about what Dave Ruben was promoting or the people he was having on his show. I think we totally agree with you there. This isn't meant to be a Sam badging thing because we could list off nice things to say about Sam as well. But in common with a number of other gurus it really is surprising sometimes how little background like research or just knowledge goes into it some of the statements or endorsements of other figures i just wanted to agree with you that this is something we've definitely talked about a lot. This is the other thing though, is everyone is the hero of their own

story, right? And so I think, obviously we know that people are influenced by audiences, but I think when we think about that, we think about you're purposefully playing into your audience and you're sifting through to see what can most persuasively sell to these idiots that you've got in your audience.

But I think they're far more influenced in it than they know. So I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, these blind spot they have for certain people who they'll defend almost without looking into them, I wouldn't be surprised if subconsciously they know, like, cause they've received comments that their audience likes these kinds of people. If not the person in question that you're talking about, that people of their ilk.

likes these kind of people, if not the person in question that you're talking about, the people of their ilk. And because these commentators have all got big off speaking, having a platform, they're not going to rationalize it as, I got big by liked these gullible fools. They're going to look at it as, I got big because people value what I say and I'm making sense. And when you look at the people they'll defend, it's people that broadly exist in the same spectrum of where the sense makers, and so you say they've got a blind spot, I don't think that it's lack of research and I don't think they're consciously doing it, but they're influenced to ignore all the warning signs about these people in my community.

For example, I know like I get a lot of comments around destiny. Have you heard of destiny? Yeah. Hmm. Twitch stream destiny? Yeah. Twitch streamer. Yeah. He's massively toxic on Twitter, but the best debate hands down. I don't think I've ever seen anyone debate better than he does

with like conservative people. He's like not a deluge of comments, but it's a stream of comments that happens often enough that I notice it where if I reference destiny or bring up anything like ponce about destiny I'll get people like destiny oh my god that guy and it's not that it's not that it makes me feel bad in any way but when you're then thinking about making a new bit of content or putting something out you're then when you're reaching for the destiny clips you suddenly got that finger back, oh, I'll get a little bit push like, oh, is it worth it? I might as well.

Do you know what I mean? And it just leads you on to, you know, maybe in interviews when people ask you about it, you back off talking about destiny in this way, I think similarly with these guys, they vaguely know their audience like these people who they're getting asked to provide a statement on, or do you think this person's honest? But they're like, well, I don't know enough about him. I, because they know at the back of their minds, there's that thing that they know there's enough of their audience to be bothered about it, that it's one either

skirting around the topic completely, or even going the other way and saying something nice about the person because it's the least hassle route to go down. In your Dave Rubin videos, your early videos, it's quite clear, right? You have a relatively positive assessment of Eric Weinstein. Very much so, yeah. In comparison to Dave Rubin. And I will say that the approach that you saw to Eric, like I remember the very first time I saw Eric and he was on the Rubin show with Jordan Peterson and

a bunch of them like sat around having a chat. And I remember listening to Eric and he started going on about economics theory. And he was probably like, now that I'm familiar with his content, he was probably talking about gauge theory and using physics term. But I remember thinking, wow, this guy is like, why is he here with these people? He's really like a cut above, like he's talking about economics theories and stuff that these people don't seem to know anything about.

And then I didn't pay much attention to Eric's content. And now we have. I think like in that respect, it's an illustration that you can be looking critically at content. You can be aware of these techniques. And part of the reason that the Weinsteins have proven a subject of fascination for me and Matt is that we feel they're doing something new

in the conspiracy space. And that, you know, it's tied to the way that they can present science and martial economics and so on in a way that's convincing. But I'm curious about your opinion of Eric has shifted somewhat, but maybe it's a good illustration when you were preparing those videos, right? That you went and did an extensive check into like, is Eric much better than Ruben? And let me deep dive in his content.

This is what I'd still say. and let me deep dive into his content. This is what I'd still say. I think the main point I was making is that if you take Eric out of the context of the Rubin Report and essentially take him out of the context of the culture war, he's actually really interesting.

There was another interviewer that did an interview with him. I think it was in 2015 or 2014. So that's before the intellectual dark web. It's before all of Eric's entry into the culture war. And when he's talking about languages, when he's talking about like different cultural traits, and it's not got the spin of Rubin's political edge, there's nothing wrong with it. But then as soon as you put him in the culture war, he's suddenly obliviating about points that are kind of life or death issues

in American politics for people. And speaking to an audience who I don't think they're able to pass the difference between an intelligent person who's generally intelligent, but doesn't really know that much about the issues that you need to in order to make an authoritative claim about political issues they can't pass the difference between that vaguely intelligent person and someone who actually knows what they're talking about when they talk about the issues that eric talks about because i think that's what eric is he's a vaguely intelligent person but in the areas that he talks about he doesn't really have any specialism that would allow him to give any insights that are greater than the vast majority of us, right?

But he's really good at dressing it up. I think it would be right to say that my opinion on Eric has changed, but I still don't see him as some nasty potent force in the same way as Tim Paul, James O'Keefe, like those kinds of people. I just see Eric as a sort of blabbering, nothing. Cause he just says, he kind of, he just posts these tweets,

you read the threads and I'm like, what you said, you so many words, you've said so little. And it's just like, seems to cash in on these opportunities where like Sam's involved in being with someone. Eric will step in.

Like I am a friend to Sam and name X or the person from the culture. I will mediate this. It's like, no one asked me to get involved, Derek. I'm pretty sure no one cares about you being involved on Twitter in this thing. Least of all, Sam and the other person we've been talking about. They've probably got bigger followers than you.

So it's more I just see it as a little bit of a clout-chasing nothing burger now. But not necessarily a bad pun. Well, look, we're probably definitely less, we're definitely less charitable to Eric. I partly perhaps because we're as triggered by blathering narcissists as a political.

So it seems like they're graduate. Good. Yeah. For, from a few podcasts I listened to. They do. They do. Um, but I did see you tweet once about narcissism and these figures. And this is something that's become more central for us, I think. And we're doing a bit of

psychologizing It's True and trying to understand the motivations and the appeal. We've also talked a lot, as you mentioned, about the way in which this audience capture happens. And I think the influence of the audience happens to everyone. It's a very normal human thing to think twice about saying things that will disappoint the people that you're talking to. And it can almost happen subconsciously, I think. I think it's probably also fair to say that if you have these narcissistic traits, then you are going to be more sensitive to those dynamics, those levers of approval, and tend to chase the praise and the adoration more so than somebody more in the normal spectrum. So, yeah, I mean, do you think we're on the money there? Do you think narcissism is like a core defining trait of people who tend to do this kind of thing i think it's the

core defining trait of everyone and it's the people who think it's just a trait of people who are like doing these youtube videos and stuff i think they vastly underestimate what they would behave like if they had an audience of a size that these people do validating them and i don't think even we like you guys and me can picture it because obviously i've got a fairly sizable audience i've got like 70 000 subscribers which is a lot of people to validate me and my opinions but having a million people doing that is on a completely different scale. No one can picture what that would do to you in terms of how it would change your self-perception and how it would change the way you look at yourself and your place in the world.

Because if you've got a million people lifting you up and praising you for, quote unquote, getting the truth out, which is something that people like to say about the alternative media pundits, suddenly you don't probably see it as a YouTube channel and you actually see it as like a calling. You're like, wow, I've actually found what I was put on this planet to do. And look like the proof is in the numbers. Cause look how many people are listening to it. So I think narcissism, I don't think they actually have any more narcissists than the average person but it would take someone i don't know it would take like a jesus christ style figure actually that depicts jesus as a not narcissistic person

which i think the bible masses that would point to be quite nice we know what you mean we had that story about you know we had that story about when jesus goes to the he goes to the house of the two women and one of the women is like trying to get everything ready for jesus and she's like busy in the kitchen she's like cooking like loads of nice food for him and she's like cleaning the whole house and she's gone on out and her sister does nothing and she just was in the living room with jesus the whole house and she's gone on out and her sister does nothing and she's just in the living room with jesus the whole time and then she gets the the biggest jar of perfume in the house and she pours it over jesus's feet and the the sister i agree with because she's like why are you not helping me oh my god like i'm sweating buckets here and i'm doing all this work and then

jesus turns to her and he says your sister did did right by me that's what you should have done and i'm just like well i'm not just a piece of like she's she's the one who's going on how to cook food for you and stuff and you're praising like this like do nothing person who just poured the most expensive perfume on your feet like he didn't even reject the perfume he allowed her to do that expensive perfume on your feet. Like he didn't even reject the perfume. He allowed her to do that. There's a lot of Bible verses that have somewhat questionable moral lessons to extract from them. The lesser told tales of the Bible, especially different times.

If somebody now came into your house and you poured a large amount of perfume over their feet, they probably wouldn't take it as, look what this person did to honor me. You were making the point that perhaps these figures are not narcissists, but rather any one of us in the same situation would be. There's a lot of truth in that. But at the same time, if you take Donald Trump and compare him to other politicians, I'm sure all politicians at the top echelons of the presidential race in the United States are narcissistic to some

degree, like we all are, maybe even more so than the normal person. But at the same time, Trump is special, right? He's a bit different. Chris, what do you think? Yeah, the argument you're making, Timba, and I always think it's better to err towards the side of charity with people and to go for it. I do think that's a valuable position to take. At the same time, I can't help but think Robert Wright was talking about, Robert Wright, this commentator online, public intellectual, was talking about Robert Malone and his conspiratorial tendencies

and his persecution complex. And he made the point that everyone has these feelings that they aren't giving enough credit and that there may be sinister forces arrayed at kind of keeping them down. And he was putting Robert Malone at the top of that spectrum, but he was saying it's all a continuum and we're all on that. And, and I'm on board with us all being on that and being aware that we have some of the same issues. And if we had a huge audience, you don't know how you would react to that. But at the same time, I see in figures like the Weinsteins and Jordan Peterson

and Tim Pool, This thing which is different from ordinary people that like when you go back and look at their early content before they were famous, there's often other people remarking on the level of self-aggrandizement that they have and their tendency to see themselves as like having revolutionary insights or world that they are at the forefront of ideas, even if there's no actual evidence of that from their, the output of their work. And I think that sense that like,

I don't get the impression that like you, Timba, or Matt, or I have this notion that like, well, actually what the world really needs is to put like me and Timba and Matt in at the head of government to get everything working right. And if they just did that, we'd be able to straighten this all out. I think what it comes down to is maybe something slightly different. It's all life. I think what it comes down to is maybe something slightly different. So not the level of narcissism within the person, but maybe the extent to which that pushes them to make bigger lies and bigger claims, because I feel like you could be quite a narcissistic individual in your head and be like, principally,

I don't want to say that that's ludicrous. That's going too far. But it seems like there's a certain level you go over and ronald is definitely in that category where he's almost it doesn't even matter if he gets caught out on a lie he'll just spin it again and that's also the thing you see with donald trump so it's like the way their narcissism that maps onto this kind of flagrant disregard for consequences of things they say that might come back to bite them, like they lose an awareness of that. Yeah.

You disagree, I can tell. Yeah, look, it's one of those things, isn't it? Like we're psychologizing, so one can never really say. Like when we first covered Eric and Brett Weinstein, we went through some of Brett's first appearances on the portal where they went into great length regarding all of the groundbreaking revolutionary theories discoveries and how they were stolen from him and he wasn't given the credit he was deserved and there was this tale of grievance and of course eric has his own tales of grievance many of them and they

have pretty much frankly said that themselves and other people or their family deserve Nobel Prizes now I've worked for an academia for 20 years so I've met a bunch of academics and all academics are hungry for recognition right this is the game and I think all academics do have a bit of a tendency to imagine that their contribution was a bit bigger than it actually was, to be somewhat jealous of each other and so on. That's all true. But at the same time, I've met just a few that were on another level and generally pretty toxic personalities. They generally don't do very well because they alienate everyone around them. And just relating my impression of those brothers

to my professional experience, I definitely place them in the quasi-pathological category. Yeah, I think this has been a thing in academia because it's part of the thing. You've got to keep publishing, haven't you? So it's almost like a system that necessitates that like hungry desire for, as you say, like recognition and doing work that also finding a gap for your research. Inevitably, you've got to go to more and more niche stuff in order to be a

recognized expert in that field, because like all the gaps, I suppose things that people discover now might become a bigger thing further down the line but there's so many gaps that are plugged so um this comes really strongly in on the guy which of the ones that you're talking about is the mrna guy that's robert malone yeah right yeah so in his very like little niche of mrna it just so happens he struck gold with that after the fact right right? Because at the point when he did his research, it wasn't a fully-fledged vaccine that was being used to treat the whole world, but it became that. And so I think that's a really, really crafty tool he's got in his toolbox

to plan his interviews, the fact that he can say that. Yeah, I mean, he's another good example, of course, of someone who has a personal tale of grievance. And just my personal take is I relate that to narcissistic personality type. It's just one of those things. It's one of those markers of people towards the end of that spectrum. I have a question, Timber, because I definitely do recognize in your content a similar mentality, for better or worse, with myself. a similar mentality for better or worse with myself.

And I'm curious about when you cover a character, any of the ones you've covered, Tim, Tim Ruhl, James, Tim Poole, James O'Keefe or Dave Rubin, you do like exhaustive analysis of them. And I will also say that this is just a side note, but to praise you, but I've seen that your analysis, it gets endorsed by a wide array. I'll hear it endorsed on Knowledge Fight, which is quite a leftist leaning podcast, and hear it endorsed on Rebel Wisdom,

which is very IDWA sympathetic. So I think it's very good to have that broad appeal. The question is, so when you do the deep dive on the people, and after you're finished i know that you like with temple after you produce a video you need a mental break right when we do coverage of joe rogan we don't want to talk about joe rogan again for the next like six to twelve

months but i wonder that yeah and yeah i know but does it feel like, say, James O'Keefe, is that basically like, now you're able to go, well, I've done him, he's out of my mental sphere. Yeah, that's the whole idea. The thing is, I've gotten myself into spirals of video production that I really didn't want to be in. In terms of the way I'm working through this, I get to a mental place where I hate making the series.

I hate the fact that I committed to a series instead of one video. But the idea is very much like, so Dave Rubin, I will never make a video about him ever again. James O'Keefe, I will never make a video about him ever again. The idea is I do it so thoroughly, the process, that I never have to come back to them. But the process itself is horrible because idea is I do it so thoroughly, the process, that I never have to come back to them. But the process itself is horrible because essentially what I do is I do all the research up front, which is imagine like it's just three, four months of no videos getting

made. And I'm just watching those videos and noting down all the things that I see that might be of interest, but are not guaranteed to be of interest when I'm making the series. And so what I end up with is these, I've got like a Google document that's like Tim Pool, 2017, Tim Pool, 2018. Each one is like 80 pages long, full of different notes on different videos. And then when I come to like, how I'm going to make the series, I then grip it by, I try and sort of thematically say right well is there a theme in the things he's getting wrong that goes into one category that goes into another but the whole the problem with it is I made a video about about music I made two videos about music actually about like genres of music that I like and I found that there was this lovely creative process where I was

writing the scripts and it just came straight out of my head and just landed on the page and it was like a joy to write about those subjects. Whereas the political videos I make, it's you're constantly like chipping away at this massive pile of bits of evidence you've got and often I'm going into videos and I've got a certain conclusion and I realized that I don't have the evidence to substantiate that conclusion. So I have to change the whole thing. Um, because what it does is it focuses your mind to think, can I actually say that? It's like, I've only got two clips of that.

So probably not, probably that's not a thing they do a lot. If I watched all these videos and I can only find two examples. So it's a really arduous, arduous process. And like this, obviously I did my first Timberfall one. The second one, I got held up because I was in a horrible job last year where I was working like 15 hour days. So I couldn't do any video stuff for a while. But I was chipping away at that second one for so long and trying to work out what the video was about before I got to the Ben City thing. So I was like, that's what you call it, like what he's doing.

And then it sort of fleshed out from there. But yeah, because it's such a long process, inherently, I never want to think about these characters ever again after i've made the series that sort of sounds healthy like in in a good way and i think what you intend is what happens it does feel like you don't need to return to reuben and i i often see people now essentially say well you know what the Rubin does, just look at Timber's like three part series. So I think that's definitely to your credit and what you're describing as your process, it actually sounds very similar to how we clip for the episodes, right?

We're doing that on a much smaller scale, but we're listening through the content usually like at, at least twice, if not more, and then noting down clips and then extracting them and trying to remember afterwards. And we end up with like hundreds of clips from a couple of episodes and then thematically collect them into these folders, which might be conspiracism or might be like strategic disclaimers surely the conspiracism folder is just like everything like this is there there are certain folders that tend to become rather like uh huge in nature often that's overwhelming like i don't

know if you know but matt listened to six hours of Joe Rogan and he couldn't resist mentioning it. Damn bro, that's crazy. Like what you do is like it compared to us, it's on a much grander scale, like months of preparation to go into it. But this is, I coming back to something else you said as well, that I think part of the reason why I wouldn't say I have a broad political appeal as in you know i appeal to the right as much as i do the left no i make it a very specific point in my youtube about me to stay lefty politic i think one of the main things i'm criticizing about these people i criticize

is that presenting themselves as something other than what they are but they would be massively hypocritical if i was to go in pretending i had no political affiliation pretending i had no political views that i was obviously like invested in because it's wrong of course i am but i think the reason why the videos have broad appeal is because i don't reveal my hand until the end of the videos usually so what you find is usually so like david fuller i know he's like the guy from rebel wisdom yeah i know he's someone who is he's vaguely liberal certainly i think kind of aligned with you guys in many ways i think in terms of his actual political leanings

but he's specifically with his content trying to appeal to everyone all the time which i couldn't do i think it'd be too tiring trying to do that. But when they've got a certain problem with commentators that I talk about, my videos, the better ones for them to push out because people aren't going to go into my videos and suddenly be assailed with lots and lots of like insults, jokes about how dumb conservatives are. All these things that, unless they're massive red flags, if you go to a video and that's what it is from the offset, you're not going to, unless you are already solidly left and happily on the left, you're not going to

find that video appealing, even centrist I think don't like it so much when you go in and it's just like an endless like stream of venom about a certain political side, because they know what they let themselves in for. And I think it's because my videos are seen as safer ones to recommend for them more centrist people. You know i mean yeah yeah and i think it's fair to point to say well horses for courses right because there can be very like the pointed and accurate critiques that come from a very clear political skew so i agree with you that it's important that people flag up where they're coming from, but it doesn't in any way necessarily invalidate the criticism, but it can make

it much harder to listen to when there's constant signals, you know, that you are, if you're a conservative person or whatever, that you are like a member of the targeted art group. So, so yeah. Well, I get, I get comments sometimes it's like this youtuber pretends to be neutral but really he's a leftist like go with my youtube bye i'm saying that i'm a leftist man i'm not i'm not i'm not hiding from you the reason why you think i'm hiding it from you is because my video viewers are like don't have insults don't have these ridiculous attacks

it's not me hiding anything it's just for me what constitutes a better criticism which is to leave that stuff out or leave it off the table until such a point as you feel like you've thoroughly proved it and can make some more comments there like and more from the heart of your own political beliefs and they i usually just save them till the end of my videos. I mean, one thing that we hardly endorse and we do it too, is to be upfront about where one's coming from politically and rather, but for me, I guess I'd like to think perhaps not that good communication, non-rhetorical discussion, being clear, being evidence-based and so on, doesn't have to have a political slant to it. So there's something that Chris and I talk about a

lot, which is even though politics inevitably comes into play and a lot of our assessments are influenced by that, we don't want to have a political podcast. There's any number of those ones. We want to have a podcast that is about good evidence-based reasoning, good information, literacy, that kind of thing. So I'm just wondering, is that similar to how you describe yourself and your motivations? Or do you... You know what it is? and your motivations or do you you know what it is because i get it so personally so i perhaps this might go outside of your guys wheelhouse in terms of people whose names you wouldn't know

so i started watching youtube around its lights you know when you say you start watching youtube obviously youtube's been about for time there's a point where you hook into your specific youtube niche you know i'm gonna watch youtube like way more than often now and like have been ever since so it's around the time of donald trump's election in 2015 and i found h plumber guy who's this like i think he's very far left actually and he's a guy who at that time he was special particularly special to me because he was a guy who it was a atmosphere of just very very like massive hatred towards the left on youtube as a platform because we hadn't yet got to a time where there was all these different lefty content creators who were making response videos and like holding their own, so it was typically a space where if you were making a lefty video, you'd

get like dislike bombed and all the comments would be like negative and HatesBomberGuy was the one creator who seemed to have this massive audience. And he was going after conservative commentators and doing quite a good job at debunking them. I'm still quite into his videos, but there's certain things that Eda and a lot of other creators do now that kind of, I don't know, now I'm like, uh, slightly older, sort of bug me as a, not that they, not that I find them like bad, but they take me out of the critique.

So these are the things in bread shoot right it's like crazy side plot jokes that have nothing to do with the video subject so like henchmama guy will shout at a porcelain dog for like two minutes i have some sort of dialogue that has nothing to do with the video and i'm just like sitting there like, oh, come on, man. Like get back to that. He made a brilliant video about the anti-vax community recently, which I don't know if you guys would have seen, but it really, it goes back to the first guy who's like Andrew Wakefield, who started the anti-vax movement. It goes specifically into the papers that he wrote. It goes specifically into the forms of those papers.

It's great. But there's so many like little side things, like little jokes. And each time I'm just like, ah, it's making me lose a bit of focus on what's going on and takes me a bit out of it. And it's the same thing with like very blatant attacks on the right. Whenever I go into a video critique and I see a creator who's, so again, we'll make it away from hate moment guy, but then also something that's just something that happens a lot in like left-wing YouTube, just very, very like snarky

comments about conservatives on the way here, when I don't feel like they've actually proven anything against conservatives at the point where they've made the joke or they've made the comment. And again, that's the sort of thing that just zones me right out of the video. I'm like, ah, it doesn't make me cringe, but it sends this spike through my heart. Like, I know that this is a good video. I don't think this is going to be very persuasive to many people. And so I think the specific thing about how I craft my video comes from not the things that I find bad about other people's videos,

meaning them to worm their way into mine. And I think to understand where HMO guy people are like, this is the other big thing about having an audience. You think that your jokes are way more funny than they are. When you're preparing something, you're writing a video, like I can't, I can't tell you how many there are in my scripts or like how many comments I put in that when I'm saying it out loud, or even when I, you know, I've said it, I've recorded it and I get to the video and I'm just like, well, that was quite

a vicious comment really that doesn't really add much and I ended up going back and finding a way to take them out. Because when you're in your own zone, preparing the content, you think you're really funny. You think your insults are really good and like really like on the bar. And then suddenly when you listen to yourself, you're like, Oh no, actually. And I've never regretted going back and editing something like that out because I think the balance is always better.

And it's only if I've got a super fire joke where I'm like, Oh no, sounded funny when I ran it, it's funny recording it and it's fully in the video. That's when I'll keep it in. But I think that's, that's the sort of path I go down when I'm writing. We are, we're definitely less funny than we imagine. That's that's, that's the badly and probably applies to like the vast majority of humans. That's, that's a part where everybody is guilty on that spectrum.

You've got, you've got super plausible deniability in that you guys are having live conversations with each other. Well, if a joke, if a joke, it's with my video, I've written it, like recorded it, edited it, at that point, I'm very committed to the junk and it's gone through all those. It's right. Like we do have the clapping C feedback from both of us that allow us to feel validated and we can blame it on the other. But the interesting thing for me, Timber, is like, I don't know the leftist YouTube sphere very well.

Like I know about bread tube i'm familiar with h bomber guy by name and the popular ben shapiro aquaman viral video and that kind of thing but i i don't know the the content of many of those creators well and like we looked at counterpoints and and she's probably the person i've seen the most content of but one the ecosystem, which will have its own dynamics. And I wonder if you think this applies because like your videos, right? They're quite artistically made. Like the music in them is good. The anime clips are good.

And as you mentioned, you have some other videos about like music, right? About Skrillex. To be clear to the audience, it's a video. It's not like I'm a big fan of Skrillex, by the way. I'm talking about how he ruined my cultural dubstep movement that I was part of at MIT.

It's just a disclaimer. That's probably an important disclaimer in your world. It wouldn't matter at all to your audience. Yeah. But I think the point I want to make about that is because you're obviously making content that relates to the culture war and figures that are prominent in it, but because you have these other interests and your video,

which is about all your homies hitting Skrillex is like 1.5 million views, right? Like I'm just looking at your channel. It's the most popular. So I think that when people have an interest or a life, which is not completely consumed by the culture war, that it actually makes them like more healthy, even when they're like indulging in breaking down videos or characters that are prominent in the culture war,

that it gives you like a level of detachment that you know that there are communities and other interests where the culture war might have some impact, but it's not all that matters. I get that sense from your videos, but do you think that is helpful or is this completely irrelevant? I think that's exactly right. If you can make videos essentially responding just to war, that is helpful or is this a completely irrelevant? I think that's exactly right.

If you can make videos essentially responding just to them, but make them jumping off points for the topics. And this is something I think that like LeftTube is big up with the people that do it well is they'll make a response video, but then it's actually a video about the passing of certain laws. But you didn't know that going in, you thought it was a response to Ben Shapiro, but then they use it to talk about the treatment of black people in America and like back to the Jim Crow era and suddenly you learn a lot of stuff outside of just the political cultural thing that you went in for and yeah, I think you're right with my videos.

I like the fact that I could put my own music in them. I like the fact that this is the thing that I enjoy the most about the music is that I feel like I could match the music to the mood i want to create which is why i decided to do it early on made my own beats it's because you can't always find stock clips of things that capture the exact mood you want and so through the music i can elevate the level of mood that goes with videos if if simple's talking about culture i've got like a crazy trap beat i can play in the background and if it's a part where he's talking about something boring, I'll make the beat in the background quite nice and gentle and chill. But yeah, I think recently as well, I've been trying to just like not be involved in so many tiffs on Twitter.

Because I think overall, you always feel like there's some points made that you can make really well. But I've realized that I'm actually better at making those points on YouTube. point to me that you can make really well, but I've realized that I'm actually better at making those points on YouTube and keeping my Twitter line very clear and clean. Because I don't think in any of the arguments I had on Twitter, I ended up coming off very well, or certainly not as well as I do in my videos. So I've consciously made the decision to be like, right, I'm just going to try and not respond to as many things. And also consciously, I try and make my timeline on Twitter, not consciously, it sounds like I'm playing some sort of ulterior motive game, but consciously I try and not respond to as many things. And also consciously I try and make my timeline on Twitter, not consciously, it sounds like

I'm playing some sort of ulterior motive game, but consciously I try and do like just non-political content in amongst everything else. So that again, it's like the appearance of like, if people come to my Twitter or whatever, they're not like, well, he's like a crazy deranged lunatic. Who's just obsessed with James O'Keefe for these people he's made videos of. Cause my videos are always suggest I'm quite obsessed about them. I feel this Timber by inference, if anybody looks at my Twitter page. It's about the same thing. I'm not saying that I'm not a fan of the word.

I'm not saying that I'm not a fan of the word. I'm not saying that I'm not a fan of the word. I'm not saying that I'm not a fan of the word. I'm not saying that I'm not a fan of the word. I'm not saying that I'm not a fan of the word. I'm not saying that I'm not a fan of the word. I'm not saying that I'm not a fan of the word. I'm not saying that I'm not a fan of the word.

I'm not saying that I'm not a fan of the word. I'm not saying. I feel this, Timber. By inference, if anybody looks at my Twitter feed. It's about the same. Yeah. You're quite big on Twitter, aren't you, Chris? No, I'm not. I'm not big on Twitter, but I certainly don't practice the level of restraint that you're discussing, which is probably a much healthier way to engage with like the Twitter sphere.

I mean, you serve in the lightning rod as well for the side of the more liberal centristy types that are critiques of the IDW. So I still think there's a function to that. It's just, I'd rather it be you than me. Yeah, I think that's how a lot of people would be about me. Like much, much rather it be you than me. To such a large extent, I prefer that. In the same respect, I'm glad that you took the bullet

with Tim Poop because I don't want to listen to his content. But before I get off the topic and it escapes my mind, do you know Dave Pizarro

from Very Bad Wizards? Are you familiar with their podcast? I do not. I thought his name sounded familiar, but then lots of Dave sound familiar. He was on the episode with us, so you might have heard him there. So he makes the music for his podcast, which is described as beats, which to me sounds quite reminiscent of the music that you use.

And I recognize some parts of like, I listen to lo-fi or retro wave stuff when I'm trying to work and lock things out. But I'm just curious, like the genre of music that you use in the videos, like, or genres, what is it just for like people who might know better in our audience? Essentially, it's all sorts of genres. So the fact that you need to talk over this music means that you use less instruments on each track. So all of them have a lo-fi aesthetic by implication. So everyone is into this channel called Lo-Fi Beats to Study Slash Relax To.

The reason why the beats are nice to study slash relax to is because they're very melodically simple. They have a pad, like a gliding pad, usually, sometimes a piano, and then a melody over the top, and they leave it there. They've not got any crazy sound design elements going on over the top. And I think when you're making music for YouTube videos, if you're trying to make something you're going to speak over, it's going to inherently lead you down that path. Because if you take any beat you're making, strip away loads of stuff and leave only two elements,

you're not going to make the drums that complex either. Yeah, they sound like lo-fi beats. So I think most of the music in my YouTube videos would fit under that category, I reckon. That's, to my musically illiterate mind, that's very helpful. So I appreciate that. I don't have anything to say, except I enjoy listening to it. Now, you know, research lo-fi beat.

Oh no, of course I know that. I have that channel on repeat, but I think the stuff that you're sampling from is like well beyond my range. It's very reminiscent of that for sure. So Jim, but before we let you go, we feel like we have to ask you, if it won't be spoiling the surprise,

what's the next project? What are you thinking? What a question, Matt. So I think it's actually really hard to tell. If you look at my videos, right? What I can tell you, and this is probably of interest if anyone follows my videos, I can tell you the people who I don't think it's going to be. I don't think it's going to be ever Ben Shapiro. I don't think it's

ever going to be Steven Crowder. Now, the reason for that is that if you look at the people I've made videos on, there's a common theme. So obviously you could say conservative, as in they're right-leaning or they appeal to right-wing audiences. Yes. And that's true, but it's also people who present themselves as one thing and are in fact doing something else. And not only that, but they have an audience who are also complicit in the same talking points from them that they are the thing that they're fakely claiming

to be so Debra been pretending to be a neutral talk show host exploring ideas is actually a hack James O'Keefe chatting to be a journalist exposing the truth is actually a hack, Tim pool offends to their reporter is actually a hack. If you look at that, it's like Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder don't really satisfy the criteria because I don't think, I think they're conservatives say they're conservative, they make conservative content. As far as my scope is concerned, who I'm looking at to do videos on, these two people, for that reason, don't really interest me. So at the moment, I don't know

who it's going to be. I think certainly people like Eric Weinstein, he's more of an interest because it's like, well, there's something to unfold here. We would love it. You would make us both so happy. That's my, my God, my eyes are lighting up with the thought of this. And just to mention, he did do an interview with James O'Keefe, which was perhaps, which James O'Keefe described as his favorite interview for very predictable reasons, although Eric presented it as an extremely tough grilling. Wait, wait, who was interviewing who?

Was it? Eric interviewed James O'Keefe. And he presented as a tough grilling of James O'Keefe. Yeah. Yes. He brought the questions that made James really have to think and answer for what he does, but that. I'm really curious to what, because here's the thing, James O'Keefe

has a response for everything. He's really good at that. I don't think there's anything that Eric could say that would be a grilling for James O'Keefe. Because he's answered the criticisms about his work like so many times. Anyway, I'm going to give that a listen. I could figure it in a possible issue video, I guess. For like a grilling, you have never heard the word heroic and heroism used so many times. Yeah.

heroic and heroism used so many times. Yeah, yeah. If what you're saying is true, you're an American hero, the likes of which we have never seen on planet Earth. Well, I'm just trying to convince you to do Eric Weinstein, but I think he's perfect for your theme of people pretending to be something they're not. And I just, it sounds mean,

but he's a pretended intellectual in my book, but, but he's good at it and you would have so much to unpack unravel. Oh, it would be so good. It would be, well, he sends these in scientists and accomplished scientists, but what is he really maybe a hack. Tune into my videos to find out. Yeah. Join the seven part series at the end that we'll be reviewing.

I like that hook. Here's what this mask really, oh my God, it's a hack. It's a hack, yeah. You can even send up at the front, like in episode one of the seven-part series. In these series, I'll reveal that Eric Weinstein is in fact a hack. I've tried to end our interviews recently. I've only done it once, but I'm now making it into a thing where I finish with a kind of stupid question,

which is just my personal idiosyncratic interest, Timber. So I apologize for this to round things off, but I'm just genuinely curious. Your accent, right? I lived in England for a long time time i'm quite bad at placing accents but is so i told matt that your accent was like sort of cockney which i think is i don't know if it's true or not but obviously you're british you have like a british sarcastic sense of humor, which is like very appealing to people like myself and Matt.

But is your accent, am I right? Was I right? Or is it completely off? I'll unravel for you the mysteries of my accent. So I'm originally from Nottingham, which is Midlands. And there's a very specific Nottingham accent, which you could have from there. However, my parents are middle class, so the Nottingham accent

gets a bit wiped out by that, as we know. Being part of the middle class is always like an accent neutraliser a little bit. But then I also spent a lot of my teenage years listening to dubstep DJs who were all Londoners on the radio and grime MCs who were all Londoners on the radio and grime MCs who were also from London.

So I think there's a twang there, perhaps it's from that influence. And you could say that I was maybe imitating them, which is a bit cringy, which I think is true. I think I spent a lot of time listening to them and I wanted to emulate the way they spoke and be like them. And so, yeah, I got this a lot when I went to uni. I didn't sound like a a midlands person oh yeah now that's how accents work yeah they just rub off on you but really this is just such a great illustration chris when you said the timber had a cockney accent i laughed at you didn't know that was my response you did you did

no matt who's like look Matt. Who's laughing now? It comes across to an Australian. I guess we all sound quite similar. Do I sound like Chris to you? No, you do not. You do not. No. Compared to Chris, I'm a connoisseur of English regional and class accents.

I had you pegged as middle'm here in dublin i had you pegged as uh as middle class but a little bit straight yeah yeah there's nothing wrong with that you have said that after i revealed that well yeah it was in my it was in my head it was in my head yeah it's less impressive you should say that after i revealed that that's exactly why well yeah i didn't yeah okay underneath it all he is just a hack what is this language understanding really oh my god he's like well your accent sort of sounds like you're someone who was born in nottingham but then listen to dubstep dj that's the vibe it's the reading i'm getting from this this is how you do a cold reading for you. Yeah.

What we'll do is just cut out the bit where you reveal that and edit it around so Matt comes first. Well, it's been a pleasure, Timber, and we are obviously big fans of your work and like all the stuff you do and we really do hope that you are motivated to cover eric weinstein because it would make our day but whoever you do and if the temple series continues it's great we'll send links to all your channel and the recent temple stuff and it's been a pleasure to have you on so thanks a lot likewise as i said i think we've got like a lot of uh crossover with our audience so that your guys names just comes up fairly often um in my comment sections and such so i think it's only a matter of time but yeah

it's been very fun appreciate the support and um maybe we'll do it again in two years and i will have done we'll have done some more vids because that's how long it's going to take realistically. Oh, good stuff. Well, thanks so much Timba. It was really fun. And now you've promised to do Eric Weinstein. We'll talk to you after that. Yeah.

There you have it, Matt. The interview is complete. Tim Pool has been unmasked as a secret partisan, and Timba has revealed the secrets of the online guru set. I was shocked to find out that Tim Pool was really not that good after all. Just such a disappointment. I know. It is. It's really sad. He seemed just so genuine, such a reasonable voice in the culture war.

And to find out that he actually has a partisan skew just makes you sad, really. It makes you sad. We were lamenting off-air that Tim Pool... The first time I came across him, I think, as I mentioned in the interview, was when Paul Joseph Watson was recommending him as his favorite journalist, Paul Joseph Watson from Alex Jones' Infowars thing. And as soon as I looked into him, I thought he was a giant tool.

Like, even when I saw his Occupy coverage and that, looking at that, I was like, no, this is a giant tool like even when i saw his occupy coverage in that like i looking at that was like no this is a tool but he is a tool who's widely acknowledged as a like a comic figure wearing a beanie to hide his baldness and an obvious partisan but he's a millionaire with millions of followers people just throwing money at him left, right, and center, invited by Joe Rogan to cross-examine CEOs of Twitter and stuff. Like, ugh. Just makes you sad, doesn't it? People say we're mean,

but the honest thing I can think of to say about him is that he's a pointless waste of space. Is that mean? Or is it just descriptive? I'm not sure. It's accurate. I think it's fair. He's just someone profiting of conspiracy theory and partisan rhetoric. That's not a good person. No. Shame on them, Chris.

Anyway, just a clown show. Yeah, it is a clown show. Don't look it up, Matt. Let's move from that clown show to a different circus. Our reviewers, commentators. So they're much more reasonable people than than that sphere but so we have our review of reviews section and you know i heard somebody i heard the conspirituality guys refer to it as we pour over every piece of feedback we receive

i just want to say this is not the case, right? We can get all our, at least like two random reviews. We don't take every review that we receive and discuss it. So this is not exactly accurate, but in any case, this week I have a review which comes from the Twittersphere

and particularly from an account known for its acerbic wit, Uberfeminist. Uberfeminist is also an account which can really go pretty hard. Like sometimes the digs are pretty spicy and your tolerance may vary but in general and an account which is not afraid to uh highlight the idiocy of the weinsteins or other members of the uh online tribes yeah you just don't want to get on the wrong side of it no no um and she wrote a review of well a tweet review of our podcast so let me read it so this is from uber feminist been listening to a lot of gurus pod lately every episode is simply jordan peterson is a weird douche but said in a hedged way over three hours by two dudes who

aren't really certain what they actually want to say from one minute to the next. And it's kind of my kink at the moment. I thought that's pretty good. That's a nicely backhanded compliment. I'm taking it as a compliment, hyperfeminist. Taking this as a compliment. Thank you. Thank you.

Yeah. hyperfeminist taking this as a compliment thank you thank you yeah so you know i think that's the kind of positive review that i can get behind and i can't say it's entirely wrong no i have no notes on that review it's yeah no she's got us banged to rights in most respects yeah Yeah. So was that positive or negative? That's probably positive, right? So I'll give you a negative, Matt. This is from Samix57. It's just a... Well, unfortunately,

it's not a very interesting negative review, but he said the title is Meh. Meh. And then his review is disappointing. I was hoping to hear some intelligent points made, but what I get is mostly jokey rambling that doesn't have any clear direction echoes of Uber feminist here, their content is not much better than the content they are criticizing. So it just seems like an endless loop of gurus decoding gurus, decoding gurus.

Samix 57. Good day, sir. That's that's it. This seems like an endless loop of gurus decoding gurus decoding gurus. Samix57. Good day, sir. That's it. So, Matt, this is a criticism we've never heard before, which is, aren't you the gurus just decoding other gurus? What makes you not like the gurus? We're never not going to hear that are we it's going to be

every week for the rest of our lives yeah that that one and we are covering famous people so we can attach ourselves leech like to their profile popularity yeah online clout yeah that one too like reverend moon yeah it's so hot right now but um yeah so the one point i would make here and i've made it elsewhere now i'll endlessly restate it is people are welcome to rate us on the grometer or to look at how we match up to the various definitions we offer for gurus. However much you hate us, if you think we do the same thing as what

Jordan Peterson does or what Eric Weinstein does, just your fucking critical assessment is up your arse. You don't get it. We're not offering revolutionary theories. We're not claiming that we deserve a Nobel Peace Prize.

And yeah, the establishment is not arrayed against us giving our take. So yeah, that just, you know, our message is much more mundane. Yeah, it's mundane it is largely involved by academic research i have to say and we aren't proposing any global conspiracies trying to hold us down um no yeah many points of difference if you're actually the more you think about it in fact the more points of difference you find it's yeah it's like you know what's our what's our core message be critical of the content you consume seek out relevant experts and people who are not super invested in the latest culture war

drama to understand an issue and institutions and whatnot are not perfect but they're not always improved by the alternative ecosphere so yeah yeah as you said mundane if if you're remotely sensible you're boring that's right if you're remotely sensible you already know all of these things because they're pretty freaking obvious um but for the rest of you you're welcome to leave us a negative review yeah that's fine we appreciate it so thank you very much samix57 um so matt there is one shout out i want to quickly give before we talk about our patrons which is we have a volunteer called jo Scanlon who manages the Instagram account and she posts up content there and I often forget to even send emails about the stuff that we're releasing or

that kind of thing and she does it out of the goodness of her heart just because you know we asked people if they wanted to do that and she did it and she's almost got like a thousand followers on the Instagram account. So I just want to say thank you to Joanna and we appreciate that. So there is a stuff on Instagram and if it's good and useful, you can find Joanna, not me and Matt because we're too lazy to, to manage the social media accounts properly. So, so thank you,

Joanna. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much, Joanna. We, we don't use Instagram that much because we're addicted to Twitter

and getting into pointless arguments there. So Instagram stuff can fly under our radar a little bit, but it's really nice of her to do that. So thank you. Yep, we appreciate it. And so much to the Patreons.

We're going to try something this week it might not work out but uh you had the confession on dying love to everyone so it seems fair that we make me have to do something um similar and this time since i cannot confess love by my very nature, I'm going to announce my resentment for each of them. So that means you're going to be reading the names. Can you manage that? Oh, yeah. That seems easy. I've seen you do it.

It's fine. All right. So let's go. Okay. Okay. Chris, so the Galaxy Brained Gurus uh on your hit list are christopher mclaughlin thank you chris uh dexter king williams alex bander alex bander amber ho how benjamin ashcraft uh brian nass marston stan scott m and david ainsworth i know david from twitter i Brian Nass, Marcin Stan, Scott M, and David

Ainsworth. I know David from Twitter, I think. Yeah. You missed one, Matt. J. Also J. That wasn't... Oh, just the letter J. I thought that was a typo. Yeah. Sorry, J. Sorry, the letter J. Now, you see, Matt, what you did

there, just to give you some tips on your reading of the Phaetrons, you didn't pause after any of them, so now I have to collectively make a comment about how much I resent them all, right? So the format is just, you know, just keep that in mind. So I can do it, don't worry. I'll do it quickly.

So let me see. Christopher McLaughlin. Obviously with him, the problem is that he's tried to take my name. There's too many Christophers in the world and Mick, like, you know, Irish appropriation, maybe even as Irish. So that's his problem. Dexter King Williams. King, if he does say so himself is it a middle dmr or is it you

know self-aggrandizing who can say so that's dexter's issue all right alex bander that's difficult that's difficult because that's that's a rather unique name and maybe that's his problem matt maybe that's why i resent them he probably had things too easy for him in life because people like Disney and the Bandar. How many people do you know called Bandar? So that's the problem with him. Amber. Amber's lovely because I've met her

in the AMAs that we have, but you know, I have to say something and resent. She's almost too nice when you think about it. She is. That's a problem. That's like a slap in the face.

I know. It is a big wet fish across the face. So that's Amber's issue, but otherwise very nice. Benjamin Ashcraft. Well, what can I say about Benjamin? The surname, you know, it's so pretentious. Implies that you're going to be crafting things out of ash. Who's going to be doing that?

Nobody wants your, you know, your bespoken ash product. I think Benjamin misspelt his own name. I think it should be Ashcroft. That's the normal way to write that. So you've got to wonder about someone who gets their own last name wrong. Right. Now, Brian Nass, obviously in his case, we already thanked him once, and he didn't send anything,

but I just got the sense that he wanted thanked in the correct tier. So, yes, what an entitled guy, Matt. Just getting shout-outs every week. That's Seth, Brian, terrible. Scott M. Scott M. He has your problem, Matt. Scott M. Scott M. He has your problem, Matt. Generic.

Generic. What can I say about old Scott? Unless it's a fake username. That's even worse because he picked the generic name with just an initial. I can't do anything with. So thanks very much for that. And David Ensworth's trouble, as you already mentioned, is that he knows you

and follows you on Twitter. Big problems Matt. Got bad taste there. Oh and lastly Morrison Stan Morrison Stan Oh well people standing people that's a problem. That's an issue

in this world so his name just reminds me that that's what he's got wrong they just hearing his name puts me in the rage jay lazy one letter you know how many letters are they in the alphabet you could do with a couple more and you're using single name who does he think he is prince so? So, yeah. Thank you all for contributing at the top tier. Yeah. That took longer than I intended. Yeah.

It does take a while, doesn't it, to do everyone individually? Yeah. Well, I'll shorten down the amount of revolutionary geniuses and conspiracy theorists, and I'll try to keep my views shorter. So, here are the revolutionary geniuses and conspiracy theorists. And I'll try to keep my abuse shorter. So here are the revolutionary geniuses, Matt. So they are Liz Pagan.

Her problem, Matt, her problem, Paganism. As a Catholic, what can I say? I'm not even a Catholic, but my upbringing, it just sends me in the rage at the mere mention of paganism. So, Liz Pagan, bad, bad, bad. Heretic. Next. Agni Ezka Z.

Zed. Well, obviously, a foreigner. Not with a name like that. Or maybe not. Maybe not. There are immigrants. So the fact that her name made me automatically say something bigoted, isn't that, you know, whose problem is that?

Is that my problem? Some would say so, but I, yeah, that's a, you know, that's a, that's a good name. So that's, again, just I'm obviously filled with bigotry and resentment and automatically categorizing people as foreigners. So that's, yeah, that's on you. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Agnieszka. Thanks.

Thanks for that. Yeah. Thanks. If you get canceled, we know who to blame. Amber Rose. Amber Rose. Well, we know who to blame. Amber Rose. Amber Rose. Well, we already had an Amber. So that's, you know, what am I supposed to do with that?

Two people with the same name? It's like that guy Christopher McLaughlin. Just come on. Mix it up, people. Stop picking same names. Start making it hard to come up with idiosyncratic comments. So Amber, that's not making it hard to come up with idiosyncratic comments. So Amber, that's your issue.

Amber, the Amber slot is taken. We've already got an Amber and we like her a lot. So, you know, try something else. Kevin O'Rourke. Thank you, Kevin. Kevin O'Rourke. Old Kevin. I probably had some feuds with O'Rourkes in my time. I'm sure in school there was an O'Rourke stealing

my dinner money or stepping on my shoe. And he's probably distantly related through like lineages, the Kavnas and the O'Rourkes, the age old feud. And so it's a genetic tribal bias. Yeah. I mean, just statistically speaking, it's almost a certainty that his people probably massacred your people at some point before the British come over and brought peace. Yeah, very problematic. Okay, thank you to all of you. I don't condone or support anything that Chris said. I'm very fond of you all. Especially the one about the foreigner.

That's what you don't want to hear. Yeah. Good God. Okay. So let's just do three conspiracy theories because I'm running out of time as we go. So here we go. Harder than it looks, isn't it, Chris? Harder than it looks.

Right. So what's this group called again? Conspiracy Hypothesizers. Conspiracy Hypothesizers. Just as good as the other two tiers. Trenton Knauer. Trenton Knauer. Well, give me time. Give me time, right?

Give me a little space. I'll get it covered in there. So, you pronounce the Knauer. I'm going to say Noah. And that is what an entitled surname, Noah, as if you are the person who get to decide who knows and who doesn't. Trenton. Trenton. So that's Trenton's problem. His surname, if it's mispronounced, sounds like Noah. Very good, very good. Shona Perez. Thank you, Shona. Chris? What I'm going to say here is, wasn't there someone like Perez Hilton who was annoying on the internet

or like some gossip columnist? Perez Hilton? No, there was Perez Hilton, but there was a guy called Perez Hilton who was like an online gossip monger. So again, I'm just triggered. I'm triggered by the cosmic vibration of the Perez name there. So that's the problem for Shona.

Sorry. Look what you've done, Shona. I hope you're proud of yourself. Gordon Sweeney. Thank you, Gordon. There was a TV show where this was a character called Sweeney. I think he was a policeman. And he might have been a British policeman.

And Ireland has a history of being brutalized by the British. And the, you know, the like military and police were involved in that. So, so. What more do dandy to say, Matt? That's the connection is obvious and the resentment is clear. So that's Gordon Sweeney. There we go. Look what you've done, Gordon. Chris is getting flashbacks of paddy wagons and being taken to a basement under a castle.

Yeah. I'm not saying you're responsible. I'm just not saying you're innocent. That's all. Well, great. That was painful. Thank you, Chris. Jesus, we'll never do that again.

We're sorry, everybody. Yeah, we're never doing that again. So we'll never do the segment where you tell everyone you love them. We'll never do the one where I tell them I resent them all just go back to sound clips matt we'll go back to sound clips no this is what we do you know we experiment we try out things they they don't work and we promise never to ever do them again we'll place a content warning on this section so people could skip over it skip it yeah because it's interminably long. So, yeah, but there we go. So should anyone still be here?

I'd still be like, you know, where can we find them? No one will be thinking that now. You're right. So we're on Twitter, we're on Instagram. You can email us at thecodingleaguers at gmail.com. And yeah, we'll be back soon enough with, I think our next episode is a crossover with the Very Bad Wizards. So that's something people can look forward to.

And we promise we'll do the shout outs differently next time. Yes, we'll stick to the script. We're not going to improvise it. No fresh ideas. It'll just be normal. No, that's a boring Monday and book toast. That's our brand. All right.

So thanks, everybody. Oh, we had another frigging innovation at the very end. I'm mixing up the cyanide. What was it? Remember the disc, Matt? Consider the gin. Oh, no, fuck. It was...

Note... Remember... Recognize the gin. Note the disc. I don't remember, but do that, Matt. Beware. Beware. All right, I will.

And stay fresh, cheese bags. Oh, very good. That's nice. Bye-bye. Bye. Thank you.