Decoding the Gurus - Red Scare: Bohemian Hipsterism x Reactionary Tradcaths

Episode Date: December 8, 2023

In today's joyous episode, we saunter into the loft apartment, take a draw on our gauloise, and glance icily into a world of bohemian hipsters living their best postmodern tradcath lives. Welcome to the irony-drenched world of 'Red Scare', a popular podcast hosted (sardonically) by Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova. Also joining them in the episode we cover is hip writer and artist, Tao Lin, a pioneer in the alt-lit world. Get ready for hours of 'transgressive' insights, independent research, dorm-room philosophies and monotone delivery. Thrill at their 'edgy' humour, bespoke theories of autism, standard anti-vax bullshit, and all of the usual positions you find with postmodern conservatism. You will learn things like how Tao Lin diagnosed his cat with autism, how long each host was breastfed, why half of Americans will be non-verbal in 2050, how Trump's anti-vaccine conspiracies make him trustworthy, the best way to chug your bootleg raw milk, and that thick books are always full of reliable facts.When it is all brought together, although we might not have an episode that is lighting up the gurometer, we do have a rather contemporary melange of postmodern-conservatism, trad-cath lifehacks, new-age spirituality, anti-vax conspiracy theories, and irony-laced, not even bothered, posturing.So like... enjoy... or whatever...Also features a discussion of Elon Musk's latest grandiosity, some unexpected guru clashing, and confirmation that Chris and Matt are not cool enough to be invited to your next Bohemian soiree.LinksRed Scare: Crazy Autistic Asians w/ Tao LinElon Musk Interview with Andrew Ross SorkinJames Lindsay & Jonathan Pageau Tussle on Twitter and as usual Demons are involvedTao Lin's Essay The Story of Autism: How We Got Here, How We HealCatala-Lopez, F., Hutton, B., Page, M. J., Driver, J. A., Ridao, M., Alonso-Arroyo, A., ... & Tabarés-Seisdedos, R. (2022). Mortality in persons with autism spectrum disorder or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA pediatrics, e216401-e216401.Modabbernia, A., Velthorst, E., & Reichenberg, A. (2017). Environmental risk factors for autism: an evidence-based review of systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Molecular autism, 8(1), 1-16.

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about. I'm Matt Brown, with me is Chris Kavanagh and I can never remember what comes after this Chris. I don't remember how the intro finishes but it's gonna finish differently every time from now on I think. I noticed Matt you dropped the honorifics decided to be more casual today none of your casual maligning of me as a beer associate professor no no that's all in the past now we're just two men we're just normal men. We're normal men. I'm sorry, are we normal?

We're approaching there. We're relatively normal. By the standards of the internet, we're relatively normal. We're relatively normal. We do spend a couple of hours talking about random internet figures for no particular reason. But apart from that, we're surprisingly normal. I suppose that is true. People that aren't normal, Matt, that we talk surprisingly normal i suppose that is true people that aren't normal matt that we talk about the online gurus some of them have been up to things one which i thought was particularly amusing was old favorite james lindsey had a run-in with new boy on the

street jonathan pageau a metaphorical religious master and um they got into a little conflict online merely you know as is the case because james lindsey came flying in with guns blazing suddenly deciding to target pageau for his fluffy religious nonsense and Peugeot didn't take it kindly so it was just interesting to see they fired shots at each other talking about revealing your true colors and anti-enlightenment goals and all that but yeah but I think it ended with a suggestion from Peugeot that they needed to sit down together to hash this out in a long- form podcast so yes that is right he did make that suggestion but you know lindsey is occasionally likes to show his bad boy credentials and prove that he's not you know just a simp of the religious right so whatever it was just funny the twitter x

drama but it is always interesting when you see gurus collide in the night. And this was a funny collision. I'll put a link in the show notes so people can go and look for themselves if they want. In terms of online drama, Chris, I noticed something that made the grommet go ding. What was that? That was a tweet by Elon Musk on X, formerly Twitter. X is the only platform you can trust for honest information. All the others are bought and paid for.

Some cultish, cultish conspiratorial dynamics there, Chris. Yeah, just a bit. It's very on brand for Elon. And speaking about this, there was a new interview with Elon Musk that went viral, mainly because of his comments regarding advertisers. So I'll play that. But I think actually the more interesting bit is what came after that. But this is the part that had the internet, I believe. You know that there's a public perception that, and you're clarifying this now, but there's a public perception that that was part of a

apology tour, if you will. That this had been said online, there was all of the criticism, there was advertisers leaving. We talked to Bob Iger today. I hope they stop. You hope... Don't advertise. You don't want them to advertise? No. What do you mean? If somebody's gonna try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself. But go fuck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is. Hey Bob, If you're in the audience. Well, let me ask you then. That's how I feel. Don't advertise.

Yeah, that was Musk being his brash, self-telling advertisers who have left the platform ostensibly over his kind of anti-Semitism and general promotion of conspiratorial accounts and kind of crap on X or Twitter that he doesn't want them there anyway. They can go bugger off because he won't be pushed around by the likes of Disney and Bob Iger and all that kind of thing. And I will say, Matt, that I thought this part of it was pretty much on brand for him. This is the kind of thing that he likes to say, you know, presenting himself as, you know, what are you rebelling against? What do you got?

Like he's this is what he likes to do. So make a statement, you know, say, go fuck yourself. It's so edgy. And he knows that that's going to appeal and like targeting Disney or corporations or whatever, that also just generally plays very well. So yeah, I didn't find this bit particularly strange, but I do take the point that he is rather directly telling advertisers, you know, to bugger off, which is unlikely to restore Twitter's positive ad revenue.

Yeah, yeah, indeed. Like I say, it is on brand for him because amongst the people that that love elon i think a big selling point is partly that kind of juvenile rebel without a cause thing but it's also the other narrative there is that he's so rich yeah that he's he's above things like making money and sponsorships and things like that he's got his eyes fixed on colonizing mars and promoting free speech and that kind of thing. So yeah, it's on brand for him to advertise this to get stuffed. Yeah, so the part that interested me more

was the segment after this though. So that's the kind of viral crowd-stopping, look at me, I'm telling the advertisers to go fuck themselves. I can't be bought, right, moment. But listen to this little bit that comes after. How do you think then about the economics of X? If part of the underlying model, at least today, and maybe it needs to shift, maybe the answer is it needs to shift away from advertising.

If you believe that this is the one part of your business where you will be beholden to those who have this view, what do you do? I understand that, but there's a reality, too. Right. Yes. No, no. I mean, Linda Iaccarino's right here and she's got to sell advertising. Absolutely. So, no, no, don't tell me. So, no, no. Actually, what this advertising boycott is going to do, it's going to kill the company. And you think that the company... And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company. And we will document it in great detail.

But those advertisers, I imagine, are going to say, they're going to say, we didn't kill the company. Oh, yeah? They're going to say... Tell it to Earth. But they're going to say, Elon, that you killed the company because you said these things, and that they were inappropriate things,

and that they didn't feel comfortable on the platform, right? That's what they're going to say. And let's see how Earth responds to that. Yeah, that is more interesting, isn't it? I haven't heard this before, by the way, Chris. This is the first time I've heard both of those. Like one, he doesn't really care that much if Twitter slash X goes bankrupt, right?

And that actually makes sense because he's got enough other companies, I suppose. I don't think it would send him bankrupt if it did but the way he sees it that it's uh it's almost like a game and that the whole world is watching like i don't know he sees it in very what's the word grandiose terms yeah and you know he makes appeals to earth earth will respond like it seems to be here that the people right you know the everyday workaday folk are going to rise up when they realize that advertisers have fled twitter and caused the business model to collapse and like it's a illustration of myopia but it like you

suggest it's also this weird view that you know the the whole earth would care yeah about elon's company feeling when there's so many twitter clones and stuff already existing right like you and i are heavy twitter users and we don't care no you know it's not that most most people don't use it and most people who do use it use it only a tiny little bit most of us don't like it and would quite happily move to a different platform if everyone else kind of did at the same time, which would happen if Twitter went bankrupt. Yeah. And he does look in mannerisms and response.

He doesn't look nonchalant in the actual clip, Matt. He looks like kind of bug-eyed. He looks like a surly toad. Well, he does. Yes. In that image, he's kind of, you know, jutting his neck out and all this kind of thing. But also that part where the interviewer, right, when he was doing the like pause for effect, and he didn't really get the response from that particular crowd. And then they point to, you know, but your CEO is there, they've got the sale advertisements. And for a minute, he kind of snaps back into, oh, well, yeah, like, you know know and kind of then tries to like get out of just for a second come out of like the performance but then snaps back into it so i i don't know just like people were talking about was he on stuff maybe he was maybe he wasn't but i think he's just

somebody that's absolutely bought in on his own bullshit like he thinks he is the center of the universe and later actually if you listen to the whole interview the interviewer goes on asks him various stuff around controversial topics but also gets him talking about his big vision and philosophy and what motivates him in the morning and that kind of thing and actually when it gets to that stuff you actually see you actually see the Elon that was having cameos in Marvel movies or whatever, the kind of tech billionaire, slightly eccentric genius who has these big ideas about settling distant planets and is focused on the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and all that. But it's interesting because it's basically juxtaposed with his new pilled right-wing populist character

that keeps coming out a couple of minutes later. So he just looks like someone that's fundamentally broken and not in an interesting way, in the same way that people were red-pilled uncles by the Trump election or that kind of thing. Like he's a billionaire, but he's just a red-pilled conspiracy theorist billionaire. That's all. Yeah.

Yeah. In terms of how he got that way, I think it's interesting as to why. I mean, part of it would be his personality. But I also think that being a billionaire for however many years has an effect on you. There's that well-known effect in Hollywoodllywood where pretty much all a-list hollywood stars become a bit weird just because they've been living so many years of their life where everybody treats them as the absolute center of attention hangs on there everywhere laughs at every joke runs off to grab them a drink if they're thirsty etc etc and even the ones that seem kind of endearing and nice i've heard tend

to be a bit weird after a career at the a-list and i imagine it's something similar is going on if you happen to have a few billion dollars right yeah it's going to just exaggerate whatever flaws you have it's going to draw a huge amount of sycophants and it's going to because of like prestige bias and those kind of effects lead to people you know looking up to you as somebody with wisdom not just money insights and you know special powers and whatnot and i think that has a two-way effect like it isn't just the audience who you know is is kind of bowing down and becoming parasocially attached, but the subject of that attention also gets the message that they are profound, insightful, you know, special kind of people. So maybe it's just our social primate brains are not great

at dealing with like, you know, massive amounts of attention and associated prestige. Could be that. This is why I like to remind you that you're an associate professor, just to help you stop being a piece of your business. Keep me on the straight and narrow. Yeah, but still there are rich people who are not pale demoniacs like Elon Musk.

So you didn't hear Warren Buffett endorsing PizzaG Gate or whatever conspiracy is in the news from five years ago. That's right. It is absolutely not inevitable and not an excuse. Charlie Munger, his partner, died recently and a fair few of his quotes and little bits of wisdom were floating around and he just seems like a genuinely wise and smart guy. So so um yeah you could you could be that and fabulously wealthy it's possible yeah well i've got a nice pivot from well-adjusted reasonable people let's turn to the subjects of the episode this week. So just one point of clarification

before we start this, okay? People make suggestions of folks that we should cover. Sometimes we get a lot of requests for individuals and we don't think that they particularly well fit the secular guru template, but nonetheless, it's useful to cover some people that don't fit so well to see how well the gurometer or the heuristics apply, because there is an entire rainbow of ways to be

terrible or conspiratorial or that kind of thing. And being a secular guru is a more specific thing. So if somebody doesn't fit into that template, it doesn't mean they're good. And I just want to mention this because this week we're looking at a podcast called Red Scare. What would you describe Red Scare as, Matt, having listened to an episode? I would struggle to describe it. Maybe by the end of our episode, I'll be able to describe it a bit better.

But after one episode, I guess it was a couple of people, a couple of women just talking about random topics with their guest in a kind of ironic, world-weary, casual kind of way. Yeah, sardonic might be a word that i would use and drenched in irony so one of the issues that we're gonna face here is that to even take them seriously is to lose because anything that you point out especially when people have such a strong irony drenched presentation is to basically feel to get

the joke right oh you took that seriously we were that's just a joke or we didn't mean that and you know and that's unavoidable but this is a tactic which is actually very common in left-wing media, I feel, especially like Chapo Trapa, Funhaus, or whatever it's called, side of social media. So we've seen it previously with ContraPoints in her content. She uses irony and casual self-deprecation in quite an effective way. But it does provide you with a layer of protection because you can always just present it that, well, that was just, you know, I was just making a joke. And I'm just a big dummy anyway. So don't take me seriously.

Yeah, I'm Joe Rogan. I'm just a comedian. But like Joe Rogan, you do notice some rather clear, recurrent motifs in the content. And I think Red Scare has come to be labeled as relatively reactionary, maybe initially associated with the dirtbag left, but recent guests, if you just look at the guest list, it kind of hints about the kind of the oeuvre that you have come to expect. You might see Glenn Greenwald, you might see Alex Jones was on there. The guy that we are covering is a recent episode with a novelist Tao Lin, who's probably

less familiar, but Steve Bannon, the Bronze Age pervert so on so forth yeah right it's what you have come to expect from this neck of the woods yeah yeah i think that would be a mistake to position them too precisely on the political spectrum because they are politically labile i think as as we'll kind of see and from just the basic descriptions you can find of their podcasts in the media um you can see that they sort of occupied that area on the horseshoe where ultra-sceptical, ultra-ironic left and right sort of come together, but it's ambiguous. It's been described as a loose hipster podcast, I see,

on Wikipedia, quoting New York Times. Yeah, anyway, we'll see. We'll see. It's a vibe. It's a vibe it's a place they're from lower manhattan which seems to be somehow relevant it's got that shtick about it well the host matt the hosts who are the two hosts of this lovely podcast it's an excellent excellent question chris i'm glad you asked good so i'm here for apparently it's uh dasha nekrasova and anna kachian and a kachan i pronounced them wrong but that's all right people expect that by now actually the little biography there about that

was interesting because it reminded me of dr evil's backstory because nekrasova is a belarusian born actress who became known as sailor Socialism after an interview with an InfoWars reporter went viral. She immigrated to Las Vegas, Nevada with her acrobat parents when she was four. The other one's got a similarly colorful background. So I like that. Yeah, they're kind of my follower would make ludicrous claims like he invented the question mark, right?

So just out of childhood. my father would make ludicrous claims like he invented the question mark right so just just out of childhood but yes and the new york times reviewer whatever you were quoting from there mentioned the term hipster i would say that is a very good description of the vibe but it's it's kind of the hipsters that have got into the contrarian right space so they give a little packaged history of the podcast and here's how they describe it we plateaued but we had a big period of growth we went zero to one um and we had some we were both pretty active on twitter and so we had like pretty modest audiences but then i think well i had the sailor socialism thing i had like a viral video that um got us a lot of attention and then i think uh podcasts weren't the market wasn't oversaturated

and we're based in new york which is like a media epicenter so it kind of like organically i don't know um and we said provocative things and like yeah came out against me too very early we just started the rape apology early on and then things fall from there and we got a lot of negative press yeah yeah and they say that helped yeah so i'm just gonna say this now matt there's gonna be a lot of vocal friend a lot of yeah i don't have a problem with that i'm blind that it's very sexist to have a problem with that it's fine that's fine so you're gonna hear quite a lot of that tone i think the writer that like they came into the prime in a period when you know there was still a lot of um space in podcasting land and they were controversial and hip and questioning me too and generating controversy And one of them is the girl from a viral video

making fun of Infowars. It's edgy, Matt. You know, what isn't the like? And also Dasha was in Succession recently. She was one of the actors in Succession. Oh, really? Like season three. Yeah.

Oh, I have to check that out. I really like Succession. She i have to check that out i really i really like succession she hasn't been in succession they did seem like playing like something of a version of herself but anyway but chris i um i listened to the whole episode and the whole time i think in my mind i was imagining them as being like 20 something young oh yeah i mean um but you you pointed out and i've just checked now that they're aged 32 and 38 and their guest on this episode is do you know how old he is oh god i wish he was like 14 or something probably he's gonna be like 40 he's 40 yeah so yes this episode is one of the very recent episodes i I think the most recently released episode,

which was called Crazy Autistic Asians. And it's because they have a novelist, Tao Lin, with them, who has written about autism, has some theories about autism, as we'll hear. So let me just play a little bit to give the flavor of the podcast and this is from the introduction showing the kind of tone of the podcast um anna what did you have for breakfast um fuck i don't know uh it's a chocolate chip cookie good i had oh my god i did eat something weird i went to like the cafe there's like a cafeteria for un delegates by my house i went there and i they have like a hot bar and i got like eggs and a caprese salad that sounds disgusting that is the general tone when they're talking about

breakfast when they're talking about anything else it's the same yeah and part of the appeal of it is the authentic nature of the interaction so not really prepared to just you know shooting the ship we could get down with that we're done with that aren't we chris that's our style yeah yeah i guess so i mean i just painted a picture, Matt, so people who haven't listened can get the gist of what this was like for multiple hours. And here's the introduction of Taolin. It was just steak and onions.

He was pretty discreet about it. He's such a humble, self-abnegating person that he didn't inform anybody. So happy birthday, Jordan. It was steak, you said? Steak. Steak and onion and cheese and some other stuff. Yeah.

That sounds nice. I made Jordan a Wikipedia page for his birthday. So that flat-toned individual, that's Tao Lin, the guest. And that flat tone is going to be part of his delivery shtick maybe it's a side effect of autism as he claims maybe not but in any case that kind of plodding monotone delivery is is going to do a lot of the heavy lifting for his various perspectives on this episode so ta a little introduction to him he's a novelist right and uh i guess he comes from the same milieu he's uh very hip in terms of his

output he's kind of one of these like an edgy modern novelist and his his work has attracted a fair bit of praise but it's also attracted a fair bit of criticism again this is just from wikipedia research so don't take this too seriously but gawker called him maybe perhaps the single most irritating person we've ever had to deal with and then um to which lynn retaliated by completely covering the front door of the gawker office building with stickers bearing britney spears name which is like yeah a form of protest i guess l magazine wrote we've long been deeply irked by Lynn's vacuous posturing. And I know you are, but what am I? Dorm room philosophizing. So there's a couple of negative

statements, but you know, he's written quite a few books and I've attracted some positive sort of arty literary feedback as well. So that's who he is. He's a celebrated author. And i think he does the writing about your life in a vaguely disguised manner style from what he describes in this episode so i think he is celebrated by various literary critic types as well as some regarding him as an intellectual poser i might lean more heavily towards the latter based on this conversation. But I actually don't think that in general, to be a good artist or a good writer, that you need to be somebody who is, you know, au fait with science or not a conspiracy theorist. I'm sure there are plenty of very good authors who have very stupid insights into autism or whatever politics whatever you care about so actually i don't think that the stuff that we're going to

cover in this episode would necessarily mean that this output is bad or that kind of thing because it's art man yeah yeah absolutely and um, artists famously known for having very stable and grounded personalities. No, but I did notice like the general theme with that stuff, which is he is his writing is super hip. And it's cool with a certain edgy, sophisticated crowd. He's clearly got a knack for self promotion, many and, you know, staging events and getting media attention things like that yeah i might be showing my misunderstanding of current views around autism but they talk a lot about his self-identification as someone with autism and it just struck me as a little bit at odds with that yeah gotta be careful with that kind of thing i suppose don't want to deny somebody's identity but we'll get into that uh all that stuff and the claims and whatnot but how much of a defense that would be for the various stuff that he says i'm less compelled by but in any case here's an introduction to him from the hosts hi we're back we're back um um we have a very exciting guest yeah um novelist poet writer autism advocate nutritionist

uh auto fiction pioneer needs no introduction uh taolin welcome to red scare thank you this is my favorite podcast that I've been on. Really? Chris, I have a question for you. How popular is Red Scare? Is it a big podcast? Yeah, yeah, it's very popular. I don't know where it's ranked, but very popular is the answer, yes.

And can you not tell why we're such scintillating interactions? But it is focusing on delivery at the minute, Matt. But I don't think this reflects my age because I never found this appealing even when I was myself an edgy teenager. But I'm so incredibly excited. This is amazing. He's unbelievable.

And then, thank you, this podcast is my favorite it just jesus christ if i was at a party with these people i would just be pounding back the shots to get out of these competitions i think at least part of it is a difference in social milieu that's it though i just want to make it clear it's not just about age it's about social because i have been at parties like this well tyler is 40 right he's 40 he's the same age as me i remember when i was 40 and i was a spring chicken of 40 um yeah it's true i wasn't i didn't like this kind of stuff then i previously talked about matt how i went to a party in london from a friend who was working in the fx industry there and it was a very hipsterish party in

shoreditch territory and that party almost made me want to kill myself like just the escape the in the in conversations that people were having there i genuinely it was mental torture and i've you know i've been to bar parties i've talked to you've talked to plenty of you know idiots or people in all walks of life even at good parties right but like this was just so something and this is giving me flashbacks to that event now you mention it, I have mixed in artistic circles too and gone to parties that were full of musos. Everyone had a band with varying degrees of success. I remember a party that was hosted by a poet.

He was a poet and he had a little crowd of fans around him. And he was an incredibly charming and charismatic and handsome guy. But that was similar. That's the similar vibe. And you're right, it and charismatic and handsome guy. But that was similar. That's the similar vibe. And you're right. It's not my thing either. So I guess we're just laying our cards on the table in terms of, you know, it's not just individuals. There are different social groupings.

And I'm sure it's pretty intense down there on the lower east side of Manhattan or wherever they're from. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just a country chicken from a small in queensland australia that's it we don't do these kind of fancy events but you know i do think there is a parallel with the idw you know sophisticated dinner get-togethers which they're always talking about having these big conversations over dinner i also don't go to those. So I'm not taking part in any of the whole intellectual social milieu. So, all right. Anyway, with that clear, there's

something we need to get out of the way early because it's going to come up. You might have guessed that, but one part of being edgy is saying like edgy words and things which are supposed to be offensive. and that demonstrates that you're cool because you don't give a shit what normal restrictions are man like you're too hip for that so just two examples are you a mama's boy can you describe that i mean who are you closer with your mom or your dad my mom definitely yeah okay totally you identify more with your mother i think also your dad's like not retarded and he probably can intuit that you and your mother have what feels like a conspiracy together against him retarded you know whoa say the r word wow

yeah yeah here i just wanted to highlight that you might have thought that like that was the cutting edge of humor when south park came to the fore right to say retarded or something like that and it'd be edgy but no anyway it's worth noticing and another example is this one do you feel like being like the child of immigrants contributed at all to your perspective as an artist it's kind of a gay and cliched question but it also dawns on me that autism aside having shame-based foreigner parents also gives you a sense of critical distance it's a gay question matt you know it's the words that used to be used offhand but now deliberately used to show that you're you know beyond yeah yeah yeah transgressive that's the word you're looking for that's a word

yeah yeah it's transgressive it's hip to be square that's all right that's right i like south park yeah if you make it a cornerstone of your personality that's impressive but nonetheless i'm just saying it because you'll hear it come up. And so there's two clips. That's it. And if that was the extent of it, just to be clear, I would just be like, okay, you know, whatever. It's not that which makes the rest of the stuff that you're going to hear like bad, right? That's just a symptom of the hipster edgy contrarian space but i i think one of the things is like if people focus on that that gives them an easy out to say that oh look people are just being triggered by sure you know that's that's what it's there for well i wasn't i

wasn't triggered i wasn't triggered well so bad luck triggered. Well, bad luck. You failed the triggers. You're not going to get it that easily. I'm just trying to figure out how to tell the difference between someone who's not neurotypical and someone who's just incredibly, incredibly cool. Yeah. It's a timeline. Yeah, that's true. So let's get into it.

So obviously this episode is going to be heavily focused on autism and there's various reasons for that. Tao Lin has apparently been described as an autistic writer by various people, or at least they claim that. So here's him talking about this a little bit. You're a very evocative writer in spite or because of being very literal, which you've talked about and which you attribute to autism yeah yeah you talked about i forgot where that you generally don't like and shy away from devices like metaphor or idioms or whatever do you feel like that's like an autistic trait

yeah yeah i feel like i i have two styles one of them is the one you're describing it's really literal and it just describes concrete details and also like some thoughts and feelings and also like some thoughts and feelings and that one's the one that everyone associates me with so they think i like write really simply but i also write in longer sentences with a lot of metaphors and stuff like i did in my book taipei but i feel like both of them are autistic literary styles. Like with the long sentences, I'll use like really weird autistic similes. Scintillating. So he uses weird similes and he describes things in a factual way because of, you know, his autistic tendencies. And you might at this point be curious is he autistic and just to answer that he explains but we do have a lot of questions about autism have you ever been formally diagnosed

as autistic no so you just suspect that you're autistic yeah yeah i've self-diagnosed okay and i've taken tests i'm like i took this test pretending i was in high school or college and i scored 39 and above 31 indicates oh i've taken this test yeah yeah and then you said you retook it from your perspective today and you scored 28 so when you say you were pretending that you were in high school or college what does that mean i just sat there thinking like i just sat there thinking like I'm in, what was it like when I was in 11th grade and like a freshman in college. And I've written about it so much I feel like I can just remember it. And I just filled out the test. Okay.

I was trying to think of the particular vibe that's being portrayed here. And it reminded me of, like, you know those directors like andy warhol or jim jamush that they both like handed up on purpose and jim jamush did a cameo in a funny sort of new york comedy it was about a i forget what it was called it was a guy as a he was like a private detective there was a scene where jim jamush is having this surreal conversation with him while he's riding around a little bicycle honking a little horn and it's just so pretentious and artsy and all at the same time yeah i feel like that's the vibe that talyn's going for for me the part that strikes me here matt is cutting through all of that self-diagnosed

with autism on the basis of taking a test and thinking back to when you were younger and that you would score higher at the time than you would now. Now, I'm not going to argue that autism is diagnosed on the spectrum, right? Autism spectrum disorder exists. So it is quite possible that somebody doesn't reach clinically diagnosable levels, but they're somewhere on the spectrum. But just that whole approach, if you were really this focused on the topic and concerned about it, why wouldn't you just go see like a qualified psychiatrist or psychologist and get a diagnosis? And actually, if you wanted a diagnosis, I think the way that you choose to answer questions on her test is not that hard

to work out so it's but it just speaks to that that like that's what all of this is based on is self-diagnosis and self-research and all the things that you're gonna hear is all from taolin's own autodidactic approach to research yeah i think the point is he's he's kind of autistic but ironically yeah kind of he is but he isn't he's you know um don't take it seriously but don't not take it seriously it's another one of the influences on his style and i guess it's part of the gestalt that makes him pretty fascinating and interesting to some people yes so uh here's him talking about you know definitions of autism a bit more the cdc's definition of it no the dsm-5 definition of it is just that you have

deficits and social interaction and communication and just anything social and then you also have and just anything social and then you also have repetitive behaviors and then the third thing that these things cause quote significant impairment in your functioning so it's just those three things okay so it's not like if you go to a doctor there's no biological test or genetic test for it right you mentioned that unlike something like down syndrome or other forms of retardation which can be localized to like a single chromosome or something i feel mad that this is a little bit common actually it reminds me of some of the stuff and i used to read works about mental health denialism that whole you know anti-psychiatry movement and there's general critiques that you can have of the DSM V5 and the history of psychiatry and all that

kind of thing. But whenever diagnoses are presented like this, it tends to be saying, you know, like the diagnostic criteria is so loose, so broad that basically it's very easy to fit yourself into these criteria if you want, right? Like, what does it mean to be impaired? What does it mean repetitive behaviors? But actually, although there could be issues with overdiagnosis, I think in general, a good psychiatrist and whatnot will not hand out a diagnosis without, you know, significant evidence.

And it isn't just that you read the checklist online and then that's it, right? Like all of the things, if you read it, will say that this requires proper extended evaluation. So this reminds me a bit of like going, you know, web MDing your symptoms and being like, oh yes, yes, I've got that. So I must have some rare exotic disease.

And of course, autism is not that rare compared to other disorders. But it's just the approach. It's very vibe-based, like, yeah, this applies. There may be issues with clinical diagnosis, over-diagnosis or under-diagnosis, but certainly those pale in comparison to self-diagnosis. So I'm not going to attempt a casual diagnosis, but I've met a few people on the spectrum in real life. I'm related to some of them. Some people have accused me of being somewhere along the spectrum, but that doesn't matter because I'm not a clinician either. Then you'll be interested to hear their discussions about where the origins of autism lie, because you might not be a clinician matt but taolin has done research

they found like the exact gene or whatever but with autism they found like 500 to a thousand different genes that are associated with it and even though they found that many they still think they just still view it as genetic right and you and your point like basically the tldr from what i understand is that all these modern chemicals and technologies are what's making us ill and the genetic explanation is kind of a scapegoat that diverts away from the environmental factors. Is that correct? Definitely, yeah. Okay. So it's the technology and the contaminants in the modern world that is making us... Environmental factors, Matt.

And the kind of skepticism around genetic factors there is a thing that will be recurrent. And in this podcast, whenever they talked about topics, whenever I was preparing for this episode, I went and did a little bit of research. I did my own research, right, Matt? But I actually know how to locate meta-analyses and studies and to put them in general context of qualities of studies. And from my research and background information on this, I think the general position is there is a genetic contribution. The percentage is debatable, but it's not insignificant. And that there are potential environmental factors, but almost all of the ones that Tao

Lin will go on to discuss are not strongly supported by evidence. There's weak studies or they're associated with anti-vaccine claims or this kind of thing. And some of the better, more established ones related to environment during early pregnancy and early stages of life and so on are not so strongly focused on that, except for the kind of chemicals in the environment, electromagnetic waves, ingredients in vaccines, all this kind of stuff. So it's, yeah. Yeah, that's right.

Primarily genetic. And also important to remember, when we talk about environmental factors, we're not just talking about the society that we live in and too much screen time. We're talking about exposure to stuff during pregnancy or medicines and things like that, birth complications and so on. Right. Those are the things that are actually relatively strongly supported, but that's not what they're going to fix it on and part of the issue is when you say exposure to chemicals and early stages of life or whatever the kind of

chemicals that they're going to talk about are not the ones that have strong evidence supporting them so yeah it's one of those things where like environment gets mixed in with all types of things. But if you imagine by environment, they're primarily talking about, you know, the same kind of toxins that most of your health and wellness influencers will identify, thimerosal, these kinds of things, right? Yeah, that's what's going to come up. these kind of things, right?

Yeah, that's what's going to come up. Now, here's a little bit more about autism as a identity category and general stupidity about the causes of autism. Now that there's this like push for neurodiversity as like an identity category, you say also in your essay that like, they're sort of trying to destigmatize neurodivergency and in that way also failing to do the research necessary to actually attribute it to the certain environmental

or chemical causes that but first of all like autism gets thrown around a lot yes it's very broadly applied um obviously people are becoming more autistic clinically but i also feel like a lot of normative behaviors now qualify sort of as like our times are becoming increasingly autistic and everyone so everyone is sort of on the spectrum do you think that like for instance being online makes you more autistic or do autistic people gravitate toward being online both both of those i feel like it's not just environmental toxins but but just literally everything like even how you're raised right or your experiences it's extremely vague and broad, isn't it?

I mean, one thing to say that being online makes you more autistic or just everything, all your experiences, then you're talking in such broad terms. And you must be referring to some concept of autism that is just so broad as to be entirely meaningless, surely. That shit does make the point there, but there being a lot of claims about behavior being autistic or people being autistic, right? It's kind of trendy, especially in Silicon Valley kind of spaces.

But I think also in these artistic and creative spaces too, you know, I was mentioning these, you know, hip directors and you could think of names of artists, authors and stuff like that who have a brand. And a bit like the Silicon Valley people, it kind of makes sense to have that brand where you're in touch with the infinite. You're somehow special. Your insights are better.

They're more unique. And when you're building a brand to become well-known as an artist of some kind, I could see an incentive to lean into that. So it's kind of ironic, isn't it, that they bring that up with Tal Lin, who, you know, arguably could be leaning into it for the same reasons. Yes, it is slightly ironic. We don't need more irony in this show, Chris. They're already supplying enough.

We shouldn't do it. I would take it as an underhand dig, because they did say at the start that they have some questions about his claims about autism and stuff as well. So I think there is an element of that there. But the way that it's used here, like here's another example of it just being like used as a very broad term and diagnoses being thrown around casually. Yeah, I feel like the increase in is must be connected to the increase in auto fiction if there is an increase in auto fiction i don't know if there has been but just it seems like autistic people do you think joan didion was autistic sorry i don't know a little yeah something was up with her yeah so talyn's an auto fictional writer right that's

a genre it's a genre of literature that combines elements of autobiography and fiction and he was saying that that fictional style is connected to the rise of autism yeah i think his link is autistic people being fixated on topics and linking things, seeing things from their perspective that, you know, having difficulties with theory of mind stuff means that that would be an appealing genre of literature for them. But the logic there as well, Matt, is I think the rise of this, if there has been a rise, like you would want the first thing, right? You'd want to establish that if you want to make the claim that this is because autism is becoming more common so now this is becoming a more popular

genre of fiction you'd first want to know that that is the case and also i think like people writing from their autobiographical perspective and disguising as fiction it's not entirely a new genre of fiction that i've never heard of before i've heard of plenty of waves that sound very familiar to this and like previous generations so yeah yeah yeah marcel proust and the russia de tonks body exactly all of that matt all of that and uh and you can hear the same kind of loose reasoning when they're talking about autism and testosterone here's an example that's interesting because i have i have a question about autism which come there's some common sort of perceptions about it that it's also due to an excess of testosterone which is why most autists

are male and that it's i've someone described it to me as um like being excessively male brained and thus lacking kind of the more feminine instincts for like empathizing and like feminine instincts for like empathizing and like graciousness sure that's part of it testosterone levels i hadn't heard of it being too high though or maybe low or some imbalance i feel like low probably or free because there's a difference a lot of autists are high t yeah but there's like the the idea of like free testosterone in your blood, which I don't fully follow or understand, but maybe that's a thread. Maybe. A bit of free speculation there, Chris.

Yeah. So they've read stuff about the extreme male brain theory and testosterone. Yes. Time and barren corn. Yeah. And I think it is true, right, that autism is much more prevalent in males than females right much more prevalent amongst males than females questions about you know is part of that to do

with the way that it presents in males being more readily diagnosable but also the evidence around this being linked to testosterone levels and i believe it's particularly higher levels of prenatal testosterone. So like in the amniotic fluid. Yeah. So it's not that autistic people have higher levels of testosterone. It's that when they were gestating,

they could have been higher levels of testosterone in the amniotic fluid. So a bit different. Right. But, you know, there are various versions of the theory and whatnot. But the general thing I would say is that it doesn't have strong evidence currently. And more this clip highlights, and we'll see it in other clips, the way that they approach

these kind of topics. In some respect, Matt, this is the way a lot of people approach this kind of topic. So Tao Lin has apparently been, you know, quite focused on this issue. But when you hear the way he talks about studies or the way that you know he finds what dash and anna say you know yeah yeah that's right it's kind of like that whatever like it's just very very superficial and vibe yeah beast i heard once from a friend yeah my friend saw that and yeah it's basically joe rogan epistemology yeah it's something you read once and you vaguely remember and you know it's a theory the evidence for it

is pretty weak and i've kind of not even remembered it quite right anyway so yeah so this gets tied in this is something that's going to come up again later but in a lot of these podcasts that we cover, Matt, the different types of figures that we cover, one recurrent pattern that you see across a diverse range is this kind of fascination with esoteric and the presentation of, noble savage, the return to the way that humans are supposed to live. And this kind of naturalistic is good philosophy, right? You see that crop up a lot. You know, the indigenous peoples have knowledge that is closer to the ideal form that humans should live, this kind of thing.

And Tao Lin links this into stuff to do with autism i liked what you're talking about earlier about how you think everyone's on the spectrum that's what i think like definitely now compare it to our pre-agricultural ancestors everyone now is on the spectrum i think because some We're on some kind of spectrum. We're on all the spectrum. Autistic, suicidal. Psychotic. I'm feeble-minded myself. Unstable.

Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. It's intersectional. Because that one artist, George Catlin, in the 1800s, he visited 2 million Native Americans and South American natives. And he didn't meet one. He called it idiot or lunatic, quote lunatic, out of 2 million people. And he said he heard of three or four you see the

reference that it's intersectional actually i know that's kind of just a flippant comment but i do think that is the horseshoe thing coming in that they are fluent in that way of thinking you know the oh yes post-modern oh yeah and and if you think back to some of those other clips you played there chris they're very much au fait with the very sophisticated kind of discourse language that you normally would associate with super ultra progressive people yeah yeah but there's a horseshoe going on where the levels of irony and skepticism and so on has reached such a point that there's a bit of a horseshoe at play but yeah yeah, it was interesting his theory that we're all autistic now to some degree or another, the modern world has made us this way.

And the proof of this is some firsthand account of some early pioneer. He met a lot of Native Americans and didn't meet many, was it idiots is the word that he used? Yeah. So that's strong evidence. Actually, I went and looked up about this guy. Of course you did. people, Native Americans, and on the one hand, presented them in an overall positive light and kind of documenting that they're a very varied collection of different people and that they have these traditions which are beautiful and they care of landscapes and

all this kind of thing. But it's very much also associated with the kind of noble savage presentation from that period right and it's very much regarding them as the repository of wisdom that can cure the ills of the western mind which is a very common motif yeah and i'm sure chris sorry this is an aside but i'm sure like i know it's it's easy to mock that right people coming from the sort of early industrial age looking at people living in more natural environments moving around i can imagine i don't know for sure but i can imagine them making valid comparisons of of people being you know physically fitter and seemingly more relaxed and stuff like that,

compared to the sort of people in some industrial town in the Midwest, you know, going off to the factory and that. I mean, there is that, right? You can focus on that aspect, but a lot of it is just exoticism. And I absolutely would not trust his assessment of how many people were suffering suffering from mental illness in the you know and and there's a lot about them having kind of special breathing techniques which allow them you know to live healthier lives and all this kind of stuff so it's it's very much the exact same as the theosophists just like a different target but tylen treats it as well we can take his account as very accurate because and that shows that pre-agricultural societies

just didn't have significant levels of autism or you know mental illnesses associated with that yeah yeah no that's the past matt what about the future have some projections about the future i wanted to ask you about this quote from your essay um where if i can find it um the united states which is of 2011 had the highest first day in infant death rate in the industrialized world might succumb to autism um becoming a cautionary example for other countries. The autism rate here has doubled on average of every five years since 1970. At this rate, the majority of American boys will be autistic by 2036, and by around 2045, most children here will be nonverbal.

Are you being sarcastic or facetious, or do you think that's actually true? The nonverbal thing yeah i calculated it that's yeah a lot of times like i calculated it yeah it's true okay i mean i buy it yeah i said it's like on pace to do that unless well is there any there's no way to remedy it and there is the lonely causing debility is our environment yeah okay so the truth in that there chris is that rates of diagnosis of autism in the u.s and to some degree elsewhere have been increasing a lot over recent decades haven't they that's right but what he's doing there very scientifically talon is extrapolating out, assuming that there will be a consistent increase

from a growth, right? Like it's projecting an exponential increase. So by the same thing, you could look at the production of some new type of cheese or some popular sweet and say, look, the production of prime drink is doubling year on year for you know the past five years or whatever it's been out and if this continues by the year 2050 the earth will just be comprised solely of prime drinks you know you can't do that and also i don't trust his calculations no okay but he did say it was an extrapolation. It was a forecast when they pushed him on it. He calculated it several times, but he did slip in there that he was extrapolating.

Right, but that's the thing, Matt. Really, the whole, the US is going to be nonverbal by the mid-2000s. I know they're expressing their skepticism over that claim as well, but I do feel that shows quite how seriously you should take some of the other claims made by Powell. Of course, of course. I mean, he makes several mistakes. I mean, the least of which probably is the extrapolation, because you could give him the

benefit of the doubt and says he knows that he's just saying at present rates. But I guess what he's ignoring is that he's assuming that the increased rates of diagnosis are entirely due to an increased underlying prevalence of autistic symptomatology in the population, where I think it's pretty uncontroversial to say that a lot of the increase would be due to broader diagnostic criteria. Increase attention to it and awareness of the issue yes this is part of the problem because there's an association where people are like look the developed societies which are you know wealthy and have modern medicine that's where you're seeing these increase in autism yeah that's right if you're living in the 1800s in london you would get a diagnosis of any

mental condition if you were literally taking off all your clothes and running down the street attacking people, right? Then they'll drag you off, throw you in a dungeon, give you some diagnosis. But barring that, there wasn't the awareness and people had bigger fish to fry in terms of their problems, in terms of whether or not somebody was showing symptoms of autism. I mean, look, it's certainly possible that there are some environmental features at play. Who knows? Could be microplastics, whatever. But, you know, other things like people having children later in life, right?

It could be older parental age. Things like that could be going on. All of those things, obviously, do not extrapolate. From what I could see of looking at the reviews about the evidence, one of the strongest supported predictors is pregnancy in older age, right? But as a result, there's no time spent on that in this particular discussion. And you heard there at the end, you know, that Talon said there is a way to reverse this dystopic future. And it comes from Catlin. He references, you know, what Catlin

showed from the indigenous Americans was that if you just treat it correctly, it doesn't manifest, you don't find anybody with autism. So here is a little bit of that discussion. Catlin, you mentioned when he was in the field, like embedded with the Native Americans, often came across the theory that the reason that there were less like deaf, dumb and mute and insane people in their population is because they like called, like killed off the feeble-minded ones at first. Yeah.

And you say that that's actually not the case and he in fact discovered that when those rare instances did occur those people were treated with dignity and almost elevated to the level of deities because they were considered to be like a special sign from god because they were so rare yeah and and i'm sure they did function that way as special things that would just they would have a different perspective than anyone else and and they would figure out a way to use that to benefit the tribe caitlin said the general thing is that the indigenous americans native americans treated people with mental illnesses like deities elevated them and recognized they had special insights and you know that is what allowed people to flourish and yeah that's right i mean that's

the key thing here like the whys and wherefores of autism are a little bit beside the point it's we're going to be talking about some different topics soon but the general the general vibe and the generally intuitively attractive point that is being made is that modern society sucks and it's all making us all sick and we need to get back in touch with nature, right? Yes, that's right. And if you want a little bit more on the dystopic future that we're heading towards. Sure.

So what you're saying basically is our society will be a population of extreme autists administered by people on the spectrum who are like more or less functional yeah yeah and that could be good that's kind of beautiful yeah it is well because you end this essay on a very beautiful and hopeful note um the more autistic among us the more injured and excluded by civilization blessed and cursed with reclusion and mental independence bent toward accuracy and numbers and language, would lead society in the gradual rewarding work of healing.

Do you feel like it's going to be the functionally autistic who rescue and heal our broken civilization? Yeah, if you hear the little quote that she wrote out from his essay, you can see that this is someone who's kind of an artist, right? He's got a way with words. He wrote some very, very nice prose there, but it's not well-founded scientifically. I'm sure it's a beautiful article though. Yeah, we will get off the autism topic soon, Matt, but there's just so many references to it that I can't let some of them go past.

So, you know, if you think we're being a little bit too cruel about that maybe how lynn just does have good insights to this and you know he might be off with some of his remarks and whatnot but you know generally he's approaching this correctly listen to this oh interesting i've been working on that and taking care of my cats nice one of my cats is autistic how so a lot autistic compared to the other one he's really he moves really slow and he doesn't touch you like the other cats will rub against me a lot this one doesn't and he has he throws up a lot it's not a joke right they're laughing but he is diagnosing

his cat as having autism because it's not affectionate enough that's all ticks right like he's describing a cat then yeah it's but it's not as friendly as the other cats ergo it's an autistic cat and it's not just him that does this kind of thing so here's another classic of the genre that chinese is kind of an autistic language yeah yeah and that um you speak to them in chinese i assume with some words in english yeah but so that the dialogue in leaf society is also like translated and i think it's like well also because you're writing it there's like a literalness but my impression of chinese in general also is that it's very russian it's not the case with russians are very like uh kind of complicated and baroque and kind of yeah it has many like yeah like

yeah chinese it's a very emotional language where chinese is yeah sorry go ahead yeah chinese is really terse like it'll often be less words in chinese and i think chinese people in america come off as very terse and autistic coded chinese people come across as autistic coded i think people with a background in in the humanities with a liberal arts degree they should just stay away from topics like autism they should keep talking about marcel pruse famously non-poetic language chinese that's you know not going into like dialects or what specifically they're referencing there, but the notion that because compared to European or Russian, the language structure in Chinese can sometimes seem bare bones.

Yeah. I get that there is a lot of poetry in China. Yes. Yeah. Orchery in China, yes. Yeah, I know. I know that because Chinese people are not displaying the responses assumed by European standards, ergo, that means there's something up. Well, in fantasy, you did say autistic coded. Yeah, all right.

Yes, and there is a giggle. It's ironic, Ma. It's just a joke. But is it? But the point I got is that this is the artistic literary style where you play with ideas and you cross the streams and you combine this observation with that observation. And it can all be very nice. It's just you and I are looking at it through the lens of,

is this factually accurate? Is this grounded in any kind of evidence and the answer is always no which is why i think they should stay away from topics like autism yes and i agree i mean it is like that but it leads to stuff like this but and i i don't think this is contradicting what you're saying but it's kind of illustrating why i have such a problem with it that's really good yeah and East Asians seem more autistic just overall yeah when I go to Taiwan like everyone seems autistic like they say a lot as a response and you said that they smile when they're placed in an uncomfortable or unflattering social situation which comes off weird to westerners because like why are you why are you laughing and i kind of do that yeah yeah and i feel like they even said

there, oh, comes off to Westerners as like a bit weird, right, but that doesn't mean it's autism, right, it's a different thing, it's just that there's other cultures in the world that have different social behaviors and

responses, and oh, but they say, mm, which is like non-responsive yeah rather than yeah so yeah i know it's vapid all the observations i heard were all vapid last one matt last one for the autism one last one and it's uh again it's a concrete claim a very concrete claim when people think of autists they think a of socially awkward people and b of people who are geniuses but a lot of autistic people actually have pretty limited mental capacity there's some middling yeah yeah there's like it's like 30 percent have IQs lower than 70. They're retarded.

Wow. That's like us for real. And the average lifespan of autistic people is only 36.2 years. Wow. That's insane. Okay. So what were the concrete claims you're referring to? The average lifespan?

I mean, it's a spectrum. So I suspect any of these statistics, whether it's IQ, lifespan or whatever, can only apply to some threshold of severity that you put people across. So he said the life expectancy was 36 years. This is a thing which you actually see cited across a bunch of things. But again, Matt, a single search on Google Scholar, you can actually find a paper from

The Lancet this year, estimating life expectancy and years of life lost for autistic people in the UK, a match cohort story, and blah, blah, blah. Studies on premature mortality in autistic people have often been misinterpreted, right? So they attempt to look. And in contrast to the dramatic claims made by Tao Lin, they find that people diagnosed with autism and intellectual disability had 2.83 times the mortality rate, reduction in life expectancy, 6.14 years, or people with autism and intellectual disability, 7.28 years compared to the average right so slightly i assume this is people actually meet clinical criteria for the disorder not not for people that are somewhere along the spectrum which is what they've been talking about he may have been talking about people with severe autism at that particular point but even then this is one of the

things that you can check right and if you spent an hour checking, you would see that those claims are based on, you know, very flimsy research. And they're often cited in the kind of anti-vaccine general autism discourse space. But it's not hard to find out that yes, while there is, of of course a expected greater susceptibility to injuries or or just things that will reduce your lifespan whenever you have autism or related disabilities if it were something where your lifespan was reduced from 36 and the average lifespan you know in a developed country 70 or 80 and if most of the people in the society in 2045 were going to be non-verbal right so lifespan also going down presumably right i get

the general gist of what you're saying chris i mean you can take pretty much any of the statements made by talyn and there's a theme which is that they all are all drawn from a very superficial vibe from low quality discourse out there and aren't actually accurate when you check with the literature and this is someone who's done a deep dive on it right he's written essays about it written articles books around the topic so yeah this is what it looks like when an arts and humanities poet person does a deep dive. I'm sorry. Sorry, arts and humanities people. We're taking Tal in at whatever place to him.

No, that's not fair. When they do a dive on a scientific topic, it often ends up like this. It depends on the person. That's not fair. Some of them do a good job. Everyone, stick to your art galleries. Stick to your book signings you know just just make your comments on literature and art stay away from the real world it's not for you yeah sorry sorry that was too broad that was unfair

i take it back my arts that you want these brothers and sisters i'm sorry for besmirching you but you understand why i'm a little bit frustrated from this material and if you thought it was just related to autism because of this guest and that's very specific and we're picking a bit too much let's go to a completely different topic oh what could that be i don't know we got to read the real dr fauci to find out i'm sure he gets into all those numbers i mean i'm bad a ton yeah of course but he bought like a lot of stock and then like after selling it he came out and said like the vaccine is not that effective and stuff like that and we were all i mean i regret getting it did you get the max vaccine? No, I didn't get it. Good for you.

Oh, thank you. I mean, I don't feel any difference. Good for you, Matt. Yep. So Fauci, what a bastard, eh, Chris? Didn't get the vaccine. Good. Lucky you.

Smart decision. That comes towards the end of the podcast. Let's jump back in time to them introducing this topic. And there's a bit of a connection to the previous topic but i'm sorry leaf and science right and i think the way they get you there is when you start really digging into that kind of stuff it is not only officially but socially censured because you are made to feel like a weird tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist and therefore lame and uncool and socially unacceptable.

Nobody wants that. That's how liberals will view you, yeah. Liberals will be, yeah. Yeah. And that's been isolating. We spoke about this before, actually. I have. Me and you.

I think you asked me about working in the entertainment industry and when they were rolling out the covid vaccines there was a totally like homogenous culture wherever all of my colleagues were just being like which vaccine are you gonna get you know and like why haven't you done it yet you know and you're like like sweating because you don't want to get into it that you even have and i don't even know the facts i just have like doubts yeah any any natural misgiving that you may have is billed as like a nefarious dogma like merely for asking questions but as you mentioned the autistic have a powerful upper hand in grappling with these issues because they're less um socially conformist and they

have they can know so many facts there you go chris all of those squares out there all conformists they're all getting the vaccine and they're asking, why aren't you vaccinated? It's like, oh, my God. Yeah. So cringe. And Cowling correctly notes that in liberal circles, being anti-vaccine is seen as a negative thing. It's not so negative and conservative. In fact, it's not edgy or unusual.

It's mainstream. In some respects, it's not edgy or unusual. It's mainstream. In some respects, it's necessary. If they want to do a podcast about how good Fauci is, that would be edgy for their audience. I think that's an interesting aspect to them. This is where when you get so edgy and so ironic and so sophisticated in scare quotes, at some point that takes you to this horse-fuel part of the political spectrum

where you can do sort of right-wingy, conspiratorial, anti-authoritarian stuff, but it's all done in a very artsy, Manhattan, liberal arts graduate kind of way. This is an interesting example of a broader thing that we've seen a lot. Yeah, though i guess the point i would make here is that when you hear the references that they make they'll talk in some of the other clips about glenn greenwald joe rogan it's not a random assortmentse across the political spectrum it's all from a very predictable right-wing grifftosphere like and i can play one clip that kind of highlights the kind of thing i'm talking about so listen to this but one thing that is interesting is that trump has tweeted like 30 times about the connection between vaccines and autism

which just made me trust and admire him a lot like why would you say something that's going to alienate like almost everyone right and keep saying it and just from my research on it, it seems true. Well, what did you find through your research about vaccines? Have you read The Real Dr. Fauci by R.F.K. Jr.? No. It seems amazing, though. It seems like you're beat. It seems very well-researched and very thin margins. It's, like, jam-packed with information.

It's amazing he can write books like that well that's why i also kind of trust rfk jr is because he's been a very vocal um vaccine truther yeah for a long time which has like certainly done him no favors yeah that's why you can trust rfk jr because he's been such a vocal anti-vaccine advocate. Yeah, and he wrote a book with thin margins. It's packed with facts. It's connected to this dark enlightenment sort of thing as well, isn't it? It's this very sophisticated take on the reactionary vibe, right? Very sophisticated?

Well, you know, I'm using the heavy scare quotes to describe it. Yeah, heavy, heavy scare quotes. But some of those names on that list we're talking about before elizabeth brunig tulsi gabbard glenn greenwald steve bannon stavrov zizek is a bit of an exception but also alex jones curtis yavin like these these are the former guests on the red scare so as you say i'm agreeing with you it is a new kind of post-modern way to be right-wing reactionary but it's also super ironic and sophisticated in scare quotes and you can hear like the vibe based nature for it in a whole bunch of things and i think it's anna talking about candace owens

but but just listen to the way she assesses her i had this thought with candace owens who a lot of people don't like i'm not like a huge candace owens stan or anything like that but one of the redeeming qualities that she has is that in spite of being like a right-wing ideologue she never really seems angry or bitter even though she plays that part like she seems like on the whole like a pretty like cheerful person she feels very polished yeah polished and cheerful yeah that's why you know she's good isn't that nice that's sort of reflecting like who gives a you know that's the mistake that so many people make is like they assume people that are ideologues or conspiracy theorists have to be like horrific people to be around yeah they've got to have bad bo they've got to be hairy yeah what does it matter that she's cheerfully an ideologue who cares that's right she was loudly

demanding that the u.s marine corps invade australia doesn't really matter if she her nails are done really well and she wears snappy outfits that she's insane come on yeah to give some credence to your approach though matt you do hear basha talk about her previous politics right so listen to this so when you started you were a bernie sanders supporter i was a bernie crat yeah what were you like a nothing burger i mean i was always low-key i don't want to say i'm not a conservative you're not in any form yeah but i've always been like kind of low-key right wing because my my mom is very liberal in a way that doesn't map onto the normal American coordinates and my dad was always

very right wing in his own special way and I never really felt the urge to rebel against him my parents are kind of libtards they're Gen Xers and I was

pretty apolitical I really was not interested in politics and then i liked bernie sanders and i was really poor and so whatever democratic socialism seems like intriguing to me because i was like oh i could have a safety net my life could be less precarious what is there to say about it? I mean, you described it as vapid a while ago. And is there anything more to say about it apart from that? The point here is that people have drawn this parallel before to say that Bernie supporters, some of them went on to support figures like Trump. And how?

How could they jump from a democratic socialist candidate to a right wing populist? And this is how. This is how you do it. You go on vibes, on like being counterculture. And Anna's point there that, you know, she's conservative, but she's not like a normal conservative. She's like a special category. And Dash is like, you know, know not a standard just liberal person her thing was being

much more nonchalant but like yeah they both want to say we're not just the standard no no of course like i get it in the sense of figuring out where they are in terms of what they're reacting against and what they feel is hip and cool and whatever and you know it it says in what's written about it that they're reacting against things like the Me Too movement or woke consumerism, where you, you know, ethical this and that, or call out culture or cancel culture or whatever. And I can see how they can look at their parents or Gen Xers and normies and go, well, that stuff is not cool. And they're having their own reaction against it. So I can sort of understand the

internal logic for them. I have two clips that speak to that. So one is just like a straight up standard thing, which comes up in all this is the denial that you are conservative, like trigonometry, Dean of Rubin until very late in his trajectory and Tim Pool, all of them, not conservatives are not conservatives regardless of how many conservative points they re-use i wanted to ask you too how you changed away from being a liberal each of you getting older and making more money for me nothing will make you conservative like having something to lose yeah i think but i still am i mean i wouldn't say i'm not a liberal yeah i don't i don't

on one hand i'm definitely not a conservative liberal but on the other hand i still am a liberal in many ways yeah yeah that makes sense that's what i'll say about myself too sorry tolin if you're a big political hard-on so for trump and rfk jr maybe you're not actually as liberal as you imagine yourself to be it's clear the conservative is still uncool right there's still like a uncool association so i'm not a i'm not a conservative like i'm not on the hip right and then when it comes to that point about what you were saying about the potential association negative connotations with it just listen to this yeah how do you identify politically politically i don't think i've ever identified with any party yeah for sure and also i think

it's very hard to be an artist and be a conservative hmm really like a true conservative yes not like a right-wing person but an an actual kind of old classic style conservative. Interesting. The point is that conservatism, classic conservatism, old style, you can't even be an artist and be a conservative, right? Yeah. They recognize a tension there, so they have to be not that. I guess my point is, Chris, is they are not that. I think they're accurately describing themselves, right? I think that the political landscape in the USA,

particularly, but other places as well, to some degree, is changing, where those old school conservatives are still around, the religious ones, the ones that believe in traditional family values, people, they don't talk like this. But then there's a new kind of, just like there's probably a new kind of ways of being a progressive from the olden days, there are new ways of being whatever they are. It's kind of reactionary. It's kind of conservative. But it's also like into this sort of natural health and getting away from the modern world, you know, not believing in anything the authorities say. You know, Anthony Fauci has got to be lying about things.

But that's all conspiratial to be lying about things but that's all conspiratiality right yeah that's what i'm saying i think it's slightly different from the stodgy old conservatism oh yeah it is but it doesn't seem to me like unclear about where the political lean of it is i get that it's perfectly understandable to me that given the heuristics that they're applying this like kind of very vibe based reasoning that they could fall into a left-wing populist right if it was the right one but the current position and where they've been since they've emerged on the scene is very firmly ensconced in the kind of reactionary right dark enlightenment like there's no real mystery about kurdish jarvin whether he's right or left right he is a reactionary right-wing person and people that

they like the things that they promote they're not that at all surprising it's trump it's rfk jr it's candace owens it's not left-wing bomb throwers or that kind of person, right? Yeah. No, no, I'm agreeing with you. I'm just saying that the political landscape is evolving. So these terms left and right, reactionary or progressive or whatever, they are relative terms that describe the current landscape. And it just doesn't mean the same thing, whether you're talking about the left or the right

as it did 50 years ago or even 30 years ago. Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. Okay. So two clips on this then we'll get back to the the vaccine i know you're you're itching but yeah yeah so on the viperist politic how is this seeing like that clip of bernie sanders that was circulating on the internet like a week ago of him addressing like the israel palestine conflict like he is like at the end of the day

kind of no frills and plain spoken and that's his appeal like he's he's to me is not a loathsome character even though he's i feel betrayed by him sure yeah and that made me maybe a sort of reactionary or at least i only became political because of bernie sanders because i liked them and then i became disillusioned it's a it's class it's sort of classic yeah and there isn't any and now i don't really believe in leftism so-called as a project at all it is a very superficial approach to politics right it's the same as like, you're going to interview Alex Jones, but you don't do any research into why he's criticized. It's just, he's controversial. And are people saying things that aren't fair and this kind of thing, right? And it's edgy to talk to him because he's edgy. But that personal expression there of, you know, I bought into

Bernie Sanders and then I felt betrayed by him. so now i became kind of reactionary it's just like yeah that's yeah that sounds like when you go that sounds like you yeah there's the deep mystery here like and she's diagnosing it quite accurately so kudos there yeah it is surprising to me that this is such a popular podcast they make something like 25 000 a month i don't know probably more who knows but a lot i think that's just from the patreon subscriptions or something so i don't know what their raw numbers are but it's incredibly popular so yeah but there's a lot of people out there chris who feel like they're getting something from it and i don't think that they're gun-toting christian people from the midwest i think that they're people who like to think of themselves

as hip and sophisticated disenchanted with like the liberal orthodoxy in new york lower manhattan like i can see why amongst that crowd it would be appealing but it's just it is what it is but okay so the, just the last, the hammer, the steel, or the coffin. They're quite clear about the way that they approach politics. Were you ever a Bernie bro? No. Good for you. You just didn't.

I didn't pay attention that much to politics. Don't. I feel, honestly, that's also partly, I feel not just disillusioned, but like I got scammed into even caring about a political project like that was it was like i was emotionally manipulated into aligning myself politically with some candidate and now i'm like why did i even what a worthless besides it's like sociological and kind of like psychosocial

insights i feel like politics is just useless that world weary detached and so alienated from everything and yeah just too cool for school yeah i can't get the appeal amongst a certain kind of listener i can't say i approve though the basic message there of sympathy for you know being turned off by politics or whatever it's very common right i think myself you might even suffer from various levels of that sentiment as well but it's not i don't know just i cared about something and it was yeah and i was disappointed so i'm yeah so over that now it's it is all very self-indulgent and it really doesn't have a great deal to do with politics i mean they have terrible opinions about vaccines for instance but they're all just a reflection

of them wearing their opinions on their sleeve like little badges of of honor you know being a black sheep and rebelling against those tongue-clicking finger-wagging normies it's it really functions as a personal brand in a hip and cool social environment more than anything else so yeah like i get it i just um yeah there's just not much to it but matt uh just to give an example of it being applied to a non-related topic here's vibe-based chat around veganism that's for sure i feel like veganism is is bad for fertility deaf absolutely i don't think we're meant to be vegans as much as i'm like not a fan of current forms of meat consumption production i'm like an animal rights truther but yeah me too i feel like most people who are in to meat or ancestral diets care a lot. And like we're vegetarian or vegan before.

Were you ever vegetarian? Vegetarian and vegan. And how'd that go for you? That created a lot of eczema. And like IBS. Yeah, I feel like two years after or years after becoming a vegetarian is when I started getting eczema and an autoimmune disorder, back pain. It's getting pushed so much now with the climate change, vegetarian and veganism.

That reminds me of, what's the name of Jordan Peterson's daughter? Michaela. It's like a conversation you could hear on Michaela's podcast. You can imagine a version of that where it's, we all should be veg vegans or you can imagine a version of it which is we should all eat meat because i heard that you're gonna have a low fertility if you don't you know like it's just as you said vibe-based random vapid musings yeah and i have not heard death as a shortened version of definitely before that's a new haven't you you haven't heard of most deaf most deaf oh i have heard that but i've never heard death by itself have you heard of totes totes of course i've heard of totes i don't know about different cultures i didn't know

if that was a local thing just like all of that yeah i think you know veganism it's bad for fertility oh yeah totally and yeah just it's fair to say it's not your thing it's not my thing yeah and that but that talk around food that actually will come up again yeah but one other thing to say and this is where it's got the link to peterson stuff like that is that there is a consistent theme Like, it is a bit random in a way, but there are themes there as well. And they keep, you know, the natural is good, right? The natural, whatever our ancestors were doing, whatever the Native Americans were doing, that's kind of the key, right? Yeah.

So back to vaccines, Matt. Back to vaccines. Well, what's your take on vaccines? Vaccines, Matt. Back to vaccines. Well, what's your take on vaccines? Because you also mentioned how, like, I don't remember when, in, like, 1940 or 1950, there were, like, three pediatric vaccines that children in America got, and now there are 38, which seems alarming.

And we're, like, one of the more unhealthy countries, and we're at the forefront of handing out pediatric vaccines whereas some countries you mentioned that are considered healthier like israel japan sweden iceland um are fairly low yeah on the childhood vaccinations people don't talk about this that much the u.s has three times the amount of mandatory vaccines than the average developed country in europe and asia and when i was in 1983 when i was born that meant i got like 10 vaccines right so in the u.., it's a way bigger problem than other countries and the autism rates are higher. Is the U.S. the country with the highest childhood autism rates or?

I don't know. There might be some small countries somewhere, but but probably near the top and also are vaccines the whole story because presumably the healthier countries that regulate the vaccines are also regulating other aspects of public health more than we do in the united states that's it right so i i suspect you like me fact checked this one chris before you leap into a debunking I just want us to acknowledge that at the very beginning, there was an astonishing piece of reasoning, which was that America is one of the unhealthiest countries and also gets a lot of vaccines. Yeah. Interesting to see the comparison to countries like Japan, especially given later that we're going to be told that

East Asian society is autistic. And if you listen on, he'll go on about hikikomori and stuff, but none of it is consistent. That doesn't matter. So what was your fact checking about childhood vaccinations? America doesn't get a vastly higher number of vaccines than other developed countries. That's the first thing I remember. America gives most of the same vaccines that are in the rest of the developed world, but they separate them out into separate vaccinations, right? In some countries, they're kind of lumped together, like the MMR vaccine or I had the BCG in the UK. But the coverage is basically the same.

And also, there's still no association with any vaccines and autism. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It's just that autism is a disorder that's often detected in childhood and you get vaccines in childhood. So that's the association. All the claims have been debunked and the study is extremely flawed that have claimed to show relationship. Yeah, so it's kind of impressive that bit of reasoning because it was like bad reasoning layered on inaccurate factual assumptions, right? Where even if the factual statements they made were correct, then their logic still wouldn't follow, right? A totally spurious association between these things.

But the facts aren't even right. right a totally spurious association between these things but the facts aren't even right so um you know i think you were building up a bit of a case there that talent in particular but the hosts as well just have a terrible approach yeah their epistemics are broken completely broken they're pure pure vibe based and maybe they're good for understanding some avant-garde drama show that's being put on bmv we'll have to take that on faith right we can't assist that they definitely don't work well with science and i've got two more clips which highlight this in all their beauty so here's a discussion about you know so we've established that vaccines are a big problem how big of a problem well how big of a problem are vaccines because

for instance i have a reputation for being like a rabid anti-vaxxer and i'm really not like i got my kid all the normal like standard pediatric vaccines um for like practical reasons because they can't continue on in school if they don't have them and you're literally just shut out from society and have to become like a trad cap homestead or homeschooler if you want to like it's a little bit of aboriginal tribe like a thatch hut well the more i look into it the worse it seems and i stopped myself from looking into it too much like i've got this really thick book, Dissolving Illusions, that talks about how sanitation and other things like that were what lowered the infectious disease rates, not vaccines. But I haven't read it.

But it just, I don't know how bad it is it could be with like way worse than what i already think yeah well he doesn't know totally ignorant hasn't even read but the book is fake matt it's fake it's really fake so you know it's not like you can make a fake book with wrong information and that i think it's kind of funny because they're not even hiding, like, how little effort they've put into figuring out the truth here. Because that would be uncool, right? To do a lot of, you know, nerdy research and stuff. He presents himself as having done a lot of reflection and research on this topic. And they're kind of like, you know know deferring to him as the expert here and i

also i meant to say but the whole framing about this the introduction was like what's your take on vaccines right you have to have a take on vaccines right this isn't edgy this is exactly standard borg standard for their particular ecosystem to not have a take on vaccines would be the edgy thing to just be like i don't know you know the yeah my doctor said i should get it so i got it yeah that would be edgy and like ahead of the curve but that's not the game here and matt the next clip i know we've already demonstrated the level of reasoning that's applied, but it can't be stressed enough. Here's Tao Lin talking about vaccines and how many he would give his children and whatnot.

If I had a kid, I feel like I'd be fine with them getting like 10 vaccines. Right. Just because it's like, and I just make them healthy in other ways and they they should be fine but i wouldn't let them get like 30 vaccines but do you believe that there is a definite connection between autism and vaccines yeah yeah yeah because i feel like I can picture a glyphosate molecule like being breathed in or eaten or injected and it going into the stomach and binding with aluminum molecules and going into the blood and going into the brain. And then in the brain, the glyphosate and the aluminum separates

and they're both toxic okay i didn't just make this up it's this yeah researcher this mit researcher stephanie seneff she's researched this a lot so glyphosate is in vaccines this non-profit organization Moms Across America found out when they sent vaccines to a lab. And Stephanie Seneff and another researcher confirmed this and published a paper on it. Okay. And it's in vaccines because vaccines contain soy, sucrose, egg protein,

and a lot of other things that are contaminated with glyphosate. So he's a bog standard anti-vaxxer whose brain has been contaminated by brain worms. It all started with Andrew Wegfeld and it's never gone away. There's been one born every minute ever since. The glyphosate thing was so absurd chris do you know do you know about that i think i know the details behind it let me see if i get this straight so glyphosate round up i got some in the shed yeah i use it all the time right it's a standard thing you spray to kill weeds and things like that and the idea is is because some ingredients from vaccines are made from non-organic crops there's some organic ingredients that's probably

distilled out of a corn husk or something like that it's been distilled a thousand times but because it came from a farm that might have used glyphosate at some point then theoretically there could be some infinitesimal trace amount of glyphosate in the vaccine. So there you go. Autism. That's it. That's it. Antivax claims that glyphosate is like, you know, it's a new thimerosal, basically. But it's even worse than thimerosal because at least that was used as a preservative in vaccines. But in this case, they're saying, you know, it's an unacknowledged toxic ingredient that is causing all of these problems and anna goes on to talk about it and i'll just play it because i can't do it justice so it's not just how lynn that reasons like this you know like uh here's a bit about yes anding that that's contaminated glyphosate because the

cows and pigs get fed yeah and they're like factory farmed animals i'm assuming uh-huh yes today on twitter there was like a factory farming discourse that was picked up by glenn greenwald of course like an awful video yeah like of a of a pig in like a pig sad it's like humanoid bearing the pain of the world um and there there has been some research i mean glyphosate right is the compound that's found in roundup yeah in what in roundup which is um it's like a big chemical pesticide that was used after ddt is that what it's called was banned tau talks about this in his essay and that's been attributed to increasing the rates of all sorts of diseases like diabetes alzheimer's etc um i've talked about this before um eli's dad my baby daddy

his father died at age 49 of a now curable cancer non-hodgkin's lymphoma he was spraying on his property and it was a totally avoidable, preventable thing that there was like a class action lawsuit that a bunch of families were involved in. Yeah, so we should ban vibe-based reasoning, right, Chris? But just to spell it out in case anyone missed it, there may well, right, there is demonstrable dangers of if you're out there spraying away glyphosate,

getting covered in clouds of the stuff, you're inhaling it, glyphosate getting yes and there has been lawsuits has been lawsuits getting covered in clouds of the stuff you're inhaling it like asbestos or something like that right it's going to be bad for you i have lots of warnings and things on the labels now but what they're referring to in terms of the link to vaccines she cites this as a part of the reasoning for why it's plausible is that the idea goes is that if there are pigs or something out there and they're grazing in a paddock that might at some point have been treated with Roundup, then at some point the pig could ingest some little bit of it. And then the extract that they get from the animal, which then might go into the vaccines, is going to have these trace amounts. It's a completely different thing to inhaling clouds of it when you're spraying.

Are you saying they're conspiratorial in nature and like very loose with how they're applying standards of evidence yes i don't know that that wouldn't apply but a lot of the time i'm thinking about like the truth about 9-11 or something because there's this idea that like things are so complicated that there's no truth and i feel like that stops people from investigating things i think that's another classic scapegoat like saying autism is purely genetic it's i think it's meant to like the idea and silence you from asking questions. It's a very Pomo idea. With that I sort of do subscribe to a bit. But that's

it's also very autistic to believe in a kind of knowable truth. Well when you really roll up your sleeves and start digging in the details like the bigger picture loses its shape and you start to panic because there is what is that expression in the forest for the trees or whatever?

Yeah, the forest through the trees. Wouldn't it be amazing, Chris, if the very thing that all of these environmental contaminants caused, autism, actually turned out to be the superpower that enabled us to sift through all of this complex, confusing information to find the truth about what happened. That would be a turn up for the books, wouldn't it? You just get there, though, Matt. Like 9-11 truth stuff, just to highlight conspiracies flow together. They're rarely isolated, right? So, Taolin's bad epistemics about vaccines, autism,

everything applies also to 9-11. And no pushback from our intrepid hosts. Instead, they talk about how the concept of truth has been attacked by postmodernists, which Dasha is kind of on board with in some way. But actually, autistic people, they are focused on like the whole thing man it's it's so flimsy and ironically their neck of the woods their contrarian right is absolutely soaked in post-modernism they're like jordan peterson or tucker carlson nothing is true everything is a conspiracy like it's such a weird melange of things i get what you're saying chris and it's

just occurred to me that although we talked about this before the episode that in virtually all ways they are very unlike the gurus that we cover yeah i'm sure they'll score very low on our gromada but they do have that one aspect that is super in common with them which is that they have that kind of hipster contrarian black sheep type of thing which gives them the kind of insight that leads them funnily enough straight to you know your standard reactionary conspiratorial bullshit so in that respect i think their self-image and and the image that they project for the audience, and who would also probably be the similar, is quite similar to Brett and Heather Haying, right? They're also into natural health. They also believe we should go back and

get back in a more authentic relationship with nature and that vaccines are killing us. And they also would not describe themselves as right-wing reactionaries, right? They describe themselves as liberals, but a special hip kind of liberal that is actually against everything that leftists today are for. So in that sense, that's sort of hipster politics. I think they're on the money. Yeah. And I feel this is a little unfair, Matt, but to give you some flashbacks to those meat based conversations or any number of the things that we've talked about. I'll just play you a couple of clips

that surround hang-ups about diets. And that's probably why in Aboriginal societies, in addition to, because the real sort of point of the essay is how you were able to remedy some of the symptoms um through returning to basically like sorry like an ancestral diet and taking kind of health measures just taking all kinds of health measures all kinds of health measures ma and ancestral diet can cure autism right where have we heard this inflammation you know eating a meat diet is the cure of all ills and uh not not against vaccines in general just maximum of 10 or so the rest you can take

care of by eating lots of leafy greens but matt have you you know there's debates on these kind of things around what food is good like what about fish oils good bad there's sort of a beef between them and the repeat people specifically having to do with fish oil because repeat peters say that the fish oil is rancid and when i heard that i was like it felt true was like, of course, why wouldn't it be Ransom? And the picture was horrible for me. It sucks when you're like doing something that you think is healthy. I used to eat kale all the time and I was like dying.

And every day I'd force myself to like choke down a bunch of kale. And I lived in L.A. because I thought I was like, got to eat the right things for my body. And now I'm finding out i was eating totally the wrong things but i have a kind of quirky idea about nutrition um which is that i eat mcdonald's a lot and i think that mcdonald's is actually healthy for me. I'm not saying people should be eating McDonald's. But because it makes me happy to eat it like a child, it reduces stress, which reduces inflammation, which if I feel good when I'm eating it, it can't be that bad for me.

Yeah, I can see that helping a lot irony or not are they joking are they not it doesn't really matter at some point does it this is becoming a very common diagnostic thing though mental issues around food right you remember huberman and adia talked about like stuffing their face with donuts on their cheat days and eating 20 pizzas or whatever or it does come up a lot that's right i'm not saying it's good advice for everybody but it works for me yeah in an inflammation these inflammation there's so many of these things that i just the type of focus for modern humanity is on these a very specific set of chronic you know problems they're worried about vaccines but they seem to have a lot of

health problems themselves so here's a bit more okay mcdonald's is not the healthiest thing but it's actually healthier than a lot of the supposedly healthy foods you're ingesting because it does have like a lot of animal fats and proteins and stuff it's definitely edible yeah i used to eat a lot of almonds and turmeric and spinach and a lot of things that i found out last year contain a lot of plant anti-nutrients what is that defense chemicals there are these chemicals plants make so that animals don't eat them and that a lot of these are harmful like oxalates and i feel like that was giving me headaches a lot and eczema i used to have a eczema just my crotch would be itchy yeah Yeah. A lot because of the food I ate. For sure.

The skin issues are, I have suffered from acne and I've had, I don't know if it was eczema, but not for a long time. Scintillating insights about the properties of food and and definitely very clearly science-based back you know aren't the the plants smart they got these chemicals to stop the animals yeah anti-nutrients that's all bullshit by the way scratching your crotch well i have but that's not the reason um no yeah that's all bullshit i fact-checked one. Oh, God. I mean, yeah. You know, the natural health and the obsessive concern with diet and also these chronic diseases. I mean, who hasn't got eczema from time to time these days? Or inflammation or whatever.

There is like the modern humanity because we eliminated these terrible things like polio, right? Because we're generally not starving we're not dealing with the kinds of health issues like genuinely serious health issues that we dealt with a couple of infectious diseases yeah there's a thing in in psychology which is like it's a universal human constant which we just we adjust our range of concerns to fit to suit what whatever level we're at and it is so clearly what's going on here and i'm not talking about them specifically i'm talking about the whole zeitgeist at the moment there's more about fish oil but i'm gonna swear to you there's three more

clips specifically about fish oil and and whether it makes towel and gassy or uh that kind of thing but there was some discussion around raw milk that was particularly notable so here's Basha introducing that I had a kind of spurgey ex-boyfriend who recommended it to me and this was around the time that like the raw milk I used to really try to drink raw milk and like do I really was trying to kind of eat in this right wing health way um but it really just stressed me out and didn't make i didn't i was taking tons of supplements now i basically don't take any and eat mcdonald's and take benzos so So the link there, Matt, to the autism and the Asperger's, right, the ex-boyfriend who recommended it.

And just to make that image complete about consuming raw milk, that's a kind of lefty thing or like, you know, health and wellness space issue. But just look at this image. Oh my God, I got to go because raw milk is actually legal in New York. Yeah, so it's actually stressful to procure the raw milk is actually legal in new york yeah so it's actually

stressful to procure the wrong getting a i'm committing a felony by meeting up with these amish people who are dealing with these amish girls who could go to federal prison for giving me this milk i don't even like and then i'd be like chugging the milk makes me feel fucking sick there is this obsessive concern with diet. But doing insane, dangerous shit, like, you know, worried about vaccines, like chugging raw milk that makes you feel sick. Like then you have to get bootlegged from average people. Yeah, but it requires so much effort too.

Like people don't have something better to do with their time except to go on an odyssey to obtain raw milk which they now recognize as like not helpful it does have some parallels with you know addy and huberman and their intermittent fasting or injecting themselves with something which they then come to decide is like not i mean i know people are annoyed to be pointing that out but i do think there is some parallels here admittedly addy is a lot less vibe based yes to his credit yeah yeah yeah it's like this is the weird neurotic things that they do to cope with what they see is this horrible artificial world full of contaminants and vaccines and stuff yeah well i'll get out of the food space but i'll i'll move us on we're rounding the corner so uh here's a another clip for you like i gave him

twenty thousand dollars once and i made him write out a plan like if this doesn't work you're gonna do this plan and it was all like you can't take out any more loans you have to do your normal business stuff like he has lasers and he's like a inventor but after i gave him the 20 000 we went to the bank together to wire it and the bank was telling us like this seems like a scam and my dad was just like no no no i it's not it's not my son is my own son is scamming me and then after after that he figured out just the scammers said like the scammers actually sent him like a bank account that was fake from hsbc and they just kept leading

him on and he like every time there'd be some new fee or something that was five months ago when he stayed with me and he's staying with me again in like a month the only thing i could think of is to try to give him psychedelics so this is towlin describing his dad and his penchant for falling victims for scams there's quite a lengthy segment so one part it just goes into great detail he wants their advice on you know what's it mean that this dad just falls for scams and there is like a confessional aspect to this discussion right which is surprisingly open but i can't tell if this is the vibe in general like oversharing or it's towel lens style of delivery or so here's a bit more the richer that you get the more money

you need my dad never learned that he just keeps getting pleasure out of it and he just has no spiritual aspect or hobbies or interests or friends well i was going to ask you that was my next question if he has hobbies if he has hobbies or friends no does he gamble he used to yeah oh no he my mom told me that recently he started gambling with some people on whether the deal he's working on is a scam or not yeah so my recollection chris is that the point of this story which i talk about for a while it's just that his dad's a real doober. He's pretty disappointing or stupid or something. So, yeah, I think the appeal is that it's oversharing, right?

You listen to someone talking about a close family member. Yeah. Yeah, and so it feels more intimate, right? Chris, I'll tell you what it reminds me of. The vibe is very much the young people in American Beauty, the movie. For instance, the daughter will just talk about her dad like that. And that's one of the appealing aspects of the movie, right? Same sort of world weary, exasperated, droll style as well.

I feel like it's a bit of a shtick. Well, for me, I didn't care. No. That in itself wasn't interesting. What interested me was shortly after describing what a rube his dad was he described this incident i got scammed recently my facebook fan page got stolen oh what someone emailed me saying asking if i wanted to do a podcast for two thousand dollars and i said well you know that's a scam i should have known it was us but it was sponsored by nike

it just made sense it was done by some celebrity tony something some guy with like 190 instagram followers and then i got on a phone call with them because they were going to show me how to do Facebook Live or something. And somehow they took a screenshot of my screen. I showed them my screen and they got my URL. And they just used that to take my account. That's so smart. I do admire the scammer. I know that's a humorous story, right? or the scammer. I know that's like humorous story, right?

But immediately after talking about how susceptible his dad is and like, you know, doesn't have the ability, he describes what is an obvious scam, right? Somebody with a couple of hundred followers on Instagram offering you thousands to go on the podcast and they want to hop on a call and get you to share your screen. Like, I feel like he's in a glass house flinging rocks around yeah but i think that's kind of the point it's kind of the same thing

you know what i mean he's kind of putting himself down when he puts his father down in a way but this is the point for me matt that there's an obvious parallel there but this is after a little gap and none of them at any point re is like oh this is a bit like your dad isn't it like so i feel like it's just the compartmentalization thing where you know okay we talked about that now i'll tell this funny story because he doesn't you know like the bit there would be i guess this acorn doesn't fall far from the tree or something right but you're saying this was all knowing they were making that no no i don't think they were linking the things together i think these are

just random self-deprecating mumblecore type anecdotes not much not much in it i don't want to spend too much more time with paolin but just to mention matt here's his approach to getting information I feel like when I'm looking for truth I just find like details like tons of details and some are more credible than others and I'm always just building and changing my model of everything and it's always changing depending on like what I just read because I'll forget like a lot of stuff so my view on things is just always changing but dasha you mentioned being alone and getting in the esoteric stuff isolating you i feel like that's isolated me. Like just learning about, say, vaccines. Just finding out vaccines aren't as good as everyone thinks. It's isolated.

Of course. Amen, brother. Yeah, because vaccines really depend on a kind of social consensus, right? So I guess it goes to your point earlier, Chris, that their epistemics, their ability to figure out what's what is terrible. But it also, in the way he describes the way he goes about his research, like accruing all the little details and whatever, obviously it does sound like most of the people

who do their own research on the internet. But as well as that, it's also self-deprecatory, right? Yeah, because he forgets. So it's very much in the style the persona is is very anti-guru in some ways yeah well okay yes in terms of like confident delivery and all that kind of stuff it's more conspiracy theorist style reasoning oh yeah yeah yeah i mean they get to the same place they've got the same conspiracy theories the same anti-vax type stuff but this is very different from a weinstein a jordan Jordan Peterson who would never admit that they ever

forgot anything right yeah and in terms of further evidence about bad epistemic habits or or sources of information here's Howland discussing the kinds of you know, he listens to to get him inspired. Oh, yeah. I want to ask you about the mandalas. What's that all about? It's just, it was a good way to do something. It's meditative? Do something without having to be on drugs. I started after my pharmaceutical drug addiction. I was in my room a lot and just drawing and listening to Joe Rogan a lot.

Cool. If you went on Joe Rogan, would that be your favorite podcast you've ever done? Maybe. Yeah, I think it would. Fair. Are you a Joe Rogan fan? Big time, yeah. I love Joe Rogan.

Are you a Tucker fan? I like i like him yeah i've seen some things yeah yeah i like him i think this is part of why some people might have questions about the depth of talents insights like uh yeah making mandalas because it's something to do and i listened to a lot of rogan so yeah i do think this mat is perhaps you know what a lot of critics of modern art think is actually under the hood yeah he's probably not representing the art scene avant-garde or is he this is the question is he not representing where they are? That esoteric point. So apparently he makes mandala type stuff, artwork. But that reminds me, Matt, that there was a segment on reincarnation, the esoteric reincarnation. So let me just get that for you.

Do you believe in reincarnation? Reincarnation? Yeah, or past lives or whatever you would... I don't know, but I'm interested in it. Do you? I don't know. Not, I mean, I'm open to it conceptually, but I'm a Catholic,

so I believe in the eternal afterlife. I can see, I mean, I believe in reincarnation in like a purely technical sense in that I believe that there are certain types that repeat themselves throughout time and history. Getting a bit Jonathan Pajot at the end. I wanted to play that because conceptually being open to reincarnation, but then, you know, being like, but, you know being like but you know i'm a trad

calf right so like heaven or hell so what is that how much of a trad calf are you this reincarnation in the conception of traditional catholicism it wasn't considered compatible in my catholic upbringing that's very much a dorm room type conversation isn't it it is but these people are much too old i know to be in a dorm room but i guess maybe you're underestimating chris a lot of normal people just talk like this they do but the contradictions that's what gets me matt the contradictions so you believe in after you die, what happens? You go to heaven or hell. And then, but I don't know, I'm open to different metaphysical kind of, but maybe something happens after that.

But that basically the point of life is to achieve salvation is to become a saint and the greatest tragedy is yet to perish and burn in hell i mean you could also think like reincarnation works on like a technical functional level if you think of like what having kids is which is like reincarnating not not even yourself like you can't even think of yourself because you're someone else's kid. Like you're constantly reincarnating and remixing some type of lineage. Dorm room conversation pretty much sums it up. That is about as insightful

as various conversations I had at university. But yeah, reincarnation you know i feel the trad calf thing is a little bit of a pose it feels like the metaphysical commitments are not taken that seriously i feel like everything is a pose here. Like literally everything. I wouldn't read too much into anything, really. It's all just stuff that sounds good at the time. Does it sound good? No, it doesn't sound good.

Straight thoughts wander in, your mouth moves, then they wander out again. That's pretty much it. I'm not liking us right now, Chris. We sound so disdainful, so snobbish, so whatever. But, you know, what can you do? You put this content in front of me i don't know that there's a way to engage with this that isn't disdainful but snobbish is the

wrong word but because it's not like this is the people this is not what the people do your average joes aren't doing this this is what like hipster people in manhattan do at their avant-garde art festivals yeah except of course they've got the alt-right pilled thing going on right as well that's the one thing about it that's interesting combining the hipster artsy-fartsy manhattan vibe with that so it's a curious little thing you know you can hear the talking points that you tend to hear in you know trad con spaces as well but is it ironic who can tell matt and then there's birth control that gets rid of it all well yeah which is awful what's your take on birth control net negative or net positive net neutral that's an option too i know it's really unhealthy super unhealthy i read this book called

the garden of fertility that talks about how bad they are and she promotes just being aware of your cycle and knowing when you can get pregnant or not and she talks about how um certain christian groups i think teach this it is increasingly interesting really isn't it because it is this interesting blend of that trad conservative sort of instincts with, you know, new agey spiritual alternative health thing, plus this sort of affected world weary hipster sophisticate vibe. It's a wild combination. It really speaks to like, it's just a different world these days in 2023 going on 24.

The crossollination aspects yeah i've got i've got another clip which kind of highlights all these things interacting the trad con with the noble savage kind of presentation and the other ways of knowing alt health perspectives just listen to this she cooked a lot of meat and like taiwanese chinese stuff that was really healthy for me i'm grateful for that were you breastfed were you breastfed no yeah that's interesting i wasn't breastfed either that's a big factor i feel like i was but only for six months which they tell you is enough but i don't think so i think the longer you can go and then preferably until the child is seven to ten years old yeah there's

eskimos breastfeed for up to like six years in aboriginal groups all breastfeed for like at least two years right i think like two is probably like the sweet spot. I think once the child could talk to you, it's definitely time to stop. That's no, Matt, that's not culturally relative enough. But it's just an interesting mixture of perspectives because there is the standard liberal fondness for traditional societies and concerns about artificial toxins and the environment pollutants and all that but mixed in with like the kind of trad con stuff like knowing how many months you were breastfed like why do they all do that i've never i haven't had

i haven't had a conversation with my mother either. Yeah, but they act like, of course, everyone knows that, right? Like everybody's had that conversation. It's so funny. No, but it's true. Like the natural health, obviously, breastfeeding is a hugely big thing in that area too. So there's some consistent themes. We can say that.

There was one clip that I forgot to play that that relates to this thing we're talking about and connects in a previous one that i feel we shouldn't miss out on so we heard about you know the raw milk they ask your parents to get raw milk from amish people right but taolin has his own milk routine that he follows now i drink muscle milk because it's sweet. Wait, aren't dairy products inflammatory? If they're pasteurized,

I feel like. Okay, but not if they're unpasteurized, then they're good. They should be. I have to let my raw milk ferment for like 24 hours. What does that mean? You just leave it out in the sun?

Yeah, in the kitchen. I just leave it there. And then you drink it. If I drink it just without doing that, I get really gassy and sometimes diarrhea. Their life sounds so horrific to me. Having the meetings with amish people to chug raw milk that makes you want to puke or in thailand's case leaving raw milk out on the

counter for one day before you branch it down because otherwise you're getting diarrhea all the time and like jesus christ no wonder they have the attitude that they do because to live like this sounds like hell it's like like hell but how much of it is real that's the bit i can't quite figure out is it authentic to what degree is it yeah how much of it is uh opposed this is uh probably a legitimate point to raise and by even asking the question matt you're showing you know that you're deeply on hip you don't get it you don't really get like what it's about and all that kind of shit and just to come towards the finishing line so like all these kind of podcasts they need to emphasize that they are not belonging to any traditional political camp

yeah how do you identify politically i don't think i've ever identified with any party yeah for sure and also i think it's very hard to be an artist and be a conservative hmm really like a true conservative yes not like a right-wing person but an actual like kind of um old classic style conservative interesting the problem isn't so much that it's like reactionary or right-wing but that it's it's very like literal and canned and they see like degeneracy and immorality everywhere and it's very hard to make art from that place because you have to be kind of like morally agnostic in order to be creative or not even you can't you can't like shoehorn your morality into your work and that way it's hard to have any strong ideology. For me, I feel like I don't really have politics.

I just don't want to be hindered creatively. And that's sort of the driving, you know, animus behind how I orient myself in the world. If you're not with me, you're against me. I don't like feeling lied to or manipulated so my position is not like a liberal or a conservative one it's like the position that i feel personally is on the side of truth or my truth or whatever yeah that makes sense but that's like i think most people who have or try to have like a mind of their own. Do you have a strong feeling about the truth? Yeah, I'm just for looking for the truth.

There's a component of that that I'm sympathetic with, which is that it's okay not to be super political or to feel a strong affiliation with any particular ideology. I know. That part's fine. And I kind of agree that like if you're driven by moral or ideological commitments and i think it's hard to be an artist in that respect is it our artists fame for not having strong political stances or injecting their politics into their art that's not my experience some of them do yeah some of them

bob dylan famously apolitical uh he's a he's a folk singer chris he's not an artist i'm thinking jackson i'm thinking jackson pollock or something i mean you and your expressionists like slashing the floor and stuff right it doesn't mean it doesn't mean you know socialism is good it just means it's it's a picture. Did Van Gogh have an ideology? But yeah, I get the argument, but I just think there's a lot of artists in the world. Sure, but there's just an intrinsic dichotomy between conservatism, like she said, conservatism and creativity.

I get that, but I just think a lot of artists are highly ideological people because they're passionate about whatever the hell they're into. And sometimes that's some art style and sometimes it's some message that they want to convey with their art, right? Don't get me wrong. I didn't like most of what they said, but you know, it was kind of authentic, I think. Like she said, she doesn't like being lied to. What they believe in is just finding out the truth for yourself. I mean, they are kind of authentically voicing their conspiratorial, self-centered sort of

point of view in terms of you know get out of my way i'm just against any politics that stops me from doing what i want yeah what are you rebelling against what you got man but the issue for me in this case and with a lot of the people that take this sort of stances they seem completely unaware or at least a very substantially downplayed the obvious skew in the content yes there's a melange of different influences but like the references are all in one direction right glenn greenwald is good joe rogan is good rfk jr is good trump is unfairly maligned tucker carlson is good biden is bad yeah i get that so in that sense it's very much like our classic gurus brett and eric weinstein who do the same kind of extreme sympathy to all of those reactionary figures but

they're not conservatives themselves they're just right thinking independent yeah yeah that's it and just to take that point home i don't think we've ever been like primarily a political podcast point home i don't think we've ever been like primarily a political podcast cultural commentary yeah but i think yeah we had an audience initially that was like well there was just a lot of that energy and fervor cultural commentary is probably right but i wouldn't dispute that but i think there just is a significant skew injected and it's really obvious i mean this is a random episode and like we just talked about all the references that you can pick up clearly highlight the kind of ecosystem and sources that they're relying on and the anti-vax stuff and uh you know yeah there's 9-11 conspiracies and trump's gonna win the election blah blah blah yeah yeah this is what

post-modern conservatism looks like right people over yeah yeah that's a good good way to present the post-modern conservatism well that's it matt there's there's endless tips that could go on but yeah please stop please stop to go first i'll just see rather straightforwardly, I don't think they really fit the secular guru template very well at all. As we've discussed, they're doing a lot of stuff that I think is bad. They've got bad epistemics. They're conspiracy prone. They don't acknowledge their obvious political skew and they wrap themselves in a cushion or an armor of irony that allows

them to kind of dance away from any statements that they make. And the whole thing is stating you that if you criticize them or you take them seriously, you're just demonstrating how uncool you are because you don't get like how none of it really matters, man. And some people might like that. I can kind of see why they would appeal to certain people fed up with liberal orthodoxies and the left progressive spaces they go in. But from my perspective, it's just like boring conspiracy standard stuff with like an extra veneer of irony but it isn't really secular guru stuff because a lot of what they're saying is kind of tongue-in-cheek and self-disparaging and you know recognizing how fickle they are and how prone to change and that's not really what the

secular gurus do so really this is just like cultural commentary and pathos, political commentary that attracts an audience. So they won't score high on the grometer, I would estimate. So, you know, not good, don't like them, but not secular gurus, really. No, no. There's that self-deprecatory style and very low-key downplaying where you know you can still say stuff but you go i'm just a dummy i don't really know but i really think you know the world's gonna end in a few days yeah so it's like rogan style a bit but yeah they're not really

gurus it's just a really an interesting little peek into a microcosm of what we said post-modern conservatism what it looks like and it can be a little bit surprising to people if you still have these sort of old fashioned notions of what a right winger looks like and what a left winger looks like. I read something, a bit of research, apparently, Chris, this is a bit of a sidetrack about, you know, bubbles and things, you know, people have heard about information bubbles on the internet. And this article was sort of debunking that idea a little bit and said, one of the things that the internet does is bring you into contact with a huge diversity of opinions, most of which are going to be incredibly unappealing to you. So in your normal day-to-day life, we tend to assault with people

who have pretty much the same assumptions and are working from the same place as we are. And there's so much aggravation on a platform like twitter because everyone is bumping up against people from vastly different backgrounds and sort of world views and this little example of us bumping into their little world is i think a good example of that where you know it's just incredibly tedious and distasteful to me but as you said they're not really gurus except for the conspiracy adult stuff yeah and being anti establishment and maybe a bit of pseudo profound bullshit which is kind of i think that's obligatory on the lower east side i don't know yeah it would the thing is i i keep coming back to this point you made that like if these were 20 somethings in the dorm if joe rogan was a 20 something college

student i'd find it annoying but i'd also be like yeah but you know and if if joe rogan was a 20 something college student i'd find it annoying but i'd also be like yeah but you know and if you're like musk was a nine-year-old boy then i'd be far more yeah it's pseudo philosophical profundity is a occupational hazard at certain stages of life but they're not right they're almost the same age as you and me and they're much more successful. Like they're richer, all of that stuff. It's not like we're punching down in any way, shape or form, right? Their audience wouldn't like us either.

This is what you said about like two ecosystems that, you know, are just not made to... Oil and water, Chris. Oil and water. Oil and water. Yeah, because it's not just that they're ironic-pilled sardonic delivery. They're also conspiracy theorists. They clearly don't understand anything about science or that kind of thing. So their approach is just all arts and humanities, postmodern style.

And that doesn't gel. Yeah. Amazingly low critical literacy when it comes to consuming information on the internet. So yeah, America, do better with your education. Yeah, I noticed we didn't spend very much time on the vocal fry, okay? And so just bear that in mind. I said I wasn't going to talk about it and I didn't.

And the use of the edgy words and stuff, that's as exciting as like when teenagers do it. It's like, congratulations. Well, Chris, I could have a go at them for sort of lilting up at the end of sentences, but unfortunately, I can't. You cannot, not in this podcast. Because Australians do that.

You look like you were taking a dig at me. No, no, Australians. Didn't you know that? That's an Australian thing. No, it's an old Irish thing, Matt. I thought you were taking the dig at me. No, no, Australians. That's an old-marriage person. Didn't you know that? That's an Australian thing. No, it's an old-marriage thing, Matt. How dare you? We do it. We did it first.

It's our thing, man. We did it. Yeah, you're wrong. You're wrong, but it's all right. So that's them. We are hopefully next time going to look at some people that are more applicable to the Guru template. But, you know, it's useful sometimes to get comparisons from people that don't particularly well fit.

So this is a good illustration of that point, that people can be bad without being secular gurus. All right. So my humble suggestion for the next episode, Chris, we should cover someone who either, it's your choice, either a bona fide 100% fits the guru mold perfectly or pretty well, or someone who's just like really great, who we find fascinating and interesting. One or the other, but not another person who's both terrible and not a guru. All right.

I'll see what I can do. So Matt, we have a review of reviews to do and Patreon shoutouts. And then we're done. We're out of here. We're kicking this caboose down the road. So I do have a review from an American with a brain. That's the title of their review. I didn't say that.

And Madam S, they wrote, Decoding the Gurus is a great podcast for doing yard work, housework, or working out. While most podcasts are edited down to an hour, these guys ramble on for two to three hours. They are so niche that they get very few advertisers interrupting them. There is no need to stop what we are doing to fast forward through the ads. This optimizes the time spent on whatever task we want them to distract us from. They provide uninterrupted distraction for tasks that uninterrupted distraction can benefit.

The only problem is that the length of the podcast can cause a listener to keep working or working out past the optimal healthy time. A listener may feel dehydrated or pull so many weeds that they end up with joint or nerve pain. A listener may end up enjoying a long walk and be so distracted they end up miles from home and need to call a taxi to return home chris and matt have wonderfully eccentric accents and they share just enough personal information to make them relatable unlike the obnoxiously self-centered gurus they cover so see that man we've got just the right parasocial dial it in that's right yeah we don't let out that's right you'll hear no complaining about our mothers or our fathers. How long did your mother breastfeed you?

You should ask her. One, I don't know. Two, if I did, that's not a fit topic of conversation. I don't feel like talking about it. Yes, Dakota and the Gurus, the podcast that acknowledges that some household chores take longer than two hours. That's right.

That was a five-star review, Matt. I have another five-star review, but I thought this one was a nice negging one it's by our town and it's synth wave question mark and it says one host trashes robo cup the other one was on the synth wave podcast embarrassing time yeah that's really good but five stars so i like that you know trash robo cup almost every episode, despite having watched it recently and realizing it's actually really good. But you know what happened?

Because you found out because I was tweeting to you. I was messaging you. Do you want to tell us? Oh my God, this is so embarrassing. You shouldn't admit this, but I do think you need to. I was getting messages from Matt that he felt inspired from one chat to watch RoboCop. And he was like, you know, it's good.

Like, I don't remember it being like this. I was particularly impressed by the special effects, Chris. I know. But I thought it was made in the 1980s or something. Correct. And then you mentioned to me about Samuel Jackson's performance. And Matt, Samuel Jackson wasn't in the RoboCop from the 80s. He was in the remake from a couple of years ago.

So you watched the reboot version with modern special effects. I thought that was from the 80s. And that is not even a very good film. So that's the other point that you... I thought they digitally remastered it or something. Yeah, my God. So that was incredible. So you still haven't watched the old one that's the thing that was pretty special yeah i will have to rewatch the old one yeah yeah what was my take on that i can't remember you liked it you thought it lost

its way at the end but it was you know generally good yeah and it was okay it did tweak in my defense i was drunk at the time. Even so. That's standard. You're drunk right now. And speaking of drunk goods, Matt, we need to shout out the patrons who pay for the podcast. This is the only thing that can explain that action.

So I feel they do deserve thanks. And I've got a bunch of them to thank. So without further ado, conspiracy hypothesizers, Ryan, Cosmograph, Peter Risholm, Charlotte Goodhall, Adam Scher, Kitty Gilbert, XI, Tristan Flock, Miklos Somos, Jim Murray, Marcus, Max Mullitz, Liren Shapiro,

Aaron Holder, Lappin, Jenica, Thomas McKenzie, Nia Finn-Smith, Kylie Hudson, Sasha Hamilton, Zach Oliver, Fiat Tyner, and Richard Hardy and I Am Scare. That's them. Thank you, guys. Thank you. No advertisers, just Patreons. That's how we do it. Yeah, just the real people, right?

I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions and they've all circulated this list of correct answers i wasn't at this conference this kind of shit makes me think man it's almost like someone is being paid like when when you hear these george soros stories well he's trying to destroy the country from within. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. Hey, one little episode related comment, Chris. I mean, listening to Rogan there reminded me that, you know, that's what like someone who's really conspiratorial sounds like. Like they're very

passionate about it. It's a big deal for Rogan. With the people that we covered on Red Scare, they're much more casual about it. I think they're very passionate about it it's a big deal for rogan with the people that we covered on red scare they're much more casual about it i think they're much more like your typical consumer of it's more opposed as opposed to their lifestyle right like the conspiracist pose yeah yeah and like i'm not saying they're not conspiratorial they are it's just i don't think it plays a huge role for them does anything play a huge role i don't know i don't know what's like the level of enthusiasm i think in general is not high yeah right that would be against the point that's true so there's those people might then those revolutionary geniuses the ones who get access to the decoding series, where we keep our real insights behind the $5 paywall.

So that's there. And we have a bunch of them to mention. I will mention, for example, LTB, Dominica, Andre Alessi, Buck, James O Cravalhus, Empty Cognizance, Alexander Hess, Jeff Wedding, Ryan Bruno, Alexander Eldon, and Amborg Lou and Elgin Street. The lovely Elgin Street from the falling out podcast. Lovely, lovely.

Good old Elgin. A lot of male names there, I think. Have we ever done a gender breakdown of our listenership? I know we have some women because I've met them. Nah, it's about 50-50. Yeah, of course, 50-50. 50-50. I don't know.

Actually, I haven't seen. We don't have any metrics that tell us that. No, no. That's it. Just revolutionary geniuses, Matt. That's's that's the important um social signifier that's the important identity category that they are in and we thank you for it i'm usually running i don't know 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time and the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm i'm someone who's a true polymath. I'm all over the place. But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of

evolutionary consumption. Now, that's just a guess, and it could easily be wrong, but it also could not be wrong. The fact that it's even plausible is stunning. Happy every time. Yeah, the old classic. Now, Galaxy Bean Gurus, as usual, as usual i don't have a huge haul of them maybe we're not selling our the one-on-one facetime that that brings people do not value that enough yeah they don't it's seemingly or or we've we've reached the

ceiling levels but nonetheless there are some so steve presentszadzpelski, we thank you, Steve. You are a prince amongst men. And Jen B, that's the two I'm going to shout out. The two special little diamonds in the rough there. And yeah, for anyone who is at that vaunted tier, come along to the monthly catch-ups. You can ask us questions. We talk about stuff.

There's no weird parasocial stuff going on behind the scenes. But, you know, you might have specific topics, specific questions you want to talk about. So it's good fun. You want to know how many months Matt was breastfed for? That's the place. That's where you get the good content. So you get that info. I'll also just throw into the power, Matt. I may as well put them in there because they're around.

M-E-M, Logan M, and Amanda Kutsuras. Those also would be Galaxy Brain Gurus. Fantastic. Just adding them into the power. We tried to warn people. Yeah. Like what was coming, how it was going to come in, Fantastic. Just adding them into the power. We tried to warn people. Yeah. Like what was coming, how it was going to come in,

the fact that it was everywhere and in everything. Considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense. I have no tribe. I'm in exile. Think again, sunshine. Yeah. Well, well, there they all are. Thank you, everyone. This is a bit of a long one, but, you know, we'll edit it down.

It'll be tight. There'll be no unnecessary repeated points. None of that. It'll be a tight episode for you. And we thank Andy Last for his editing efforts. Any problem with anything we say, pick it up with Andy. That's the person to blame. Be sure to delete all of chris's vocal fry andy um that's the most important job for you get rid of it yeah yeah that's right and to everyone

else have a great day have a just enjoy yourself just get out there have a blessed day don't wallow in ironic depression or chug raw milk don't chug raw milk just drink normal milk it's all right yeah get your vaccinations which whatever the doctor don't think about it too much you don't need to do your own research about it no you clearly don't not like this um those precious neurons for something more useful like creating avant-garde art yeah that's it well on that important note for civilization i bid you see you ma yeah yeah okay all right yeah yeah I've wondered if he's been mind controlled in some way with just having voices implanted in his head saying like the deal was real

mm-hmm just based on my research it seems like that happens the mind control it voice implantation it's called voice to skull technology like they've had it for like 30 years or something and they just beam it into your brain