Decoding the Gurus - Special Episode: Interview with Robert Wright on crackpots, gurus, and modern media ecosystems

Episode Date: August 13, 2021

This week we welcome the author, journalist, and podcaster Robert Wright. Robert wrote the popular (and provocative!) book 'Why Buddhism is True' and has hosted many interesting discussions and debates at bloggingheads.tv, which he co-founded.We had a wide ranging discussion that touched on a vast array of topics including: the Weinsteins & their relative crackpot ratings, alternative & Mainstream media ecosystems and how they feed into guruism, what are gurus anyway (and are they all bad), Sam Harris and cognitive biases, whether Bob is a Buddhist Modernist, the extent to which meditation is a form of cultural conditioning, if wokism is really taking over America, and whether Matt & Chris' actually hate evolutionary psychology or not.Robert offers a unique perspective, displays a lot of good humour and patience, and indulges our ongoing fetishism of self deprecation culture. So join us for a suitably meandering Irish-Aussie-Americo conversation that involves only the prescribed amount of mutual backpatting!P.S. We promise the Gad Saad episode is coming soon!LinksBob's Book 'Why Buddhism is True''Is Eric Weinstein a Crackpot' on Bob's Non-zero SubstackBob's Interview with Tim Nguyen for The Wright ShowBob's article for Wired on Sam Harris & Tribalism (the one that got him cut off!)The Crackpot Index by John Baez

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try our best to understand what they're talking about. And sometimes, just sometimes, we have special guests on who are going to help us figure out what is true, beautiful, and real in this crazy, mixed-up world. And today is one of those days, isn't it, Chris? and real in this crazy mixed up world and today is one of those days isn't it Chris? That's right morning Matt we have Robert Wright who we mentioned just recently when we had Evan Thompson on because of his recent book Why Buddhism is True but that's that's just one of the many things that he's done he's a journalist and author and probably got into the online podcasting

or video tubing, I'm not sure the terminology, with Blogging Heads TV quite a while back and has wrote a number of books, The Moral Animal, Non-Zero, The Logic of Human Destiny, The Evolution of God. So hello, Bob. Hello. If it's okay to call you Bob. It's very common to call me Bob, yes. And I should also mention that I have recently become a patron of the Parrot Room. So God bless you. Yeah, this is opposition research. You and Mickey Cruz, I feel like I'm starting to know personally in the parasocial way that the online space creates.

Well, Mickey and I are opposed to each other, so you can't be opposed to both of us. I don't know what the form the opposition research takes, but I guess we'll explore that as the conversation proceeds. I know I'm an advocate of some things that you guys are skeptical of. Yeah. To varying degrees, but maybe us too. No, you're actually generally skeptical of people I'm skeptical of. As far as I know, I'm largely on the same page as you.

I was thinking that a place to start might be in line, Matt, with our recent recorded episodes. Not with Evan, but with Daniel. We invited somebody who was from the more anti-fascist leftist side to discuss some issues that they had with the way that we covered the IDW and related spheres. Given how happy that made all of the people who listened, I thought it might be a good space to start

an airing of grievances. Well, this is the part, Bob, where we show what open-minded people, how welcoming we are to criticism. We probably agree on heaps of stuff, but is there any stuff you disagree with us about? You want to get off your chest? I mean, I know I have heard casual references to your

skepticism about evolutionary psychology. My book, The Moral Animal, was kind of one of the first book-length advocacies of evolutionary psychology, but I haven't heard you flesh that out. There's the Buddhism issue. I don't know where exactly the disagreement would be there. My last book was called Why Buddhism is True, and I forget how you characterized that title, Chris, on your Evan Thompson podcast, but it was a reference to it not being just loaded with epistemic humility, I guess. I think that's fair. Provocative.

Maybe you called it provocative. Yeah. With dry understatement. I mean, that's relevant to the whole Sam Harris thing. I have my own history of writing critically about some of the people you podcast skeptically about. Yeah. I've written a piece about Sam Harris in Wired Magazine that led him to cut off all communication with me. He had had me on his podcast to promote my book, so maybe the timing wasn't optimal. And I've written critically of the intellectual dark web generically and a few particular people

in it, like Barry Weiss and lately Eric Weinstein. Now that had a kind of synergy with what you guys had been doing. I became aware of Tim Nguyen, who critiqued Eric's theory of everything, this mathematician, and had him on my podcast, The Right Show. I titled the YouTube version of that, Is Eric Weinstein a crackpot? That just passed the 50,000 view mark. So next time you criticize one of my titling decisions, Chris, just remember that. decisions, Chris, just remember that. I'm going to say that I feel that in so doing, we should thank you because as you noted before we started recording, Eric has made various hints,

playful hints at forthcoming litigation in the critics who are preventing him from podcasting. So I think the fact that you publicly posed the question of whether he's a crackpot, we should thank you because that's probably... You think I'm now the one that the lawsuit will be aimed at? Yeah, the eye of Sauron has shifted to... However, just to show you how far I think these things through in advance, I did also a piece called, Is Eric Weinstein a crackpot? in my newsletter, the Non-Zero Newsletter, and that addressed a different part, not the theory of everything, but his conspiracy theories. thought. Partly because, in a way, on IDW grounds, in the sense that I think we should be reluctant to give people labels that are designed to marginalize them. I actually do believe that. And I try to believe it consistently, which I think may be more than I can say for some people

in the intellectual dark web. I suspect that nuance may be lost on somebody of Eric's particular sensitivities. But for me, I felt that like crackpot, when I hear the term, I imagine, you know, like Tim said, somebody sending you in their handwritten letter of like refuting Einstein and relativity, right? And there's a... He does say his theory may enable us to break the Einsteinian speed limit of the speed of light. Yes. And there is a crackpot checklist that you might have came across in your wandering. Some physicists prepared because they received a lot of those kind of correspondence and you get points for various things. And I scored Eric on it for my own amusement before.

And he did meet the technical qualification by a large margin on that scoring. So you're safe then. You can get an expert witness to testify that he actually is a crackpot. So according to that schema, yes. But as I understood it, though, you were hesitant to label Eric a crackpot. You were more, the bigger hesitation was you had a broader schema, right? Like are the Weinsteins collectively crackpots? And with Brett, you were more hesitant to apply that, label them with Eric.

Is that fair? I had been. I think I still probably would be. But you're right. At that point, I was using the word crank. Before I came across your podcast, I said on my, the weekly version of, I do two shows a week. One is always with my friend of me, Mickey Kaus. And I had said, I have not a grand unified theory about the Weinstein brothers, but at this point, a grand unified hypothesis. It's that they're both cranks. After I said that, and I am still exploring

that, by the way, it remains a hypothesis. But one of our viewers sent me to your podcast. And the first one I listened to was the one on the conversation between Brett and Eric, which I had already listened to. But your analysis of it was useful to me because you highlighted some things I hadn't remembered. You mentioned that you were just hypothesizing. Again, I feel that this is a nice judo flip maneuver because I've listened to much Weinstein content and they are always very clear. As long as it's a hypothesis, there can be no judgment passed because you have not claimed it's a theory. You're just working your way towards it. So yeah, I think that's another smart move on your behalf. When the case eventually comes to court,

this will be a key component. We can cite Brett. Totally. That hypotheses cannot be held to any standard. He doesn't engage in conspiracy theorizing, just conspiracy hypothesizing. No, Brett says he does conspiracy hypotheses. He's actually said that.

Look, I think he should score a few more crank points because he's appearing at the Making Contact UFO conference as a speaker. Oh, this is Eric. This is Eric. You're not necessarily a crackpot to be a speaker at a UFO conference. Well, Matt, your own personal guru is Carl Sagan, who had quite an open mind on the extraterrestrial life front. I strongly believe that there are aliens out there somewhere. I just don't think that they're probing people in middle America.

It'll just be a short while till you're at one of those conferences, Matt. Be careful. Bob, how have you taken the turn that Brett has taken rather publicly towards vaccine hesitancy, skepticism, you might say anti-vax advocacy, and then strong promotion of ivermectin as a miracle drug that can save the world in three easy steps. Well, I mean, I genuinely do try to keep an open mind on these things because in the US, I'm maybe more conscious than you are of the way Trump polarized media coverage of things. Once Trump started advocating hydroxychloroquine, it was going to have a real uphill struggle, the drug was, to get like the New York Times to say it works. Now, as I understand it, it doesn't work, so it doesn't matter. But my point is things are really so polarized here that it affects the coverage of even things like that.

I try to keep an open mind when somebody says they have a marginalized view that's not getting airtime. I listened to Brett's podcast on ivermectin and the guy, what's his name? Pierre Corey. He described this study in either Argentina or Chile or something. And I went and looked up the details and he really hadn't characterized it accurately. He had failed to mention that ivermectin was not the only drug being administered to the group, leaving aside that it wasn't a control group. And it was exactly the kind of situation where you can imagine it not being controlled, leading to dramatically misleading results and all that. He just had not spoken carefully about it the way a scientist

would. Similarly, I mean, you know, Brett's Vax podcast with Robert Malone, who does seem to have some relevant credentials and seems relatively sober. And this other guy whose name escapes me. Steve Kush. Yeah. He seemed like, I mean, did you listen to it? Yes. He seems emotionally unstable or something. I mean, he's like a rich guy who funds research. And so people like Malone are nice to him, I guess. But my later heard Malone on Tucker Carlson show speaking critically of Tony Fauci, and I have criticisms of Tony Fauci, but this was in a way that led me to wonder whether he didn't have kind of a thing about Tony Fauci, like a history of antagonism that had colored his whole reaction to Fauci-supported vaccines. I think it's legitimate to look at this stuff on multiple levels. You can look at the

level of evidence and arguments and so on, talk about meta-analyses, talk about whether or not it's a proper RCT or not. But I'm pretty hesitant to do that, to be honest, because I'm not a virologist and I'm not an epidemiologist. You know, I know a lot of people do love to dive into that and that's good, but I do think there's a pretty good argument. Unless you're a completely

paranoid conspiracy theorist i think there is good reason to defer to bona fide experts in these fields and i don't mean individual people but rather the community as a whole i do agree that you know some fields do have especially in the social sciences my own psychology have can have a bias one way or another with fields like virology and the heart of sciences generally i feel much more confident in simply going to the peer-reviewed literature and i don't mean pouring through the methods section or someone of some random papers. I mean, just reading the review articles and the commentary articles, the high level opinions essentially from experts. And I tend to take that as a guide personally. Yeah, it's true. I mean, at the same time,

the vax thing has, as hydroxychloroquine did, has gotten caught up in this kind of tribal lens, this kind of tribal conflict in America. And not only that, but of course, anti-vaxxers have a reputational problem to begin with. So I'm open to the possibility that there could be data that reflects unfavorably on the vaccine that's not getting as much attention as it deserves. But so far as I can tell, the concerns are pretty conjectural. It's not like there's any clear data that he can show us. I may have a more favorable view of Brett generally than you do. I've generally thought he's a less problematic character than Eric. As I said, I listened to your podcast on his claim that he came up with this theory that didn't get its day in court. And as it happens, I knew, most of them

are not alive, but I knew some of the characters in this story. I mean, I know Brett slightly because he was on my podcast before he cut off communication with me because of my piece about Sam Harris. I knew his dissertation advisor, Richard Alexander. I knew George Williams, who was this huge figure in the senescence field. I thought you asked earlier, you know, do I have any criticisms? I thought you were a little too hard on him. I think the bare bones of that story could be true. It happens that you share a good idea with some more prestigious scientist,

you fail to get it on the record, you make the mistake maybe of just saying it in conversation, so there's no paper trail, and they take more credit than they should and they don't cite you. That has definitely happened. That could be the case. Now, that wasn't the end of his story. And I think, I mean, there's no doubt that Eric was hyping the whole thing, but that's another case where, you know, I'm kind of agnostic. I haven't dismissed the possibility that that thing happened. I'm still not clear on how important Brett's idea was, but I did go look at his paper and read the abstract. It was not nothing. I don't know. the abstract it was uh it was not nothing i don't know yeah oh look i mean this is one of those issues i mean partly it's a he said she said thing of course you know so it's it's speculative but

it's one of those questions where one's priors come into play and as you say yeah it's true that people academics steal each other's ideas right that that that happens and um yeah more prestigious more established people might take credit for stuff that say a graduate student did at the same time i just know from personal experience that good ideas are a dime a dozen in academia like it's just super rare that somebody comes up with an idea and no one else has thought of that and the idea is really the precious thing um you know people talk all the time there's just so much communication going on that again it's just personal experience in academia that really what matters is is turning that nice idea it's a bit like being an entrepreneur,

turning the nice idea into reality. That's actually the key thing. So I guess my prior there was having, I mean, but what is actually very common is academics feeling like someone else has taken our good idea. It's really, really common. This problem is not confined to academics, believe me. I mean,

there's a literature on this particular cognitive bias. By the way, George Williams is an interesting case because he was not the kind to lodge those kinds of complaints, but he probably had grounds to. If you look at the theories that are considered foundational in evolutionary psychology, a number of them can be found in his book, Adaptation and Natural Selection. Bob Trivers developed them, and maybe you're right. It's the person who takes the idea and runs with it. But I know for a fact Bob Trivers was reading his book, and the basics of reciprocal altruism can be found in Williams. The basics of what was called the theory of parental investment, I think, along with, I believe it was Williams who came up with a very smart way to kind of test the theory,

the hypothesis in a sense. George Williams is a great thinker. I mean, I'm getting off track now, but he really was a really wonderful human being and an unsung hero in evolutionary biology. I've heard you talk about that before, Bob, in an episode discussing Evo Psych. I can't remember who you were interviewing, but I think you made the case well for that. And I think that's largely beyond dispute and beyond most theorists in evolutionary psychology kind of land. I'm following a beyond most theorists and evolutionary psychology kind of land. In regards to Brett, just to put a quota on that point, I would say, like Matt, that, you know, academics not giving credit, a grad student having ideas stolen or whatever.

Yes, happens. And I wouldn't have that much skepticism about something like that happens. The way Brett tells it with like a telephone call and all that oh okay like the specifics whatever you know the mists of time but the issue that looms large for me is that Brett doesn't just say I had an idea I talked about with someone and they ram of it and got some studies right what he claims is that they realized the importance of this insight they held it in house they use this to secret knowledge to create like a whole line of experiments then in her nobel talk that this is kind of a centerpiece that she's now adopted and like a weinsteinian framework without credit and that if brett had been credited not only would he have adopted like a Weinsteinian framework without credit. And that if Brett had been credited, not only would he have had like a successful paper and more influence, but actually the entire drug industry in the US may have come crashing down because of this problem with the telomeres of specific mice that were prevalent.

And like all of that seems to me hugely dubious I watched Carol Greider's Nobel speech and the the part that Brett is talking about is a slide and it's it's like covered in about 20 seconds and it's a very like she basically says you know we did this interesting study oh the and we find out actually lab mice had surprisingly long telemeters or like one species of lab mice but but when i looked in the details after that study they're looking at like 15 different strains and that's just one of them but in any case like the we don't need to litigate the details but i just want to say that those extrapolations that he poses a threat to the entire pharmaceutical industry and that he uses this to justify his skepticism of the current set of vaccines that all seems like highly dubious to

me and why it's right to be skeptical as opposed to like say well there might be some truth to what he's saying because the truth might be there but the the broader points it feels are very far-fetched i wondered about that has he explicitly made that connection because i wondered whether his current jihad against kind of pharmaceutical conventional wisdom both on the covid therapy and and the covid vaccination front whether that was somehow grounded in antagonism toward the pharmaceutical industrial complex, which would be kind of weird because I don't think his theory is that Biogen stepped in and suppressed and was in cahoots with this professor he thinks stole his credit. But I wonder about that. Has he made the connection himself? He has. Yeah.

Yeah. He's specifically like that. And you know that he's anti-fraudation. Oh, God. Is he really? Yes. Does he think it's a communist plot like in Dr. Strangelove or he just thinks it's bad? I think he just thinks it's bad.

But the other stuff that comes into play is that Brett has a history of grandiose claims. All right. There is like he's outlined an alternative theory of evolution. Yeah, like lineage evolution. You mean the, what's it called, explorer mode? Yeah, that kind of thing. Explorer mode is part of lineage lacking. I'm not convinced that's entirely crazy.

Now, he did trot out on my podcast a theory specifically about human evolution that I think seems pretty far-fetched. I have to look into explorer mode a little more. I think most biologists are taking it to be a form of group selection. I'm not sure it's not. But that aside, he did have this theory of human evolution that had this side effect of glorifying the people in the intellectual dark web like there's some special adaptation oh yeah yeah that gives humans the power there's like some switch that can get flipped when things are really dire and we need really creative solutions and he thinks that's like built into our genes. And in the IDW people, the switch has been flipped. And the rest of us are waiting for our switch to be flipped.

I mean, look, people can see if I'm being unfair, but it's on YouTube. Google me and Brett Weinstein. I have to add to that, Bob. We'll move off Weinstein world, we promise shortly. I'm not sure, but we all we all seem to like talking about it they're fascinating characters but Eric has also like a post-election we covered this episode he did where he did like he does his little 15 minute introductions to his podcast and he essentially weaved a narrative whereby the term fake news was invented by like a secretive cabal

in order to elect Biden but most importantly was also designed to discredit the intellectual dark web and long-form podcasters wait the term the term fake news yeah so it was like he had a narrative whereby it wasn't just, you know, that fake news was a term that came to prevalence after Trump. He was kind of making a Mandela effect kind of argument saying you thought the fake news was something that was discussed in the run up to the 2016 election. It was actually a post-election narrative. And I think that rests on like the specific term where Trump started popularizing like fake news as a term. But Eric's narrative, like the thing with Brett that you described, the amazing thing was it all linked into the targeted suppression of the intellectual dark web thinkers, Sam Harris, Joe Rogan, him, his brother. And this was that the blob or the neoliberal institutions, they sensed the danger and they were just, they were running mad to shut it down. So it's always impressive that the intellectual dark web is the beating heart of the resistance

to whatever they are. I would say the only hope for our species lies within the intellectual dark web. I actually think this goes into a topic that I wanted to ask you about and relates to your figure who you are a great admirer of. So Barry Weiss has started her podcast called Honestly. That's the title. I can't remember the person she interviewed

for the first episode. It was a journalist. At the end of the interview, she basically asked him, what can we do to defend the Republic in the face of everything that's happened in partisanship, the problems with liberal media

and right-wing extremism and so on. And the answer of her guest was that subscribe to people on Substack, support independent journalists, and that basically people like Barry and so on are holding the line for Western civilization against encroaching forces of wokeness. And you've been active in this space a a long time you have kind of like one foot in alternative media one foot in mainstream media maybe or at least previously and i wonder you don't seem the kind of person to take that grandiose stand but what do you think about the

broad dynamics alternative media the mainstream media is it the sub stack is the savior of civilization or where do you land? Well, I mean, you know, we all have our hobby horses. We all have our areas where we think our views don't get enough attention. My own probably is in foreign policy. I do think the American foreign policy narrative that you see in mainstream media is a very destructive and dangerous thing. I mean, if you just look at the way the New York Times covers Iran, for example. Now, it goes back to the Iraq War. I was against the Iraq War.

I observed the way it was being processed. I hold out hope that alternative media could expand the Overton window or whatever in that space. That said, in the run-up to the Iraq war, bloggers were as complicit as mainstream reporters in confirming the kind of mindset that got us into the Iraq war. So the other thing I just think is like, at some point they're going to have to quit calling it alternative. I mean, Joe Rogan, who wouldn't kill to be on Joe Rogan's show? If you're like Eric Weinstein and you can email Joe Rogan and say, I'd like to be on your show like April 2nd after I roll out my paper,

and then it happens, well, just quit whining about being ignored by media. There's like, where would you rather be on that day? Anywhere? There's no place where stuff like that gets discussed that would be better than Joe Rogan show. A hobby horse that Matt and I sometimes get on is that when people are talking about mainstream media and the lack of attention. They tend to one completely ignore the entire right wing ecosystem. Brett can talk about he's not appearing on the New York Times or CNN, but he is appearing on Tucker Carlson. He's getting coverage now on Infowars as it happens. You know, Megyn Kelly interviewed him and Joe Rogan did an emergency podcast in a similar way with Eric.

So I think you made a similar, not exactly a similar point when you were criticizing Sam Harris, but this inability to see that there's a kind of tribalistic element to it and an openness to those narratives, it seems to be really lacking and the willingness to acknowledge that, as you've described with Eric, that he is now a part of an establishment or he's a celebrity figure with a lot of push, a lot more than Tim Nguyen, information, eco-space, or that kind of thing. No, absolutely. One reason I find the Weinstein so fascinating is the role they played in catalyzing at least some of this. I mean, Joe Rogan had his own momentum before Barry Weiss popularized the label Intellectual

Dark Web and put it in the New York Times and got all this attention. Of course, Eric had thought up the phrase, but it's just interesting the synergy between the brothers. Brett had started to become a figure because of the Evergreen controversy. And then Eric, he's the impresario of the two. And you kind of saw this in the dialogue between them, right? It's like Brett is, he's this humble scholar who, gosh, doesn't want to make a big deal of this or anything. And Eric is, wait, this theory was huge. And you suffered an egregious crime. And it's interesting to see how they have worked together to kind of launch the intellectual dark web almost.

Again, this was happening anyway. I mean, the reaction against wokeism was going to happen. And that's a lot of this. It was happening with Jordan Peterson. And so with or without the idw label maybe we'd be roughly where we are but the weinsteins are a fascinating case study in in new media synergy or something i think you can't overstate the influence of the reaction against wokeness if we want to call it that. I mean, somebody, actually, Liam Bright tweeted today,

if the Evergreen students could have just chilled out for a couple of days, then none of us would have ever heard of Brett Weinstein. And to some degree, that's true of Jordan Peterson as well. That's true. That was his total ticket. Absolutely. And what's interesting with him and Jordan Peterson is how you become famous for one thing. And maybe this is one of the perils posed by restrictive speech codes or something. I mean, at least in Peterson's case, it was a speech code. It's like you become famous just for violating a speech code. And then all of a sudden, you've got a huge audience listening to you go on and on about the logos you translate your fame from the from kind

of the boundary pushing realm into uh into guru territory well exactly i mean the key thing is is that the narrative of the suppression of dangerous ideas and i agree with you about say the new york times having not being particularly willing to write about certain things and being much more willing to be talking about other things. I agree that's true. But the gurus that we look at, they gain so much leverage from the narrative that you cannot get this information anywhere else.

Mainstream media isn't willing to talk about it. These theories about covert or whatever they rely on the conspiracy essentially because without the conspiracy why on earth would you listen to them they have no qualifications or experience in the areas that they're talking about so so the rationale for listening to them is that you can't trust what's being published in, say, The Lancet or BJM, because those researchers are all tainted. They're either succumbing to a kind of groupthink, or they're subjected to institutional incentives, or they're directly part of a conspiracy.

So there's a spectrum there. But the rationale is the same. They rely on that no persecution is a great asset these days or the perception of persecution so the actually i was curious about this i'm i'm you may have spelt it out before but like you have a quite an interesting position because like blogging head seems to the platform as a general thing that exists seems to be relatively welcoming to you know people having to be it's across the aisle so to speak and you host a podcast that is explicitly that right with your frenemy mickey cows i get the impression from

that that you're not on board with notions about, you could call it like pollution narratives, that you shouldn't give platforms to people who are any further right than center-left, basically. And even center-left are kind of questionable to look at. But I'm wondering, has that dynamic impacted you? You live in America, you talk to a lot of people that are deemed beyond appeal or controversial, and you also do it on the left side of the spectrum, because I would probably have more criticism for like platforming,

so to speak, of people like Aaron Maté and so on. But I'm just wondering, you know, how do you view those dynamics as somebody that's like been in the game for a long time? Yeah. I feel almost sure I'm the only podcaster who's had a conversation with both Aaron Mate and Brett Stevens, for example. Aaron gets dismissed as an Assad apologist. I mean, one thing I feel very strongly about is the value of cognitive empathy. That's not like feeling people's pain. It's just understanding their perspective. Yeah. And I want to apply that to everybody. I want to understand how Assad views the world. I don't

consider Aaron an Assad apologist, but whether he is or not is actually immaterial to me. If he is a good stand-in for how Assad views the world, fine. I want to know how Assad views the world, how Putin views the world. And I just know how the view we got of the Syrian civil war in America was not a balanced view, okay? Because we intervened by proxy, and that just colored the way the whole thing was covered. And my own view is, in retrospect, if we and our allies hadn't funneled a bunch of weapons into Syria, we'd be in a better place. Assad would still be in charge. He would have done some horrible stuff, but way less than he did. And a lot of, you know, there are various dead people and refugees who

wouldn't be dead people and refugees. So I don't want to get into the politics too heavily, but I think if we had at that point understood that the story was just a little more complicated than one dictator and an entire nation that felt oppressed by him and had understood that there were people who didn't like the proxies that were being armed because they considered them scary jihadists, we'd be better off. I mean, it's just an example of where, would I have Alex Jones on? No. He's obviously not acting in good faith. He has manipulated people's brains in an obviously horrible way. And I'm kind of surprised that Joe Rogan has had him on his show recently, at least within the last year, right? Yeah.

There are limits I draw, but they're not ideological. I would say that I'm completely on board, Bob, with your general stance, which is that there are narratives and things are more complicated than are presented in mainstream American media. I don't have that much experience of, you know, American media like CNN or Fox, you know, just the clips that rotate around the internet. But I gather there are, you know, narratives that are rather simplistic in the way that things are presented. But perhaps the part where I would differ from you is that when you interviewed Bret Stevens and you tried to get him to have cognitive empathy for how people in Palestine may regard the situation in Israel, regardless of the truth of how it came to be or that, but just the situation they find themselves in and why it might make them amenable to people who would justify violence.

them amenable to people who would justify violence. And he didn't seem to want to do that, right? But from my point of view, I completely agreed with you that there's no harm. In fact, it's helpful to take the viewpoint of like, why would these people act like that, right? And I come from Northern Ireland. So in the same respect, it was helpful to meet Protestants and, you know, see the way that they view the situation in Northern Ireland, which is very different from me and my family and my experience. But it's helpful to understand their perspective. where you're claiming that things are false flags and that you're denying the chemical attacks took place and going on tours organized by the Assad regime. Like there is complicated narratives and there are views which are heterodox

or alternative viewpoints. But there's also, there is apologism, apologetics and conspiracy theories and denialism. If you disqualified every journalist who has been on a trip organized by a government, you know, Assad, it is the government of Syria. And is your argument that it's a. No, it's not. My argument isn't that you can never do that. You can never go on that.

I think he denies that he was subsidized in any way by the government. I'm not sure. But and I don't I don't know the details. Basically, I see it as there are always things when people have to get access. And like if you want to go to North Korea, you're going to have to deal with the North Korean state. You're not going to have freedom of movement in that country. That's just the reality. Right. But there's a difference if you then come back and say, well, I see North Korea, the people there, they're happy, and I got to talk to them. And I got to see, you know, how the situation was on the ground. If you end up that you're essentially endorsing then a regime's position, at least I look skeptical of that and I think like Max Blumenthal and the

gray zone there's been pretty good documents about a shift in their perspective which aligned with a visit to a Russian conference right and in even if you don't accept that, I think their questioning of the evidence for the war crimes of like the gas attacks and that, that seems really approaching the same kind of thing of global warming denialism in terms of credibility. that there's certainly people who you can find that will argue that. There's experts who will say it's exaggerated. But the weight of evidence is quite firmly against them. Well, actually, there's one chemical weapons attack where a lot of documents came out in Wikipedia. It's the Douma attack, the one that Trump retaliated for without waiting for the inspection team from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to get there. And in that case, the

original director of the OPCW, of the Organization for Prevention of Chemical Weapons, okay, has himself said that there needs to be an investigation because there is evidence that the OPCW under American pressure covered up the original report filed by the inspection team. And what I've said about that is I have no idea what the story is. What I'm sure of, I've looked at the documents enough to know for sure that if the American media were doing its job, there would at least be a story about the controversy, about the fact that the original director of the OPCW has said this. It strikes me as, as I say, kind of similar parallels where you might have people that are involved in IPCC, for example, who will release their version where

they say, look, this was a political document and I disagreed with the projections of global warming, right? And my analysis did not support the claims of this document. And that's the impression I get with the analyst who, you know, made a report and was annoyed that it wasn't reflected in the final report that was issued. There are, like you say, there's difference of opinions exist, but it's in the same way that there are difference of opinions exist, but it's in the same way that there are different set of opinions exist on global warming. There's still a very strong consensus in a particular

direction. So if you cover the controversy, I think you have to frame it that there's minority positions on those issues. Sure, of course. Let me put this in the context that matters to me. And it gets back to the title of both my newsletter and my book, Non-Zero, which is about my conviction that the institutions of global governance be functioning well. So I think there should be an investigation into how the WHO has handled the pandemic and whether they did or did not submit to Chinese pressure. And I do think there should be an investigation of whether the OPCW submitted to pressure from the Trump administration. See, for me, it's not so much about the chemical weapons attack. It's about the functioning of an international institution and the fact that these institutions in some cases aren't being taken seriously enough by our media to even be closely monitored. Now, as it happens,

the WHO thing is feeding into this neo-Cold War narrative with China. So that's going to get attention and that should get attention. But I'm saying all legitimate questions about the functioning of international institutions should get attention and they're not getting it in all cases. Can I push back one last thing on that, Bob? When you say like the don't get attention, like the WHO, to me, when I look at the past two years, there's been nothing but attention a who team trying to organize access with china right and they have a taiwan reporter who asked them about taiwan's response right and they do this terrible attempt to avoid the question of like addressing a geopolitical point and they oh you know they hang up the call right that got got taken as like complete irrefutable evidence of the capture of the WHO to China's agenda.

Whereas to me, that seems more, and one, it got covered everywhere. Like I heard about, I'm still hearing about that endlessly. But to me, that is an example of like, that's a mid-level WHO person trying to avoid creating something that's going to be quoted all over the media and that the the chinese government will then react strongly to that would to me kind of counteract that nobody is issuing these criticisms they're not being heard and that

they should be hated because like a nuanced view of that to me is that yes we should be concerned like you say with the influence of China on the WHO but we shouldn't be focusing on things like that zoom call as being this thing that we need to endlessly litigate because it could happen in so many contexts right that you don't involve Chinese domination or alternatively I mean I agree that was overemphasized, but it was interesting. But what I feel is that this narrative that China runs the WHO should be counterbalanced by an understanding of how often the United States has strong-armed international institutions. And the OPCW, this may be a case of it. There is evidence that there was a team of US officials who visited the OPCW and tried to lay down the law about what the findings

of the inspection team should be. That should at least be examined. And that's what I want, is an understanding that the US has often abused its power with international institutions. We shouldn't do it. We shouldn't do it. China shouldn't do it. That's my view. Well, we can all agree on that. All right. Okay. I'm going to perform my role as let's all agree that international institutions are important and that big, powerful nations like China and the United States do have a fair bit of influence on them. It's uncontroversial to say that whether it's the EU or the United Nations, they're not necessarily functioning in the way that they were envisaged to function. And let's also agree that politics

in the Middle East is very complicated, very complicated indeed. And simple narratives don't work very well there. I'm going to change direction here because i just want to correct one small thing because bob i think you got the impression that we were kind of down on evo psych and we're actually not i mean speaking for myself i'm a huge fan of evolutionary psychology in terms of the respectable parts of it, and there's a lot of it, the stuff that you see on Twitter or on social media that everyone tends to talk about, whether or not it's the sort of EvoPsych bros who want to make some point about women and lipstick or something,

or the haters, it tends to be a relatively small proportion of it that you do not see in EvoPsych textbooks in psychology departments. You only see it on social media. So, yeah, I just wanted to correct that potential misperception. Okay. I thought I had heard Chris allude to issues you had with EvoPsych, but without elaboration. Without elaboration. Yeah, I would say, like Matt, I take issue with, like, Jeffrey Miller school of evil. I tend to be very skeptical of a lot of the claims about the revolve around, like Matt says, the wearing red at certain times of fertility.

times of fertility but i'm much less skeptical of that like in the conversation you had with evan thompson where he was kind of emphasizing that massive modularity is a a necessary feature of the evil psych approach and i was more on your side there that you know that might have been true early in the evil psych field but now there's a much greater understanding of the role of culture and and the dominant views would be dual inheritance theory so like i like joe henricks and michael murta krishnas and that kind of groups work on evil psych so maybe i maybe it's an issue that you would share that like some of the way that evolutionary psychology is presented in the mainstream is doing it at service. Or do you think that's not like? Oh, I'm sure that's true.

And I don't like the way casual applications of it have gotten caught up in politics or at least some of them. I mean, like James Damore, is that his name? politics, or at least some of them. I mean, like James Damore, is that his name? The guy at Google who wrote the memo. And I think there was a conflation between kind of evolutionary psychology and his observations on some data about sex differences that was kind of unfortunate. It's not like, I mean, for example, if women seem to do, if there's some evidence that they seem to do better on some tasks than others relative to men, I mean, it's not the case that evolutionary psychology always has some story about why that would be in the genes. There are sex differences in the aggregate. I mean, you know, statistical differences that evolutionary psychology does think have a genetic basis, but I think you need to be careful about that. Your regular listeners

may know, you had a conversation with Evan Thompson. He's critical of something that he calls Buddhist modernism, I guess, which is kind of Western secular Buddhism. And I want to be clear, first of all, that I don't hold one view that he attributes to Buddhist modernism, which is that this Western secular Buddhism actually captures the essence of the true ancient Buddhism. And he kind of mischaracterized my book and his book, not intentionally. As you know, he and I had a conversation about this, and I think I succeeded in convincing him that my book actually says the opposite, that Western secular Buddhism is one evolutionary strand of Buddhism. I do think it captures a lot of what you could call the naturalistic part of Buddhism going back pretty far. And by that, I mean not rebirth, not gods, not the stuff that some people might call supernatural or metaphysically exotic or whatever.

I was focusing on the parts of Buddhism, which are emphasized in this Western Buddhism, which are, I think, amenable at least to scientific and you might say philosophical analysis without appeal to special revelation or authority or anything. But I'm not under the illusion that that's what Buddhism is in Asia. I say in my book that a lot of Americans at least think that Buddhism is this religion where they don't believe in God and they do meditate. It's closer to being the opposite. In Asia, by and large, the lay people don't meditate, and they do believe in deities, not a creator God, but deities. So

on that, I'm more on Evan's page than I think he thought I was. Yeah. It reminds me, Bob, just to mention that we covered Sam Harris talking about this, and he mentioned that if you engage in introspective practices, you will confirm the key insights of Jesus and the Buddha. So in that sense, there's quite a strong contrast between the stance that you're taking, I think, on that topic. I remember when you played that segment from Sam, I listened to that podcast too of yours. And when

he says basically that Sam has had the same experience that Jesus had or something. I mean, first of all, look, I was raised Protestant. I don't recall Jesus mentioning, you know, having the not self-experience in anything like explicit terms. I mean, maybe, I don't recall Jesus mentioning, you know, having the not self-experience in anything like explicit terms. I mean, maybe, I don't know. I mean, I suppose there are things you could take as metaphorical or something, but. Me and Chris grew up in a Catholic background, so it's mainly just about the not masturbating. That's the key message, I think. Yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah, Sam is, I mean, this brings us back to kind of the character of the IDW, I guess. One interesting question is how much of the character of the new atheist did the IDW inherit? There is, and look, the IDW is a pretty diverse set of characters, I guess, And it seems to have fallen apart anyway, but which is very entertaining it's an assertion of almost unique authority, right? It's like Sam has seen the one true vision. I remember he had on his podcast, Joseph Goldstein, who's a very renowned, very important figure in American Buddhism, very important. Sam was championing this one kind of meditation and Joseph had done that and he had done another kind and he thought they both had value. And Sam was like, no, no, no. The kind I'm doing, the kind I'm doing is, you know, trying to get Joseph to say one was better than the other. There does seem a myopic expression there. And I think Evan makes a very valid critique when he's kind of saying the view from nowhere.

I mean, you've made this point as well, Bob, with your article about Sam and tribalism, that it's a very appealing narrative that you are seeing things objectively and non-tribalistic and all of your opponents are simply engaged in tribalism and bad faith it's like a that's that's a very useful way to frame the the reason that you may disagree with people so it's maybe unfortunately that this might be a bit harsh on like modern buddhism but i think there isn't a tendency towards that amongst modern Buddhists that it's a prevalent sentiment that maybe it's common in general from people who convert to things later in life that they think they have seen something that other people haven't. Yeah, maybe I should plead a little guilty to that. I mean, the feeling I had after my first meditation retreat, which was like a week-long silent meditation retreat, and you know, I had never had any success meditating before then. But my consciousness had been so transformed by the end of that that I came out of it as something of an evangelist.

I was just way less inclined to, like, judge people. I mean, calmer, but I'm willing to defend the claim that it was closer to being an objective view of reality that I had at the end of it I'm willing to defend that claim I've never gotten to the view from nowhere that's what true enlightenment would be I guess I don't I don't know I've never met anybody I was sure had attained enlightenment I mean I don't know if Sam actually says he has or not but I believe at that moment and this is hard to hang on to this point you can get to in the course of a retreat. But I think at that moment I had a clearer view of the world. And the connection to evolutionary psychology is just that, and this was a theme in my book, The Moral Animal, about evolutionary psychology, is just that natural selection did not design us to see the world clearly.

And in some ways it designed us to have a specifically distorted view of the world. That's what all these cognitive biases are about. On that point, I agree with you very, very strongly. I teach a class in neurophysiology, and we actually go in detail into the biological basis for cognition and behavior in people. And it's strong. It's very strong. And the one lesson from evolution is that evolution is stupid.

It doesn't have our best interests at heart. We actually have entirely different interests. And I don't think you're a fan of Richard Dawkins, but I think it was him who described... No, I'm a fan of early Dawkins. Oh, yeah too pretty philanthropic yeah yeah i i'll leave that to another another time maybe yeah like he one one metaphor i liked of his i think it was him who described like us as in our conscious selves as being like a parasitic software virus, right, that had invaded our brains, a bit like the invasion of the body snatchers. And we're now essentially inhabiting these hosts

and bending our biological substrate to our own fiendish desires, which is to do things like create art and have nice non-dominating relationships with one another and do podcasts and a whole bunch of things which have absolutely nothing to do with evolution. And that's like a marvellous thing. But I agree with you that our biases, our heuristics, including things like overconfidence,

there's a famous result where, I hope it hasn't been invalidated because of like a lot of social psychology. Don't tell me if it has. But there's a famous result where i hope it hasn't been invalidated because of like a lot of social psychology don't tell me if it has but there's there's a very nice result which is that people with a more inaccurate view of the world tend to actually are happier and do better and in various ways i mean that's just that's just an illustration that it's not i mean we do want to be happy but you know it is an illustration that one being, I don't think being happy is necessarily consistent with following your biological impulses. And two, having an accurate view of the a reasonable approximation of maximizing genetic proliferation.

But the point is, A, that doesn't mean creating happy organisms. In fact, quite the opposite. It means creating eternally unsatisfied organisms. And that is a deep connection with Buddhism and early Buddhism. To get back to things that were in the ancient texts, you know, the Buddha's first, well, what is said to be his first sermon. We don't know what was what. But the point is the earliest texts say it's his first sermon is about how the craving for things leads to unhappiness. That's a product of natural selection. We keep thinking that satisfying the craving is going to make us enduringly happy, and it doesn't.

And that's just one of many ways in which, you know, natural selection does not design organisms to be happy uh it does it designs them to attain happiness but but the point is it also designs a happiness to evaporate so that they will be motivated again to do the next thing and then there's the second problem that we're living in an environment different from the one it designed us for anyway i mean this is not uh you know this is a technologically weird place that is definitely not hunter hunter-gatherer society. You're familiar with the work on supernormal stimuli? I'm not sure what you mean by that, no. It's basically just supporting your point there.

There's a whole lot of research on what they call supernormal stimuli, which are essentially artificial artifacts, which instigate responses to our evolved of evolved preferences, but are like a hypernormal versions of it, which can lead us in a not necessarily healthy direction. So typical examples are things like, you know, gambling products, right. And which basically hijack our reward systems, but but also things like pornography, for instance, which... Well, and just one place I'd advocate mindfulness is on social media. Just try to be aware of the feelings that are leading you to retweet something or to reply to somebody. And if you can pause and observe the feeling, and I think meditation does make you better at this, you can probably keep

yourself out of some trouble and maintain a little more in the way of equanimity. So Evan has suggested that when people are taking part like in long silent retreats or so on, that rather than getting like an objective insight into the mind, that they are being fed an interpretive framework, right? One which is associated with a certain tradition. And I don't think you'd take an issue with that because you could do like a

Hindu meditation retreat, which give you a different kind of framework for the experiences. But the question I have is say that the approach that you outlined that it does, regardless of whether it's a culturally transmitted framework and how authentic it is to an original tradition, that it does give you the ability to control, recognize emotional reactions, have a bit more distance and so on. And in a sense then, like be aware of how you're experiencing things if that were the case doesn't matter in any respect if it is ultimately tied into the buddhist tradition or like a a long an ancient teaching right because like if it's a modern thing and works i'm I'm just wondering, is there a necessity or any benefit to begin by crediting it

to a Buddhist tradition, except to say like, this is where I'm drawing ideas from, but I have no idea about where they fall. I don't think it's essential. I think it actually helps some people. Some people like getting into the ritual and bowing to the Buddha statue when they walk into the meditation hall. I don't do that stuff. It helps some people. And that's why, you know, I don't get into big arguments about whether we really know that the Buddha said this, even though my own view is one of agnosticism about what we know about what the Buddha actually said, because, you know nothing, so far as we know, is recorded in texts that have survived at the time he lived. It does help some people,

but there are people who are treating it as divorced from Buddhism and want to do it that way. There were people who wouldn't, like there's a mindfulness magazine or something that wouldn't touch my book because it had the word Buddhism in it. And there are a lot of institutional settings. Well, I mean, American schools, believe me, if you want to get mindfulness into the schools, you should not mention the name of a non-Christian religion. And so it is being divorced from Buddhism in that context, which I think is also fine. Whatever works. And I would say, by the way, you're right that the retreat can shape your interpretation of what's going on. And there are a lot of different meditation traditions, even within Buddhism. I mean, Tibetan meditation is very different.

And there are different streams of that from what I've done, which is mainly, you know, want to talk about, which is, you know, how our evolved brains distort our vision. Yeah, and you're probably damned if you do and you don't in a way, because like, if you didn't acknowledge the Buddhist history of certain ideas, you know, other people would take issues with you not giving credit. So like like you're rocking a hard place spring to mind but yeah i wonder bob the ostensible theme of our podcast is talking about gurus right and we've we've talked about a wide variety of potential gurus but i'm curious in some respects it wouldn't be beyond appeal if people suggested have you considered doing robert right he's a like he fits the guru model right and there's a perennial joke amongst

people where they say when are you going to decode yourself right that comes up so i'm we've noted that like in thinking about the topic that a lot of the stuff that we're focusing on in the guru sphere is slightly the negative skewed side of it. Right. Slightly. A little more than slightly, Chris. There is an air of skepticism I've noticed, yes. Just a tad. in a sense is actually like the way that we we try to rate people and because you know it makes us feel a bit better as well if we can put people on scales and not say that everyone we're treating is just in a flat category but the grommeter that we came up with these 10 characteristics

if you score highly on that you're generally not a good person so you're you know at least people should be wary. I guess I'm wondering how you personally or in general feel about the topic of the parasocial dynamics that exist now in the online world and the potential danger of being perceived as a guru. I mean, you wrote a book about Buddhism. You've written books about philosophy and how the evolutionary side, like it seems that you are, you would be in danger of falling into that thing. But I guess healthy self-deprecation counts against that. What you're asking, am I a guru?

No, I guess I'm asking, how do you avoid the unhealthy aspects of guruism doing what you do? Probably if I had a big following as Sam Harris, it would be harder. I don't know. I mean, you know, it's like audience capture is a powerful thing. I mean, I don't think I have, you know, they're just aspects of Sam's personality that are conducive to becoming a guru. The sense of self-certainty, gurus, I don't think gurus are necessarily always bad things. They're obvious pitfalls. I guess it's having an uncritical audience that constitutes a lot of the pitfalls, I would say. I mean, that's having just an enraptured, uncritical audience. And I'm not saying that Sam has that in particular, but I would think that

that's one of the things that leads people astray and leads them to start exploiting their followers and so on. I mean, I'm a little unclear on your definition of what a guru is. I was surprised that Carl Sagan qualified, for example. Yeah. Was he a borderline case? Well, yeah, it's confusing for people because we made it confusing. It's our fault. Yeah, like when we talk about those characteristics of gurus that we don't like, like the conspiracy mongering and the galaxy brain and this and so on, they're obviously all bad things, right? So there's one aspect to which we talk about gurus and it's being a bad thing we don't want to discover terrible people right so

and you know like you said you can be be a well-known sort of public figure you can be perceived as having some kind of intellectual stature You can be willing to give opinions or study or talk about a wide variety of topics. And you could do it in a healthy way. And so we enjoyed covering Carl Sagan because he, to us, was the epitome of a good guru because he does in some of these talks go beyond simply doing public education of science and talking about black holes and stars and so on. He does link that to broader thoughts about animal welfare, about international relations, about how we should be living our lives, what's important, and so on. So that's just answering your question, that there's two ways to use that word. So that's just answering your question that there's, we've got two, there's two ways to use that word.

Yeah. I mean, I would have thought that a guru needed to have some kind of self-help dimension. I guess I would qualify in those grounds. Basically, the question is forcing you to pitch yourself as a guru. I apologize for that. Yeah. It's funny. After the book came out, I did a video series with Tricycle Magazine.

You know, that's kind of the big American Buddhist magazine on mindfulness and the psychology of tribalism. Maybe that's what it was called. Originally, the idea was that Sharon Salzberg, who is this very big figure in American Buddhism, and in particular, she is the person to see on meta-meditation or loving kindness meditation. She was going to do these guided meditations to go on the end of each lecture that I gave. Then she got sick. She's now all better and it's fine, but she couldn't do them. I had the option of doing them myself, the guided meditations. And I don't know, maybe I should have. I didn't feel qualified quite. It didn't feel quite right. And I was just kind of busy, but maybe that was the guru path not taken. Who knows? Maybe if I had done that, I'd be hanging out with Sam Harris instead of you guys right now.

Yeah. You made the wrong choice, but definitely monetarily wise. I think from my perspective, when we initially started the project, we were kind of interested in the emergence of unconventional gurus might be the way to put it. Because like you suggested, the kind of traditional version of a guru is a self-help, spiritual healer, potentially alternative medicine advocate. And what we find interesting was there were these people like, like Jordan Peterson, like the Weinsteins who seem to be emerging and to display lots of the characteristics that are associated with those kinds of figures.

I'm not just, I don't even mean like, you know, Jim Jones types. I mean like more mainstream people, but that they didn't carry with them necessarily. Like I know Jordan Peterson has a self-help component but like eric weinstein doesn't necessarily right it's more about the anti-institution position so we were interested in this kind of emergence what we called secular gurus and since then on the podcast we've kind of expanded to just at people like Gwyneth Paltrow who fall more into the traditional space. But I think the thing that surprised us was that there's so many characteristics which overlap in all these categories, in the alternative health space,

in the secular guru space. And Jordan Peterson can, in many respects, just be best understood as a traditional guru figure. It's just that he also implements it through the space of science and psychology. But that's not even that unusual when you go back and look at what gurus have been talking about throughout history. Actually, this is a criticism I think you brought up to a certain extent we lack

enthusiasm when it comes to addressing like candy or contra points or the the left wasn't sure your heart was i mean i didn't i i listened to the beginning of the candy podcast and it didn't seem like you were heading into it with quite the sharp edge that you would approach say a Weinstein yeah yeah I think it's fair to say that like we're nobody with any sanity is super enthusiastic about reading into race dynamics in the U.s and like race and iq debates and that kind of thing like you know it kind of i just i always think about sam saying i really don't want to talk all the time about race and iq and yet it comes up so much but the uh from our side of it, I think we'll find people that don't fit this, but people like Kennedy and ContraPoints, they kind of fall more into possibly a point that you are talking about. intellectuals with advancing a particular political program and they didn't display the same level of the kind of manipulative guru characteristics that we like we didn't agree with

candy's framework like the anti-racist framework but i people were a little bit disappointed that we didn't tear him apart but in in our guru set he actually did come across more reasonable so it was kind of it's it's an interesting issue because it might be that the lefty type people are just a bit better at disguising their rhetoric or whatever in a way that is more palatable to audiences without like going into a Weinsteinian rant about the, the disc and whatnot. But yeah, it's, so it's an, it's a wrinkle that we've discussed. Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious, by the way, if you're, if you've thought about doing Steve Bannon, for a while, I was listening to his podcast during the Trump era and, you know, he's got, I don't know if you'd call it self-help, but he's got his sermons about agency and volition. One thing maybe all of these people have in common, I mean, if you wanted to draw in some people like the Weinsteins, even though they're not doing so much, obviously, in the way of self-help, but if you wanted to still draw them into the guru paradigm, there is this idea that if you accept their worldview, it will be transformative.

there is this idea that if you accept their worldview, it will be transformative. Right. And look, who am I? I mean, I wrote a book called Why Buddhism is True. I mean, I'm making the same claim. So maybe I'm the G word. That's something that's true of these, of all, you could say probably about pretty much all the people you're trying to draw into your model. Whether or not there's self-help, there's this hint of transformation. Yeah, no, no, that's right. I was going to push back a little bit on before when you mentioned that self-help was like a necessary ingredient. And yeah, but you've kind of said it yourself.

We don't think it is. It often, what's involved is a transformative worldview that you need to know these things it's very important to know these things so if you take someone like scott adams say he's just purely a political figure monster you know when your worldview does involve these oppressive forces that are lying to you and so on that are pulling the wool over your eyes then obviously by opening your eyes and getting woke to that is going to be super transformative. So the political and the personal overlap a great deal.

And the other thing I'll just say is that we've been thinking a lot about like, the fact is like we expected going into the Kendi episode, we, I knew virtually nothing about him. So, and except what I'd read on from people tweeting or something and my expectations was that it would be terrible like just nonsensical

rhetoric not not nonsensical but certainly really hardcore rhetoric which would have a lot of flaws in it and it it was quite carefully argued as this thing that we noticed, and his style of doing it was a very academic style. That doesn't mean, as Chris said, that we necessarily agreed with it and we could pick holes in it, but it just didn't have the same character as the centristy or right-wing gurus. And we actually find it quite hard to find, except in the health and wellness space, we find it quite hard to find gurus that fit our garometer

on the left wing. That's not to say that there isn't bad ideas on the left, that there isn't rhetoric on the left or manipulative stuff going on. Have you done Marianne Williamson? Not yet, but she's been suggested. I think there, I'm kind of convinced that if we look at Jimmy Dore and stuff, we will find very similar dynamics. You might be more sympathetic to his worldview,

but I think Glenn Greenwald and Matt Tybee as well would fall closer to the dynamics. And they have a lot of sympathy for people in the intellectual dark web. But I want to say before it goes out of my head that I think one thing, Bob, in your favor, and this is completely, I acknowledge, my own bias culturally, personality-wise in play, is that I think a key thing that the guru set lack is a genuine willingness to self-deprecate and to evoke a kind of an awareness of how partial their understanding is about topics and

the the one thing that you definitely do have is a willingness to self-deprecate and acknowledgement of partial understanding of things. So in that respect, you don't fit well into the guru set because you're self-deprecating. You can self-deprecate as a guru as long as you do it in a way where you're actually praising yourself. Then it's okay. But genuine self-deprecation is rare. Well, that's the way I've always tried to do it in a really, like a way where you're actually praising yourself. Then it's okay. But like genuine self-deprecation is rare. Well, that's the way I've always tried to do it. It sounds like I failed. You think I have not succeeded in using tactical self-deprecation to enhance my credibility.

But seriously, it's interesting. For a while, I used to think Sam Harris had no sense of humor. But then I realized he had no sense of humor, but then I realized he has a sense of humor, but it's almost always making at the expense of other people, right? It's like he would say things his audience considered funny about people who had various religious beliefs or something. And I'm trying to think if I've ever heard him be self-deprecating, but it's an interesting question, the category of self-deprecating gurus.

That's a whole realm for you to, that's a whole series of podcasts for you. Yeah, the person that we've saw who's done that is ContraPoints. There's a leftist kind of, you know, ironic self-deprecation, which I think it works as a deflection but it also seems to reflect at least in her case a genuine personality like whether it's genuine self-loathing or ironic self-loathing it's it doesn't come across as forced so they like as a as a northern Irish person I feel like I'm a connoisseur of self-deprecation it's like the core value of my society is based around that and and so i i think my bullshit detector for self-deprecation is finally attuned so yeah and

australian culture i think is quite similar matt right you forgot to put culture in inverted commas australian culture such as. Yeah, such as it is. Culture. Yeah. Yeah, we've got lots of good culture. Yeah, yeah, it's true. It's true. So, yeah, American culture, a lot of great things about it,

but it does more uncritically, I think, not everyone, obviously, and Trump's probably a bad example because, obviously, at least 50% of the country hate him. But the fact that even some people could find him an attractive or a funny person. The weird thing is, I would say, I mean, there is a strong American tradition of self-deprecation. It's part of my cultural heritage. And I would say my cultural heritage is also kind of middle American in the cultural sense. The funny thing is Trump's constituency resides largely in that demographic where supposedly self-deprecation is actually a value. That's what's so weird. You will find a lot more

self-deprecation in Missouri than New York. I don't know. It's one of the great puzzles of Trump. There is an element, Bob, like when I live in Japan, right? And when, of course, there's big cultural differences between Northern Ireland and Japan, shocking, and the cultural insight you gain here. But there is this, like, one element, which is very similar is that in Japan, there's a real value around, just leave other people alone, don't cause them disruption, like don't talk to people when they're eating, just they sit down and they eat and so on. And like,

in my case, you know, I grew up in the UK and spent time in London and stuff. And there's a little bit like the value is similar, maybe with like grumpiness around service staff, also a cultural value. But when I go to America, even in the liberal cities the level

of what looks to me to be extremely faux enthusiasm and friendliness and and a like you know a talkativeness like people talk about america about how you know people are coming insulated and isolated and so on and like i feel like they just should spend some time in other countries to understand how that is, is, is myopic perspective, because I feel baseline in America for accepting enthusiasm. And there's cross-cultural studies about willingness to self-promote. And it's always presented as the West versus the East. But it actually means Japan versus America. They're at very strong loggerheads. That seems to me, you know, the element that Trump tapped into, that there's a cultural value towards self-promotion and willingness to speak out and that kind of thing.

Yeah. Well, just being comfortable with it. I mean, and I just want to correct, because I didn't mean to imply before that Americans don't have a good sense of humor or are all annoying like Trump. Right. But, like, what I was thinking of was... He just says that in private. I know, I said that off camera because, you know, we've got a lot of Patreons in America.

Like, for example, my American colleague who's been in Australia for many years, he finds Australians quite annoying because, you know, he'll go to a place and he'll say, look, is the cake any good or whatever? And they'll go, oh, it's all right, I guess, you know. Whereas in the United States, you go, this is the best pie good or whatever? And they'll go, it's all right, I guess, you know, whereas if in the United States to go, this is the best pie in the state. We,

we make the best pie in the state. You mean if you, if you ask like, if you ask like the waiter or something, if you ask somebody who's serving it. Well, yeah, I mean,

but I think he'd say it was just a bit more like a more general willingness to be positive, not, not necessarily to be, you know, narcissistic or self-aggrandizing and that, be generally positive i do think that's more urban america i mean my heritage is from west texas farm families and i'm telling you how you doing how you doing oh yeah uh i guess not too bad i guess it could be worse i suppose

i can't imagine how but it could be no i hear suppose. I can't imagine how, but it could be. No, I hear you. I hear you. And look, so I'll say something that our entire American audience knows, which is that America is a hugely diverse place geographically, right? And places like Australia, it's just a monoculture. We've got less history, basically. Is it?

It is, basically, yeah. You go to Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, you know, even New Zealand. I mean, it's not that different, really. Like, Australians are a hell of a lot more similar to New Zealanders than Texans would be to New Yorkers. There's a couple of notable divides in Ireland. I think of one.

What? What's that? But culturally, actually, pretty similar similar relatively speaking that's so that maybe exaggerated but yeah but i i think matt matt's caveat is probably well put that like yeah listening to you and mickey i feel perfectly at home because you're both constantly either taking shots at each other or or you know self deprecated and that's very that doesn't feel it feels like a perfectly normal part you know Larry David is just as American as is Trump so yeah there there definitely is a cultural value attached to that I guess it's just in the aggregate it comes out differently yeah and we

have boris johnson in the uk like it's not that narcissistic self-aggrandizers can't can't do well yeah although you know trump trump makes him look like i don't know churchill or somebody you know it's funny i mean trump if you ask how did somebody so obnoxious capture the hearts of people who ostensibly would not seem to share many of his kind of his superficial values, his mode of self-presentation and everything, the ostentatiousness and so on. You know, the answer is related to the answer to the question of like, how did somebody as strange as Eric Weinstein burst on the scene and capture a bunch of attention? I mean, it was the they both captured the same set of frustrations. People feeling like, oh, now you're telling us what to, you know, A, B and C and so on. I think the grand unified guru theory can accommodate both Trump and Eric Weinstein in principle.

That's true. And I think there definitely is a component that people from the left side of the sphere, like us at least, don't focus that much on the issue about wokeism, you know, because there is

an already existing narrative amongst the right, which is like very fixated on wokeism, and you don't want to feed into that. But I think that context is really relevant to why certain figures can emerge and get traction, like, you know, it's, we've already mentioned, but like the evergreen situation, if the students don't do that, then I, you know, don't react in the way that they did. Right. I doubt that Brett is getting time on Fox news. Right. And he was always a guru in waiting. I think he's described that he always felt he had a place in the public conversation that was just waiting for him to burst forth but like you can see that but yeah yeah but but still he wouldn't have that if it weren't for how events transpired there so

yeah that's that's something that i think we get charged by our followers who lean more to the right as being out of touch with because matt's in aust and I'm in Japan. So Bob, are you besieged by wokeism? Do you feel in America now where you are in your enclave, are you kind of being pressed on to say men and women, there's no differences? Well, I am the least woke member of my family. My wife and my two daughters are both more woke than me. So there's a certain amount of oppression on the domestic front. My two daughters are out of the house now. Do I feel, I mean, I suppose there are things I'm reluctant to say on social media. You know, social media is kind of an intimidating place. But at the same time, I guess I'm trying to make a point to say them somewhere.

I mean, for example, I have a conversation set up with an anthropologist. You may know of him. I don't know, Augustine Fuentes. He's now at Princeton, was at Notre Dame. About the gender thing. Are there the sex differences thing? I'm going to argue the evolutionary psychology side. I feel careful about, too careful. I'm trying to start feeling less careful about what I say on social media in a sense. It's lucrative. Well, that's the funny thing is one of the, I think, largely unhealthy things about the modern environment is just how being outrageous

gets positive reinforcement. You get more and more followers and there's an incentive to be transgressive. And I think certain kinds of transgressiveness are healthy but i'm not a fan of transgressiveness for the sake of transgressiveness yeah yeah it's true isn't it like if if you are transgressive you'll you might accumulate three times as many haters as fans but you'll certainly accrue attention and many of those fans will pay you so it can work out it can work out and for for every person who's cancelled, I suppose there's maybe somebody who's benefiting. We've been watching a couple of figures like James Lindsay

and more recently Michael O'Fallon. And they didn't start off like, you know, wilting violets in general, but there's definitely a spiraling and increasing level of rhetoric that emerges from them and it gets like at least in the case of O'Fallon and Lindsay they get really just into you know Alex Jones level conspiracies the great reset billions are going to be killed and it's it's quite impressive to watch how quickly you know that pool go. But their audience is just ever expanding. So there's definitely an unhealthy dynamic there.

Well, I think speaking of audience capture, Bob mentioned audience capture before is a really important thing. And I agree with you, Chris. I think that's really happening. They notice that the more outrageous they are, there's a flurry of likes and their follower count goes up and so on.

But maybe what they don't notice is that their fan base is shifting. It may be growing, but it's actually changing. So I would say at the beginning there were many people who were fans of James Lindsay because they agreed that there were some stupid articles were fans of James Lindsay because they agreed that there were some stupid articles written in the you know critical theory of society feminist glaciology feminist glaciology right and then he may not have noticed he may not notice or care that his fan base has has shifted to include basically just lunatics now. But I guess there are a lot more of them somehow.

Yeah, when the follower count is growing and more money is coming in, it's probably hard to change course. I don't know. I wouldn't know. Yeah. I want that problem. Bob, you made that point.

I suspect it wasn't that much of a surprise for you as it was for Sam Harris when he discovered that a large amount of his audience were fans of Trump. And from your criticisms that you leveled at him and the new atheist more generally, you probably saw that coming, right? That there would be sympathies for people in that side. Because I think if I'm rightly characterizing,

you've essentially said that the New Leaf is the criticism of religion focuses like on ideology and kind of ignores the foreign policy aspect and neoliberal kind of potential influence on things. I think I was the first person to say in print that although they were casting themselves as liberals, when it came to foreign policy, they were on the right. Both if you look at some of Sam's specific views, but also almost intrinsically in the sense that if you attribute conflict to religious motivation, the sense that if you attribute conflict to religious motivation, that tends to obscure sources of conflict on the ground, so to speak, that include things like invasion and occupation

and so on. So when Richard Dawkins said, if it weren't for religion, there would be no Israel-Palestine conflict. That's just incredibly naive. And it's a way of kind of dismissing the Palestinian perspective as being a result of religious fervor. I mean, the truth is Zionism was not very religious to begin with. It was essentially secular. The initial Palestinian resistance was not particularly religious. And by the way, there are a lot of Palestinian Christians. I think it's a false view to see religion as this kind of autonomous force that governs events in the world, as opposed to the more, I suppose, in a way it's a Marxist field. I'm not some kind of thoroughgoing Marxist, but the view that

religion and ideology is itself responsive to facts on the ground. When you see fervent and intolerant forms of religion, that probably reflects some kind of conflict that has its origin on the ground. Yeah, I think you're completely right about that. It seems like a very easy thing to agree with. I guess the only little elaboration I'd put there is, like, I know an Israeli guy. He's a secular guy. And he talks a lot about the hardcore religious faction in Israel. And, you know, these tend to be settlers and so on.

And they are, you know, to at least some degree motivated by their beliefs. Well, as conflict goes on, it often gets more religiously intense. I debated Sam Harris in Los Angeles, like, I don't know, 12, 15 years ago or something. Richard Dawkins was in the audience. And I criticized his view, which was not a reflection of my courage. I didn't know he was in the audience and I criticized his view, which was not a reflection of my courage. I didn't know he was in the audience. So I criticized his view on that specific thing about, you know, there would be no Israel-Palestine conflict. And he said, but religion serves as an ethnic marker.

And now that is true. It can serve as an ethnic marker, as now that is true. It can serve as an ethnic marker as I would think it does in Ireland. But you didn't need a religious ethnic marker in Israel because you had a linguistic and cultural mark. The Arabs speak Arabic. The Israelis don't. So once you had what originated as a territorial dispute, it didn't take religion to turn it into a, you know, a kind of tribal conflict. I think that like trying to understand the Northern Ireland conflict, for example, just through the lens of the different doctrines of Protestantism and Catholicism would be like completely meaningless in comparison to understanding republicanism versus unionism as political doctrines and so I think I fall closer in line

with anybody who's arguing that social dynamics and geopolitical realities impact you know and like you say oppression and kind of invasion play a big role. But I will, I would add the caveat that there are circumstances, like, for example, when you have Western recruits to extremist Islamist groups who haven't lived in oppressive, like some of them maybe have treated badly, but there are cases where there's like foreigners from wealthy backgrounds and also people in the Middle East or in relatively wealthy backgrounds who become enamored with maybe an unsophisticated interpretation of a religion. But I think you do get ideological fanatics, but focusing on that as if that's the core that explains all conflicts.

That's the problem. And I think you would, I imagine, Bob, agree. No, sure. I mean, once you've got a conflict, you can get people who will just feel more fulfilled if they latch on to one cause or the other. But the cause can be religious. It can be ideological. It almost doesn't matter. What they need is like a worldview that can give meaning to their lives. And that's why I think we should be careful about starting conflicts. I mean, if we had not intervened by proxy in Afghanistan 40 years ago, or however long ago it was, and if we had not invaded Iraq, I mean, both of those things had ongoing consequences,

both of those things had ongoing consequences, created whole new conflicts that could generate new movements. I don't think ISIS would exist if we hadn't invaded Iraq. But yeah, absolutely. And I don't mean to say that you don't wind up with situations where people are appealing to their religions to justify the conflict. I'm just saying, I don't think that means that religious doctrine is very often the actual source of the conflict. Yeah, there's a funny parallel there, because your message there is essentially that religion may well be a contributing factor, but it's not special. It's not a special thing. And that parallels really our view of these gurus, right? Some of them may be religious or spiritual or whatever. Some of them may focus on political things, but in a sense, the details don't really matter

that much. No, I think that's right. It's partly a question of like what psychological buttons are being pushed and ideology and national affiliation and religious affiliation can all push the same buttons. And any of these things can become worldviews that give your life meaning. Bob, I feel like we've stolen a lot of your time. It's been fun, though. Is there anything that we forgot to mention or that we lose threads that we should have covered or or burning questions that

you felt have gone unanswered um just that salvation can only be found through me that that is the end game of our podcast we're getting to that in the second half of our tram i will say like and i'm gonna engage in idw back padding here so take this for what it's worth i've disclaimered now so i'm fine i enjoy bob the the way that especially your interviews where there's an element of disagreement and kind of cantankerous back and forth with guests that like it's it's still relatively rare to find people that can have you know extended conversations with like you say with someone that you disagree so strongly with like with like brett stevens and i know people argue that well that you know

civility porn and all this kind of thing but i i think there's there is civility porn but there is also just civility and the ability to have like an engaging dialogue. And I think you and your conversation with Brett Stevens did a good job of highlighting from my point of view, areas that were lacking in his position, but he also represented his position quite well. And I think that amongst the guru set, the tendency to take any strong criticism as a potential source of litigation

or as a, like, that Ezra Klein has a fundamental feeling and anybody that would agree with him is just a myopic fool, that I appreciate what you add to the information ecosystem, whether you're a guru or not. You're a good guru in my books. So if we cover you, we'll be gentle.

I can't think of a better blurb for an aspiring guru that the Decoding the Gurus podcasters themselves consider me a relatively good one. I guess if it's going to be truly IDWS back padding, I should compliment you. I've really gotten engrossed in your podcast and uh it's a fact it's a fascinating enterprise there's a lot of gurus out there so we got like a review recently where somebody was saying oh they're running out of guru because they're having to go back to the 80s i was thinking that it's really not the problem that's not the issue.

Well, also, there's nothing wrong with getting historical, and there's a lot of history on the record. I mean, you know, there's Norman Vincent Peale. There's this fascinating— L. Ron Hubbard, I think, is someone that we've talked about. Now, that's a guru. Yeah. By the way, Trump went to a church where Norman Vincent Peale preached. He was still preaching at Marble Collegiate, I think, church in Manhattan when I believe Trump went there as a kid.

So there. It's been very enjoyable, Bob, and wide ranging as anticipated. So really appreciate you humoring us for and and also like sticking with us for the past two hours really enjoyed it and appreciate it thanks bob we'll be posting links to uh all of bob's venues sub stacks podcasts patreon podcast venmo venmo patreon because he really is looking for those bucks in the links. But yeah, thanks very much for me. It's been fun. Thank you.