Decoding the Gurus - Robert Wright: A Cosmic Journey Across the Bob-o-verse

Episode Date: February 19, 2022

Matt and Chris finally leave the Rogan-verse behind, activate their Infinite Improbability Drive, and blast off for the Bob-o-verse. In an off-again / on-again, will they / won't they battle of wits, we outmanoeuvre Bob by covering an episode that he planned to record for our benefit, which we then explained we wouldn't cover because that would violate our rules, which he decided to record anyway, and we then decided it would be alright to cover because he thought we weren't going to cover it. Which one of us is playing 4-dimensional chess and who's playing Hungry Hippo? We're not sure.Robert Wright is a journalist, author, independent commentator, and podcaster. A stalwart of the public intellectual scene, he never joined the Intellectual Dark Web. How's that for a recommendation!? He's written and thought, or thought and then written about so many topics it's impossible to mention them all, but they span evolution, Buddhism, geopolitics, philosophy, and everything in between. But is he a guru?(Spoiler) Of course he is. Yes, definitely. But is he a good guru? Well, we're not going to tell you. You're going to have to tune in to find out. Chris and Matt are simple folk, but they do their best to wrap their heads around Bob's cosmic philosophy, which spans the fundamental algorithms of evolution, black holes, alternative universes, and how we should probably all be nice to one another if we want to create a global brain. You might think grokking those ideas would be like watching Koyaanisqatsi while tripping on ayahuasca, but actually it all makes sense. We think.But is it true? Is it real? Is Wright right? That my friends, is up to you to decide. But in this episode we will open the door.... (and possibly resolve the mystery of consciousness at the same time, turns out there was no problem all along).Links Timbah on Toast's new video on Tim Pool: Fence SitterKnowledge Fight: Formulaic Objections Part 4The Dharma of Bob 8: A Cosmic View of Our Situation | Robert Wright & Josh Summers | The Wright ShowWhat is Tribalism? Non-Zero NewsletterSponsorCheck out the sponsor of this week's episode, Ground News to compare news coverage. Spot media bias. And be better informed. Download the free Ground News app at ground.news/gurus.CoverartThanks to Mark Ledwich (@mark_ledwich) and Elsa Jansen (@ElsaJansen) for the coverart this week! Contributions for coverart for upcoming episodes always welcome.

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus. It's 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. As always, I'm Professor Matt Brown, and as always is with me, Associate Professor Chris Kavanagh. G'day, Chris. Top of the morning to you, Matthew.

Well, you're looking fine and dandy there. What a glorious morning. Oh, Chris. Top of the morning to you, Matthew. Well, you're looking fine and dandy there. What a glorious morning. Oh, yes. Good. We've got that Chris with us today. We've got that little leprechaun Chris. That's my non-on-air voice. That's the voice that I use in everyday life when we're not recording.

Oh, yeah. Well, top of the morning to you too. I'm doing pretty well. I'm all right. morning to you too. I'm doing pretty well. I'm all right. I had a swim today. I'm actually getting some research done. So it's a red-letter day for me. You're getting research done.

Recently, you've been lauding it over me that you are out on the boat, faffing around, sailing across bodies of water in the sun in Australia. Is this rumor true or false, Matt? Yep, absolutely true. I'm living my best life.

I'm out there in nature, being rugged, developing my tan, and yes, sailing across bodies of water in a little trimaran, a little HobieCat trimaran, which is a really fun little device when there's wind. That's not something that you've just invented, that there's a real thing, the Hobie Cat Tram around. That's right, it is a real thing. Yeah, terrific

fun. It's nice, comfortable weather seats. It's got these clever little pedals, so essentially when there's not much wind or just that extra bit of grunt, you can use your pedals. It's got pedal power as well, so that's good. Well, the issue, though, as I discovered, Matt matt because you mistakenly

let me know the exact name of the location and then i subsequently searched that particular body of water and discovered that you were in danger you were putting your life and limb at risk mac because in that body of water there are bull sharks right isn't that what they are there are bull sharks absolutely and those as the name suggests those are not like the cuddly friendly sharks that you know you want the pet they're not like lemon sharks or cookie cutter sharks these little no friendly cute sharks they're big bullies no they They're big bullies. No, they're nasty. Big bullies, nasty little buggers, the kinds of things that'll take a good chunk out of you

and swim away and leave you to bleed to death. So, yes, you've got to think twice before you dangle appendages into the water. See, I think this needs to be an intervention, Matt, because is it worth it? Is it? To be above the water, like on a boat going along? Yes, I know the scenery is nice, but underneath you Matt, underneath you,

dark shadows lurk and one, you know, bad mood bull shark and no more cutting the gurus, I'm not sure that this is worth the risk. What am I going to do if I see in the news, psychology professor mauled by bull shark, irresponsibly drinking on catamaran. I shouldn't tell you this, but when we're hiking on Fraser Island and we'd gotten up to the point and yeah, all of these people had congregated and helicopter came and stuff like that. His people had congregated and helicopter came and stuff like that.

And yeah, it was someone doing some spearfishing who had a big bite and sadly died from blood loss. No, not fully eaten. He had a big chunk taken out of him and very sadly bled to death on the point there. So yeah, it does happen from time to time, but it's not a leading cause of death in Australia. No. It is attention-getting. That's totalitarian brutality.

It's mainly the totalitarian brutality. That's what you need to worry about. But actually, no, you don't. I mean, I wasn't worried about bull sharks, but I was worried about stonefish. You know about stonefish? I know they're fish that look like stones that are much more painful to step on than ordinary stones.

Yes, extraordinarily painful. So I hear. I've never stepped on one, thank God. But yeah, I wasn't wearing shoes because nobody wants to wear shoes or thongs or whatever when you're sailing. You want to be barefoot. But we did get stuck on a few mud banks. I had to get out and push.

foot but we did get stuck on a few mud banks i had to get out and push and every time you put your foot down you're just thinking that's not a stone fish just don't do it man just stop i managed to get through my life without swimming in bodies of water where sharks are around it's it's not that hard there's nothing else to do in australia know, you just, you have to, basically. You just sit on the shore being bored. I suppose that's true. That is understandable. Basically, you can't go anywhere in Australia without risking life and limb because of poisonous or deadly animals. So, okay, we'll give you a pass on those grinds. That's all right.

So, Matt, we recently released a trio of episodes that were focused on one joseph rogan and he's now become the only thing that people can discuss online he's like an all-consuming bold son around which all discourse must orbit and uh yeah that seems a regrettable state of affairs. I'm sure everyone knows, but after we did our analysis of his initial apology video for the COVID conspiracy promotion stuff, he subsequently released another apology video like a day or so later, this time apologizing for using the N word repeatedly on previous episodes and making some racist comments about the planet of the apes in resembling a black neighborhood and the black and white people's brains being different. So there were these like kind of edited clip videos going around. And so since then, the discourse has just swirled around with various people either calling for him to be deplatformed and kind of penalized or unrecognized as racist or people defending him saying those clips are out of context. He's already apologized and they stand beside Joe Rogan. Coleman Hughes, roller, impressively declared that if everybody had the attitude of Joe Rogan,

that we would be living in Martin Luther King's utopian, raceless society of the future. So, yeah, so there's no hyperbolic takes flying around at all. And, yeah, I don't have much to say about it. I'm, like, retiring from rogan discourse i think we've we've said our piece on this topic what about you now i'm with you i have no take on that jerry good discourse because it seems like a bottomless hole into which one would vanish so uh i'll leave it to the very good people on twitter to sort it all out it seems like there's a kind of division in the discourse about like when a person makes these kind of statements right which i i think are relatively

uncontroversially racist like saying that black and white people have different brilliance it doesn't really seem hard to assign whether that's racist or not but then the question does revolve around does somebody saying racist things make them inherently a racist or can they say those things and then not be somebody that is racist right or somebody who has changed their perspective or somebody all this thing about and a lot of it seems to revolve around the extent to which you judge statements to reflect inherent beliefs that people have and also it gets all mixed in with the extent to which rogan is apologetic for right-wing figures. And in my case, I've always found him extremely apologetic for Alex Jones. Alex Jones is a, if you look at his content, is far right and has a whole bunch of racist material

in this content. Joe never addresses it, but I think he just ignores it primarily. So yeah. So anyway, the discourse rumbles on and we are generally dumb with contributing to it, unless we were to have a conversation related to our coverage with a certain Josh Zeps. If that were to happen, then we might discuss our opinion further.

But yes, outside of that context, we are retiring from Rogan discourse for the at least next six to 12 months. That's right. We got to move on. We can't get hung up on one particular guru. There's too many gurus to cover. We're rolling stones, man.

Yeah, that's right. I have no desire to become a Rogan response podcast. So we're out. We've sold our stock in Rogan coins. We're out. This is our official retirement. If you have any questions, go talk to the Very Bad Wizards. They're buying in.

They want in on the controversy around Rogan. They'd be very happy to discuss all of these issues. So please contact Dave Pizarro and Tamler Summers. I was listening to Very Bad Wizards again just yesterday and it just reminded me how much I like their style. Even when they're saying things that I might not particularly agree with. I'm wrong. I like about ghosts or whatever. I still like it and I like them. So I'm very much aware that our audience is almost certainly a subset of theirs.

If you draw this Venn diagram, I'm sure we are nested comfortably within them in terms of our audiences. But if there's anyone listening who isn't also a listener to Very Bad Wizards, then you're some kind of freaking unicorn. You should know that. You need to take a good hard look at yourself. Why aren't you listening to Very Bad Wizards? Go check them out.

They're good. That's good. Just ties people into following a live podcast. But yeah, I agree. It's very entertaining. And they're often talking about philosophical topics that are slightly above my pay grade. So I get to feel smart listening.

So you can too. Sure. And this is an unpaid advertisement for the Very Bad Wizards. However, Matt, there are people who do pay us. That's not a great way to introduce an advertisement segment, but we have something to talk about that our listeners may remember. Yeah, we do. I'll tell you more, Matt. So, Matt, you look like you have something you want to talk about that our listeners may remember. Yeah, we do. I'll tell you more, Matt.

So, Matt, you look like you have something you want to talk about. Just, I can see ideas bubbling in your mind. What is it? What is it, Skippy? It's funny you should say that because I have been thinking about this app called Ground News, which we've both been using. Yes, we have. It's a website, an app that shows you how breaking news is being covered across

the political spectrum. That's true, isn't it? That is indeed true. And yeah, it's interesting because you can take a particular headline or particular news story and then you can scroll down and see how different aspects of it get emphasised by the different media sources. Do you have a relevant topic to illustrate this feature? I'm glad you asked because I did a little search on the website for ivermectin. And I see there's one story that shows a pro-ivermectin Kansas doctor lawmaker under investigation

because he's pushing a bill that's favoring ivermectin Kansas doctor lawmaker under investigation because he's pushing a bill that's favoring Ivermectin and so this reflects negatively on Ivermectin more strongly covered by the center and left media and not at all on the right on the other hand this other news story in an area that I think you're familiar with Chris Japan there's this headline about Kowa Company saying that ivermectin shows antiviral effect against Omicron in research. So there you go, exciting news, Chris. In vitro research.

In mice. Not even mice. Selves. No, no, test tube. And that's covered, you know, almost entirely by the right and a little bit by the center so yeah interesting little example there that's a good example isn't it because we can point out from that you know being able to see how issues are being framed on the left and right is useful it does not mean however that the correct answer is somewhere in the middle but

you can use the app to look at what different kinds of stories are getting coverage. And I think that's a good function of it. But don't try and search out the golden mean. Don't you dare, listeners. That's not what we're saying. That's right. We're milquetoast centrists, but we wouldn't do that. So, yeah, at the very least, you can do a bit of research and get a sense of how different parts are living in these different bubbles.

And, you know, you can take stories where you do know something about it, like ivermectin in our case, and see how accurately it's getting covered across the spectrum. So, yeah, pretty interesting. And where they would need to go, Matt, if they wanted to let Grind News know that we told them about them, is you'd go to ground.news.com forward slash gurus. You can download the app and see how it goes. The link will be in the show notes if that sounds interesting. And if not, don't worry about it. That's fine too. Yeah, that's fine.

You know, do something else. We don't mind. That's right. Just log on to Fox News or something if that's your bag. Whatever. We don't mind. You're right. Just log on to Fox News or something, if that's your bag. Whatever. We don't mind. You're free agents. You have agency.

Okay. So there, that's a product and or service that people need to be aware of that we have now informed you of honestly and accurately. So don't forget that code, whatever we told you. That's what it is. That's right. That product and or service is really very good. Yeah. And so the other thing I wanted to mention before we get to the coding segment this week was there are two things I want to give a shout out to.

One is a video that I mentioned in passing on the Rogan Apology breakdown. Timber on Toast's new second part of his series on Tim Pool. I know you've watched it as well. It's on YouTube and it's kind of a breakdown of the kind of both-siders stance that Tim Pool uses. And I would also say a very nice illustration about strategic disclaimers and how they work with lots of great examples, also very good music. We will interview Timbo and Toast soon about the video and his work more generally. But if anybody hasn't seen it, it's really good. And I think really good in particular at breaking down how the technique is used, right?

This kind of strategic ambiguity and also how it is not fence-sitting both-siderism, but it actually is promotion of a particular side presenting itself as a middle position. So highly recommend it. Yeah, we're definitely going to steal his ideas and integrate them into the Garometer, I think. other hand, this other thing, and just goes backwards and forwards into this sort of Rorschach diagram or one of those ambiguous kind of figure ground things where on one level, he

says he's trying to be extremely precise and exact in his language. And all of these caveats and all of this sort of back and forth is meant to be specifying his position. But the truth is, it makes his position completely impossible to decipher and makes it such that if you wanted to, you could present it as being this dispassionate consideration of alternative arguments. But as you say, it's not really that. It's more like having that as one interpretation of what he's doing but sort of underneath it or through it he really is pushing usually a right-wing reactionary weird-ass conspiratorial interpretation so it's really weird it's an

amazing example of having your cake and eating it too and i'd yeah i'd be really interesting to to hear timber talk more about that yeah so aside from the fact that he doesn't use the incredibly insightful description strategic disclaimers that's that's the main drawback of the video but the you're and you know matt who has gone further who's made a more elaborate important point that's not we don't need to get into that but but i will say he he does make this very good point about how like there's a difference in the level of animation in making conspiratorial hyperbolic partisan positions and then a kind of completely disinterested like very quickly stated boring tone for the disclaimers, right?

So like shoddy conspiracies, quickly whispered disclaimers is the modus operandum. I think he made the really interesting point that that two-step shuffle is really attractive to his audience because people like that guy. What's his name again? Tim Pool. Tim Pool. They like Tim Bond toast as well. Yeah.

We like him. Yeah, so Tim Pool. His audience certainly wants to think of themselves as probably like all of us would like to perceive ourselves, right? As people that are able to sit back, you know, hear all sides of an issue, aren't really sort of politic, don't have a strict political ideology, but are taking in all the information and coming up with a rational assessment. That's the self-image that his audience would like to have of themselves. And his style allows them to retain that self-image while also being able to essentially go along with these intuitive and emotionally appealing partisan ideological misinformation claims so yeah it's just interesting there's an obvious parallel with the dark horse

content by brett weinstein because i've argued and i will argue this more forcefully in a future episode that there are very real parallels to the content in info wars with alex jones and with the content that brett and heller put out on dark horse and they in the same way allow their audience to indulge in Alex Jones style conspiracism, but without the kind of baggage that comes along with that, right? The right wing partisan imagery and the crazy cookie, you know, Infowars stuff. So the audience get the ability to endorse often right leaning or if not right leaning, just, you know, highly conspiratorial beliefs, but with the veneer of like a critical scientific approach.

So yeah, I think it's a very similar thing that they provide their audience and we will analyze it as such. Chris, it reminds me of back in the day, probably 1980s or 90s before the internet provided this deluge of easily accessible pornography. There was a kind of a niche market for these sort of pseudo-arthouse type movies that had an awful lot of gratuitous nudity and sex scenes in them.

And there was a small audience, perhaps, that could go along that. It would be titillating and sexy and fun and stuff like that, but they could say, no, no, I'm enjoying a sophisticated arthouse movie. It's, how's that for an analogy? Is that a good analogy? Yeah, that's good. That's good. I think that's right.

And the other piece of content, which I wanted to recommend, we've mentioned before, is that there is a podcast called Knowledge Fight, which covers InfoWars. And they had an episode they released at the end of January called Formulaic Objections Part 4. They release three episodes, two or three episodes a week. So they've got loads of content, but Formulaic Objections Part 4.

And the reason I'm highlighting that specifically is this is a analysis of the deposition that Alex Jones gave in the ongoing, one of the Sandy Hook court cases. And it's very interesting because the host of Knowledge Fight, which has been covering Alex Jones in depth for years, actually is involved in the deposition. He was kind of invited by the lawyer for the prosecution to help with the deposition and and respond to you know give context and relevant examples and all these kind of things so it's really interesting behind the scenes look at a really quite horrifying event right which is the harassment of

the parents of their children at sandy hook from alex j Jones and his audience and what InfoWars did to enable and stoke that and the interesting thing is just one to get a look behind the scenes at InfoWars you know when they're not recording when they're being questioned by competent lawyers and so on but also it's a little bit just satisfying to see somebody who promotes conspiracies and broadly profits on it get called to task with a kind of debunking person who has devoted a large amount of time to analyzing alex jones and now contributes to holding him to account so dan and jordan at knowledge fight they didn't mention any of this while it was going on and the events are like a couple of months in the past now but it's it's a really great episode in terms of

like kind of rewarding all the stuff they've done and also gives you insight into what info words is actually about and what they do and it is not this kind of harmless, jokey thing. You get to hear about some of the harassments that the parents suffered, and it's horrendous. So I really recommend that episode if people have an interest in that kind of thing. But it's worth looking at, even if you don't want to listen to stuff about Alex Jones every week. Yeah. Well, the common denominator here is that Martin Bailey technique, isn't it? So Joe Rogan

will defend what he's doing as being just entertainment, just open-minded conversations. Alex Jones, I'm sure defends himself occasionally as being just entertainment. So you can have it both ways. People can tell themselves that they're not taking it seriously, that it's just a little thought experiment. We're just exploring conspiracy hypotheses um it's a very strategic disclaimer yeah and you can you can see that there's actually lots of funny things just like the the extent to which the info wars team is unprepared in these depositions is astonishing and it's funny at times. So like the episode is not just like the super depressing thing. It is funny as well.

But at the heart of it is the kind of harassment of parents. So but yeah, so check that out. And that's it. That's my content recommendations for this week. The Tim Bond host and Knowledge Fight, both highly recommended podcasts and kind of debunkers in a way. Yeah.

Good content, Chris. You came here with content just more than I could do. I got nothing, but I was happy to be here for it. So with that out of the way, Matt, this week, we are looking at someone who has been on the show before. We've interviewed them, Robert Wright from The Wright Show, non-zero. He has a Substack newsletter, non-zero, and he's published a whole variety of books. And in particular, the content that we're going to look at is an episode called the Dharma of Bob number eight, a cosmic view of our situation,

which was actually well, we'll get into it. It's an interesting content for a variety of reasons. So Robert Wright is an ex guest and I would say friend of the podcast. We wanted to look at somebody that we expected to be a pretty good guru, look at somebody that we expected to be a pretty good guru, but he, he definitely does have the aspects of, you know, having a kind of secular philosophical system, which ties into politics, but has like kind of more cosmic implications, which we'll explore and, uh, yeah, I'm looking forward to this. We actually get to talk about someone that is not terrible.

Yeah, I listened to the content in question twice, and I'm not complaining about it. I enjoyed the experience. And I'm glad to talk about it. This is a revelation. That's a ringing endorsement. It's not often I hear that. But one thing, before I met Bob, I saw his book, Why Buddhism is True, and I saw lots of people kind of get into it. And my

contrarian urge, especially because I'd studied Buddhism at university and very much in line with the kind of Evan Thompson's critical approach to Buddhism, i did imagine that i would strongly take against bob and you know want to tear down that like oh this is exceptionalism putting buddhism up on the pedestal because it's exotic and that kind of thing so so this is the chance but finally i've got the opportunity to get the hooks in and take down bob a peg or two from his lofty arrogance declaring Buddhism true for the universe. When you Google Robert Wright or anything, you get people also ask, commonly asked questions about Robert Wright. So, yeah, there's a couple of obvious ones. Why is Buddha true?

Is Robert Wright a Buddhist? But the most common one is is how old is Robert Wright? He's a hundred or 105, something around that. I think he's eternal. He's what happens when black holes get together to create consciousness. He's been here since the dawn of time and he will be here long after we're gone so bob is indeterminate the age that's the answer to that question i like that that's good i believe it

i will also say that as much as i wanted to condemn bob because of my contrarian streak towards people that take an exceptionalist view towards budd When I've seen him discuss the topic with Evan Thompson, they had a long discussion. I can't, the problem is Bob is so goddamn reasonable that it's very hard to keep my eye intact. And he adds all of the appropriate caveats and it's just very reasonable. So it's unfortunate, Matt.

He really has taken the wind out of my sails for doing a harsh takedown of his book because, yeah, I don't think it's that bad. So this could be the ultimate guru maneuver, just to be very, very, very reasonable. That's just such a dirty trick, isn't it? Such a bastard. And strategic reasonableness. But we'll get into it when we look at this specific content. But I think that I am a fan of Bob's writing and his general approach to things.

So that's our bias up front, right? Going in, it's like, I wanted to hit him, but I couldn't because he's a lovable curmudgeon. You've got a reputation to uphold and we definitely do not want to be the kind of opinion that is that it's all about. Oh, we're friends with so-and-so. So they're just great. Don't want to be accused of that, do we?

So we're going to put him through the ringer. That's right. We're going to raise the bar. Raise the bar. Make it harsher. Yeah. Just like all his verbal tics, they're all going to be highlighted. Any just misstatements leaped upon.

We need to do it for discourse sake, for our reputation. And one point apart from my overall general fondness towards bob and we'll get into why but i do have very strong disagreements with him in terms of politics it's not that i think his politics is terrible or anything like that he's he's very much a kind of non-intervention advocate anti-imperialist perspectives these these kind of things and so i'm not saying i'm i'm advocating the opposite i'm not pro-imperial but i i think that i disagree strongly with bob in example how he regards the folks at gray zone and he tends to think that people throw around the word apologetics too liberally for people talking about syria or people talking about r. Whereas I think many of the figures that he would defend are rightly criticized for being

apologists. So we would have disagreements on politics apart from that both of us are on the liberal side of the spectrum. But that's not... Well, actually, it does tie in this content a little bit. But yeah, just to say it isn't complete agreement. Like politically, we have differences of opinion that would be relevant. Yeah.

Liking someone's style is not equivalent to signing off on every one of their stances. Political things. Yeah. But even when I don't agree, I enjoy hearing Bob argue for his position. Well, anyway, enough pre-decoding prayers. Let's get into the content. Let's do it. All right, Matt. So the guru for this week is ex-podcast guest, Robert Wright, journalist,

author, fellow podcaster. He's the co-founder and editor in chief actually of Blogging Heads, something we talked to him a little bit about on the episode and we're looking at Bob because he does have like all encompassing, largely secular, quasi encompassing largely secular, quasi-spiritual worldview, which is tied in with a whole bunch of things, including his views on evolution and meditation and some cosmic material as well. And so what we're looking at is an episode called the Dharma of Bob number eight, a cosmic view of our situation, which is Bob being interviewed by his friend, Josh Summers. They've had a series of similar conversations, but he's trying to give an overview of his worldview.

And that's what we're going to look at. This might serve as, as recruiting material for people in search of a secular guru. That I'm, I'm open to that, you know, and, uh, yes. And, and they can sell all their worldly possessions and we know where they should send the proceeds. Yeah. So the backstory to this particular content is that we told Bob that we were going to cover him. And then Bob said, oh,

okay, I'll record something for you guys to cover. And we said, no, no, no, no, no. That's not how this works. You don't get to choose. And he went, oh, okay, but this seems like a good idea to give an overview of my worldview. So I'm going to do it anyway. So we did it anyway. And then we decided, well, now we can do it because he didn't know we were going to cover it. And so it's come full circle. Yeah. You can hear Bob tried to explain this. The hosts, Matthew Brown and Chris Cavanaugh, happened where they said, well, why don't we treat me as a secular guru and appraise me? And even though they realize I'm kind of a borderline case, you know, I don't really go in full on guru mode the way, say, Sam or Jordan Peterson does, I would say. We'll be the judge of that. You know, and they said, well, where's the source material?

Good question. Precisely because I don't think I have as much of that kind of material as Sam or any of the kinds of people they tend to appraise. So there you go, Matt. This is the meta commentary on the meta commentary of the meta commentary. I don't know how many layers deep we are in the Inception podcasting world, but we have tricked Bob or he has tricked us in a nine dimensional chess game into using content, which was initially thought to be for us, but kind of is not for us, but

actually ended up perfect for us. So yeah, super meta, super meta. Now we've judged that it's now okay to cover this material. Yeah. Because he thinks we're not going to do it. Exactly. So whose chess board are we playing on, Matt? Who's the chess player?

Is Bob, has he reverse-psychologized us into covering it or did he fall in the art trap? Is he just our mouse running in the maze that we constructed for him? I think it's safest to assume that it's the Bobaverse. He's pulling all the strings and we are just inhabitants of it. That's right. I will say that his co-host, Josh Summers, was given a fake reassurance at the end of that segment. So this won't be used as source material for the...

This will not be. Nothing you say, you don't have to worry about anything you say being used on the decoding the gurus podcast. Yeah. So I just, I just liked the reassurance. Like you don't need to worry. Nobody will be taking your clips out and overanalyzing them. And yes, I'm, I'm sorry.

That's not true. Not true. Yeah, exactly. Even though our main target is Bob, you know, people have been caught in the crossfire of our critique before. So he's not safe. He's not safe. Yeah, that's right.

And so one thing that I think even from those clips is evident is that Bob has a unique way of talking. Like he has quite a halting i mean i've been i've been accused by some people uh sam harris fans of having a staccato rhythm to the way that i speak no that's not true that's agreed i i agree it's a completely false accusation. Nonetheless, some people have said so. And so I'm not throwing shade, but I think Bob has the same tendency that we would have of including caveats. Like he doesn't have the verbal fluency of Eric Weinstein or Jordan Peterson in the way that he speaks. Yeah. And he noticed that himself, if you just talk about these four people, Eric and Brett Weinstein, Jordan, Jordan, uh, and, and Sam Harris, um, that's four very different people, very different styles. They're all very good at talking in different ways. They all have different, interesting rhetorical powers.

And it's an interesting feature of our age technologically that that can really be a valuable thing for someone either in guru space or in public intellectual space or whatever. You know, it wasn't like this 40 years ago. Unless you had such a big audience 40 years ago, you could go on CBS, right? It didn't help to be a good orator really much. You had to communicate with writing if you had the size of following that public intellectuals or even most secular gurus would have. So you have this interesting species of people who are extremely good at talking. So, you know, this is a very simple observation, but it's an important one, isn't it? You know, you're right, Chris, we share this lack of mellifluousness with bob and you know it's pretty normal really to not be able to speak in this really fluid way off the cuff

continuously you know i was just looking through our list of gurus and the the majority of them especially the ones that are a bit on the toxic side, do all speak extraordinarily well, even when they have literally nothing to say. Like in the case of, well, I don't want to name names, but there's a couple I'm thinking of in particular. Jordan Hall. Yeah, and like in some sense there's a logical aspect to that because, you know,

a lot of the people we cover are famous because they have a public profile. And if you have a public profile, you're probably good at speaking in public. And which came first, the ability to speak well or the public profile or vice versa, because those are the kinds of things that you can train, but I think Bob is a good example of someone who can remain within the public sphere, have very important things to say, but who doesn't have that same way with language and just kind of rolling off into metaphorical landscape without pause for five minutes of the stretch. He doesn't talk like that. And that is one thing which distinguishes him from the characters that we've looked at.

That's honestly, that's one difference between them and me. I don't, I just, I'm not horrible, but I'm not, I don't, you know, they all have these special oratorical powers that are different in each case. So Bob, well done. You did highlight a distinguishing characteristic. We concur. And Josh and him doing our job, they also highlight another feature, which distinguishes Bob from the gurus.

The counter argument would be, you know, you don't, you don't, I mean, sometimes the Weinsteins make a thing of that, but basically you hear a lot of confident assertions. part of your character's makeup is to rigorously interrogate your own positions and then cast out on it and and and doubt yourself and and and do you not accept that i mean i try i think we would all say all those people would say they try and and and part of my world view is that none of us is in position to judge how successful we are um because you know the human mind was designed to convince you by natural selection to convince you that you know yeah it's completely reliable instrument you're you're the one seeing things clearly and everyone who disagrees with you is the one who's

wrong yeah so some of um bob's humility, I guess, on display there. And charity, I think, to the gurus. He probably has more charity to the other gurus than we do. But Chris, what do you think? Are these two things, this ability to be super loquacious and the super confident assertions without much respect for caution or caveats. Are these two things perhaps not connected? I mean, on one hand, it could just be that these gurus that we kind of dislike just have a skill, or perhaps the lack of caution in making these confident assertions

really can allow you to focus on sounding good. You know what I mean? You know, gurus like Jordan Peterson, just famous for being very unrestrained and free and confident in expressing their views. I think it's actually connected to the loquaciousness. If you give yourself those degrees of freedom in not worrying about contradicting yourself or things, if you've got two priorities, one is being accurate and clear and cautious and all those things.

And you're also trying to speak the question, then that's harder to do than if you just have one priority, which is to sound really good. David Pérez- I do agree that they're connected in having confidence and being able to monologue about your thoughts without hesitation. There's an obvious through line there, but I think it would be possible for you to have one without the other, right? Like a very strong confidence in your ideas, but not a verbal fluency that matches the strength of your conviction. I think that it's possible to be high in one and low in the other, but it's rarer. It's more common that people who are very confident in their views will speak very confidently.

And Bob is an interesting case because it is not the case that he lacks confidence in his positions. He argues them quite well and we'll see that he sets them out clearly. But what he does have, which almost all of the other gurus that we've covered, including people who are not on the side of manipulative, egotistical gurus, is that he does express uncertainty around his positions and an acknowledgement that there are plenty of alternative views that don't correspond with the position that he outlines. And that is more unusual to hear from gurus. What we tend to get is strategic disclaimers, not genuine disclaimers.

strategic disclaimers, not genuine disclaimers. And as we'll see in this content, I think that the disclaimers that Bob issues are genuine. Yeah. I mean, listeners can make their own mind up about that, but I agree with you. Yeah. So maybe I'm just going to play a clip to highlight that. It's a bit out of context, but this comes towards the end of the episode, just to give an example of what I'm talking about. Because I think this conversation comes closer to covering the waterfront in terms of my own worldview than maybe any conversation I've ever had. Well, I can't take credit for it.

Well, there aren't many people who want to sit down and hear my worldview, sadly, including people I'm closely related to. I got to say. So I really appreciate it. Just to stop, right? That's all at the end, thanking Josh for having the long conversation. How many of the other gurus have we heard would at the end of outlining their worldview

would be like, well, I don't think many people would want to listen to this. Like Eric Weinstein and Douglas Murray talk about their conversations, saving civilization when they're saying like so little of consequence. And as we'll get into Bob actually outlines a pretty cosmic worldview around evolutionary theory. And he acknowledges at the end, you know, most people probably won't be interested in and there's, you know, there probably won't be interested and there's you know there's humbleness and in some way bob is a guru that's built for us right because because of

this aspect that's true the degree of self-importance that now more toxic gurus have just you cannot be overstated the the degree of importance and self-congratulation that they apply to their conversations and yeah it's a pretty big contrast with bob which is like yeah you know not many people want to talk to me so you know thanks for indulging me and listening to me yeah yeah so that's uh i mean i i enjoy that but let's get into what he actually outlined um beforehand and see whether he's justified in in that humbleness or not yeah let's go we're going to go through it sequentially aren't we and it'd just be interesting to see how he builds up this this worldview so this is an interesting footnote to mention is that most of the gurus that we cover we can't jump around in the content

because they're covering several different topics. And a lot of it is fairly disjointed points that they're making. But I mean, in some sense, Bob intended this to be an outline of his worldview, right? So there's that, but it actually, the content builds on previous segments and there's an argument constructed. And it's so refreshing to have someone do that, that there actually is a logical coherence to the entire conversation. It makes sense to treat this conversation chronologically, but it doesn't really matter for most of the other gurus that we cover. That's true. Very true.

Yeah. So let's start at the beginning. Okay. So this is him giving a little bit of an outline about what he's going to present. I'm going to start off by talking both about some things about evolution in the broad sense. Biological evolution, which starts a few billion years ago,

all the way through the cultural evolution that has gotten us where we are today. I want to talk about some things that are and aren't amazing about that. And that I kind of picked up on fairly early during college. And the picking up on them kind of steered my own intellectual development. And then ultimately, we hope this does lead to more practical things, including meditation and we'll see. So he's going to build up from evolution and cultural evolution and then get to meditation, non-zero politics, that kind of stuff. So that's the progression we'll take with the content as well.

Ambitious, ambitious. Ambitious. Yeah. But as he says, you know, we'll see. We'll see how we go. And so Bob has written a bunch of books and given various talks on evolution. And I think he has a nice, like a good grasp of it in a way that certain other gurus we covered do not. And he describes the basic building blocks in quite a neat way. I think you, it is very natural

to be amazed when you first understand natural selection, that it could have led to all this in the sense of all animal species, including us. Very simple principle. You start off with some genetic material, some information encoded in chemistry. These happen to be strands of information that make copies of themselves. They make copying mistakes every once in a while. And that's the whole algorithm at the beginning. Apparently, the copying mistakes create variety. The varieties that are best at getting themselves copied persist and flourish. And that's it. And, you know, I mean, as things develop and you get sexual recombination, you get new sources of novelty, of variety.

recombination you get new sources of novelty of variety but still in the beginning it's pretty much copying and copying errors as i understand it uh and and you know more or less anyway it's a pretty pretty simple algorithm yeah i particularly enjoyed that i never get tired of hearing people describe evolution and i gotta say that's probably one of the best 30-second explainers that I've heard. It's accurate. It just doesn't use any fancy terminology. And I think Bob highlights the two important algorithmic elements, which is some degree of randomness in copying to create some degree of variation or diversity and then a kind of a censoring or a selection mechanism that operates on that diversity and you just repeat those two steps ad infinitum and you got yourself evolution and yeah he really emphasizes

the simplicity of the algorithm which i like like. Yeah. And again, you know, with the verbal tics that I recognize and know and love, it doesn't detract from the beauty and the elegance of the algorithm that he's describing. So I think a lot of people who have become interested in a scientific worldview and evolution can understand that initial response when you get, you know, a basic conception of the way evolution works and you think, shit, that's all it takes to, to get complex things that lead to the eye and human brains and so on. Just copying and mistakes and copying. Yeah.

I mean, one of the interesting things about that algorithm is, of course, it's not even restricted to biological stuff. We'll get to that, Matt. Hold here. But before we get there, we're sticking on the basic biological aspects of evolution. And there were two other processes that he described quite neatly. So one is kin selection. Now, theory of kin selection at the level of organisms explains why we feel altruistic toward close relatives, why that would be favored by natural selection.

And you could hear that without understanding how the mechanism works. And I think when you understand how the actual selective mechanism does favor that kind of altruism, it's so beautiful and elegant that you might have an epiphany the way I did when I finally understood it. But an interesting thing about that is it also applies at much lower levels of organization than multi-celled organisms, okay? So, you know, for example, once a strand replicates and there's a copy of itself next to it, if it does things that help the other strand that has the same information, that kind of altruism will be favored right at the beginning of time.

Yeah. So one of the things that's apparent in what Bob does is that he takes the listener step-by-step through a very concrete, concise, but still complete description of the different ingredients that he's using to build his argument. Now, that's one of the things that the more toxic gurus don't do, right? They sort of flatter their audiences. Oh, you guys are super smart. You know, you guys are super keen. And then they jump in at a high level of abstraction and complexity,

which supposedly is showing great respect for their listeners, but actually isn't, is it? Because whereas what Bob's doing is actually describing the building blocks. And, you know, it could be a little bit remedial. A lot of people listening would already know this stuff, but just like giving a good talk, you don't assume that people know stuff. You set it out. No. And also there's an effort to simplify descriptions so that they're understandable. And he does a very good job illustrating very nicely that for kin selection to occur, it

doesn't require organisms that have concepts of kin or, or even organisms with well developed brains, right? All it requires is that it's beneficial in the terms of producing more copies that you have a genetic component that says sacrifice yourself and this leads to more copies of your genetic structure being present. Like I'm already describing it worse than he did, but that's the point. It's a nice description and one that it gives you the point and it's also laying the foundations for other parts to come.

And it leads neatly on to talking about altruism. parts to come and it leads neatly on to talking about altruism you've got three strands of identical say rna floating around in the primordial ooze any three strands of genetic information and uh they develop a mutation such that if there's something that threatens all three, the first one to sense it steps out and says, and does a self-sacrificial thing that saves the other two, okay, that will be favored by natural selection. I'm not talking about any altruism in the subjective sense. I'm just saying any behavior that happens to have the effect of saving copies of, you know, identical copies of this. natural selection if genes happen to arise that that foster behaviors that are self-sacrificial in the literal sense like this strand dies but it means these two strands live that will be favored

um and i i want to leave it at that for now because you know you could you could spend all day yeah so you know that's could spend all day. Yeah. So, you know, that's accurate. I mean, he's being a bit specific there in terms of sacrifice because, you know, altruistic behavior is just any kind of behavior that benefits other organisms at a cost to itself. And I find Dawkins' gene-centered approach really helpful here because it seems altruistic when you look at it at the level of the organism, but it's not really altruistic when you look at it from the point of view of the DNA because it's in helping copies of itself, it's sort of benefiting itself. Well, it's an interesting illustration, isn't it? That, you know, inserting or projecting human characteristics

onto genetic material or that kind of thing is really, you know, it's just an analogy that helps us understand because you can look at it as genes being selfish, right? Wanting to favor more copies into the next generation and that being their primary goal. Or you can look at it as creating little altruists who will sacrifice themselves to save other copies, even though they won't exist in the future. Like it's really a limitation of our brain and has led to much debate around Dawkinsburg and just the concept of the selfish gene more broadly

about how helpful or misleading it is. But as this illustration shows, you can have the concept of selfish genes that are behaving altruistically and there's no contradiction there. And that's something which should be obvious, but which is not always obvious to people, right? There's so many takes that present the selfish gene as justifying eugenics

or that kind of thing, but it, it doesn't follow at all. It's simply a description about prioritizing, getting copies into the next generation. Yeah. Just it's, it's a level of analysis thing. Dawkins encourages people to look at things at the level of the gene rather than the organism. And yeah, as you say, these words like sacrifice and altruism and selfishness, you're just right in that it betrays the limitations of our language and the way we think about things when they're really nothing more than metaphors for what is a brute force algorithm.

Yeah. So there's a little tangent now, but it's actually necessary to get to the more cosmic stuff because Bob and Josh go on to talk about Bob's view about consciousness and the nature of subjectivity. So here's this topic being introduced. But according to mainstream behavioral science, the subjective experience was not essential. I mean, mainstream behavioral science says, look, I can show you the physical sensors on your finger and the flow of physical information that goes up your arm and the processes that trigger that lead to the reflex of withdrawing your arm. Moreover, we can build robots that have all that, and we assume it's not like anything to be them. So we have a lot of reason to believe that the subjective experience is superfluous in functional terms.

Objective experience is superfluous in functional terms. Yes. So I suspect this is something you and I are going to go back and forth on. But, you know, essentially my understanding of what he's saying here is that if you take a materialist view of the world, then you can divide stuff into its parts. And there is no extra magical fairy dust required to describe its functionality. So philosophers have the, what is it, ship of Theseus idea, where you could go in, replace each of the neurons in the brain with a little circuit that performs exactly the same functionality. You could progressively do that,

and you would have then a complete working functional model of the human brain that has all exactly the same emergent behavior that there's no Cartesian dualism because all there is is the material stuff. Yeah, actually, the ship of Vesas was referenced in WandaVision, the recent Marvel series. Oh. Wanda and the Vision, that was a part of the final battle at the end. So I'm sure it's familiar. Not just the philosophers, but also fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So look, don't you dare slam pop culture or superhero movies. They're introducing these heady philosophical concepts to Philistines like myself.

But yeah, we probably are going to have a difference here but not on this point okay i i don't need any so just to be clear i want to make this clear up front i don't need any mystical magical substance i don't think any of that exists okay my view of consciousness does not rest on that. I think I do end up in disagreement with you and Bob and probably all, it's true. It's something that scientists and philosophers, but we'll get to those points of disagreement. I want to outline first the three options that Bob sees as available for addressing consciousness, mainly because I think there's a fourth option, but here we go.

Basically, the only three options are either you're an epiphenomenalist or you actually don't believe consciousness exists, which some philosophers say, which is nuts, with all due respect. And some philosophers don't say, but I think kind of secretly believe, and I've accused Dennett of this, but he, of course, vigorously denies it. Or you can have some third view of consciousness that I think doesn't fit readily into, that greatly complicates the whole scientific paradigm. And some people might say, look, quantum physics is so weird that it demands a conception of consciousness that weird. Okay, fine. But anyway, we're in weird land if we're not in epiphenomenal land and if consciousness exists. And my point is that even epiphenomenal land is weird land because it means that we have this

subjective experience that has no obvious functional explanation. There's no reason it exists, which is all the more amazing when you realize it's what gives life meaning, right? Mm-hmm. Okay. So I think I'm more on board here. So let me just quickly summarize what Bob is saying. First of all, the epiphenomenal, is that it? View.

View is that consciousness is real as a subjective experience, but it doesn't actually do anything, right? It's just you have the impression of free will, you have the fond belief that you're actually influencing the world with your intentional actions or whatever, but actually you're like this kind of you know ghost that inhabits the material world and thinks that one is affecting things but actually it's just the actions of neurons and action potentials and so on yeah so that's right

number one that's your number one it's very weird so i think he's right there view number one. It's very weird. So I think he's right there. View number two, that consciousness doesn't exist. That's number two, isn't it? I think number two is that consciousness is real and is influencing things, but that requires... Influencing things in a spooky kind of way. Yeah. So that is also very weird because it resolves that you know you have the feeling that your consciousness is affecting things in the world so it makes sense on that level but it's spooky and weird because you've got this non-physical substance or entity or whatever that is affecting things in the real world so that is weird right and what was the third thing i think the the third one is saying that like no i don't need a mystical substance instead i'm gonna invoke quantum physics and string theory or quantum indeterminacy or whatever to like explain how it it looks spooky but it's actually tied to physics laws and material stuff so he's kind of saying well that is

just a variation on the second option i think which doesn't resolve the mystical spooky part because you're just positing a scientifical mystical spooky part yeah yeah i don't think it i think i agree with him in the sense that i don't think it resolves anything either i've read those accounts before. So there's this quantum indeterminacy which injects randomness and free will and consciousness somehow lives in the cracks of quantum randomness. And it's so, yeah, okay. I think isn't that Roger Penrose's kind of approach? Yeah, Roger Penrose wrote a book about that.

And frankly, it seemed like a lot of hand-waving to me. Like, I don't see, even if you did inject randomness into the universe that's still just randomness it's not it's not well right yeah so much so i like i don't think any issue with most of that like what has been described my issue is that those are the only three options okay because this is my fourth option. And I, I like, I always come to this problem that I just don't see. It's like the P zombies, you know, the P zombies where we can't tell that other people actually have an internal subjective experience, they might just look like it and they might all be wandering around, but actually you or me or whoever's listening is the only real person with

the internal subjective experience. And like all of the rest of the people don't, they're all zombies that look like, uh, with interior lives, but they don't have them, they're P zombies, philosophical zombies. I guess it's David Chambers, um, idea. And, and I, like I, along with other people, I know I'm not alone in this, think it isn't a problem. Think that that's like, it's a pseudo problem because we have no reason to infer that other people would have all of the same fundamental biological building blocks and would have a

completely empty interior experience that we don't have, but they still discuss it, right? Like they, they talk about it and they produce literature as if they have internal experiences like me. But it's, it's all a farce because it could be produced by P-zombies. Like, I don't know why that seems to be like philosophers wanking off. Like, I don't know why that seems to be like philosophers wanking off. And like an idea which has no impact and which seems on the face of it to be contradicted by all of the kind of Occam's reasoning that I can imagine.

But that's okay. Chris. Is it not mental wankery, Matt? Are you sure? That what you're describing, well, first of all, it's not a false perspective, right? No, no. Yeah. Describe the false.

Forget about the peace zombies because that's just a thought experiment. Nobody's seriously suggesting that no one else. They do. They're all upset about it. Right. So I'm just saying philosophers like to talk and say these things are big problems. I'm not so convinced they are. And this is another one.

Okay. But I was waiting to hear your fourth view. You're going to hear it. You're going to hear it. Okay. That was just the introduction. This is part one. No. This is part one.

No. So with that foundation laid, my issue, the fourth option, is that people are meat puppets. They're biological things and there is materialism and that exists. And then we have brains just like other animals, but we have brains which are more complex. Our brains can plot out alternative scenarios. We run these mental simulations of ourselves in different situations, different future possibilities, and we game plan things out, right? We can go into the past in our memories, recreate them, so on. We have this amazing mental apparatus, which is designed to let us navigate complex social worlds and to devise our Machiavellian schemes to be successful and have sex with lots of

people, right? You're on board so far. Nothing I've said is controversial. Especially with the last bit. Yes. Yeah, Right. Now, I don't see why people have this difficulty with the idea that given that we are the only type of creatures on the planet with the ability to produce cumulative cultural evolution, like the complexity of our culture is much greater than any other animal. Our social

worlds are much more complex, more people to track and so on. That our brains, the complexity of them and the things that they're producing with creating and assessing alternative perspectives perspectives and possibilities in the future might require that you have a sense of consciousness. That consciousness is a necessary component for you to be able to game plan things out like that, to have an individual sense of self and to imagine yourself projected into the future or to draw lessons from the past. So people saying, well, we could create a computer that can do the same thing, but it wouldn't have the conscious experience. First of all, we don't know that because we've never created a computer, anything like a human brain in terms of complexity. So we can't do that yet. And we don't know that you can create that without the interior subjective experience

of consciousness. And second of all, it seems very likely to me that this subjective sense of self and self-referential ability and so on is tied in to the human ability to process social words and imagine the future. So like consciousness in that respect, it's not an epiphenome because the argument is that the way that the brain architecture exists and the way that humans make use of it might require a subjective sense of self and the subjective conscious experience.

And so why, Matt, explain to me how that is wrong. And we know that we can create brains that do the exact same thing that humans do without any interior experience. How does anybody know that when we've never done it? What's the difference between that and the P-Zombie experiment? No, no, I think it's similar. I think I'm with you part of the way, right? I'd fully accept that a lot of the things that our conscious awareness does, or the

central executive does, could well be functional, maybe even necessary in order to have the degree of effectiveness, social intelligence, or whatever that the human beings do. I think you wouldn't disagree that it is in principle possible to build a computer of equivalent complexity and equivalent self-reflexivity and so on. Would you? Is that right? I think theoretically, we can do it. Like in the future, with positronic brains or whatever the case may be.

Yes, we don't need it to be like a biological flesh and blood. There's no material. There's no magic substance to blood and guts. So the point would be then, it's maybe easy to think about it in terms of a positronic brain, right? That, like, why does it need to be conscious? It could be doing all the functions of consciousness, but you could explain its behavior perfectly by just looking at the flow of electrons and so on through circuits. at the flow of electrons and so on through circuits. But you said there, like, the problem that I see in that argument is that you inserted that you can create all of the outputs of consciousness without consciousness.

Can you? Can anybody show that that is possible? Yeah. No, no, but I'm agreeing with you, right? I mean, I'm just giving you the point. Let's assume that the things that we call consciousness is functional, right? But consciousness isn't a thing in the material world that's actually having an effect on anything.

The behavior of the system, the positronic brain, is perfectly described at that lower level of electrons flowing around. It's a materialistic account. Even if you accept that there's these sort of emergent phenomenas and these things that can be described at a higher level of abstraction, just like you can describe what a computer does at a higher level of abstraction. You've got Microsoft Word running, it's doing stuff. You can describe its functionality without recourse to electrons and so on. But ultimately, it's epiphenomenal, right?

Like you clicking on a button or editing a thing or a spell check happening it's actually epiphenomenal to the electrons wearing around and ones and zeros flipping on and off but then and if that's the claim then you're basically saying everything is just like quarks bumping in the night like what does anthony's matter like we're all empty space predominantly right i think i think this is the part where i agree with you like i think emergent phenomena are important and those levels of description are just as meaningful because everything above quarks is like emergent behavior right yeah so so i agree with you there but i think where i'm agreeing with bob and other people that says it's a problem or it's a mystery is that according to that thinking of it as an emergent phenomena, there's no need for a subjective experience of consciousness, like an eye that is able to be aware of one's memories and stuff like that.

It could all be happening without that. How does anyone know that could be happening without that? Because what if that specific sensation is required for those kind of brains to function? Yeah, but the sensation experienced by what? By who? Yeah, the thing with the brain like that's that's this is the bit where my detachment comes because like say to me that well you you can have that without any conscious like when it's hypothetical right because the only beings that we know that have the level of uh

cognitive complexity and and the ability to elaborate on that are us which are beings which have a self-reflects conscious experience right so saying well you can have that without that but there's no case of it ever existing yet. There's only the hypothetical that you could do that and nobody's done it. Like you can make something which fools people into behaving in a similar way, but you can do that with lots of things, right? You can make something which looks like it's an animal, but underneath it's not. It's just a machine wearing around and its battery will run out.

But that doesn't mean that you've made an exact copy of an animal. And whenever it gets to the point of people saying, but when we get to the future and we can make it so that it is an exact copy, the part that I don't get is then inserting, and it won't have consciousness. Like, how do you know? You can't say that until you do it. I feel like you're like arguing at cross purposes.

Like you're arguing to a different point. I think that philosophers in general, but me and Bob in particular are talking about, right? Like imagine, imagine taking a person and, you know, it could be simulated or whatever. It doesn't matter, but it would be, it is in principle possible to say slow down all of the operations, right? It's a little bit like the Chinese room thought experiment. Just run the person, run Chris Kavanagh in slow motion, right? So that for, you know, one thought to cross your mind takes a hundred years. that for you know one one thought to cross your mind takes a hundred years now my point i guess is that if you i guess you probably said okay consciousness is still there it's still necessary

it's just operating much more slowly right that is just deeply weird like is it your position is basically what's the problem don't worry about it i'm kind of like i don't i know sam harris has written books i know philosophers have spent hundreds of years discussing this i know how ignorant i am but just fundamentally i don't see the problem i don't think we're ever going to resolve this for you because i just don't think that's how your brain works your brain i'm not even sure you're conscious now after this conversation yeah I I I don't know there must be people in the audience who are like yeah yeah he's right alongside the larger convention I'll say the people saying what? Like, how does he not get this?

But yeah, so that's it. I'm just saying, like, I don't get it. I don't get it. I get it. I've got a good way to tie, like, just to tie a bar on this. I think I'm with you in the sense that I think that consciousness might well be functional. It might well be an emergent phenomena that is just a higher level of description of the same physical processes in the same way that you can describe what word does in a functional way and not in terms of ones and zeros flipping on and off. And I'd even concede that maybe

that kind of emergent behavior is necessary in order to get the adaptive complex behavior that something like a human displays. I'm just with Bob and philosophers generally in still saying that's still weird and mysterious, right? That this emergent phenomena gives people the subjective feeling of being humans and experiencing stuff. I'm with Dennett and the Pete Zombies because I don't see any fundamental reason

why there has to be an observer. But there isn't one. There can just be the feeling of there being one. That's fine. Okay, well, that's the epiphenomenal. So what you're describing then is the epiphenomenal. No, because the epiphenomenal is saying it isn't necessary. It's an epiphenomenal.

It doesn't affect things. And I'm saying no. Well, it could be a necessary thing. it isn't necessary it's an epiphenome it doesn't affect things and i'm saying no no it well it could it could be a no it could be a necessary thing and could in other words you could have that subjective feeling necessarily arising once you have this emergent phenomena but the feeling isn't doing anything it's still driven by the ones and the zeros it's still driven by the neurons because the emergent phenomena of all of this adaptive self-reflexive behavior is still an entirely material physical thing. So I'm going to, I know most of this will be, but I'm just going to finish by

throwing shade at the entire philosophy of Buddhism and as well, I'm just going to explain why that's wrong and I'll leave it at that. Because you're like in the exact same respect, I agree. You can do meditation and you can deconstruct this subjective experience of the I, right? And the notion that is a permanent essence within you, like the homunculus driving things. You can deconstruct that through introspective practices.

I agree. But I think that there is no one on this earth functioning who in their daily life, and I include in this meditation masters feebled in the annals of Buddhist including this meditation masters fabled in the annals of Buddhist history that do not function in the world as if they are an entity, an individual who has a history, has relationships in time

and projects themselves into the future, sees things throughout. So you can talk about the metaphysics. You can talk about how unreal and how like Sam Harris, you look in the mirror and you don't see a face. You just see a temporary arrangement of atoms and attach no importance to that. But I will say that there are so few people and basically none that I've ever seen in history books that then go on not to act in the way of being an individualized being with individual relationships. So take that. I agree with you there.

Because you can't function because of the kind of creature we are. You cannot function whatever the... Yeah, that's all, Matt. So sorry for that tangent. No, that's all right. But let's do some editorializing though, because I don't think it goes anywhere. Okay. So I'll say it like this. Basically I think there's a fourth option, which is that you recognize

because of our cognitive architecture and the way that it projects senses of individuals into possible alternative futures and learns from experiences that are stored in memory of past experiences, this kind of autobiographical sense of self, that it may be, this is a necessary component for our brains to function in the way that they are, for us to work in our social environments, that it is not a completely irrelevant epiphenome. Rather, it is the way that the brain functions. And that thing which is produced that sense of self is a component of the system that you cannot have the system working without having it as an inherent part i think that's a fourth

option um which is not discussed yeah so i guess um to put my spin on it you could describe a consciousness as like an emergent phenomena that is functionally useful in various ways. But just like all emergent phenomena, it doesn't require any extra metaphysical ingredients. It just purely arises as a function of the elements interacting with each other. Exactly. And Bob also discusses about how consciousness exists on the spectrum. And I'd agree with this. But you're not saying where and when consciousness comes online. Right. But you're just sort of saying. crazy to think it exists in small measure in anything we call life, maybe, or anything. I don't know. I think most of us have the intuition, though, that it didn't just start with us, right? We certainly treat animals. Almost all of us treat animals as if they're capable of suffering,

right? It's not like people who eat meat defend it by saying, well, they can't feel anything anyway. Yeah, I don't think this is a controversial view. It's almost a necessary view. Like at some point, a fetus becomes a baby, becomes a child, becomes a person. It seems strange to say that it's like a light switch being turned on, suddenly consciousness pops up. So it seems obvious that there are differences of degree. It's easy to extend that to dogs and other animals and it is you know again talking about the weirdness of consciousness i do appreciate though that the panpsychists are really just taking that argument to the nth degree and saying well if it's matters of degree then you have to accept that even like a rock has some degree of consciousness even if it's infinitesimal

yeah i'm kind of not on board with the rock. Am I not surprised? I'm on board with the mosquitoes and stuff, so we'll take them. Leave rocks out of it, eh? Don't complicate things, Matt. We've just got done with the pea zombies and the nature of consciousness. So, look, regardless of all that, we have these two building blocks, right?

We have the elegance of the natural selection and other fundamental components of evolution. And then we have this, whatever it is, component of consciousness that we have subjective experiences and that maybe other animals have some degree of that as well. But like we have it, right? And this is important because when you put the two things together, you get this. If you agree with me that life without subjective experience, if we were just robots lacking sentience, that that kind of life would really lack fundamental meaning. Right. And that's what I meant by the category of meaning. Yeah, that's all I mean.

I don't mean like the comprehension of sentences, that kind of meaning. I mean meaning in the more moral, spiritual sense of like, why is life worth living? And why do we take moral questions seriously? And why is it worth talking about how we treat other people and animals? And that's the kind of meaning I mean. And I'm saying, you know, natural selection is this algorithm for generating more and more meaning.

And we don't have a clue as to why yeah so how about that matt so it's an interesting place to take the argument so it's uncontroversial to say that biological evolution has led to something that looks like consciousness in us and probably other animals as well. And I agree with him that, yeah, a universe without conscious experience, you could have really complicated stuff going on. It could be super interesting fractals and all kinds of emergent phenomena. But if there's no body around to apprehend it, then I think I'm with him. It makes sense to say that such a universe would lack meaning. How about you?

Yeah, I mean, I think we slip into tautology space because meaning is really like, it's tied in with human subjective experience. So saying that, you know, evolution is a process which ultimately generates meaning, like sure it did when it produced us, but if we didn't exist, that's a pretty meaningless long span where the dinosaurs invested in meaning if they had the earth for a lot longer than we did. And they were, you know, the outputs of evolution just as much. So I think they were, you know, the outputs of evolution just as much. So I think they were conscious.

So is a universe populated with planets full of dinosaurs that are just running around eating each other and laying eggs? Like, is that a universe full of meaning? Or does it require humans or human-like creatures, right, which have this introspective, self-reflexive kind of consciousness. So I think that is, and I think Bob is also making the claim, right, that evolution leads to that kind of creature. But my contention is maybe it doesn't, right?

It doesn't necessarily require that. We could just be dinosaurs forever if there was no asteroid. Yeah, I think there's a couple of issues that you brought up and I agree with them. One is it is a bit tautological because if you say that meaning arises from conscious entities, and then you go, okay, well, we're conscious and we're a product of evolution. So evolution in some way has a purpose or a role or a function in generating something that we think is important so of course we think it's important because we've defined meaning as stuff that we think is important and the other thing is that yeah i'm with you of course and i don't think

bob would disagree with this that there's nothing teleological well we'll see but i would so i yeah i would disagree that there's anything at all teleological in evolution i think it's all very very contingent and we simply don't know whether increasingly complex conscious entities are a kind of inevitable product of evolution given enough time you know maybe not so on that issue of teleology teleology here is a relevant clip i should say separate from this and and this i want to be careful about how i phrase this i i have argued that um there is reason to at least suspect and argue on behalf of the proposition that evolution has a larger purpose. There's a larger purpose unfolding. But I want to emphasize that that does not entail departure from a

Darwinian conception of evolution. Okay? If you think it does, then I should spend an hour talking to you and explaining why it doesn't and it's it's subtle for some people but but the main point is just material systems can have purpose uh my thermostat has purpose so bob wants to argue that it doesn't automatically, like arguing that it were the case that evolution has a purpose for generating conscious beings, for example, that that could be something which arises due to natural laws or just constraints about universes. And he actually gives this nice cosmic example of how that could be the case related to black holes. So I'll play that. of how that could be the case related to black holes.

So I'll play that. Now to give you an idea of how far ranging the things could be that imbued purpose, you know, Lee Smolin, the physicist, has this idea that maybe universes replicate, perhaps through black holes. So there could be natural selection among universes. So what gets favored, so you can imagine universes that create a lot of black holes So there could be natural selection among universes. So what gets favored?

So you can imagine universes that create a lot of black holes get favored over time, right? They're good at reproducing. Now, you can also imagine scenarios where universes that develop intelligent life wind up with more black holes or for some other reason are better reproducing if that were the case and i've discussed this with him and he says yeah in theory this could be uh he gets exactly what i'm saying that if you have self-replicating universes and those universes that uh that that have intelligent life are better replicating then that is this kind of meta natural selection thing that would lead to universes in which yes, evolution can be said to have a purpose, if that makes sense. Whether it does or not, I like the caveat.

For me, Matt, that whole presentation, I don't think it gets you with it, right? Because it's like when you're talking at the point of like black hole universes replicating and like the relative prevalence of black holes being the selective factor, you're talking about what, billions of years, hundreds of billions, like, I don't know, gazillions of years. You're talking about timescales beyond human comprehension, forces like that we barely can properly grasp. And so at some point, I know I'm glad that physicists, you know, discuss these things and we may find ways to address like cosmic possibilities

and multiverses and all this. There is an element where it's like fundamentally mysterious and who knows, right? Like if we know it'll probably be thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years before we know. So like black hole gods, maybe, but if they exist, they're nothing like what we imagine a god to be. And they're operating on a timescale which is incomprehensible to our minds. Yeah, like I'm pretty easygoing with this stuff too, I guess. Partly because Bob does preface it with a lot of caveats. He acknowledges right off the bat that this is unproven, perhaps unprovable, and it's

kind of metaphysical speculation, which I'm all for. You know, it's great. I love science fiction and thinking about these things. And I don't take issue with any of those logical steps. I don't think he's committed any terrible non-secateurs there. I take the point that evolution could be serving a kind of cosmic purpose in the sense that, you know, to take a simple example, if evolution led to or was likely to lead to species that could create black holes eventually, then that could contribute

to cosmic evolution. if the parameters get randomized with all of the baby black holes that get created within a given universe and you can have evolution happening on this broader level. Yeah, sure. Maybe it's possible. So his point is valid, though, that it's theoretically possible

that you could have a so-called purpose for evolution in the way that we understand it, but that it is produced by natural forces that are just beyond our comprehension or, or only dimly comprehensible to us. That's like, it's possible. Um, now the question of what imbued it with purpose, uh, was it a God? Was it some other kind of intelligent being? Was it aliens? Was it people from another universe? Could be any of those. Could even be, in principle, purpose can be imbued by non-animate things. In other words, like an organism is a goal-directed thing, there's a sense in which an organism has a purpose, namely to get genes into the next generation. But it was not created by a conscious creator or designer. It was just created by natural selection. For whatever reason, but for comprehensible reasons, in a sense, it imbues these machines called organisms with what you can call goals or purposes in a certain sense. And by the way, this is something I agree with Dan Dennett on. I mean, I agree that organisms can be described as having goals and purposes.

I encourage people to Google my discussion with him about the other question of whether evolution has a purpose. But I want to kind of bracket that because most of my worldview does not require that you accept that there could be a purpose to evolution. And I want to emphasize again, it's not the kind of purpose that would lead you to depart from a Darwinian conception of the mechanisms driving evolution. I did like that he mentioned that this notion was triggering to Steve, Steven Pinker. And I can see why. But I personally think the arguments on behalf of it are stronger than people, some people acknowledge.

The suggestion freaks some people out like steve pinker i've had this conversation with him on youtube he kind of gets triggered i would say by by by by this kind of talk um in a way that i think he shouldn't if he if he understands clearly what the talk is so yeah it's got the potential to be misunderstood and maybe misused, that concept of purpose. But I get it. Bob, I get it. I get the concept.

I'm not triggered by it. I don't mind. You didn't trigger me. You know, fine, alien gods, black hole gods, like inanimate rocks getting together and in during the universe with purpose, like fine. It theoretically possible, but I, I do think there is maybe some parts where Bob is guilty of that thing, which many people in this space talking about this kind of thing do where

they have the caveats that are there kind of saying, you know, that it's not necessary and that they're not talking about a teleological purpose in the sense of like flowy beard man has imbued people's lives with meaning. But there are components where that level of detachment seems a little bit lacking when describing the meaning and purpose that animates human lives, like in the more mystical sense. Bob's suggestion there in many ways parallels some other speculative philosophy. Like you're familiar with the simulation hypothesis, right, Chris? Like you're familiar with the simulation hypothesis, right, Chris? And there's a pretty tight argument where if you're given some reasonable assumptions about computing power and stuff, you know, given that a biological species will eventually get to a point of having pretty much infinite computing power, then they could then go ahead and simulate umpteen number of times, simulated biological organisms. The argument goes that we're much more likely to be living in a simulation than not.

It seems like this is the same logic that gets the rationalists to worshipping the non-existent supercomputer in the future so that it will torture them forever. Yeah. I mean, but I mentioned that just to point out that there are other logically consistent cosmic science-y worldviews out there one can select from. Which Bob would perfectly acknowledge, I think. Yeah. So this is my point. Given that there's probably a fair few degrees of freedom here, that we can imagine a whole bunch of cosmic possibilities while sticking to materialist scientific worldview, then we're probably going to have a natural tendency to want to pick one that feels nice. And maybe, you know,

because you can have the simulation hypothesis and maybe we're simulated literally NPCs in computer games that are just running on idle and nobody's playing them at the moment, right? Now, that wouldn't be a very satisfying worldview. It wouldn't inject meaning and wouldn't make us feel good. Bob's one, I think, is logically consistent. And I like it.

You know, it's got a good vibe to it. But I guess we have to be careful about picking a cosmic science-y metaphysics that makes us feel good. Yeah. There's an interesting parallel in a sense with like Bob's approach and the kind of approach that like, I think Bob's is much more well-grounded in science. I will say that like his understanding of evolution as we demonstrated is very good. And I don't think he's verging into the realms of light, but he's not like Russell Brand, he's not like Jordan Peterson in the degree to which they bend

in the religion, but there is a parallel in a certain sense with Peterson. And it's kind of summarized in this clip discussing like the logos and Bob himself notes the parallel in their emphasis on this potential logos. I mean, there's plenty of reasons to ask who am I, what am I already maybe, but, uh, yeah, I mean, you're, uh, you're an expression of this completely amazing thing, uh, that, you know, of the logos in a certain sense of the word and um there's an interesting uh

idea in the greek version of logos that i may not remember exactly but it's kind of that uh you know the logos it's almost a fractal conception of the logos that like within your brain is the logos it is a manifestation of the logos but it is the logos and in a way it is i mean we are having this conversation are working out uh non-zero sum the logos has been the working out of non-zero-sum. The Logos has been the working out of non-zero-sum problems as motivated often by zero-sum forces. And by that, I mean, I'm including the evolution of the complex, the eukaryotic cell and multicellular life. And now here we are having a conscious conversation about non-zero-sum thing. I think in broad brushstrokes, Bob's worldview is one in which there's like the kernel of natural laws that could be operating with our universe or could be operating across multiple universes connected by black holes or whatever.

And algorithms like evolution are operating perhaps on multiple scales and what they tend to do is create increasing complexity increasing diversity increasing levels of adaptivity and nuance and sophistication and and even you know you might say sort of like cooperation and harmony even since a cooperative mutually promoting relationships are ones that are going to lead to more complexity than destructive or monocultures and things like that. So that's the sort of big picture. And it's a really positive worldview, I think. I can see the attraction and I like it. It's much more attractive than my default, which is that we live in a totally meaningless universe.

Yeah, evolution is super interesting, but it also leads to like, you know, brain parasites and horrible worms that grow in other animals' stomachs and burst out of them. You know, there's as much horror in there as anything else. Millions of years of dinosaurs and beetles like why so many beetles it's there's no point having this many beetles dinosaurs dinosaurs okay but beetle so i guess the point that the compliment i want to give is that it's elegant his worldview has an elegance to it. The things I personally am not a big fan of is the tendency to want to imbue, connect things to meaning and things that provide us with satisfaction, because I think that can lead us to a particular framework and choosing

particular views of the world that are satisfying to us rather than reflecting reality. But the compliment I want to give is that his version is, though it's very positive and feel good and so on, it's very elegant. If you permit yourself a little bit of speculation, you can connect a lot of things that seem important, like non-zero sum views of where humanity should go to some pretty basic principles around increasing levels of sophistication and complexity. I agree because ultimately my perspective of the universe and the world around us is a bleak place devoid of meaning meaning except created by us, right? And us as the products of natural selection.

And I feel the bigger likelihood is that we are a product of natural selection and consciousness is this wonderful subjective experience that has no greater purpose than simply a thing which is produced by, you know, the kind of creatures we are. And that doesn't mean that life isn't wonderful and having children and stuff doesn't create the kind of emotional attack or not having kids and, you know, being romantically involved or whatever it is, it gives you a life meaning. It doesn't mean it can't be rich and metaphysically rich and make you,

you know, have a sense of spirituality and whatnot. But like, fundamentally, that world is cold. And Bob's worldview, it's not that because it offers people who want to acknowledge the secular realities and the material nature of existence, the possibility for a metaphysical meaning and purpose. And I've gotten the issue with someone doing that just as I don't have the issue with like someone like Peterson offering a worldview that focuses around that, it's just all of the things that come bundled in together with that.

And Bob's bundle is not that demanding and not necessarily tied to an acceptance of his kind of politics. But I will say, Matt, that he does tie them logically together in a way that Sam Harris did. And then when he talked to us, kind of said that he was not distinctly tying in his politics with meditation. But let's go to Bob talking about cultural evolution and the emergence of the global brain, because I think it speaks to this and it speaks to how his political vision tie

into these kind of cosmic views. And then cultural evolution carries human societies from like hunter-gatherer level of organization complexity to, you know, chiefdoms, ancient city-states, nations, empires. Now we're on the algorithm of natural selection. That's kind of mind-blowing. And, you know, and people may think of, you know, there have been kind of mystical versions of this vision that people might see isn't strictly, you know, scientific materialism or strictly Darwinian, like the Catholic mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Leave aside whether he did or did not comply with the Darwinian conception of evolution. There's disagreement over that.

The point is his vision of, whoa, you know, we're now building a giant global brain. So the giant global brain seeded by the natural selection algorithm. Again, Matt, the logic seems pretty clear to me about this proposed connection. And Bob wants to tie that to this concept, which one of his books and his newsletter is named after, like non-zero interactions. Ones were essentially where it is not required that for one to benefit the other suffers, right? That the, we, we can have things where there it's possible for both partners or more than one to receive benefit.

And he talks about this need related to the creation of a global community, the need to adopt this perspective. And I think crossing the threshold to the global community requires certain things of us. If we don't want to blow the planet up, if we don't want to dissolve

into fighting and chaos, that requires certain things of us. And that is kind of the heart of my my dharma my worldview is like uh is is that we should all ask um well i would encourage us to ask uh like how do i need to maybe change the way i'm living or thinking if I'm going to do my part to to increase the chances that this whole experiment flourishes and we do cross the threshold into global community and don't dissolve into fighting and chaos, blow the whole thing up with nuclear weapons, you know, destroy the environment via climate change and other things. So I think, believe it or not, I think that takes us to the threshold of what you were saying. Matt, I just want to make the point that there was an interesting part there where he said, so we need to, and then he corrected himself to, you know, one could argue that we should. Like, unlike our other gurus who have no

hesitation of being extremely prescriptive about what everyone needs to do. When Bob is prescriptive, he corrects, well, you know, or one way of saying it is like this. And I, I just appreciate that regardless of the validity or the extent to which you agree or disagree with his broader argument, he does always include those caveats and they're not throwaway. No. Yeah. That's something we should emphasize that it's really clear when you listen to this, where Bob draws a clear delineation between the parts where he's giving a straight up

factual account of how evolution works or how altruism works or whatever. And there he's not, he doesn't have the qualifiers, right? Because he knows that he's telling you like it is, right? And then he delineates his Dharma or his philosophy that sort of rests on that. But he makes the distinction very clear. And as you say, he issues those caveats and they're not strategic at all. He saying look this is where i'm going out in the limb this is where i'm speculating a little bit um so yeah very non-guru-esque behavior i keep getting drawn into wanting to argue with him that's the problem about i know well like that's a really a really good distinction that i think is important to emphasize is that one of the objections we often have to the guru figures

is that they provide genuine information about, say, evolution, and then they throw in their idiosyncratic interpretation, which has no empirical support and is highly speculative. And they don't flag these as being fundamentally different things. And what Bob does is he always flags. This is the part where I'm describing a conventional view about evolutionary theory. Now I'm adding this on top and this is my perspective, but you don't have to accept my perspective in order to appreciate the beauty of the first part that I just discussed. And he's always very carefully delineating. This is my speculative component.

This is the part which is going more cosmic, and so on, and this is the part which I don't think is debatable. And he signposts that very nicely. So that, again, it's just a refreshing thing. The other simple point that's worth making is that none of his speculations are inconsistent with basic scientific orthodoxy on evolution, say. Now, that's very different from many of our other gurus, Brett Weinstein, for instance, who would have you believe that the orthodox view of evolution is fundamentally broken,

that what's needed is his hot takes in order to fix it. Now, at no point in this recording does Bob even hint at that. A good example of this is him, like he's written a book, you know, Why Buddhism is True and provocative title or not aside, this is where he links in his views about Buddhism, because he basically sees Buddhism and meditation more generally as a way of encouraging non-zero cognition. But listen to the, when you listen to this clip, listen to the way that he frames his advocacy for Buddhism and how, whether it's optional or not. And to get back to the question you were asking, now, I'm not saying that's the only path.

There are lots of ways to do this. They don't have to involve a Buddhist context. I don't think they have to involve meditation. I personally think it's a very helpful tool. have to involve meditation. I personally think it's a very helpful tool. But I think generically the thing that is required is that we all get better at transcending the distortions of thought and perception that were built into us by natural selection because they were good at getting genes transmitted in a very different environment. Yeah. So that's very different, say, from Sam Harris, who says, if you don't meditate, you're fucked.

Yeah, he's saying there's plenty of other avenues that you could take. But I think that Buddhism and meditation is a good way to do this. And so that's one thing about introducing the caveats and recognizing there are alternative pathways. one thing about introducing the caveats and recognizing they're all alternative pathways. I'm not saying it's uncharacteristic of all people who might be gurus, but it's definitely uncharacteristic of the gurus who set themselves up as these charismatic figures offering their followers the true path and the exploitative kind of guru. So Bob doesn't seem to be that. And the other thing he does, Matt, which you don't see so much, is like actually grappling with potential contradictions in his perspective in a proper way. So like, for example, so. So, yeah, an example of that would be when societies

cooperate through non-zero-sum logic To wage war on another society Non-zero-sumness can be put to nasty uses It was to no small extent designed for that By natural selection, I mean So many of the historical common instances Of non-zero-sum dynamic working is usually driven by the presence of an animate threat, right? So two societies banding together to go to war against another tribe, for example. for example. Right.

I mean, yeah. So, you know, highlighting that there can be cases where it's necessary, right, to, like, oppose things and not to,

you know, like the Nazis or that kind of thing, right? There are times whereby it's not, win-win scenarios do not always exist

or non-zero things could lead to the case where it's beneficial for certain societies to annihilate other societies. Well, yeah, I mean, even at a more basic level, like if, like he uses biological evolution as a key framework or metaphor, but if you look at the evolution of biodiversity, most of it has come about through predation parasitism competition in various kinds so if all the trees would just agree to cooperate that they wouldn't have to waste all that energy building these massive trunks they could just all agree to grow along the ground and that capture

exactly the same amount of light energy so there's a huge huge amount of wasteful zero-sum or negative-sum interactions in biology. And arguably, the more complex the organisms are, the more complex the ecosystems, the more of that kind of stuff you tend to see. So yeah, I think there's a genuine issue there. He also highlights, if it sounds like to some extent, extolling the virtues of evolution and its ability to generate meaning within humans. He also is clear that being the products of evolution has led us into having types of cognition and biases that make us prone to making bad decisions, for example. Now, as a global community faces a situation where the perception of threats should logically lead us to interact in more non-zero-sum cooperative ways,

you know, climate change should logically lead to global cooperation. It's a very complex non-zero-sum problem with a non-trivial solution, but there is a non-zero-sum solution imaginable. But the problem is natural selection designed us to be more attentive to threats in the form of like animate threats, like other groups of people trying to kill us, other people trying to kill us.

That's super galvanizing, right? And you see that in politics. Nothing is better for a politician who wants to galvanize a society than saying there are these bad people who want to get you. You know, whether it's or pose a threat to you. or pose a threat to you. Yeah, he doesn't do any of the old lazy Evo psych fetishizing, if you like, of the naturally evolved predispositions. Yeah, and speaking of tribalism, Matt,

it's a topic that has come up on previous episodes. And Bob, he's read a very good piece on his sub stack about tribalism, a whole series on tribalism. And I think he has a very similar perspective to it that I do. And he's, he's talking about the possibility of tribal tendencies or, you know, in-group tendencies, if you don't want to use the word tribal, like not always being negative things. I'm not saying that, first of all, cognitive distortion is always bad.

They're perfectly harmless. You know, like having a non-objective view of my daughters is sometimes a perfectly fine thing you know having a non-objective view of friends uh can be a perfectly fine thing these things that facilitate uh you know esprit de corps and so on like not dwelling on their bad side or whatever you know something less than completely objective uh perception can be a fine thing in itself. Antagonism with a group can be defensible. There are bad groups.

Antagonism toward Hitler's regime, I would defend. What I'm saying is that it's when the antagonism is actually based on a distortion that it's bad. And the distortion is bad when it creates needless or counterproductive antagonism. You on board with good tribalism, Matt? I think so. I think so. You know, there's all of those studies showing that the sort of feel-good neurotransmitters in the brain, the ones that make you feel this affinity for your kin and people that are close to you, your in-group,

also tend to promote more antagonism towards an out-group. So every good vibe, you know, hippy-dippy kind of love-your-neighbor type thing tends to have a dark side to it too because those same motivations tend to involve excluding some other groups i guess i'm just realistic about it like i don't think people can live as like these sort of christ-like figures and treating everybody exactly the same and caring just as much about a stranger that you've never met as a child of yours or something. So I'm with him in that, but I don't really judge these things as good or bad. It's just sort of how people are. What do you think?

Yeah. You know, it's a good thing where you take as the default that people are going to be biased and create in groups because that's the nature of humans. That's what we do. But I kind of like the notion that given that that's an inevitability, that you want to try and make the groups that you become affiliated towards to be things which lean towards positive social values and stuff, as opposed to Nazism, because you can utilize group dynamics for positive things and for negative things,

but it's very hard to completely remove yourself from the arena of group dynamics, right? So there's this concept that Bob talks about, the tribalist tribe. Again, this is all quite amusing because famously he got into crosswords with Sam Harris by pointing out that Sam harris was quite strongly tribal which somebody else has done recently as well but this example shows that it isn't that bob doesn't think that that's like a good target to aim for i did a little thing about how tribalism various ways it's an unfortunate term the way it's being used now but it is the way it's being used now, but it is the term. It's a standard term. I'm not going to change that. It is in this currently popular usage. It is a negative thing. It's inherently an accusation. I mean, it's like, oh, he's being tribal. You know, that's like not a good thing.

And I'm fine with like, okay, use it that way. Come up with with definition explain that this is not meant to reflect badly on you know traditional tribes and so on but but if what you're saying is uh first of all isn't there uh a time when it's appropriate for groups to come together around a common cause that's not an inherently bad thing. I absolutely agree. I mean, you know, as I think you know, I've toyed with the phrase, you know, the tribalist tribe. Okay, the tribalist tribe. No, I like that.

I don't like the term. I don't think it's a good term, but I like the concept. I just like the way that when Bob is talking about these things, that he's kind of thinking through the negative reactions or some people disagreeing, and he kind of peppers his argument with responding to people. Like at the beginning of that, he's talking about tribalism and the term being associated with disparaging connotations

of indigenous people, and he doesn't want to endorse that, but at the same time, that's the term. So he's acknowledging the issues, but like moving forward at the same time. And there's a really nice clip of this where he's reflecting on the tribalist tribe concept. But at the same time, you can hear that he's working for also the objections and criticisms and not just dismissing them as irrelevant. I don't mean it's my Twitter handle, but, uh, but it's, I reserved it, uh,

tribalist tribe because it's an interesting, uh, it's obviously paradoxical and maybe that's a bad thing. It confuses people. Wait a second. How can you have a tribe if it's, right, if it's tribeless? But I guess it would, if such a thing existed, it would be the tribe of people who try to recognize the distinction I just alluded to.

Like, you know, when you've got a group that is doing things that generate needless or counterproductive antagonism, especially involving, you know, the distortion, and that I think tends naturally to involve in some sense

or another distortion of cognition or perception, that's the kind of tribe we don't want to be. That doesn't mean there's no such thing as a perfectly fine tribe. Okay. So if I understand what he's getting at correctly, he's saying that people are going to naturally organize themselves into some sort of affiliated group of people that have got similar outlook and similar goals and value similar things, right?

But he's saying, hey, perhaps we can do that and at the same time try to be more aware of the somewhat toxic social dynamics that inevitably occur once people organize themselves that way and try to counteract those tendencies as much as possible. Yes, that's it. Yeah. I'm on board with that.

Yeah. Yeah. Which, you know, you wouldn't think these kinds of things would cause so much controversy, but there you go. So, but I like Matt, the relatively relaxed perspective he takes while advocating for this, right? Like, cause he's, he's outlining a thing that might be good, but some people might consider paradoxical, but you know, overall he thinks it's a good thing, but this is a kind of activism I can get him bored with the relaxed kind. The tribe of Boston Red Sox fans is almost always harmless and they have a good time.

Fine. talks fans is almost always harmless and they have a good time fine uh it's and the tribe of people who want uh fewer wars and better international governance i like to think is a is a is a productive good tribe okay it's um i'm not against all forms of social organization um i i just i I would like to be able to, you know, I would like to see people who recognize the dangerous forms of tribalism better organized and motivated into something like a tribe. Yes. Tribalist. I'm with you, Chris. In terms of his tone, it's right up my alley.

Just that relaxed ambivalence and this could be a good idea. Maybe. Yeah. You need passion, but at the same time, there's one last clip of this, which highlights that kind of energy. Well, no, it's a tricky thing because i think you do you know you need passion to you know to be an effective kind of crusading organization or group um and i wouldn't i wouldn't want to abandon all of that uh at the same, it leads to counterproductive behavior, even, I think, for all of us sometimes, and there are people I think do it more often, which is just an overly hostile view of the foreign policy established, a counterproductively hostile view. And maybe I'm guilty of that.

I have a pretty negative view. guilty of that. I have a pretty negative view. It's a hard calibration to make, but I certainly think that you need to, you know, for any cause, for any group to pursue their cause, you need to preserve a certain kind of passion. Yeah, not too little,

not too much. It's like a golden mean type thing. I'm on board. Look, this is, I mean, it's almost nectar to milk toast people. But the thing is, Bob's worldview, right? it's almost nectar to milk toast people. But the thing is, Bob's worldview, right? Bob's politics is not milk toast. He's a strong, non-interventionist, anti-imperialist perspective on foreign policy.

His politics are not this kind of wishy-washy political system. But what he's talking about there is acknowledging that other people might also have different worldviews that they believe in fervently and that people within his camp may go too far, including himself in demonizing the art group. Right. And just acknowledging that that can be counterproductive, even though it's a side effect of having an activism, which is beneficial. And it's, it's that Matt, that kind of like constant mental back and forth and express back and forth that there are good points, there are bad points, there are

alternative points of view. I think this is better, but I recognize that, you know, I have my biases, I have my tribe. That's just so refreshing. And I think it's a good encapsulation of why Bob has the cosmic worldview that we've seen, he's outlining a political position, which he ties into his cosmic worldview, but he's not a guru in the same way that so many of the others are, because he leaves open all of these alternative possibilities and he caveats the arguments that he wants to make with genuine hesitation and genuine recognition that there may be issues you know that he's blind to or or doesn't perceive as clearly as he would so yeah i, I like it. Yeah. Well, Chris, the IDW is defunct, so I really should stop mentioning it. But that general approach was supposed to be about the idea that people could

have civil, respectful, calm, intellectually rich disagreements with each other to figure stuff out, reaching across the aisle if necessary, all that stuff. But as of course, we found out all of these things like being super civil, having this sort of group where they tend to be focused on relationships and don't actually criticize each other, or people who are nameless who seem to be unable to deal with any criticism whatsoever or any sort of not seeing it in exactly the same way. criticism whatsoever, only sort of not seeing it in exactly the same way. So the promise was very much unfulfilled because the people involved were probably temperamentally unsuitable to it. And because all of those nice ideas tended to get weaponized or just had lip service paid to them. But I do think Bob is a person who sort of lives up to those ideals. I'm sure he would disagree with someone like you

and me about policy about Syria or policy about the Ukraine. Not that I have very strong understandings of these things, but I can imagine we'd probably disagree about the content quite strongly. And he's very confident and passionate about those things. But at the same time, I'm certain that we could talk about it very easily and productively. So yeah, it's a personality thing is what I'm saying. He's got that X factor that is able to do these things. Yeah. So maybe the last place to go, there's a parallel because Bob is into Buddhism and meditation.

They talk a little bit about the exploitative gurus and the potential for exploitation, which we covered in the conversation we had with Sam Harris and how to address it. And I just thought there was this nice exchange which illustrates something. So Josh is talking about this kind of concept of people being humbled when they come to a meditation retreat.

And I just want you to listen to Bob's response to the suggestion Josh makes here. I was actually my very first retreat. The friend I showed up with, he was assigned that and then balked at it. He said, yeah, I didn't come here to clean toilets. And I'm thinking, that's the whole point. Anyway, you know, you haven't done a retreat until you've cleaned toilets. Well, then I haven't done a retreat

and I hope to never do a retreat. But I think what you're getting at is that there's a, and you've written about this and why Buddhism is true, but there's a correlation with the amount of awareness you are bringing to your experience and the appreciation of the beauty that's rendered from that experience. So his friend suggests that being humbled in the manner of like some high-powered executive or whatever, and then being made to clean toilets, that's the essence of a meditation

retreat. And if you haven't experienced that, you haven't experienced a meditation retreat. And Bob kind of mumbles, well, I've never experienced a meditation retreat and And if you haven't experienced that, you haven't experienced a meditation retreat. And Bob kind of mumbles, well, I've never experienced a meditation retreat and I hope never to experience one, right? And like, it's a good remark, but it's also one, it's just an honest expression

that like, who wants to clean toilets? And also, I think, and not in a very harsh way, but kind of undermining this point that you have to accept that kind of thing in order to do a meditation retreat properly. The reason I wanted to highlight that was, one, I appreciate that response. Like it isn't. You can still do a meditation retreat and not be ritually humiliated.

But when his co-host elaborates the point and makes a more in-depth argument that meditation retreats are fundamentally about challenging people's egocentric self, and he kind of corrects the response that he made in this way. This involves, uh, the irony is it involves being less judgmental in a broad sense. You know, it involves like less of saying, ooh, cleaning a toilet, gross. You know, I mean, notwithstanding my little remarks about cleaning toilets, the fact is that in the course of a retreat,

you reduce the extent of those little kinds of judgments. I mean, that's fundamental to the thing is that you try to drop your aversions to various things that normally you find unpleasant. mind uh unpleasant yeah i i just like that exchange right because he acknowledges the glib remark and not excusing it just kind of saying yeah setting aside that response that i said i'm gonna make this point that actually you're right but it's that duality of not being above making the remark about how you don't want to clean the toilet? I guess I'd put it like this. So the self-aggrandizing reply to someone saying, accepting that cleaning toilets is all part of the Dharma or whatever, in Buddha's circles, the self-aggrandizing comment would be to go, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

You know, I don't see any difference cleaning a toilet or writing a book. These are all activities. But, of course, his instinct is to not do that. But even though he actually agrees, when he's just being a bit more serious, he's like, yeah, that's exactly right. So yeah, no, I think it does go to his character. Well, I think we're rounding on the black hole God horizon of Bob, but there's one more clip which references a figure from my neck of the academic wood.

So it's going back to this concept of non-zero logos and to what extent Bob's worldview is religious. And let's see what he says. In the course of defining religion, he wanted to come up with a definition of religion sufficiently kind of abstract and modern to encompass some pretty modern theology and even Eastern spirituality, maybe. And he said, it's the belief that there is an unseen order and that our supreme interest lies in aligning ourselves with this order. Well, I would say my worldview is in that sense religious. You know, the unseen order has to do with this zero-sum, non-zero-sum logic that the algorithm of life forces life to accommodate.

And that accommodation has gotten us to where we are. accommodation has gotten us to where we are and we still need to accommodate and recognize and now recognize non-zero-sum logic uh and um pursue our interests in accordance with it and that and a final interesting thing to me is i i that does, we don't need to just become more mindful. I think we need to move closer to what I would call unashamedly moral truth. Yeah, that's a nice way to round it off. He's interesting in that he's similar to the moral realists in the philosophy sphere who don't want their moral or ethical frameworks to be constructed

or socially contingent or relativist. They would prefer it to be based in some fundamental reasoning. And in Bob's case, he prefers that his framework for understanding things like what we should do and what's the right objectives we should have and how we should conduct ourselves. do and what's the right objectives we should have and how we should conduct ourselves. He's a bit like a moral realist and he would prefer to have that grounded in this sort of kernel, this sort of unseen order, which within things like evolution. And Chris, you know, I think you and I, I mean, it's interesting to contrast, not that our opinions matter, but it is interesting to contrast because I think we agree with them that there is an unseen order in the sense that you can only make sense of all the biodiversity you see around yourself

with respect to evolution. If you look at the way that complex physical systems work, the unseen order there is obviously the laws of physics. And I think we also like his philosophy, his general recommendations and general outlook. But I don't think that we draw the same connection or require that grounding of one in the other. We're sort of happy for that nice stuff about ethics and meaning and so on to be rootless and drifting in a meaningless universe. But I respect the people's inclination in the other direction. Yeah, yeah.

And I think that overall, the fact that Bob acknowledges the religious components to his worldview and is able to distinguish them out and coherently describe which components of his worldview are religious and which are not. And in what sense does he mean religious? This is what distinguishes him from Jordan Peterson, even though in many ways he is, you know, Peterson in a very similar way is arguing that the kind of hero figure in the Bible is an instantiation of fundamental truth derived from the nature of the universe, logos, and human evolution. That means this book tells you the way to ascend competence hierarchies and become the most perfected man. And in Bob's worldview, there is similarly like a hum to the universe, right? A logos or a inherent purpose derived from whatever source,

the black hole gods or some alien deity or whatever it is that has imbued the universe with this purpose that we can hum along and resonate better by acknowledging it and doing it. But the difference between those two worldviews is that Bob is very clear about what parts of his worldview you have to accept in a materialist ones, which ones are speculative, and also very clear that people could get along very well

without adopting his particular brand or acknowledging Buddhism, right? As the best instantiation of that perspective. So that's where I think there's this important difference and where his teleological view of evolution is not, although there are again parallels with, I can see why he has some more sympathy than we would with someone like Brett Weinstein and his concept of, uh, what the hell do you call that? The lineage selection.

I can see why there's a greater sympathy towards that. But Bob's view of evolution, it's not metaphysical and then teleological in the same sense that Brett's is. And it doesn't rely on misrepresenting the core components of how evolution functions. So I just want to say why there are parallels that I think you can reasonably draw. There are really important distinctions as well. And it isn't just because I like Bob, because as I say, I'd much prefer if his worldview were true.

But like, unfortunately I think the universe is empty and meaningless and like, I'm fine with that. But, uh, yeah, I want to agree with you. I think there is an important qualitative similarities between Bob and Jordan Peterson and even Brett Weinstein. But I think, as you say, the differences are really important as well. Bob's metaphysical philosophy is elegant and it is quite tightly constructed. It doesn't depend on waving away or rejecting large components of evolutionary explanations, for instance. Like Jordan Peterson does something similar in terms of believing that

there's like a hum and a resonance to the universe and this underlying reality. But Jordan's argument involves just some really big leaps, you know, chaos dragons and crystalline structures. And the end point is fundamentally a very weird one. So, yeah, I think there's a similarity in kind. There's a qualitative sense in which they're the same, but Bob just does a much more careful and cautious job of it. So I just don't have the same issues that I'd have with those other guys. So I don't think it's necessary for us at this stage to say like a positive. We've been largely positive.

And yes, I like Bob. And yes, the self-deprecation and whatnot helps. But like, again, just make this clear to people, like I don't share Bob's political worldview. I think his treatment of the folks at Grayzone is a big issue where I'd strongly disagree with him. So it isn't just the case that I endorsing Bob as a good guru because it's politics match my own because they don't. I guess I'm kind of reiterating that point too much, but it's an

accusation that we often get thrown and it's misunderstanding whenever we're saying somebody is not behaving in the content that we look at as an exploitative guru. It's the mistake that people make with Kendi where because we didn't find him in the content to be engaging in like all of this terrible guru rhetorical excesses, that that means we treat him with kid gloves because we agree with his worldview because we don't. The criticisms that we had of Kendi's perspective and the kind of binary anti-racist racist perspective that he offers and the rhetorical techniques that go into that. We're very clear about.

So whenever we are saying that somebody is not falling prey to the worst of the manipulative guru tropes. It doesn't rely on them sharing our politics because you can share our politics or not share our politics and be an exploitive guru. The two things are separate components. And yes, we will have sympathies and biases that lean towards those that are closer to our politics.

But it just isn't the case that if you listen to Kendi's content, that it's the same as Russell Brand. They're very different. And Russell Brand is much closer to a secular guru as we've conceptualized it than is Ibram Kendi. Yeah, I don't have much to add to that. As I said, there's not much need to kind of have a special section where we say positive things because I basically have to give Bob a

clean bill of health when it comes to those deceptive rhetorical practices, toxic things that we tend to look for. And yeah, just to reiterate what you're saying, it is not about agreeing with his cosmic worldview nor his political worldview, even though we didn't really cover that in this episode. I'm less clear about that than you are. So, yeah, good on you, Bob. Keep doing what you're doing. We like it. Yeah.

Not sure about the cosmic stuff, but it sounds pretty groovy. Yeah. And just for the record, I'm on board'm on board with like global peace and non-endless wars and that's like, and that a war hawk demanding that the Western powers all intervene in any conflict anywhere, like, no. So I'm on board as well with many of those respects, just not so much with the tolerance for Syrian apologists, um, and, and all apologists and other people of similar stripes. So that's all. That's where our primary disagreement is.

So Matt, with Bob decoded as promised on time, we turn now to our reviews of reviews, our review of reviews. Okay. So I've got a negative review, a middle review and a positive review. I've got like the three bears of reviews. Let's start with a positive one. We'll go from positive to negative. I'll shorten it a bit because it's a bit long, but I thought it was funny. So this is from Kathy Kathy is from Oz,

and the title is, These Two Might Just Improve My Marriage. Five stars. Okay. So how do we manage this, Matt? I found this podcast through Megan Dorm's Unspeakable Podcast, and it has quickly become my favorite. Good taste. My husband, in almost all respects, is a lovely man, but he has a fatal flaw, which is that he sometimes listens to, not necessarily always agreeing with, the Weinsteins and Rogan. This has been a point of contention in our marriage for some time,

as I have long considered them to be insufferable narcissists. My husband thinks they have some good points. Needless to say, he is wrong. To prove this to him, I have taken to playing certain episodes of this podcast loudly in our house when he is home. Despite what might seem like his annoyance, I think he's coming round. This is going to do wonders for our marriage, which is otherwise very strong. So thanks, guys. I should also mention, Matt, that I spent the first part of my life in Australia. Although I now live in America, I've retained my Australian citizenship just in case I need to seek refuge in a totalitarian regime. You just never know. Keep the podcast coming. Well, that's fantastic. This is what we do. We save marriages.

We fix things. Yeah. We correct the misperceptions of Weinsteinian fans. And we're saving the internet and the reproductive rates of Western civilization one marriage at a time. This is great. I just love the idea of our episodes getting played on loudspeakers and propagandizing and changing minds.

Now, here's the middle bear review. This is by Distributist, and it says, Testing the Garometer, three stars. I enjoy the show and I'm also very annoyed and suspicious of your ability to understand your motivations and biases in how you choose your subjects. Would you consider treating an entity like CNN or the CDC or the State Department as subjects for the agorameter treatment? If not, why? Seems like the errors these entities

make are consequential to a degree that dwarfs the subjects you choose and real life impacts of the guru activity seems to be your prime stated reason for putting the energy into this um so that's a surprisingly negative three-star review i like how he moderated the stars i would have guessed that if you'd read that to me and you'd ask me to guess how many stars i would have guessed one but yeah you know that even doesn't need rebutting like we could leave the rebuttal to that as an exercise for the listeners just like in a math textbook we could matt but like look okay i can't i can't matt i cannot leave something on the internet unresponded to

this is why one of us has a harder time on twitter than the other one. But look, no, we couldn't put CNN or the CDC into the grometer because they're not gurus, right? Those are institutions. It doesn't work like that. You could put Fauci or like some representative in, but he wouldn't score very highly if you did it for the reasons that institutional figures are often not gurus. But he wouldn't score very highly if you did it for the reasons that institutional figures are often not gurus and people like Fauci draw higher.

But if you actually look at their long form content, they usually do not meet the caricature that you see in the short sequences where apparently Fauci said, I am the science. He didn't, if you look in the context, that's not what he said in any case, just to say, yes, we cannot put the CNN or CDC and just like we can't put in Fox or the Daily Mail, doesn't the grometer doesn't fit them the second part about our motivation being primarily about the level of real life impact and. No, that's not our motivation.

Because like, if that was it, we just focus on the people peddling free cancer cures or multi-level marketing that, you know, steals people's incomes. It's about secular gurus, right? This is not an activism podcast. We're not out there to try to reduce the amount of harm in the world. If that happens as a byproduct, that's fine.

That's nice. But sorry. There are gurus that I think need some response made to them. And debunking, I think, is beneficial. And I think we do that sometimes. But that's not our primary motivation. So I'm sorry. We're not that. We're better people, it so i'm sorry we're not that we're

better people it might be but we're not we're not no well if this reviewer wasn't so ideologically and conspiratorially fixated then he or she would have realized that no there is no good reason for us to cover fauci we'll see it yeah and there is an an over reliance on like the idw types but it's kind of because they're also like pretty funny to cover yeah there is a contradiction in that like we do cover you know when people promote anti-vax stuff which we consider harmful but like i think that circumstance does arise but is not the primary motivation for the podcast so yeah your calculus is wrong um okay now i'm at the one star this will show you what like a one star review is actually like oh no this podcast has become exactly what it criticizes

one out of five stars and this is is by Lou Derin Telemann. This show started out as a humorous analysis of gurus and e-celebrities. Over time, though, the hosts have become indistinguishable from the people they cover, constantly mewling for Patreon donations while their content becomes increasingly partisan.

Ring any bells? The cartoonish lack of self-awareness when throwing around terms like audience capture and grift is the only notable thing about the show these days. That and hearing two supposed scientists giggle like Beavis and Butthead over the same witless references to Twitter and Irish humor every episode. Good day, sir. That is harsh. That's harsh and indistinguishable.

You know, Brett Weinstein, Joe Rogan, Russell Bryant and us, very, very similar. And, you know, you put the content together and what's the difference, what's the difference? David Pérez- Are we continually mewling for Patreon donations? That seems unfair. David Pérez- Ah, yeah, well, we're about to. We put it at the very end so that, you know, you can just skip it.

And like, I think mewling, you know, that's harsh. That's an unnecessary word. You know, it's like what baby cats do. We're not baby cats. Do we giggle like we were some butthead? Maybe a little bit. Woody Woodpecker. Woody Woodpecker, my love's being compared to.

But, you know, it's all harsh, Matt. It's harsh. That's it. And audience capture. All those people that were pushing for us to take down Bob, we're giving it to them at last. Oh, well. He's certainly a hate listener, right?

Because he's been listening continually. I think he's out. He's out. Although, you know, the notion that we've descended from the initial lofty start, I don't think that holds up. It's a fairly consistent circling of the dream. Or the way I'd put it, but yeah. So, so there we go.

Well, but, but we are aware of these criticisms. We do take them to heart. And if people want to leave nice reviews, they can as well. Not just the negative ones. You can, you can leave nice reviews. Chris, what's the deal with five star reviews i've never figured that out you know it's something that's supposed to be very good for some reason like why oh i don't know people say that like every single podcast says leave us reviews and

on apple and that increases our visibility i assume it's true because everyone says like who who knows um we have now because of the cast of characters that we've covered recently, we've actually incurred a number of negative reviews from people who are like fans of Malone or McCulloch or that kind of thing. So, you know, our approach, I don't think it lends itself to getting lots of high reviews, but that's all right. That's all right. Yeah. We're like 4.5 or something like that. So we're fine. That's good enough.

Yeah. It's close. Yeah. Could be closer to five. Do better. So yeah, that's our review of our reviews. And now we will thank some of our kindly patrons who help support us in our endeavors. Matt, unless you object.

No, no, I'm all for that. You're mewling. You're constantly mewling. We need to thank them. Please, more money. Please. Yeah. So the conspiracy hypothesizers for this week, Matt, they are Ben Mack, Marcus, Paul Bowman,

Kurt Foster, and Lucas Anwar-Walcher. Conspiracy hypothesizers, Matt. All of them. Wow. Thank you very much. Men, too, brothers out of it. Ben, Mark, Paul, Kirk, Lucas. Not that I'm complaining. I'm a fan of men. I like men. Thanks for brother's out of it. Ben, Mark, Paul, Kirk, Lucas. Not that I'm complaining.

I'm a fan of men. I like men. Thanks for pointing that out. Okay, and Rebecca Chaperone. Rebecca, thank you. Sorry about the sausage party. That's it. Conspiracy, hypothesis. She doesn't mind. Rebecca doesn't mind. She's fine with it. She's actually a former patron.

So she left too many men, too many men, but that's all right. Thank you anyway. Thank you anyway. Yeah. Every great idea starts with a minority of one. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. Okay.

And so in terms of revolutionary geniuses, Matt, we've got Alex, Alex, a, we've got Daniel Reed Miller, Zach Hellman. And you've made me nervous about only mentioning Joel H. Dinowat. Are you joking? I'm joking. I'm joking. I'm joking. I'm joking. I'm joking. I'm joking. I'm joking. I'm joking. I'm joking. Hellman, and you've made me nervous about only mentioning Joel H. Dinot. Are you deliberately not mentioning the women? This is what's going on here. You're only shouting out men. I think

in the previous week in this document, I already shouted a lot out. But also Cecile Shoplin. No, I take that back. but also Cecile Shoplin. Cecile Shoplin. Cecile. No. I take that back. Cecile is a conspiracy hypothesizer but thanks to her or him

as well. The revolutionary genius is DNKY27. So there we go. That's our revolutionary geniuses for this week, Matt. Brilliant. Brilliant. Is that the best tea?

I forget. No, second best. Second best. They're only second best people. So thank you to all of them. Maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking. What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know.

So the last tier, Matt, the highest tier is our Galaxy Brain Gurus. For that, we're going to thank David Love, Josh Stuttman, Carolyn Reeves, and, oh no, we read that one, I think. Patrick Collins, Patrick Collins, good Irish name there. And last, David Jones. That's it. Yay. That's a revolutionary. No, sorry, the Galaxy Brain Gurus for this week. Yay. That's a revolutionary. No, sorry.

The Galaxy Brain Gurus for this week. Brilliant. Thank you, everybody. Thank you very much. Yes. We appreciate the support. But you don't have to. We're not begging for it.

We're not mewling. We're not mewling. We're not mewling. But we do appreciate it. Yeah. You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard. And you're so polite. And hey, wait a minute.

Am I an expert? I kind of am. Yeah. I don't trust people at all. Okay, Matt. So that's our Patreon shoutouts. And for anybody interested, you don't have to. There's a Patreon. there's content go if

you want you can get you know extra stuff but we're not gonna we're not gonna sell it to you just you know if you want it's there now the other ways that you can reach us is that we have email account which is decoding the gurus at gmail.com. We're on Twitter at guruspod and then r4cdent and c underscore Kavna. There's a Facebook group and then we post things on Instagram occasionally. So we're on the interwebs. You can find us should you, you know, desire that.

We're not that hard to locate. And the other thing to mention is next episode will be the next guru episode will be with aaron rabinowitz covering james lindsey and o'fallon a long overdue crossover with aaron and with a return to james lindsey and o'fallon so So that will be coming next as a main episode, but there might be some interviews. Very good. Very good. Thanks, everyone.

And good on you, Bob. Take it easy. Yeah, good on you, Bob. But Matt, you should grovel at the feet of your P-Zombies. Ah, the P-Zombies. That makes for a nice change. They won't even know I'm doing it. That's the sad thing. Yeah, it it's sad there's no real thing there it's all okay so good thing we've resolved the

nature of consciousness we've discovered that black holes created evolution and we have decoded that bob is a good secular guru and you can all follow him and join his cult because it's probably going to make the world a better place. Yeah. And now we can turn off our microphones so we can go on arguing about pea zombies. Yeah.

The thing about pea zombies, right, is... Thank you.