Decoding the Gurus - Special Episode: Interview with Daniel Harper on the Far Right & IDW Criticism

Episode Date: July 14, 2021

In this episode we have an engaging discussion with Daniel Harper host of the anti-fascist podcast 'I Don't Speak German' about his experience covering the Far Right and what constitutes responsible engagement/coverage of various online figures.We cover the role of political perspectives when examining online figures, the use of social media by far right figures, and the use and abuse of political categories. We also cover some potential criticisms with the DTG approach and in so doing answer an eternal question of the ages: 'Are we the baddies?'Join us for a fun discussion while accepting our apologies for the self-indulgence of an episode that, to some extent, involves us talking about... ourselves. We will be back with a full Guru episode very soon!LinksI Don't Speak German PodcastEpisode 88 of IDSG Podcast: The Long Shadow of New Atheism, with Eiynah Mohammed-Smith

Hello, welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer, and we try our best to understand what they're talking about. Matt Brown with me is Chris Kavanagh. Chris, would you say that we are literally defending Western civilization via long format podcasts and dismantling structural whiteness? Both true. And also without us, the whole thing goes down. That's it, Matt. The society hinges on this podcast. So we're just doing our duty. We're just doing our part.

We've had a slew of interviews recently, and they've been great. And so we thought, let's do another one. And we've got with us today, Daniel Harper, who is the co-host of I Don't Speak German podcast. And Daniel does something somewhat similar to what we do in focusing on characters and particular personalities, but I guess is looking more at the political spectrum and also, of course, the extreme right hand side of that spectrum. How else would you describe Daniel? And I don't speak German, Chris. Yeah. So Daniel looks into the darker side of the web and I think also has a explicitly anti-fascist angle to their work. All right. Well, the man is here.

Welcome, Daniel. Thanks for having me. This is, hopefully this will be entertaining and enlightening for everybody. So, yeah. I like to think that I Don't Speak German is like literally the darkest podcast in existence. You know, like it really is like people kind of come from like, yeah, I had to quit that and go back to my true crime addiction.

You know, like that's the level of, you know, listening to the accounts of serial killers is better than listening to you tell jokes about the terrible things that Chris Cantwell did. Even in doing a quick read of some of the people that you cover, and I'm seeing that there are satanic Nazi groups, which just seems totally over the top. It's one of those things which seems pretty wild. But you know, the satanic groups are generally, they're all right. Like, it feels that they're being unfairly lumped in with the Nazi category. There's the perfectly reasonable form of Satanism, which is kind of the, like, we're kind of like anti-Christian, you know, when we try to kind of engage with, you know, a very healthy and rational form of that.

And they do some good work in terms of, like, civil liberties. And then there's the, you missed the lead there. These are the Charles Manson worshiping. Oh, you may have a point. So let's add one more thing on top of that, you know, who directly inspired a bunch of mass shooters in 2019 in the United States. And the Christchurch massacre was only the most prominent of those. So, yeah. Yeah, like I'm a, as like in my scholarship related to religious traditions, I'm always quite interested in syncretism, like the mixing of traditions.

So you'll get crossovers where Taoist traditions will claim that the Buddha was actually Lao Tzu who went to the West and became the Buddha and so on and so forth. So they all claim their deities or say that the other people are a version of their teaching. But I feel like that's the enjoyable version of crossovers. Whereas like what I tend to see more often now is even amongst the people that we are looking at that, you know, Brett Weinstein is retweeting Scott Adams, who is being clipped by Dr. Roller Gator. It's not this beautiful cross of where I'd hoped for. The various shades of baby shit all mixing together, but maintaining their distinct odor. Yeah, there's little parts of Twitter and, you know, I'm not equating them to the worst group of Nazis that like you would look at, but it's fair to say there's a lot of

niches on Twitter that are just horrible spaces. You're like, you go into them and there's like a little ecosystem that you were unaware of. And you're kind of like, I know my life is better for knowing that this exists. You must get that a lot more than me and Matt. Yeah. My Twitter, it's mostly not on Twitter these days. I mean, they've kind of moved on to other platforms and we can talk about that if you're interested, because there is this kind of like the way that these groups kind of move around and the way that they kind of like combat technology and the way that social media fuels this is a big part of like, without even realizing it when I started the podcast, like that becomes kind of the theme of the show. It's as much about kind of the way that technology enables it, the way that these like sub-communities have always used technology, kind of going back. We did a two-part episode

about a guy named Tom Metzger, who if you've seen the documentary, Louis and the Nazis, Louis Thoreau's documentary, we talk a lot about that in both parts one and part two, because we use Metzger as a lens in terms of talking about the way that documentary works and the way that people have covered this stuff in the past. Sorry, I'm off on my own little tangent here. But if you understand Tom Metzger, he was one of the original people who was using the Internet before there was an Internet. He was one of the first individual users to be actually setting up a bulletin board service like an actual BBS in 1983 or 1984. These kind of far right figures have always used whatever the new emerging technology is in order to kind of spread their ideas. And that also connects to the Order, which is a terror group in 83 and 84 who ended up murdering the radio host Alan Burke.

So there are very clear material connections between outright violence and these kind of more quote-unquote intellectual figures who are just kind of spreading propaganda and spreading ideas. So we try to cover all of that and try to explore it and explain it as best we can in what is hopefully a funny and entertaining format. Sometimes there's only so much you can do, right? I wanted to say, Daniel, that I think one of your taglines is that you listen to what they're what they're talking about when they think no one else is listening, right? The far right. And I thought that's an interesting approach because in one sense it does humanize them, right? To look at what are they doing? What's the actual communities and what are their little feuds

and so on that they get involved in. But on the other hand, you also get an insight into what they are actually about, not what they're publicly presenting, but what they're saying to other people who are on board with their ideology. I'm not saying that by doing so, you launder their image, But rather, you don't characterize them as that they're inhuman monsters. It's more that they are humans and what they believe is monstrous. And they say so openly, right, when they're talking amongst themselves. Thank you, because that's kind of the point. I mean, I think very seriously about how to talk

about individuals in this movement and to do it responsibly. And I feel like any person dealing with this kind of material, even the kind of the IDW guru type figures, I feel like there is a conversation. We need to be having these thoughts about what are we putting out in the world? How are we actually exploring this? And are we engaging with this material in a way that sort of sends people closer to them? And what I try to do is to humanize them, not because I want you to empathize with them, but because I want, A, I want to be honest. I think that's an important quality to have regardless.

I think it's important to note these are human figures who have human foibles who sometimes act nobly in various situations. And I think that's just basic kind of integrity on my part. But also there is this stereotype that like the Nazi always comes in like the darkest possible guise, that they will be easily recognizable because they have a swastika emblazoned on their hat or whatever. And it turns out that that's not so simple, that it really is. You really do have to understand not just what they're saying, but what they're not saying and what the things that they're saying are going to inevitably lead to, you know, and who they tend to associate with.

And so trying to tease out the kind of differences between individuals and different segments of the movement is often about just not to defend any of them or not to say, oh, this person is fine because they disavowed this thing, but to say, these people are all terrible. They're all part of a terrible movement and they argue amongst themselves mostly for kind of optics reasons and for, you know, reasons of getting their ideas out there. And I think we'll touch back on that here in the second half, I think, but yeah. So Daniel, you mentioned how the internet technology facilitates organizing and communication among these far-right groups. And

that's something I think pretty much everyone is aware of these days. It obviously makes it a lot easier to find like-minded individuals and organize without having to book a hall and, you know, make yourself apparent on the street. But I think most people would assume that full-on, far-right neo-Nazis are a thing, but are a small thing. So, I guess, what would be your perspective in terms of, is this a problem that is bigger than people realize? Is it growing? Taking the long view of 50 years or so, what are the trends you see? I mean, it's definitely growing. And I say that with no desire to self-aggrandize or to get you to go and give me money on my Patriot or anything like that. Like that's not the point here, but we're seeing increasing far right nationalist

governments all around, all around the world. You've got Orban, you've got Bolsonaro. Trump is out of office now, but like the end of Trump is now, you know, you've got a half a dozen mini Trumps kind of waiting in the wings. And you're seeing a lot of these kind of like anti-trans bills. You're seeing the anti-critical race theory stuff there. Like they've learned how to build movements and how to build reactionary, like far right reactionary shit into just the mechanism of our government. And I focus on America because frankly, when I first started this project, I knew that I could not possibly encompass the whole thing. I know there are other people working around the world, but we do see this kind of increasing movement towards these things. And even if it's not coming in the form of electoral politics, it's coming in the form of just the way our online discourse goes. I've been seeing more and more,

even in just the last few days, people using the term anti-white as if anti-whiteness is a thing that exists within the Anglosphere, within the English-speaking world. Anti-white was created by this guy, Robert Whitaker. He created Whitaker's mantra. Robert Whitaker worked for the Reagan White House, but was too far right for the Reagan White House, which should tell you something about that. But like created this thing called Whitaker's mantra. And there are a couple of versions of it. But the central thing is anti-racist is code for anti-white.

And so when people tell you, oh, no, I'm just being anti-racist, it's like, no, you're being anti-white. And they feed this as a that suddenly we're just using that term as if it doesn't have this direct meaning. We're using it as if it is a thing, which it isn't. That's just kind of one minor example of where the conversation has changed. Look under any YouTube video about the Holocaust, and you will find Holocaust denial all through that thing, which it was there in 2014, but not nearly the same way it is now. And this is because we have literal neo-Nazis targeting 13-year-old children, feeding these ideas into their head. And then a few years later,

they reap the benefits because then suddenly they become content creators. They're going out there. It is a larger cultural problem that isn't something that is like solved by, you know, going after a handful of like people who like actually turn violent. It is a large scale cultural issue. And I don't think it's going to look like 1933 Germany tomorrow in the United States. But we are seeing the very clear signs of something that's like really awful and dangerous. And that's why I do the work I do, frankly. I would much rather go back to talking about Dr. Who, frankly. I can't join you on that, but I can on the notion of the very concerning rise of populist

far-right movements across the globe. One point I want to ask about, though, I think I read the thing that you linked to on Twitter when you made this point that when people invoke the issue of anti-whiteness as a concept that they are playing in the tropes from the far- that they might not recognize. They might, in legitimate good faith, not acknowledge the app. And I'm convinced that definitely happens. Like in the episode that we looked at with James Lindsay, whether or not he knows that he's voicing things

that Bill Cooper talked about is kind of immaterial because he is. And there's a lot of connective tissue there, regardless of awareness of it. But I do want to ask, I think you and Jack as well would be people that are critical of the kind of neoliberal anti-racist training focused, like, you know, Starbucks sending employees on IAT implicit, like, implicit racism training and regarding that as like, okay, so that's how we deal with the problem. So if somebody wants to, like, criticize stuff related to the focus on individual level issues

or implicit racism as the model, you know, what kind of those middle class or upper class white well-to-do women go into dinner parties to be lambasted for it. Right, right. The people who are doing the, you know, we're going to lambast you for how white and wealthy you are, and you're going to pay us for the privilege. And isn't that terrible? And I agree. That's terrible. That's, yeah. My question there is, because there seems to be legitimate criticisms of that, I've heard you and Jack make as well. So how do we carve out that you commit those criticisms, but without that you are enabling the connections that you're drawing to the way the far right could use those criticisms? Like, is there a way to do both that is responsible?

The far right is just going to fundamentally lie about it to begin with. Like they're going to use it in their way regardless. But I think there are ways of resisting that. And there are ways of having like kind of a more adult conversation. And that is, I think it's worth for the members of your audience who don't know me already. Jack and I do an explicitly, not just anti-fascist, but an explicitly anti-capitalist podcast. So we are socialists. I don't know exactly what Jack calls himself a Marxist. Most people who hear the word Marxist have the, most people who call themselves Marxists don't actually know anything about Marx. So just put a pin in that. This is a giant, complicated conversation that I don't necessarily want to get into, but we are by the standards of anyone who has been on this podcast before,

extremely, extremely far left, like just to be clear here. And so when I hear about the problems of like corporate diversity trainings, it's like, well, yeah, that's because the capitalist enterprise is fundamentally, you know, kind of doing things in further service on goals. Like, look, corporate diversity trainings, regardless of like how well meaning the HR representative who designed it are, corporate diversity trainings exist because there are liability laws. If some middle manager starts saying some racist or sexist shit, the company needs to be able to defend themselves from a civil suit. And by doing these kind of corporate trainings, they can absolve themselves of legal liability or at least tie it up in the courts until it doesn't matter anymore. So that's the reason that these things exist. It's not to legitimately try to build on some

kind of anti-racist foundation. What's his name? Chris Peterson, the guy at Sandia National Labs, who did a big thing about like how critical race theory is being taught in, you know, and he didn't really like that at all and kind of went on a big tear about it. He it's like, well, if Sandia National Labs was actually going to embrace critical race theory, they would no longer make nuclear weapons. Like that's, you know, they wouldn't, it wouldn't be like, we need a better diversity hire to run the drone program to install the missiles or whatever. It would be like, no, we need to fundamentally end the like military industrial complex within the United States. Like that's sort of the, you know, that's sort of the answer there. Right. So it's not like this stuff is actually being like implemented. It's, it's all kind of like a surface level thing. And so that's

how I think we should be criticizing this stuff. And like, if you're a white person and you feel bad because you went to a diversity training, when somebody said all white people have an implicit racism, Hey, I think as a white person who grew up in the American South, I think white people do have an implicit racist kind of bias. It's just true. And again, we can argue about that if you'd like to, but I think that's just empirically true. And I think any six-year-old could understand that when it's explained properly. And the reason it's not explained properly is because there are like massive, massive people with megaphones who get to speak very loudly and prevent that from being like expressed in the way that it should be. But if you went to a diversity training and you were,

and you felt insulted or you felt slighted about that, like, Hey, I don't think that's such a huge deal. There are bigger things in the world to worry about. It was an hour out of your life. I'll buy you a cookie. Like it's fine. Like, you know, being slightly miffed at being told that all white people are racist is probably less bad than the African-American person or the Black person or the Indigenous person in that same training who had to deal with a lifetime of suffering under a racist and white supremacist Western imperialist system. So think of it on that level. And I think that there are things that we should do to combat these trainings. And I think there are things that we should do to talk about that. But I think the answer isn't, oh, Robin DiAngelo is personally a terrible person

for doing these things, although she may be. But the answer is, we need to be thinking about racial issues in a larger, broader context and understand what's actually being said and done in the kind of like organization as a whole. So I'm sorry if that seems like long or like convoluted or whatever. I'm trying to express the bigger picture here. Yeah, I think people should appreciate that organizations, even bureaucratic ones like universities, are fundamentally, extremely pragmatic organizations organisations and they are very good at public relations and human resources and various types of signalling, which is free, essentially.

It doesn't cost them anything. And they will quite often use hyperbolic or buzzwordy and strong language because it makes them look good and it is just a very pragmatic thing to do so you know even putting aside political social justice stuff you can just look at the the corporate buzzwordy language about empowering people to you know maximize their potential and it's you know all of this language the more female drone pilots problems exactly if we drone strike iraq so long as it's a black trans woman

sitting at the controls. Yeah. It's feeling empowered while they do it. Yeah. And it's explicit racist use. I mean, just to put a pin on this here, it's explicit racist, like actual full-on Nazis that I listened to will use that like the CIA ads. I don't know if you guys saw these, but there were ads from the CIA that were like, I came to empower myself by working for the CIA. They will use that to justify their belief that the CIA is fundamentally woke or fundamentally anti-white or fundamentally anti-racist. And like, no, this is a gloss of PR. Yes, I agreed. And just to sort of draw a line under that, I think people would perhaps not overreact so much to some particular bit of language that gets used, which uses the buzzwords and so on, if they recognize that, yeah, they don't really,

one, they don't really mean it, and two, it's largely spin and PR. So you mentioned about organizations being focused on actually reducing liability rather than actually making some change. I mean, that's even true in universities. If you look at how an ethics review department works at a university, the first priority is to ensure that the university is not liable for some activity. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. Well, within the system in which we live, I mean, you know, A, the modern university is absolutely a capitalist enterprise, you know, and I am not an academic, but I know, you know, I don't think that you can honestly disagree with me on that.

We can talk about kind of an idealized version, but like, it's the, no, there's no ethical consumption under capitalism. And that includes, you know, the production of knowledge, you know, and yeah, so, yeah so so yeah no you would expect your university to act exactly the same way that google or standard oil does you know or sandia national labs i probably don't necessarily agree that there's no ethical consumption under capitalism but we definitely do agree on something daniel i i have a i think maybe it's a more, a little bit more pushback on one of the points there. So in the way that you outline that there, you're explicitly linking in your perspective to an anti-capitalist one. I think you and Jack are admirably upfront about the political element to your perspective. But as you know, like your position on the left-right

spectrum, I think I've heard you describe it as Bernie Sanders is not in your spectrum of appropriately left. Bernie Sanders would be a vaguely center-left politician. And I don't know, I don't know if you've been to the United States. Have you spent any time here? I have, but not very long, but I've been there. I would take completely the point about, you know, we have to take into context that we're talking about a country that has a barely functioning welfare state and like an inherent objection to most of the things that in like Western Europe are taken for granted and not regarded as these socialist elves just basic social safety net so i completely take that point and even bernie sanders i i don't know exactly but i think his view on guns would be considered in europe to be fairly to the right

actually i'm fine as a lot of like far leftists are i'm actually pretty much fine on the on the thing like that that's a comp yeah and we can we can talk about kind of complicated things um i Actually, I'm fine. As a lot of far leftists are, I'm actually pretty much fine on the gun thing. Ian, we can talk about kind of complicated things. I think, you know, just to clarify for your audience and to respond to that pushback, you know, I kind of say like I'm far, far to the left. I'm the furthest left person, mostly as a way of kind of like signaling that to your audience who, you know, we could talk about kind of the labor theory of value and kind of modes of, you know, capitalist production or modes of economic production. We could spend a lot of time on that, but I don't think that's the best use of our time here today. You know, ultimately, you know, I think that like my own politics are beyond the kind of electoral realities that are kind of existent within do great good. And I supported Bernie Sanders

strongly during both the 2016 and 2020 primaries. I have played audio of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the podcast because I think she has good messaging. I love Ilhan Omar. I almost want to move to Minneapolis just so I can vote for Ilhan Omar. That's how much I love Ilhan Omar. move to Minneapolis just so I can vote for Ilhan Omar. That's how much I love Ilhan Omar. But, you know, the point is that like that kind of politics is just fundamentally not going to bring about the requisite change in my kind of political opinion. And so, again, this becomes a, we have to look beyond the current electoral realities. So if I lived in a nice, happy social democracy with 70 Bernie Sanders and AOCs in the Senate and a majority in the House and a president, and suddenly we had something like universal healthcare, that's a

better world, but it's not fundamentally a transformed world. And I think that's the kind of thing that I'm kind of working for in my politics. So again, just to clarify that. I think it's helpful to clarify, and I agree that we should go off the politics point and on to the intellectual dark web critiques after this. But the one thing I wanted to ask, and it's a legitimate, genuine question, is given your stance and your connection with the criticisms that you have to an anti-capitalist perspective, criticisms that you have to an anti-capitalist perspective. Like, do you want moderate left people to be part, like, do you see them as fundamentally on the same side or that they are just weaker versions of the thing that you're critiquing? So you may have already answered

this by saying, you know, your politics is not the same thing as the criticism of the Nazis and far right figures that you cover. But I guess I'm just asking for clarification on that, like moderate liberals, like say Biden types or Obama types, are they within what you consider like the broad house of the left? Or are they also the kind of target of criticism for the podcast, if not for your politics specifically? Or maybe they are the two inseparable. I guess that's my issue. I think, yeah, I get what you're saying. I don't like, the thing that I get accused of sometimes is we're gatekeeping on the left and we're like neglecting, you know,

that people can have moderate positions. Like you can have whatever political position you want. I don't have any ability to like affect that, but I have the ability to criticize that. And that's, that's what I do. You know, like that's, that's, I thought we're supposed to live in a marketplace of ideas in which everything gets discussed and nobody with my politics gets invited on cable news shows. And gee, imagine how that works. Let's go check out Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent over there. We could pull out some choice paragraphs, I'm sure. Look, I think I'm very pragmatic in these things. And I kind of take your politics are kind of more based on like what you do versus

what you believe, right? It's what do you spend your time on? What do you spend your life doing is really kind of the key because there are people who are very moderate liberals who do really dangerous anti-fascist work for free, for no fanfare, because they consider it necessary. And I would much rather work with those people than to work with people who call themselves on the left, who mostly just go and whine on Twitter all day. People even monitoring their kind of local city council meetings and doing just that kind of in-person grunt work of trying to inform citizens. That's much more powerful than whatever, I don't care how many books of theory you've read. I've not read that many books of theory.

I'm, you know, I mean, Jack is the big brain on that. Like he's like way beyond anywhere I'll ever be on that. But like, it's not, it's about what do you spend your time doing? What do you spend your life on? And what are you actually doing in the material world? And I think that's the true leftist perspective in terms of what material impact are you having and how do you allocate your time? And if all you're doing is reading through theory just to have pointless debates with people, if you find that fun, that's fine,

but don't pretend that's actually doing something meaningful. And that's kind of where I land on that. So I'm not trying to gatekeep based on ideology, but the people who are really doing like solid work that like means something, those are the people that I'm going to respect way more than, you know, kind of Twitter drama. So I would completely sign on to that. Look what people do, not what they say. It's a valid way to judge things. But one comment and one question before we go to the IDW stuff, I want to get it before we go off the far right. So the first comment is just that in the same way where you are upfront

about where you are politically, since our first episode on the decoding the gurus, we've tried to do the same. Like we flag up where we stand politically. We do try to argue that's not the emphasis on the show, but we make no illusions about where we stand politically. We do try to argue that's not the emphasis on the show, but we make no illusions about where we stand politically. And I think that's an important thing for people to do just to make clear. So that was a comment. And the far right question that I had was, it's a bit left field, but so you talked about the far right and their ability to

use these technologies and to get their message out there in a way which is in some ways quite impressive, how they're able to be early adopters, the new technology and so on. brilliantly on the podcast. And I see so many of the figures in the alt and far right who are just like morons. Like to put it mildly, they seem to fundamentally be idiotic people. And I can't entirely square together that they are manipulative geniuses, but yet they're also so demonstrably stupid. So can you square that? Sure. No, no, no. It turns out that this also feeds into the race and IQ thing. There are multiple intelligences,

and people can be very good at one thing and very bad at another. But you talk about someone like Chris Cantwell, and he's fundamentally broken as a human being in terms of his interpersonal relations. I think he's got severe personality defects, which anyone who spends any time at all learning anything at all about what he does. This is the crying Nazi, by the way, who was arrested after. I know exactly who Chris Cantwell is. I've spent literally hundreds of hours listening to this man talk into a microphone to the public. And I have delved deeper Charlottesville documentary. Yeah, he's a fool. Yeah, his politics are broken.

His personality is broken. He spent way, way too much money on his podcasting setup. I can tell you that for sure. He was not as good with guns as he thought he was, or at least pretended to be. But he was a very capable radio host. And he was very capable at pushing out a very particular political message. And I think it's worth kind of disambiguating these things, right? You become a Nazi because you're kind of broken in some way. That's almost universal. But that doesn't mean that you can't be effective at spreading that message. And also, and this is something, again, as a leftist,

I'm always going to look for the structural issue. Social media and YouTube and kind of various of the platforms make these kinds of kind of heterodox ideas, make this kind of illicit content more popular than it otherwise would be through kind of algorithmic engagement. that there are other figures, not necessarily Cantwell, but certainly Andrew Anglin, who does The Daily Stormer, Mike Cernovich, and several other figures deliberately engaged with media apparatus in terms of being able to spread their message more widely. And many of the figures in the 2014-2015 far-right space that became the alt-right literally were trained by this group called the Leadership Institute, which is a far right political organization that funds people and trains them in how to spread their message better. I think you're putting your finger on something really important, but I think that's what we try to do on Unesco German is to explore this general topic. And maybe that's not explicit these days as we've kind of moved into kind of more of these IDW space, exploring how the reactionary ideas are spreading from that space. But like, certainly if you listen to like the Christopher Cantwell episodes or the Mike Enoch episodes, I think this stuff kind of does become pretty clear. That's great. Thanks, Daniel. Okay, so turning maybe to I Don't Speak German episode 88, where you criticised some of the, youicalize people don't really do a deep criticism of the

political issues involved or appreciate those issues. And taking that kind of rationalist sort of steel manning approach, bending over backwards to be a bit charitable perhaps and concede good ideas or whatever, can act to essentially launder harmful ideas. So that may be an unfair summary. So feel free to correct me. I think that's fair. I think that's a fair summary of what we said in 88. I could probably nuance that a little bit, but like, it's fine.

Yeah, no, I would stand behind that. Sure. And I want to be clear just for the audience. I'm not like naming particular people. Like we, the goal was not to start a podcast feud or anything like that. Like the goal was to discuss, it was almost more of a mission statement because we got to 88 and 88 is a special number in Nazi spaces. And we talked a lot about what to do for episode 88. And it just came up, let's just talk about this.

Let's not do a particular Nazi figure. Let's not give them that attention to be episode 88. Let's do something else. And also like after we recorded it, we realized it's like a bit of a mission statement for I Don't Speak German. And so it's not, I don't think it should be taken as criticism, like kind of like a personal attack. It should be taken as we do this thing that we do and we have reasons for doing it. And this is kind of why. I got my start in like anti-creationist forums. Like I was on Talk Origins in 2003. Like

I've seen these cycles for a while, you know, and the criticism kind of comes down to like, when I see people, for instance, kind of playing the game of like, well, Kathy Young, you know, rejected James Lindsay. And suddenly like Kathy Young gets like credit for that, right? Well, Kathy Young is just as bad. I mean, she's just as bad as James Lindsay, possibly even worse. She has a longer history, if nothing else. I can go and find you really terrible things that Kathy Young has said.

find you really terrible things that Kathy Young has said. She will reject James Lindsay when James Lindsay starts talking too much about the Jews. And then suddenly she gets credit for not being a part of that. If you don't want to talk about Kathy Young, you can talk about Helen Pluckrose, who rejected James Lindsay over the same thing because James Lindsay is an asshole. Like, I don't particularly care that James Lindsay is an asshole. I care that James Lindsay is an asshole. Like, I don't particularly care that James Lindsay is an asshole. I care that James Lindsay is actively pushing far-right reactionary talking points that are actively harming the world. And the fact that Helen Pluckrose, up until 20 minutes ago,

was deeply invested in that project, who published a book with James Lindsay. And I don't know, there's apparently a kid's version of critical cynical theories coming out. So I don't know if Helen Pluckrose is going to get credited on that or whatever, but like the idea that like, I was with you until you like went too close to the sun and suddenly she gets credit for that. It just feels like kind of

a problem, right? I feel like the issue becomes there is a concerted far-right political project in the United States. This is well-funded. They have giant megaphones. James Lindsay didn't get to sit in front of like house leadership in various states and spread anti-critical race theory talking points because he's a genius, right? To criticize him only on kind of the basis of his ideas. And I'm not saying that you guys are doing this, but to criticize him and say, you're talking about critical race theory, but that's not critical race theory. Critical race theory is another thing. And not to go, well, and also you're a part of a far right propaganda network that includes like all of these other people and all this kind of money sloshing around, et cetera, et cetera, feels like what Jack called the low hanging fruit on that episode. It's finding, yes, this is the easy thing to criticize, but not the, it's just,

what are you doing? What's the point of that? Like it is of course important to point out that James is talking about anything like what critical race theory is, but you've used that as a starting point and then move on from there to discuss the kind of larger political project. And if there is kind of a one, one like thing of like, well, I don't want to get political about this. If that's kind of your perspective project. And if there is kind of a one thing of like, well, I don't want to get political about this. If that's kind of your perspective, it's like, I don't want to kind of dig into these culture war issues. Well, they're fighting on these

culture war issues. And so if you're going to cover James Lindsay or Brett Weinstein, and if you're going to cover Brett Weinstein and not talk about the fact that they're just openly anti-transpigots at this point, you're not really covering them in a way that I think is full. And that's fair if you don't want to cover that, like I'm here to cover that, but I'm also going to kind of say, you know, please talk about that. Okay. So the, I think the first point would be that I completely agree. And like in most cases, I completely take the point, Daniel, that the episode was talking, you know, I think quite clearly

there's an implied criticism in some respects of us, right? But that is not the scope of the episode. It was broader than that, talking about, you know, other critics and other issues that maybe we don't fall into. So I put on an episode saying like these crazy lefties who think you have to be far left.

Then I would also say, yeah, that's clearly like pointed at us. And so like, it's not like I think we can have a healthy conversation and kind of acknowledge like, you know, like. Definitely. So I'm responding here as far as the point applied to us, but I want to also address a bunch of the points where we agree. So like the first thing for me is that a hundred percent, I think if you feel the consider the political elements and the role that the ecosystems,

that the guru people that we look at are involved in, you feel the capture of really important elements like understanding, looking at Scott Adams. Yes, he's a manipulative snake, but he is repeating a whole bunch of election fraud conspiracies. And the people that he's referencing are all right wing figures. Eric Weinstein, if you take like more centrist, he's laundering the reputation of James O'Keefe. He's telling people Mike Cernovich and Stephen Molyneux were right about Hillary Clinton in the 26th cycle. And he's not doing the same thing for far left voices. So I agree. And I think our episode on Michael O'Fallon, which was a very good episode. It was a very good episode. I quite liked that one. Yeah.

Yeah. And you know, part of the credit that goes to Aaron, but I think we usually with most of the gurus, especially the ones on the right or the IDW spheres, we usually have a folder which says like standard right-wing nonsense, and they're all there. Douglas Murray presented as a centrist when he's quite clearly, at the very least, he is a complete mainstream conservative. And that's only saying that now it's mainstream and conservatism to be strongly anti-immigrant, and so on. So all of that, I think I'd happily concede that people who think that you are only addressing ideas that the people say,

if you focus on whatever theoretical model that they say they're talking about and don't look at the people that they interact with, don't look at the networks that they get into, that is an impoverished approach. And I think one we generally try to avoid. But the other point about when it comes to like Cathy Young and Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay. So I'm on board with you that like the amount of credit that someone like Helen gets for distancing herself from James

when he's become openly far right and is talking about billions of people being killed and so on. And still, the level of criticism is very muted. You get some credit because you're not appearing on talking tours with him, but it's a very low hurdle to not endorse someone when they're promoting really out there, far right conspiracies. And he does that and he doesn't get criticism for it. Whatever their personal relationship is, I get that there's, like, conspiracies. And he does that. And he doesn't get criticism for it. Whatever their personal relationship is, I get that, you know, there's interpersonal dynamics. But there comes a point when what the person's putting out is harmful. So we voiced that criticism of Helen on the, I think, the episode with Aaron.

But I agree that you shouldn't be extending massive amount of credit. that you shouldn't be extending massive amount of credit. But probably a point where I disagree is that figures like, you could include Sam Harris and Cathy Young in that, that they are more harmful than figures like James Lindsay or the far right people that you look at. Like I'm no fan of the Weinsteins. I think they're doing a lot of harm. And like at present, Brett is probably responsible for

getting people killed because of his stance on ivermectin and so on. But in my worldview, I see somebody like James Lindsay or Scott Adams or those figures which are like really tightly knit in to that network or Mike Cernovich types. I'm not saying that they're like wildly apart on the spectrum because I see the connections there. But I think acknowledging the distinction is still, it's not invalid to do because like Lindsay will endorse that there's a, there's a plan from the Greek reset to kill billions of people. And he'll retweet stuff from Infowars and endorse it. And you won't see that from like Sam Harris. So if people say it's just the same, then I think it opens the door for people saying, well, no, look, I can look at his feed. I can see that he's not doing the same thing as James Lindsay. So if

you don't acknowledge this distinction, it feels like you're giving room for people to dismiss your view as too extreme. Yeah, I hear that. And I take this as a sign that I have not communicated clearly because the point that I'm making is not, you shouldn't acknowledge it. And this maybe kind of reads more in terms of Twitter interactions that I've seen as opposed to like, because obviously in a podcast, you can spound on, you can, there's a lot more nuance capable in a podcast than on in 280 characters. capable in a podcast than on in 280 characters what i see is kind of a oh isn't it nice that helen pluck rose distanced herself from james lindsey and then full stop without oh and also helen pluck rose is still fucking awful because counterweight is a bunch of bullshit etc it's almost like a wording question it's isn't it nice that helen pluck rose yada yada yada versus even the completely terrible Helen

Pluckrose is distancing herself from James Lindsay. Let's not let her do that because ultimately we acknowledge that they are part of the same kind of overall political project. And like, maybe that's, you know, you can see there's a nitpicking or whatever, but I think it's also pretty essential to understand them as part of that same project. I understand the desire to dunk on James Lindsay, but I also understand we have to think about how that message is being received and what we're actually materially putting out there in the world.

I literally praised Richard Spencer on a couple of episodes of I Don't Speak German because even he saw how stupid one of the new political parties that's spouting up is. I played audio of Richard Spencer and laughed at how he's absolutely correct to criticize these people for this thing. Richard Spencer is a terrible person. You know what I did right after I played that audio?

I went, also, Richard Spencer is a very likely spousal abuser who is an absolutely terrible person who has terrible ideas. And it's a tone issue as much as it is a kind of a, like a factual question kind of issue. And again, I'm not perfect on this. Everybody has dunked on the bad person on Twitter. Everybody has bad tweets. It's about, we need to be thinking about it on that level because our enemies and by our enemies, I mean, literal Nazis are absolutely using this material for horrible purposes. Because I'm just trying to think of how we see some things the same

and we see some things differently, right? And I'm just thinking about why that might be. And it's an obvious point, but one reason has got to be just like where we sit on the political spectrum, right? So something that will strike you as abhorrent, say, or just really objectionable, it doesn't strike us as terribly bad simply because of the difference in political opinions. That's one thing.

So I think we have to attribute some of it to simply where we're coming from in terms of political perspective. The other point of difference, I guess, is we do try to steer clear of politics, even though it's impossible to completely. Certain of these gurus that we've talked about are just these political animals whose appeal is based on those issues. And we have to acknowledge that. But for some of the people we cover and the things we're interested in, I don't think the political dimension is the most salient dimension. So to give an example of this, I'll mention Brett Weinstein, right?

Of all the people that we cover, we think he's one of the most harmful with the anti-vax road that he's gone down. But if I try to conceptualize where he is, I would say that the main issue is the self-aggrandizing narcissism and the conspiracy theorizing and just leading people to a fundamentally deluded view of the world that isn't based on empirical evidence and doing scientism, essentially, pretending to be doing science or not. Now, there is absolutely a political lens to this guy as well. But where I'm coming from is that's not always the main thing. For me, the main thing is sometimes something else. And, you know, it's got to do with our interests. Like you obviously focus on far right, on Nazis and so on. So you naturally will be drawn to that. Chris and I have a research background in things like health beliefs and

spirituality and religiosity. So we just have different interests as well. I think there's some points, Matt, where you and I might be slightly divergent as well, Matt, where you and I might be slightly divergent as well, because I also sign on that our focus is not on the political aspect. We're interested in looking at people across the spectrum, including some of the people that are not really primarily interested in the political sphere. I think that where somebody that is the salient feature about them, like Douglas Murray, for example, that a good part of our analysis ends up being about the kind of their disguising of their political views in specific kinds of rhetoric or the way that they use a particular kind of delivery to promote a specific kind of politics. So I guess I'm just nuancing the point that it isn't that we seek to push out any political content. It's that in the selecting the people that we cover, the main thing isn't do we agree or disagree with their politics. And the other point that you made, I'm not disagreeing with this. I'm seconding it. Whereas take Eric or Brett,

whichever you want from those brothers, there's an absolute reasonable point to look at the influence of Teal Capital and to look into the people that they're promoting and various aspects about the political side of where they are and where the IDW lies as well. But I think you guys as well, Daniel, when you covered them, you are also acknowledging that Eric is, he has this whole thing that he invented the theory of physics. This is what he goes and talks on Rogan about. And yes, he's talking about like culture war stuff endlessly as well, but it doesn't feel to me that's a superficial element of his story is like his view that he's a misunderstood genius or Brett's view that telomeres, he discovered this thing.

So digging into those parts and the various pseudoscience stuff that they promote, it doesn't have, to me, a necessary political angle because they could be advocating a completely different type of politics and still make the same mistakes. And it would be important to highlight to people that this is why you can't trust people who do that wherever you find them on the political spectrum. this is why you can't trust people who do that wherever you find them on the political spectrum. Sure. A, I kind of broadly agree, but I'm going to push back on some issues. And I think the first thing, and we said this, I said this on episode 88, and it's something that I fully agree with, is that to say it's not political, like we're not talking about kind of a political thing when we talk about this. The status quo gets a sort of pass for just being a thing that exists and therefore kind of non-political or apolitical. And I think that's a very dangerous attitude to have. And that's not, like, I'm not criticizing you guys specifically

for that, but we have to understand that, like, being anti-vax is political in the sense of who is going to be harmed by being anti-vax. And this is going to differentially affect various populations and all this sort of thing. It's not to say like you have to be obsessed with kind of the political angles on this, but that I just reject the premise that like you can just ignore the politics. And I don't think that's what you're saying, but I just want to be, I just want to highlight that first is that for people who have far-left politics, never find our perspective really gets like a say within a mainstream discourse. And yet, if you're a socialist, you get thrown the 100 million people died under

communism every day. And it's like, okay, how many people are dying now under the capitalist system? But that doesn't get counted. You don't get to just ignore the political just because we happen to live under a system that privileges you. It privileges me. I'm a white guy. I have a nice, comfy existence. I have a decent job. I am much luckier than many other people. And if I had been born in India or China or in Sub-Saharan Africa, I would not get to do any of these things that I get to do with my life. I did want to say, Daniel, just before I forget that I think the point about acknowledging the privilege positions that people are in and what it makes salient to people is an important point. But I'm also aware that like Matt and I aren't from America. I grew up in Belfast in the 80s and 90s, which was like a conflict area. There does sometimes feel like a flattening assumption, despite Matt's little cheeky smile.

I generally don't talk about growing up in Belfast. And I'm not arguing for like the necessity of taking a standpoint epistemology approach to it, but more that it does inform the way that I regard when people are talking about relative levels of threat and whatnot and what they've experienced. I'm not claiming that there's all this stuff that makes it that what people are experiencing in the US at the moment, it's nothing. But in the same respect,

I am sympathetic, I think, sometimes to points about catastrophizing on whichever side of the political spectrum that it arises from. And it possibly does relate to growing up somewhere like Belfast. And from a point of view about the status quo being the assumptive norm, like where I grew up, the police were over 90, 95% Protestant. I'm from a Catholic background. My family and community were fundamentally like, don't trust the police and regard them as an enemy. So it isn't that those viewpoints are alien to me or that kind of thing. And I'm not meaning to drag things into that direction. I just wanted to flag that up.

And again, I'm not trying to kind of, we're not pointing fingers at individuals here. I mean, I could talk about particular points of disagreement in your previous episodes, and I don't know, maybe that would be helpful if if if you'd like to kind of get into that i accept some of the except some of those criticisms i would be happy to kind of discuss them point by point at another time but maybe i can i can just kind of highlight a couple of things that that you've done on the podcast that i think maybe were

um less than helpful if that's perfect yeah. So we can, let's do that. Let's move to that. But with that, like Belfast waffle, the point I wanted to make, which was actually related to the point that you were making, is like, I agree with you that there's a political valiance to defending the status quo or whatever is categorized as the moderate left. It's not the default position, or maybe it is assumed to be, but it isn't a neutral position. That's a perfectly valid point. But one point in response to that is that on the far left in the IDW, and I don't know about far right, but I would assume so,

one overlap that I see is a fundamental disparagement of institutions and mainstream bodies like academia or with political institutions. And if I have a concern to push back towards the far left, there's definitely elements there that are very concerned about tankies or Assad apologists, but even setting them aside, if we're concerned about legitimizing the critiques that emerge from like the IDW sphere and the far right, the view that institutions should be fundamentally regarded with suspicion or things that we should perhaps dismantle. It seems to me that your side is in more fundamental agreement with Eric Weinstein and co than my side. that might be unfair. Oh, well, I mean, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a,

I mean, like, should we pick an example? I feel like it's, I feel like it's worthwhile to pick an example, say abolish the police or prison abolition or something like that. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think your perspective and certainly the Bret and Heather perspective and the Eric Weinstein perspective is the police protect us from the terrible actors in society. There are people who are coming out. There are

always going to be serial killers and rapists and thieves, et cetera, et cetera. And the police exist to make sure that they are protecting us, the reasonable people in society from that. And that like fundamentally any call to abolish that or to abolish the prison system is to let those people out and to where they're going to threaten us. Do you think that's a fair representation of defending the institution kind of position on this? No, that's fair. And also I think that you're right. That's a good position to highlight where there would be more overlap. I'm aware of where Brett and Heller go with their- I've been trying to highlight that more and more. This is something that I care

deeply about. And I have long considered myself a prison abolitionist. And I believe that the current policing system, certainly in the United States, is fundamentally broken beyond repair, just the current criminal justice system in general. And so what I kind of point to is, A, you can abolish the police or abolish prisons. It's a slogan that reflects like a century or so of work by activists and academics, et cetera, et cetera. conversation, there's a giant body of work that just gets flattened into that as a kind of political slogan. And then people can say, well, what are you going to do about all the rapists? Even like progressive liberal, like very centrist-y kind of people are going to tell you, like about 4% of the work that like police do in terms of like the actual hours they spend, it's spent doing anything like what we think police should do, right? In terms of like actually going after kind of major offenders. Also, we spend many times the value of any kind of replacement value of the property

that is stolen by kind of individuals like robbing somebody's house by putting them in prison for five years. The U.S. prison industrial complex is, it's a travesty on the world. We imprison like 25% of the world's prisoners. A greater percentage of people are imprisoned in the United States than at like any time other than like the highest years of the Soviet gulag system as a percentage of population. This is just true. And yet we don't think of it that way. We just think of, oh, it's law and order, et cetera, et cetera. And so what we have to do in terms of thinking about that, like maybe there's a need for a prison for the hardest of the hardcore serial killers. Maybe there's a reason for isolating these people from society for the safety of others.

But it doesn't look anything like the current system. And when you look at kind of the realities of the current criminal justice system, it's fundamentally broken in ways that like are not reformable under the current system. Like you can't apply a good DA here and there and suddenly solve this system. It needs to be fundamentally rethought and destroyed ultimately, in my opinion. And so when I say that my position is political, but like the position that like,

what are we going to do about all the rapists is like an apolitical position. Like that's kind of where I land on that. Yeah. And militarized policing in the U S I think both Matt and me are not fans. And I would concur that your position on that is very far divergent from what you would see with the Weinsteins. But I guess where I would see more the overlap would be say the criticism

directed towards the DNC. Eric, for example, will, and I'm not saying, I definitely don't think that you or Jack do this, that you make equivalences between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, right? Like Eric Weinstein's kind of approach to that. But the fundamental view they have about the Democratic Party and so on is that it's indistinguishable from the Republican. They're just different flavors of the same system, which doesn't allow for change.

I can, just to cut this off, I don't believe that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are indistinguishable. I fully support it. didn't fully support. I voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. I have very real problems with Hillary Clinton. And I think there's a kind of like Twitter kind of anarcho-kitty kind of version of this. And then there's a more nuanced tape, because I think my own perspective as someone who has been following American politics for 20 something years at this point, my belief is that there are very real things that the Democrats and Republicans have in common, and in particular, in terms of the U.S. military-industrial complex, in terms of more money for prisons, in terms of the neoliberal response to austerity, in terms of

destroying people's lives. Joe Biden, bought and paid for by the credit card industry in Delaware, like, I can point you to tons of documentation on this. Like, he's in the for by the credit card industry in Delaware. I can point you to tons of documentation on this. He's in the pocket of the credit card industry. Why does Joe Biden want to do massive reform in terms of people's student loan debt? Because he's paid not to. And that's a system in which we live. And if you follow these politics long enough, and if you follow the ins and outs of Democratic and Republican Party, yes, the Democrat is almost always going to be the better choice than the Republican, like bar none. I will vote for Democrats every time. But to think they're going to really make fundamental change based on just the history of the last 20 years, it's just it's just it's a fallacy. And

to defend the Democrats, they didn't have enough, they didn't have enough votes or they didn't have the thing, or they weren't able to do this because of that. That's the thing that I really like my, what I really want people to do is just break out of that and say, go do something else and to care about what the Democrats are doing. Go and vote. I think you should go and vote, but there's more going on then. And I think that a lot of the stuff that gets flattened into, they're basically the same thing is just that frustration is that we don't see like real change, whereas the Republicans absolutely push through really terrible things every time they get into power. And sometimes that does get resisted. And I think there's a

lot that we can learn from the Trump era in terms of the limits of that. I think there's a real conversation to have there. But criticizing the DNC from the left is a very different thing than criticizing it from the right. And Eric Weinstein saying the Republicans and Democrats are the same because they're fundamentally corrupt. And they're just kind of like, well, yeah, but the DNC is better because they're further to the left and the RNC is worse because they're further to the right. And the RNC is actively trying to destroy the world. And the DNC is just like being the ineffectual opposition to them destroying the world. I understand where you're coming from is that like on a surface level, it kind of feels like, oh, it's the same comment, but it's not.

that any kind of principle of charity in terms of saying, you know, any sense of a principle of charity in terms of allowing for more than 280 characters of conversation about this would reveal that. I think that the point you're making is important, and it might be the same point that I would make, like to defend some other points where you might say, oh, if you make a point which is similar, you know, gives credit to something that Jordan Peterson has said in a way you're making for your audience. Him seem palatable. And I would push back at that, that it's more the case that the nuance that you're talking about is important, that, you know, Jordan Peterson can make a reasonable point about something. Jordan Peterson can make a reasonable point about something. The stuff that he smuggles in alongside that are why you should oppose him. But in acknowledging that if he makes some reasonable point, it doesn't entail that all the rest gets dragged in. Well, my criticism would not be like

you acknowledging that Jordan Peterson makes a reasonable point. Jordan Peterson came to public prominence specifically based on being an anti-trans bigot. Like he was lying about the C-16 bill in Canada. Like otherwise he'd be an obscure like psychology professor that wrote a weird book. That's who he was. He does kind of do the self-help stuff for young men. And I don't study Jordan Peterson closely, but if he has been helpful to people, I think that's probably fine. But he also smuggles in a whole lot of not just reactionary bullshit, but full-on manosferian stuff about women shouldn't wear makeup in workplaces because the fuller cheeks involve in wearing makeup calls like, I mean, he's just kind of straight up like, you know, just vicious

misogyny, right? Right. And that's not to say you can't say, well, Jordan Peterson made a good point here. I actually learned quite a bit from your initial Jordan Peterson episode, because I find him word salad when he kind of gets into his like, you know, weirdo spaces. I just don't have the language to even begin to understand him. And so I appreciate that you can kind of dig in and kind of understand him, but to not see him as a fundamentally a figure who has been brought to the forefront based on this kind of like far right reactionary politics and that this is his goal. Like that's what he's trying to do. It does feel like sometimes you don't have to hand it to him.

You know, sometimes you just got to go. And, and like, again, I'm not trying to necessarily criticize you on Jordan Peterson in that way, because I think your coverage has been pretty good. But to not kind of also highlight that other stuff does give him a little bit of a pass. I think more directly, if I can give the criticism, it's the Sam Harris, the kind of meditation episode that you guys did. It wasn't where he was kind of talking, he was selling his app. And I feel like there was a very kind of clear, you know, well, Sam Harris is kind of a reasonable figure. I agree with him on a lot of things. Sam Harris has been like supporting the military industrial complex in the United States for a long time. He sits along and

like giggles along with Douglas Murray, where Douglas Murray is saying these, these Islamic countries, like they don't care about trans people. They don't care about those kinds of issues. And that's a serious civilization. And we need to be serious like that. I mean, he's like, again, this gets back to the, like, I care about what you do and not what you say or what you believe. Sam Harris just thought, you know, he doesn't spend a lot of time talking about, like, how do we solve poverty by talking about mixed land use or something like that? He's not like putting out there and like exploring these kind of ideas. It's either kind of like scientific, you know, kind of like big picture, is there life in the universe or like joking around with Ricky

Gervais, which is a thing that he's doing now, apparently, or it's almost always kind of reactionary garbage, right? It doesn't matter to me if he like hypothetically votes for Joe Biden. It matters to me what work he does in the world. And by that standard, I think Sam Harris can be fairly considered a pretty far right figure in terms of like the things he actually puts his energy into. You know, there was a piece by Nestor de Buen at Marion West, A Better Way to Understand the Intellectual Dark Web. And I would like to recommend that to people. So like with Sam Harris, a couple of points, like one is that episode was not a normal episode on Sam Harris. It was just like a special episode

because of a particularly bad thing that he dropped, which hit these specific features of kind of an interesting new wrinkle in the guru dynamics. He's presenting himself as a secular figure, but he's arguing that his politics is endorsed by introspective practices and so on. So that like there was an interesting wrinkle, which is why I wanted to address that. And it's a limitation in some respect of our approach, which is that we focus on a set piece of content. And so for Jordan Peterson, his piece was heavily focused on religion and, you know, to some extent philosophy,

but mostly religion and not culture war issues. So in that respect, the content that we covered for him in the first episode, less so with the Brett and him crossover because they got into politics, but it was more geared toward metaphorical Christian apologetics aspect rather than say his anti-trans positions or so on. And I keep that point. And I think Matt and me have always flagged that up as something of a limitation. We try to take work that's somewhat representative, but we're always going to have a, like a relatively

skewed perspective. Right. And as I indicated, I think there's value in doing the work that you're doing, focusing on that. It's just, it's an issue which you acknowledge and which I'm- Definitely. Yeah. But here's a part about probably where I think like

in some ways I agree because when we do an episode on Sam Harris as which we've discussed during a proper one I think any fair treatment of him has to deal with the kind of points that you're talking about like his wallowing in the culture war his you know I've considered doing the episode with Kathleen Blue. Oh, yeah. Believe me, I know that one very well. On white supremacy, because I think that is an episode that's very clear about where Sam's limitations, blind spots, sympathies are, and where they can lead to really dark places, right? Like arguing that the Christchurch shooter is just a shit poster. We don't know what his ideology is.

What? There's an 80-page document about that. Oh, no, but it was filled with jokes. You don't understand, Chris. How could you possibly interpret this? Like, this is just a bunch of garbage. I would also highlight the Ezra Klein. If you were going to do one, that's the one I'd love to, that I would happily come on for six hours and talk about that. I've

spent so much time on that interview. I have pages of notes. Yeah. And I think the Ezra Klein is also a watershed moment in some respect. And like for fans of Sam Harris, where it led to like a split between people like who saw okay that's a there's Sam does very badly in that interview and other people within Sam's audience who thought Ezra came across really badly and I definitely in the former rather than the latter camp but so like I agree that if you did an episode on Sam Harris and you were like saying okay we want to talk about this figure and why is he controversial, whatever. And you chose an episode that was like him talking with Paul Bloom and didn't mention anything about Charles Murray or any of the, you know, the fringe of the fringe

white supremacy that you would do. You would do the topic and an injustice. But on the same respect, I think there is a reason that Sam Harris is regarded as like a more reasonable figure than many of the others in that space and why people are still willing to appear with him, including people who do research on far right or alt right groups, Andrew Morantz and so on. But I think that element of Sam Harris, which is perhaps captured in a bit by the mind science element, the episode that we covered, although we were harsh there, it also has to be addressed in, this isn't so much your critique, Daniel, I think it might

be more Ina, who, you know, is a well-known critic of Sam Harris and quite detailed and documents the points that she wants to make. But when she or now, when you say that it's more reasonable to put Sam into like a quite far right space, to some respect, that to me means that there's a failure to acknowledge that somebody could be a liberal, they could be relatively in favor of welfare states and vote for Democrats and so on, and also have these bad reactionary views or enable reasscience and so on. But it doesn't, like, if we just automatically are putting them to, that the right it feels to me like you are fundamentally saying that anybody on the left can't be endorsing like race science and stuff and that doesn't

strike true to me because I think there's people that are on the left who are who do endorse those things and that the criticism can be off them and their views without it being that they're necessarily on the right. And there's a wrinkle there because, as you say, Sam Harris is very close to Douglas Murray on a lot of points. And he's made use of, you know, back yours statistics. He's engaged in like the Islamophobic stuff about the Muslims coming in and taking over Europe. So I don't want to just limit it to this point applied to Sam Harris, because you could take issue with that.

But in general, how do you respond to that point about somebody is like automatically on the right? Ultimately, I think the thing that we're leaning against is like, how do we want to talk about far right, far left, centrist, etc, etc. right, far left, centrist, et cetera, et cetera. If you sit and like kind of graph people's opinions on various issues, ultimately left, right is a broken dynamic because it is one axis. And like where I would land on this in a sentence is again, like where does he spend his time? And if he was going to spend his time talking about urban planning advocates, talking to, you know, people who are reducing poverty. If you wanted to spend a bunch of time on that, then I think we could fairly say, yeah, he's a mixed bag politically, but he's got one of the biggest podcasts in the world and what does he choose

to do with it? In a more general sense, can people have a variety of beliefs? Can there be racists on the left? Absolutely. Yeah. But we're talking about major figures with big platforms who have chosen to do a certain thing with that. And Joe Rogan is a mixed bag. I mean, thank God we could talk forever about Joe Rogan if you want to talk about Joe Rogan. But I just mean that people that present Joe as the centrist, that's hard to classify. It's really not. It's's not because we know what he does now cornell west has been an invited guest on joe rogan's program on a number of occasions and cornell west is definitely you know on the left of the mainstream american political

perspective you know i'm not going to just grant him that yeah no cordo west i quite like cornell west he's great and he gets to come out there and express his political views and joe rogan does the yeah man that's really wild yeah jamie pulled pulled it up. Let me see this genealogic coefficient graph or whatever. He does the same thing. But what does Joe Rogan choose to, who are you tuning into if you tune into a date to a weekend? And Joe Rogan, Sam Harris is the same way. And so, yeah. Did they vote for Joe Biden? Whatever. Yes. But that's not really the thing we're talking about. Right. And that's and that. And I'm happy to have that conversation with people about what they think is good and bad and what they think is right and wrong and, you know, kind of the varieties of that. But like, again, that's not who we're talking about here.

You know, like, I'm Daniel, I appreciate like, I think that I, I'm not somebody that's in favor of the civility porn thing. i think like this discussion is perfectly fine and we can have disagreements and and there's plenty of reasonable points that you've raised and that i think are important and yeah so just to say like there is absolutely no hard feelings on like the yeah and we'd be happy to discuss farla yeah yeah and and no like i know that there were you know i know there was some consternation in certain circles around the contents of episode 87 and 88 it was not nothing nothing was intended to be aimed at any particular you know kind of content creator if i wanted to go on and trash people i have that ability believe it or not

i can do that and like if i wanted to just grow the podcast really big, I would go troll James Lindsay and get him to retweet me to his, you know, 200,000 followers. But like, like the point would not be, thank you for having me on, obviously, and I do appreciate it. Like, it's not about like, there are ways of growing the audience that are not like, oh, let's go have a, let's go pick a fight. You know, good faith is a dirty word because of what they've done to what, you know, various

people have done to that word. But I think that using it in the way that it's actually intended, I think good thief criticism is welcome. And, and like, I've no issue with that. Well, I kind of get it. I've listened to, I've listened to every main episode, some of the bonus content I have not listened to, but I mean, I really liked the Gwyneth Paltrow one. I want you guys to do more, more like that. I was telling Chris, he should do some of the YouTube live streamers. I'd love to see like some stuff about

like kind of, I think that there's like the parasocial relationships that live streamers have with their audience and you know, that kind of stuff. I would really love to see you guys is like style of analysis towards that kind of stuff. Honestly, I think that could be really fascinating. I'm not telling you what kind of content to produce, but I would personally just really appreciate that. Look, I haven't said much in this episode. I think I'm probably less invested in many of the topics we've been talking about, perhaps. But also, I pretty much signed on to a lot of what Chris has said. And a couple of points that you've made that I've pulled out, you know, there's obviously very strong areas of agreement, you know, where we just see things exactly the same.

And that's interesting to note that there's other points where we see things a little bit differently, but that's also interesting too. So thanks for coming on. And thanks for making those points, those criticisms um because yeah like you know i've like i don't know sorry to return to something you guys were talking about which was sam harris like i don't know sam harris anywhere near as well as you guys do right so i've got like a like a normies type of outsider casual viewers yeah and you know you know one of the interesting questions is, you know, what is somebody really?

Like what are they fundamentally really about? And, you know, you can take a character like Sam Harris, and I just pulled up his podcast website, and seeing there's an episode on Are We Alone in the Universe with Neil, that's the first one, Neil deGrasse Tyson, in fact, a whole bunch of stuff on space. Yes, some culture war stuff. He talks with Jesse Singel, but also stuff about brains

and all kinds of things, you know. So I'm aware, mainly secondhand, of his, you know, to put it extremely charitably naive endorsement of certain things, but you don't have to be super charitable, yeah? You can say that there's a pattern there. So, yeah, I don't know. Like, I don't have an answer to that question, you know what i mean i i think it's hard to know what somebody is really about what their fund are they just being naive do they have an agenda all that stuff um you know

well can i can i respond to that briefly sure sure just sorry i did interrupt i apologize but you know like i think my fundamental point is like it's not it's not our job to peer into the eternal verities of someone's soul. This is where, again, that materialist conception of I care about what you do and what you say and what the content that you put out is. I agree with you that Sam Harris puts out a ton of content that has nothing to do with these kinds of things. I agree with you that Sam Harris puts out a ton of content that has nothing to do with like these kinds of things. I wish he would just stop dealing with this stuff and kind of, but even if you look at like some of the people that he's brought in to talk about some of these things, he did a recent episode about like, it was essentially an advertisement for a, like a kind of vegetarian

meat substitute. There was a company that's kind of producing this stuff and, you know, hey, I don't like corporations, et cetera, et cetera. You know, like, so, you know, but aside from that criticism, you find out the guy that he like brought in was formerly worked for Y Combinator and Y Combinator is one of the like kind of sub projects of this guy, Mencius Moldbug, AKA Curtis Yarvin, who was one of the fathers of the neo-reactionary movement, right? And so he's had people from that organization on a couple of times. And so you can dig into this and find those kinds of influences, even in some of his like kind of more non-political or kind of apolitical

episodes. And even when like he brought on, I forget the guy's name, but he's a Indian biologist, a cancer biologist. And A, he starts talking about Charles Burry and racing IQ in the middle of it. But he also does kind of a soft support for eugenics right there in the middle. And so often this content is buried in there, even if it's topically not, if it's not kind of right there on the surface. And I think that's kind of, I know that that's a detail of, you just kind of listen to the Sam Harris that you don't get from just looking at the surface. And I think that's, that's kind of, I know that that's a detail of, you know, you just kind of listen to the Sam Harris that you don't get from just looking at the website,

but I think that that's a, that's kind of why I think it's important to kind of highlight these things sometimes. Right. Yeah. Now look, I think that's a, that's a fair point, like in checking out Stefan, not deeply, but you know, I could, I could easily find these very long youtube series which was ostensibly about the roman empire or something you know and and and and it would it be 90 percent about the roman empire and how it was destroyed by the immigrant hordes by the way that was just taking the roman empire almost almost as if almost as if the rest of the content exists to uh spread a certain kind of political message almost yeah yeah so that's right so that's so sorry sorry again that's best for being snarky i'm not uh you know i'm an asshole everybody knows before you move on just

i'm sorry i'm very sorry that both me and daniel are interrupted but like with steven molyneux i think that's a good example because i think daniel you would see a lot of what he's the stuff that he's done, like, you know, highlighting the connections to the right wing ideologies and whatnot. But like, for me, while that's definitely true, and like not discounting the white ethno nationalist component of Stephen Molyneux would be a huge mistake. The fact that he ran a predatory psychology cult is also a huge part. And like the fact that he's this narcissistic figure who's adopted a whole bunch of different political ideologies, which are essentially about making himself the central grand cult figure.

That's like, he's a good example of how the perspective that we might take looking at his manipulative techniques would be a valid prism to look at things. But it wouldn't be that, you know, the white nationalist ethno stuff that he is in is therefore irrelevant. But just that you could look with both lenses and find out a lot about him. I agree. And we did an episode on Stéphane Maladieu. And I don't think we covered, you we covered that aspect, the cult aspect as much as maybe we could have, because our focus is where our focus is. And it would be absolutely valid to look at Stefan Molyneux through that lens. And I mean, even through like your recent episode about the geometric unity stuff with Eric Weinstein, perfectly valuable, valid content. That's not the argument I'm making here.

It's absolutely worthwhile to talk about Eric Weinstein and the geometric community paper and how it's a bunch of bullshit that doesn't make any sense. And like, it's him self-aggrandizing and like, that's, that's 100% valid and useful content to produce. So long as you're not also ignoring the other side of it is kind of where I would land on that. And so if you talk about Stefan Molyneux, and you do four episodes about the cult leader stuff, and then also don't go,

yeah, and he was one of the major figures that led to the kind of alt-right radicalization in 2015 and 2016. You're kind of doing a disservice both to how bad Stefan Molyneux is, but also to your audience, ultimately. And you're deciding what you think is important and what you think is important is not the fact that Stefan Molyneux is, but also to your audience, ultimately, and to you, and you're deciding what you think is important and what you think is important is not the fact that Stefan Molyneux is a Nazi. You know, like, like, I don't know, again, like I'm not, I'm not,

this isn't aimed at you. It's aimed at how we talk about this stuff. And again, the choice of like how we cover and what we choose to cover and, you know, what kind of questions we ask us. I think the, the, what I want people to kind of come away with this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds good. And the, and in the spirit of sort of wrapping up in that one final sort of comment, which is that like one thing I learned from having Aaron Rabinowitz on to talk through the O'Fallon episode was that even though, as we flagged up at the beginning he's like he's much

more woke than us right but what I learned from that episode is that with that content frankly it doesn't matter it doesn't matter whether you're a milto's liberal like us or whether you're like super woke or a communist or whatever like you you will fundamentally agree you know the only people who who would disagree with with our sort of premises people that are frankly far right you know so i think in in many cases um you know it's important to take into account those political things i think there's you know there can be that narcissism of of differences not saying they're small differences but like like i i would like someone who's a Republican voting Trump supporter

to be able to listen to something that we did on the anti-vax stuff of Brett Weinstein and go, that's anti-scientific anti-vax nonsense. They may not have changed their mind about Trump or whatever, but Hey, that's, that's still good, you know, to get vaccinated. I think. Like it's, it's like, like, that's not the level of, that's not the level of analysis that I was aiming for necessarily. And again, I like the podcast. I am a Patreon supporter to all of you. This is how you get on the podcast is you just pledge enough money. That's right. Pay us money and criticize us. That's how you get on. so i so look just to repeat daniel is the co-host of i don't speak german if you want to learn about the truly scary stuff that's happening on the far right then you

really couldn't go to a better place i think i didn't talk much but i enjoyed listening guys and yeah thank you for coming on daniel it was it was good fun see listeners matt admitted that we didn't stop him from talking he wanted to listen it was his choice as he has agency he is a a person in this world blame matt blame matt so uh yeah but eric daniel thanks and like i i agree i i get a lot out of i don't speak german even you know i i would have some criticisms of the podcast like just because of a different perspective that I have. But I will say that I usually get a lot out of listening to the episodes and your guys'

perspective, even where I disagree with maybe some of the political point or so on. So I would encourage anyone to listen. And you've done a lot of episodes recently on IDW stuff, which has a lot of good research in it. So, you know, again, I just want to clarify, this is not meant to be a contentious kind of battle or whatever. This is good faith, reasonable conversation. The stuff we're doing is actually important.

If it wasn't important, I would quit tomorrow. Talking about these things actually has again material impacts on the real world and so talking about how best to do that and like really kind of sharing that back and forth i think is is an important conversation to have yeah for sure for sure agree so yeah thanks for coming on and uh it's been great oh no no this is a lot of fun I would love to come on again if you'll happen so

thanks Daniel thanks for coming on Thank you.