Decoding the Gurus - Special Episode: Is Eric Weinstein Feynman-Negative?

Episode Date: October 30, 2020

Eric Weinstein has a habit of inserting mini conspiracy laden "audio-essays" at the beginning of his podcast The Portal. The one released this week was impressive even by Eric's standards. So, the duo took took a break from preparing for their next episode on Rutger Bregman to release a Special Bonus Episode, Hot off the press!In the episode you will learn about Seberging, Milgram-negative people, and obscure Russian Penal Codes. You will also learn that the concept of Fake News is actually FAKE NEWS, invented by a shadowy cabal of media and political elites to control you sheeple. Astoundingly, there is actually a conspiracy afoot to suppress Eric and his friends in the IDW!Chris and Matt set themselves the task of deciding whether this is serious analysis, or... something else....LinksThe Portal episode 41 with the 'audio essay'New critical article on the Weinsteins at Arc Digital

Hello and welcome to a special edition of Decoding the Gurus. All our podcast episodes are special I think, but this is a very special one. A rapid response to quickly developing shit that's happening in the online sphere. I'm Matt Brown, as usual. And with me, also as usual, is Chris Kavanagh. How are you doing, Chris? Not bad. Not bad. Cool, cool.

I don't have everything teed up, I'm afraid. So that's how special it is. That's okay. That's okay. I'm on a roll. But you have initiated the special edition because there's developments that, you know, it's important to respond to in a prompt manner. So what are we going to be responding to now? Yeah. So I called you on the decoding the guru's red emergency phone because there was some amazing nonsense that had appeared on the internet.

because there was some amazing nonsense that had appeared on the internet. So I thought you needed to be alerted. And that nonsense happens to be, in this case, Eric Weinstein, who we covered on the inaugural episode of the podcast, released a new over four-hour episode with Douglas Murray, the conservative social commentator called Heroism 2020, Defense of Our Own Civilization. That episode itself could be the subject of a later episode looking at Douglas Murray and what he does. But what caught my eye was the 18-minute audio essay, as Eric describes it, that he put at the beginning of the podcast. An audio essay, you say.

And this is in the broader context of heroes defending our civilization. That doesn't sound like Eric at all. That sounds very self-aggrandizing and hyperbolic. Yeah, it's uncharacteristic for him, certainly. But yeah, the little intro seems completely independent from the discussion with Douglas Murray, except that it's leased with the same themes of societal importance and Eric and his friends being at the center of all such things. But Eric has been releasing these little audio essays or, you know, mini diatribes at the beginning of the

portal episodes since probably about, I don't know, episode 15 or thereabouts. I can't remember where he started doing that. But they're really interesting from our podcast point of view, because they're super condensed, conspiracism and guruisms, all neatly packaged into these 10 to 15 minute condensed audio splurges. I don't know what to call them, but if you're interested in conspiracy psychology or the way that online gurus construct their arguments, they're like crack because they just pump so much into such a short period. Well, look, I did listen to this one. I have heard a few, and I think you're right about that. I got to tell you, Chris, I don't know. Maybe I was tired or something when I was listening to it, but it made very little sense to me. I think it just, it washed over me. I

struggled to figure out what on earth he was getting at. I mean, I could understand individual sentences, but I think I was missing the point, but I'm hoping if we go through it again together, you'll be able to help me with it. Let's see. see if that's true but i will say i had a similar reaction where a bit like with jordan peterson or or also the weinstein's other content if you just consume it and let it wash over you it has a kind of uh free-flowing a hypnotic and I don't mean that in the, you know, Rasputin kind of way. I mean, just cognitively engaging cadence to it where it all rolls out and you get the general picture, some bad things are afoot and how it all hangs together isn't necessarily that obvious, but it sounds good. However, if you go back and do the kind of weird things that I do,

where you take each sentence, you look for it and you break it down, it does make sense because he's written it out. Obviously beforehand, he's reading it. And it's just remarkable how ridiculous it is. And all of the connections that have been put together. So like with the Jordan Peterson analogy, when you start to break it down, they so badly fall apart. Yeah, I think it should be a good exercise, I think, to really just make it explicit.

What is it exactly that he's saying? And yeah, just see if it makes sense. Yeah. So this is an uncharacteristically deep dive, given that it's an 18-minute segment, and I suspect we'll take longer than that to go through. Okay. So let me start off by playing Eric introducing what the segment is about.

Hello, all. The subject of this audio essay is my absence, the tech platforms, the 2020 election, Gene Seberg, and oddly enough, Article 58 of the former Soviet Union's Russian penal code. Yes. So it's got all of the hallmarks of Eric's content where there's a lot of different topics being linked together, some obscure references to penal codes and the Gene Seberg conspiracy, what's that? So it's a smorgasbord that he's promising to weave into a narrative. Yes, one suspects that all of these particular bits of information are going to be woven together to make some grand points. Yeah. And maybe before we get into the meat of how the conspiracies which he outlines

hang together, it would be worth just flagging up a couple of the themes that we've talked about in previous episodes, these techniques that gurus use that we see repeatedly. So one of them is this personal engagement with the audience and presenting them not just as an audience, but as friends. I want to ensure that we can continue talking and building the community that has sprung up around the podcast. Portal Nation, if you will, is a place where I choose to spend my own free time with perhaps less distance than I should have with my audience, as many of you have become my friends. Yeah, so you're not just an audience. No, no. And you know, like we've talked about this before, to some degree, that's understandable in this kind of web 2.0 interactive media, that sort of audience engagement.

But yeah, it's fair to say some people do it more than others. And there's a kind of a tone to it also, which is a bit stronger with people like Eric. I mean, if you compare him with someone like Steven Pinker, I don't think Steven Pinker does this kind of thing. It's not something that, yeah, these public intellectuals who write books, like Richard Dawkins doesn't do this. These people who write books or Sam Harris. Yeah. And he has, even though he does have a popular podcast and all that stuff.

So yeah, it's just a thing, isn't it? It's about making that special group and yeah, that emotional connection. Yeah. And I, you, you summarized that very nicely, Matt. And like you say, it doesn't have to have nefarious implications, but I'll play another clip which shows how it can be related to presenting that your community is special and should be able to read between the lines about your intentions,

stuff that other people might miss. And it ends up sounding very close to QAnon. Anyway, let me play it and you'll hear what I mean. And perhaps now you understand more about the title of the last Portal episode as a mildly coded message to my treasured audience. Yeah. Yeah. Coded messages to your audience. Yeah, coded messages to your audience. That's not necessary. I don't think that's necessary. I don't think you need to do that.

Yeah, it's encouraging your audience to read cryptic double meanings and everything you do. Like, well, why did he call the episode that? Was there, you know, Eric likes to drop breadcrumbs. It's Q, like I say, it's QAnon shit. Yeah, yeah. And, I mean, maybe it's it's cute like i say it's q and the one shit yeah yeah and i mean maybe it's not apparent in this particular audio essay but we've seen it before where there's that kind of emotional manipulation occurring where he'll get grumpy essentially with his community like he he loves them but they've kind of let him down to some degree you know and um those sorts of

dynamics are just you know i don know, I don't like, I don't like the way it reminds me of how cult leaders behave essentially where, where they do things like that in order to sort of cement that, that the group dynamics in terms with, with, with them as the loving father, but, but sometimes a little bit stern. Yes. And there's a reference made towards the end of the podcast to potential community problems. So let me just play that.

But truth be told, there were also some other more minor issues I was having with COVID exposure and guests in the studio, loss of privacy, and some sad interactions with unstable people in my communities who seem to need psychological help. I may or may not choose to say something about these issues later. So that's him talking about why he had to step back and not be as active online or releasing episodes like his audience would like. But the interesting point is that last thing about unstable members in his community. Now, I don't know specifically what he's referencing there, but I can relate one event that I observed, which might be relevant. So a week or two back, I got a notification from someone that Eric was discussing us on his Discord, and I might want to

pop on to hear his thoughts, right? And my technical inexpertise meant that I didn't actually hear any of that, although I got the gist from other people that he basically set up this division between low quality criticism and high quality criticism. And our podcast episode, which was brought up by someone in the audience, was presented as... Let me guess. Yeah. Can you guess, Matt?

I have an inkling. Yeah. Yeah. So unfortunately, we fell into the low quality bin, but be that as it may, so sad for us. But the point I wanted to mention was the conversation then went on to Eric's disappointment at one, people recording some of his unfiltered thoughts on discord and releasing them online he talked about some experiences during his phd and it had been leaked online and this also led him to the issue of

people essentially addressing criticisms to him about him not releasing papers or being compared to other pseudo scientists or these kind of things and how he considered these kind of criticisms such low quality, so illegitimate that if they were to continue coming up, he might need to withdraw, potentially cancel the portal and definitely remove his interaction with the community. And like you say, this was presented in a very, because I love you so much and because I respect you so much, I need you to do this for me, police the community better. And I don't want the withdrawal, but if you keep doing this, you might make me. And it struck me as like, whoa, incredibly pseudo cult leader manipulative. And I'm not saying Eric is a cult leader.

I mean that he's using that same emotionally manipulative tactics that they use with their audience. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of parallels. When you put it in with the context that the community is presented not like a like a hobbyist community like or people that are you know interested in some particular topic to to sort of discuss whatever it's presented as a community with with the grand mission to save save america and western civilization and that people are invited to join who are who are

concerned about the state of the world and and want to be part of a group that's going to somehow fix these problems so it's it's it's a very grand mission it's the kind of mission that cults generally tend to have you know um religious or not but um so you know like you i'm not saying it's a cult i'm just but i am saying this sounds like that i'm not saying it's a cult i'm just but i am saying this sounds like that i'm not saying it was aliens but it's aliens there's there's cult like aspects or cult like psychology manipulations at play it's obvious there are look it's it's a it's a spectrum of cultishness and um and he's somewhere on it yeah yeah so okay to give an example of the

tone that we're talking about the kind of follow lee one let me just play one more clip which is about how eric failed to save his audience from the current situation many of you flattered me by saying where are you when we need you most as if i had somehow abandoned you and i am touched but that is not where we are i don't have have your answers. And I'm lost as well. So I've been trying to look past the election for months. I'm just being honest here. Yes, you can see that as a rare moment of contrition, where Eric is saying, you know, look, I'm just as lost as the rest of you. Or it sounds a bit like, you know, I don't know, Or it sounds a bit like, you know, I don't know, like a religious leader telling his flock, I never left you.

I was still here. You know, I was just choosing my moment to return. Yeah. Yeah, I know. It may be cynical of us, but that kind of thing where the leader says, I don't have all the answers. You have to find the answers yourselves. I'm just a fellow traveler. But then, of course course then they are giving a whole bunch of answers in the next breath and that's what happens here of course yeah um well so that's that's been pretty heavy start and i haven't even got into the conspiracy theory that he wants to thread here so maybe to

lighten it a little bit, one of the things that we touched on in the previous episode with Eric and Brett was their use of scientific jargon unnecessarily that ends up making things more complicated when they're trying to, they're supposed to be, you know, simplifying a point. So there's a, there's a beautiful example of this when Eric was explaining why Sam Harris shouldn't focus on criticizing Trump. This was at a dinner party they were having after the 2016 election. I've studied Trump's style, and it's based around deliberate ambiguities that left and

right can be counted upon to hear as meaning different things. If Trump makes N-nested ambiguous statements in a minute, he will create a minimum of two to the N legs of the decision tree that must be considered given your strategy. He will thus be able to force you and the rest of the unsuspecting United States public intellectuals

to waste much of your intellectual life for four to eight years picking up after him. And yeah, that's a hell of a way to put it, isn't it? I do love these. I love the extraordinarily abstract and technical analogies that are meant to illustrate a point. But obviously, I'm really just there to just baffle people and remind them that they're listening to someone

who's far smarter than they are yeah so n nested n nested n nested now what what does that mean exactly well isn't he just talking about it like a recursive you know unspecified number leads to two more interpretations and then you need to debunk those two interpretations. It sounds like a recursive loop, but even me finding this sounds like it's making it more complicated to just say, yes, Trump says lots of stupid stuff and it'll take too long to rebut all of them because there's too many interpretations. Yeah, Trump certainly does say ambiguous things and things that could be interpreted in one of two ways it's like a it's like a martin bailey type technique that works pretty well but why n nested yes you're

quite right about it being a recursive kind of thing and if you have a recursive decision tree where you have two two decision points on each level of the tree then yes you'll end up with two to the power of n things but is it really nested chris like like how is it nested i don't see that like it's a stupid analogy. Apart from being technical and unnecessary, it's not even right. Like, I'm sorry. Matt. Yes, go on.

No, no, but this is what happens. Because, like, when you start to try, you know, it happened with the alchemical lemon with me, with Jordan Peterson. But it seems to happen more often with you with when people make statistic references that the metaphorical nature is the retreat you know if somebody was to push that like oh no no he's just he's making a reference like this but if you try to drill down the things it often starts to crumble. And on the other hand, Eric is a mathematician, so maybe he's making some obscure point that we genuinely just don't get. But I mean, the basic point is not hard to get,

even if you don't know the maths. You don't need the maths to get the point. Well, the maths is very simple. Like the idea is that there's one of two interpretations of Trump's utterance, but then he's saying that the interpretations also have two interpretations. And then those interpretations have more. I don't, that's not, I don't think it is.

Yeah, I agree. But I think that's the least of the problems with this episode. So if that's upset you, just hold on. problems. If that's upset you, just hold on. Oh, yeah. And one other thing was, so as well as making these unhelpful analogies, the other thing is to make references, right? Sometimes obscure references, but at least intellectual references to illustrate a fairly straightforward point. So here's a random reference drop to some psychology studies. I once again suspected that almost everybody who is not sufficiently disagreeable to be considered Milgram negative, Ash negative, and Zimbardo negative, according to the three famous psychology

experiments. Now, look, I'm not saying Zimbardo, Ash, and Milgram are obscure knowledge hidden in the annals of psychology. They are, however, specialized language, right? And if you don't explain it, it's just a way that makes you look informed that your audience needs to look up what that reference is. But those are not deep experiments. And in general respects, there's big questions about at least two of them we don't need to get into the replication crisis or the you know revision of all that stuff but it's just it's just the random drop of names yeah random random random name dropping but the other thing about it i don't get is what is like for example zimbardo negative i know about zimbardo's experiments and the character but what does zimbardo negative mean this know about Zimbardo's experiments and the character, but what does

Zimbardo negative mean? This is my best go at it. He's saying, you know, Zimbardo highlighted how some people, when they're put into a specific situation, start to take on characteristics, especially, you know, oppressive characteristics when they're in a position of authority. So he's saying people that would respond negatively to that situation would refuse to oppress people that's zimbardo negative and the same goes for right but these are these are phrases he just invented like that that's not oh yeah that's like calling someone zimbardo negative it's not something that anyone else has ever that's not a phrase that anyone else has ever used i just had to phrase that anyone else has ever used. I just had to Google it just to check. No, but this is the appeal of Eric, right?

So it's not nonsensical. It's a meaningful thing to say. And if you're charitable, you can just be saying, well, look, that's just how his mind works. But you have to realize he wrote this down. He knows presumably that there are members of his audience who are not familiar with psychologists but he he would undoubtedly present it as he has enough faith that his audience will look up the references and get that if they if they care enough about the

point but i i think you have to factor in there that a lot of it is just to demonstrate the depth of knowledge and intelligence of Eric as a guru. Yeah, yeah. He's like an anti-Richard Feynman. You know Feynman, the famous physicist who was extremely good at explaining quite abstract and complicated ideas in a concrete way that people could grasp. He's just the opposite. He takes quite basic ideas and then turns them into something very technical and abstract

to make them difficult to grasp. Yeah, he's a Feynman negative. He's Feynman negative. He's a Feynman negative. I should have just said that. I shouldn't have explained it. That's where I went wrong. I should have just said that.

This is why we are the obscure podcast for internet denizens and eric is the apple podcast legend he is we need to just make references with no explanation oh yes we should indeed all right all right that's good all right we've done that to death um but yeah i i do I do treasure these analogies. They drive me out. Look, I'm just going to tell you, we haven't done it to death. There's much more. I'm going to skip over them. And again, just to tease you even more,

before we get to the major conspiracies, listeners as well, just wait, just wait. We'll get to the goods. There's one other thing that I think it's worth mentioning in passing. So a significant portion of this segment is Eric giving his political analysis about who he voted for, didn't vote for, how both sides are terrible. So stay safe out there.

You don't have to swing for the fences on this election because quite frankly, both of these are terrible options. Whether you agree or disagree with Eric's analysis, or think it's stupid, you know, that's an option. I don't really take an issue with him outlining his political views. That's fine, right? That's a reasonable thing for somebody to do. So we're not going to spend much time focused on the politics stuff that he outlines. Except there's one thing that he argues, which is really prevalent at the minute amongst the anti-social justice warrior or intellectual dark web, about why he doesn't criticize Trump so much. Let's hear him explain it. I said, I will make one or more clear statements

that Donald Trump represents an existential risk to the fabric of the United States and that I expect he will use his freedom as an outsider to do a combination of both very good and very bad things. But I'm not going to let him run my intellectual life every day on his truly ingenious brain farts. I will then focus my energy and attempt to hold my own party, the Democrats, intellectually accountable so that we can win with someone we can believe in. Reaction, Matt? Well, one thing that struck me is how whenever he talks about Trump or the right, there's always this sort of double talk. For instance, when he talks about Trump's utterances as brain farts, but also calls them ingenious, you know, says he'll expect him to do a bunch of very bad stuff, but also a bunch

of very good stuff. So, you know, I think he appreciates his audience is a mixture of pro and anti-Trump people. And you can kind of read it either way. Yeah, I noticed that as well. And those kind of caveats don't come with Democrats or whenever he's discussing the left, except for carving out the space for him and his friends. except for carving out the space for him and his friends. But it is a notable distinction that it's very rare to see harsh criticism of the right without caveats about, oh, Trump will do very good things as well. Which really good things, I wonder?

Yeah, so... I agree. There's not much else to be said there. I just wanted to flag it because, you know know it's in the atmosphere at the minute with james lindsey's endorsement of trump and today actually various figures who are critical of social justice warriors or critical theory on the left yeah also writing a joint article to respond to people who would advocate for voting for trump, including Steven Pinker and Helen Pluckrose. So yeah, this kind of debate is in the ecosphere at the minute. So I thought we're flagging up.

Yeah. So I think the context here is they've come out with pretty anti-Biden, quasi-pro-Trump type statements. I guess doing what a lot of the critics of the IDW accused them of, I thought unfairly for a long time. And I was quite glad to see the pretty long list of names who are IDW or IDW adjacent to really distance themselves from those statements. All right. Well, Matt, I think been, I think we've built up enough time now to get to the real meat of this audio essay. And just what is it that connected all those

disparate topics that Eric mentioned at the introduction? So let's start with Eric's issue with the term fake news. Yeah. So that is such bullshit. That's good analysis, right? We can wrap it up there. I mean, seriously. So he's saying, let's try to step back and just repeat what he's saying. Clearly, he's saying that fake news isn't real, that it's a beat up by the institutions. And it's them basically describing narratives that they can't control. Yeah? Yes. So let me play one more clip that might help clarify exactly what he's saying. Recall that I don't believe that fake news was an authentic narrative in November of 2016.

So what was it then? Well, I don't know. But if I had to guess, I would say that there was probably a meeting somewhere around early November of 2016, where it was decided that the United States needed a narrative to buy time for its aggrieved institutions so that the 2020 election could be fixed to the greatest extent possible. Yeah. So I'd like to return to my earlier point about this being bullshit. Because, okay first of all there's not an authentic narrative well everyone any reasonable person would agree that there is an awful lot of fake

news about yeah um there's an awful lot of lying and just what what was the phrase that trump's advisor gave it alternative facts it is. It is a thing. You cannot say that it didn't really exist and that it was just a narrative that was invented by the media companies. I mean, anyone who paid attention to what someone like Donald Trump was saying could tell that he was lying repeatedly. And he further goes on to say that there's a meeting among these institutions. A secret meeting. A secret meeting amongst these institutions to come up with this narrative, to give them more time to fix the election. It's just a nonsensical conspiracy theory. And the evidence that he's

using to support the conspiracy theory just doesn't even stack up. It obviously doesn't stack up against anyone who's even turned on their TV or looked at the internet. Well, you say that, Matt, but before I offer my thoughts, I will allow Eric to respond once more to you, providing what he considers the best evidence for his theory. Many of you are no doubt thinking, I remember everyone talking about fake news all during the election. Isn't that interesting? Because that is not what happened at all. That's a fake memory and it's not even yours. In fact, as late as the end of October of 2016, almost no one was talking much about fake news. In fact, the concept didn't really spike

until after Trump's victory. It was not until the week of Sunday, November 13th, 2016, that the hypnotic and invariant phrase fake news exploded and went from being an extremely minor news story to the supposedly settled explanation for everything that had caught the New York Times, the Democratic Party, and the heavily anti-Trump tech giants measuring the Oval Office drapes while about to lose the race of a lifetime. Okay. I think I'm too annoyed to comment, so I think you should comment. Right. So I agree with pretty much everything that you said, but Eric's argument boils down to, it looks to me that he's done a thing like a, what do you call it,

like Google Trends, where you can see how often the term is referenced and you can, you know, see a graph of when it spikes and that he thinks he's discovered this interesting pattern that fake news was not a term used that much in the run up to the election. It only became a commonly searched term after, right? After Trump's inauguration. And there's a couple of things about this. It's possible that that's true, that the word was not searched that much until after the election. And if that occurred, it's likely because Trump used the word specifically to refer to the media and started using the word repeatedly. And then it became something that people looked up.

Now, because you have to remember that Trump pivoted after the election where his main enemy had been Hillary and to a lesser extent the media, but not really fixated on that. It was after the election that he pivoted to heavily focus on the media as the new enemy, the new boogeyman to go to. So the issue here is Eric is mistaking that term for discussion of the general concept of fake news, disinformation, the manipulation of stories by people with other agendas. And you don't need the term fake news for that, right? The term did exist. It pre-existed that.

But it doesn't matter at all if it wasn't used commonly in articles prior to the election. Because what is true is that people were constantly talking about Trump's tendency to promote unreliable sources, to promote conspiracies, and Russian disinformation campaigns running. It wasn't an invented memory that that was a narrative of the election or common talking point. No, I mean, you know, people have been talking about biased media reporting for decades. You know, Fox News has been criticized for it for a long time before Trump came on the scene. So, yeah, I completely agree with you. One, he's mistaking, first of all, the actual phrase for the concept that people might have of disinformation or lying or propaganda or media manipulation or whatever.

or lying or propaganda or media manipulation or whatever. But the other thing too is that Trump was the one who brought it back into popularity. Yeah. So is he part of the institutional cabal that got together to introduce this concept slash phrase into the public consciousness in order to fix the election that doesn't make sense well is trump part of the cabal chris that's what i need to know yeah there's a lot of it that doesn't make sense because trump is the nominee and eric's talking about trump not being part of

the system and how the system would like calibrate to you know install somebody who's bland and acceptable but if that's the case, Trump should have been impeached and Mike Pence should have been the new president. Like unless the right are completely not in these conspiracies, but you know, whenever Eric's trying to offer the false equivalence of both the duopoly, they're, they're both equally as bad. He does include the right, but, but here it seems the right and the fact that trump is the nominee in 2020 still is is just sidestepped yeah there's an alternative explanation for this which is that trump lies to an extraordinary degree even though politicians

have have always been flexible with the truth and media outlets have always had an editorial line or be biased in one direction or another. The far simpler explanation is that Trump, first of all, started lying an awful lot more than any other politician. Two, as you said, basically set himself up against the mainstream media as his number one enemy. And of course, they were doing fact checking and calling him out on his various lies. And his office preferred his alternative facts. So his big thing came about, well, you can't trust anything that anyone else is saying about me. It's all fake news. And the obvious fact of the matter is that Trump is the one who popularized

it. And he's fundamentally the reason why it's entered the sort of mainstream consciousness that's that's a far simpler and that's why it's not appealing because it's a simple straightforward account that the media in large respect were responding to trump and then trying to also distinguish fake news is a thing but Trump is calling everything fake news. So what's real fake news? And, you know, like that would inevitably end up with the term being used more in articles and people discussing what the definitions and such are, and it being abused as a concept. Yeah, I think I got to say here, you know, Eric, he reminds me of the last guy we covered, JPC, who's also got a thing against fact checkers and fake news or accusations of fake news. And for exactly the same reason, which is if you love conspiracy theories and you don't want to be fact checked or you don't want to be called to account, then you invent this.

this. Conspiracy theories are all about discrediting the authoritative sources of information, discrediting any source of information apart from people who are pushing the conspiracy theory. I don't hate having actual facts checked by true fact checkers, although the words actual and true are doing a lot of heavy lifting in the sentence. And you know, Trump did that in his very obvious, simple way. And yeah, Weinstein's doing it as well. So it's a classic conspiracy theory maneuver. Yeah. So there's a clip that illustrates how the concept of fake news would be used to attack free speech. And I believe that fake news was likely the placeholder that had been settled upon. That would be the origin of the gradual changes in terms of service across Twitter, Facebook,

and Google, and how the structural changes were coordinated that would gradually erode all protections for free speech across the platforms. That clip in particular, linking it to terms and service changes will prompt one of the later stages of this conspiracy. But okay, so I think we've covered the first pillar of the conspiracy. There was an actual secret meeting, a cabal of media elites and institutional insiders who decided that the population needed to be manipulated in time for the next election for them to introduce the candidate that they could control. It's the bloody Manchurian candidate. And they were concerned about the truth coming out. So invented this term, fake news, and somehow funnel it into Trump's brain, I suppose, in order to use that as a cover for suppressing more truthful narratives that are coming from

independent sources, like, for instance, Eric. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And that will become important later when we get how the intellectual dark web are involved in this. But before that, we take a segue into Jean Seberg and how she, a famous actor, relates to all of this and what Eric is talking about.

So let's hear Eric explain it. and what Eric is talking about. So let's hear Eric explain it. The idea of the US deep state's use of mainstream media to destroy lawful citizens' lives and sanity simply for political beliefs is not a conspiracy theory. It is in fact a 100% certain conspiracy fact that for some odd reason isn't taught much in US high school. Okay, so this is him explaining that Jean Seberg, who was a famous actress, was targeted by the FBI or CIA, can't remember which one now, but with rumors being put into the media to discredit her and it led to her eventual suicide. And it's a tragic story. It's an example, well-documented example that the intelligence agencies do, you know, they do have nefarious programs. They're not above

trying to influence media. But here's the thing. These examples like Gene Seberg or Watergate, Examples like Gene Seberg or Watergate, right? Conspiracies exist. So how can you man with your head in the sand, criticize me for advancing ideas when we have documented cases of the kind of thing I'm explaining? And the problem with that reasoning is every single conspiracy theorist uses that argument.

David Icke uses it. Alex Jones uses it. All of them use it. They point to real conspiracies and say, look, real conspiracies exist. Ergo, the conspiracies I'm invoking are just as plausible as any other explanation. And it's the ergo bit, which is the problem, because no one is saying real conspiracies don't exist. The issue is the conspiracy that is being alleged is often flimsy, badly supported, and has terrible logic.

Yeah, we've seen this from these guys before, like in some of the earlier episodes. It's analogous to the idea that there are undiscovered geniuses out there. So therefore, it could well be that Brett Weinstein is one of them. it's analogous to the idea that there are undiscovered geniuses out there so therefore it could well be that Brett Weinstein is one of them and the problem which you pointed out at the time I think was that yes there are undiscovered geniuses out there who have been neglected by the mainstream but the problem is for every one of them there's a thousand delusional fools and the same thing is true of conspiracy theories for every conspiracy theory that's actually real there's an untold number of nonsensical ones so you absolutely

cannot use this sort of existence theorem existence proof uh of several of them being true as any kind of support for a conspiracy theory that you just dreamt up. Yeah. And in good Eric fashion, he wants to coin a neologism, neologism, neologism, neologism, I don't know, neologism, a neologism, one of them to codify this phenomenon that he's talking about. When this sport of personal reputational destruction is coordinated by members of the complex formed by institutional media, the intelligence community, the political parties, political consultants, finance, tech, and the academy, I call it Seiberging to remind us of just how real the threat is to all who have idiosyncratic politics, but who have done nothing legally wrong. Yeah, the complex, Chris, the complex, the complex of everybody.

It's all connected. Cue up that meme with, it's always sunny in Philadelphia with the guy with the pinboard, you know, and the string connecting all of the organizations. Yeah. Yeah. Just to be clear, Eric then goes on to mention the Data and Society report, which was a report made by Rebecca Lewis that looked at the connections between them and the regular appearances on each other's shows and promoting each other to different audiences and looking, you know, Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris and a lot of the intellectual dark web people were there.

And they really didn't like it because they considered it a paradigmatic example of guilt by association. That's where data and society and its crazy guilt by association minus any methodology technique appeared. In essence, the four-year battle plan was to figure out how to use the fake news meme to gain greater narrative control of the news. Yeah, so I mentioned that because they really didn't like that report. And they focused on this diagram that showed connections, kind of the pinboard meme was used often in response to it. But if you actually read the report, it was a very good and nuanced discussion of the way that alternative communities interact

and form around these kind of guru characters online. But the point is, that's just a report from a think tank that was done by one researcher who had become like super vilified by the IDW. But here, it's weaved into, this was a part of that grand scheme to discredit the alternative voices speaking truth to power. This is part of the, you know, fake news conspiracy consortium. They somehow commissioned this report or led to its creation. But the reality is that was just a researcher doing a report on this emerging phenomenon on YouTube.

There isn't a grand conspiracy behind it. That and society does reports on those kind of topics. That's what it exists to do. I mean, look, it's just a real red flag when somebody lists off all of these things, you know, the mainstream media, the tech companies, the FBI, the politicians, you know, and there's this huge list of,

it's basically everybody, right? And whenever a conspiracy theory starts doing that, it's just clearly a conspiracy theory, basically. There are conspiracies, as you say. Like, say, price fixing. Some rich people or companies will get together and organize something. Or a secret service organization like the FBI does do secret things. That's very different.

That's the thing. They keep it secret, right? You can't bring in the mainstream media and all tech companies and all politicians and FBI and all this. You know, it's not going to be a secret for very long. Like, we know about the Gene Seberg thing, and that was done in-house, presumably, as secretly as they could do it.

I mean, these conspiratorial narratives where they bring in all of these vague and very broad institutions and groups the the only group we left off was the jews i suppose but that's understandable yeah yeah given the years one but yeah so the next wing of this which has already been teed up, is that the intellectual dark web, Eric and his friends in particular, are part of the people that this conspiracy consortium of the media and all those institutions need to control. So it isn't just they sought to control the political narrative. No, they needed to target him and Joe Rogan and his brother and so on. So let's hear him issuing a warning to the intellectual dark web. careful not to lose their accounts. In the time since, we have seen new levels of bizarre behavior on Twitter and Facebook, which seem to be catching up to Google in terms of naked attempts to manipulate the national conversation. Yeah, so this is, you know, part of manipulating the conversation, but why would they be targeting random podcasts? So let's hear that because it's

hard to exaggerate the level of self-importance attached to podcasts. Here we go. We all opined often and often better than the professional commentariat at that. And long-form podcasting, as led by the popular Joe Rogan, became seen as the great embarrassment and threat to mainstream legacy media. People dying to be treated like adults with long attention spans dropped NPR and the New York Times is home to the 1619 project, which its leader openly admitted was attempting to get America to riot and flocked to podcasts hours in length to listen to Snowden or Bernie Sanders on Joe Rogan. And there was no plan to stop this that was working when they finally realized just how powerful these podcasts are. Yeah. so this this this this theme this theme of paranoia and self-importance right

where where they uh see themselves as absolutely instrumental in in um affecting change at a national level and therefore the the the authorities the authorities and everyone is out to get them. It reminds me of the Japanese cult. You probably would know about them. Om Shinrikyo. Om Shinrikyo. Now, they were also extraordinarily paranoid and self-important, weren't they?

Yes, they did a campaign to become elected, I think, to be prime minister for Asahara Shoko, the guru leader of that group. And they campaigned seriously. I mean, they campaigned seriously with like insane things about, you know, people with like, like Ganesh masks and stuff. But they thought that they had a chance to be elected. And it was when they were completely rejected by the public that they then switched to the self-destructive view that eventually led to the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo underground. So to be clear, we're not saying that Eric is going to organize a gas attack on the New York subway, but more the belief that, you know, they are a threat to the political institutions and that, you know, the podcasts are the thing that's going to change the very fabric of politics and society is is insane like we have we have a small podcast granted but

you know i didn't realize we had grasped such a powerful tool by doing long-form podcasts on obscure topics yeah yeah i mean it you know this that self-importance and the paranoia are like two sides of the same coin because when some random thing happens or you see things through this lens where, you know, the actions or whatever of an organization like YouTube is seen as all designed around you and your group yeah and it's it's partly a phenomenon that we see on um on on twitter with this this thing where these commentators just get too online and they just get too wrapped up in their own little world and they think that the medium and their discourse or whatever that they're having is is having a far greater importance in the broader society than it actually does yeah and that like this relates to a pattern that you see with both brett and eric that they interpret anything to do with like technical difficulties or you know some issue with tweeting something as like targeted suppression when brett

has a tweet that he doesn't think gets enough interaction he'll often at jack dorsey and say jack would you mind like telling your people to stop putting their fingers on the scale like it's it's impressive breath has interpreted interference with his camera connections in his house as potentially targeted interference from some outside source that wants to disrupt this podcast and then eventually linked it up to radiation released by the forest fires from Fukushima, which is also outlandish. At least it's not paranoid, just outlandish. At least it's not specific to him. So hold on. Here's a clip talking about how social media platforms changed their terms and service to target heterodox podcasters. So they figured out that we

needed the platforms in part to reach each other and proceeded to change the platform rules over and over again to make them vague, illogical, ideological, inconsistent, and actually impossible to understand. So, so yeah, the one thing is that the terms and conditions in social media sites are often vague and complicated. And the reasons for people being banned or whatever are not always transparent. And there's plenty of legitimate things to criticize there. But what I see very few people in these spaces take account of is the complexity and the amount of knife edge walking that platforms are doing in trying to moderate millions, if not billions of posts and content

every day. It's inevitable that they have labyrinth and Byzantine terms and conditions, and that they're applied badly or inconsistently and that we can't criticize them for that. But thinking that that was made specifically for you and your community and friends, that's... Yeah. I think it was made to target free speech or manipulate elections or something like that.

It's just really absurd. Of course, the terms and conditions are completely obscure and ridiculous. I mean, if you get a mobile phone contract, the terms and conditions will be ridiculous. They're always ridiculous and vague. When it comes to social media, everyone should know this. Social media is free. Google is free. It doesn't cost you anything to actually use this so it's been said before that you know in a real sense the people who use it like us these platforms are not the clients yeah the clients are whoever is paying them advertising revenue and stuff like that so so they serve i don't want to call them clients they serve headmasters yeah yeah like millions

of people like us right but of course they don't have high levels of customer service. They have these algorithms and things like that to call centers in some other country or whatever. And it's all completely arbitrary and high-handed. And there's heaps of people treated sort of unfairly in inverted commas. But you don't need a conspiracy theory to explain it. It's just that's how the markets work in this case. You're not going to be treated particularly well. And, you know, we could, that's something else to

talk about if one wanted to, but yeah, you get what you pay for. And the service is always going to be very bad in terms of content moderation and things like that. Like you, Chris, I'm somewhat sympathetic despite all that, because as you say, they are walking a knife edge. On one hand, they never really wanted to be in the business of content moderation. They argued that, but their hands were forced because there's always something extreme enough that people could post that everyone acknowledges has to be taken down. So where do you draw that line? And unfortunately, the job was left up to them. So where do you draw that line? And unfortunately, the job was left up to them. So yeah. Yeah. I think that one of the legitimate criticisms

that people bring up about tech platforms is that they should have foresaw this and that they should be quicker to react like when Facebook is helping to promote the potential genocide of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. And they don't have moderators who speak Burmese. This is, you know, it's a multi-billion tech platform. They should be able to consider that if they're going to open up in Burma or Myanmar, whichever you want to put it. But like, so I'm not saying there's not saying there's no grounds to criticize the platforms for their moderation policies or how they're enforced.

I do think they're not enforced particularly consistently, but it's just this constant assumption that that is all gay top-down instruction to take these specific kind of voices out of the public conversation um at the behest of the this this complex of of mainstream media fbi and powerful people powerful shadowy organizations you know yeah yeah they're not talking about you know yes the the social media platforms some of them recently purged q anon accounts. But how many years did that take? And that was a very public example, right? You know, Alex Jones being kicked off Facebook.

He was pumping out disinformation and stuff for years. He still regularly appears on like, you know, he just recently has reappeared on Joe Rogan's show. And in fact, when you look at those cases of them banning someone like Alex Jones, like they did it in response to a public outcry. Like their reasons were quite obvious because a lot of people, not some secret cabal, but just normal people were objecting to this, you know, saying, hey, your platform is being used as a way to distribute stuff that's actually leading to people getting harassed and putting people in danger like

there's legitimate reasons you don't need to construct a conspiracy to explain why alex jones got banned i mean i think the response to that would be that the the public outcry these kind of outrage campaigns mean that the tech platforms are responsive to cancel culture like the the woke outreach and to a certain extent that is true that you know if attention gets put on to a particular issue or person you know there is the potential that they could end up getting banned but like sure but it's not a conspiracy cancel culture isn't a conspiracy. It's something, it's different. It's only open.

And also you have to look at the amount of truly horrendous accounts which still operate with impunity, right? They all allege suppression and whatnot, but most of them still have voices on the platform. Like Alex Jones is off Twitter. Paul Joseph Watson is still there happily tweeting away every day you know there there's plenty of people who are making their living

on these platforms spending their time claiming the platform is censoring them like jpc yeah like so if their mission the mission of this cabal with their idea of spreading this meme of fake news in order to control the narrative and fix the election. I mean, they're doing a really bad job of it because last time I checked, there was an awful lot of counter mainstream narratives available on the internet. Yeah. It's a lot of them out there. Like Trump is consistently the most popular content on YouTube or Facebook's most popular articles sent around or, you know, often Shapiro and all these kind of things. So like this supposed domination of the social media sphere by the left that completely excludes any other voices. It isn't based on reality. When you look at the metrics

of what's being shared and what's popular, it collapses. But I think we've probably sidetracked on to that more general discussion, but it's going to be a recurring topic anyway. But so this leads us to the last pillar or the last segment of the snake or whatever the hell you want to call it, of the grand conspiratorial vision of Eric. And this relates to Article 58 of the Soviet Union and Brett Weinstein's temporary banning from Facebook. Which brings us to Article 58 of the Soviet era Russian penal code, which introduced the concept of enemy of the workers and counter-revolutionary activities as the major crime. You see, Article 58 was a law where everyone was guilty, but not everyone was prosecuted. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess we should go on and see where he's going with this. Yeah. So here we go. And sure enough, just like with Article 58 in the

show trials, the tech platforms treat trust and safety as a star chamber where you can be accused without being told what you did wrong and tried in absentia. Okay. So he's equating the Soviet era trials for counter-revolutionary behavior and so on, where you would get executed or to siberia and probably die there and so on to what having your account suspended from twitter yeah that's yes matt i i think you are correct that is the comparison that is drawing there there might be an element of catastrophizing at play i'm not sure yeah it could be it could be i mean i find myself at a loss sometimes with these review things because how many different ways can you say that something is just stupid because i think i hope for i think most people listening would just see that self-evidently

a silly comparison but it's kind of our job to to spell it out and say explicitly why that's a comparison and i feel uh i feel a bit silly for doing so but it's a difficult job but we can we can do it can't we yes no i yeah i think you're underestimating how many people will find that argument compelling i mean this this segment was promoted by joe rogan and various other people i was like if you want to really understand what's happening in the modern era, listen to Eric's new intro section. Right. So I think you're giving too much credit to people, but so, okay. How this relates to Brett is that on Twitter, Brett had not his account, but the Unity 2020 campaign account, which was his political campaign to elect two candidates outside the duopoly instead of Biden or Trump as the president for the 2020

election. And that account ended up being banned after a month or so. And Eric explains the banning busily. It appeared that the thought of Americans coming together and burying their hatchets was seen as a serious offense, which the usually forward thinking CEO Jack Dorsey himself could not face for reasons that remain utterly opaque. Okay, so the account was banned. And Eric at another point explains that there was no reasons given for why. Very quickly, the Articles of Unity account that they had set up on Twitter was suspended without explanation.

I would say that's not true because I've listened to Brett's content and he has mentioned reasons. So he's mentioned accusations, whether he received them afterwards from independent sources at Twitter, or he received them afterwards from independent sources at twitter or he received them when the account was being banned i'm not sure but the reason cited based on what he said efforts to manipulate hashtags and the use of satellite accounts right which i believe means accounts which just exist to promote your content and are coordinated to pump your message out, right? Something political campaigns do generally do, but which also can get banned on Twitter, right? As known genuine accounts. Now, Brett has explained

that he did an investigation and that his volunteers or whoever had the keys to the account didn't do this. So the accusationation is false but whether you believe that or not is entirely up to how much you trust brad's ability to do investigations into that kind of thing yeah but but the point that you're making is that what he said before is not consistent with what he said here well what he said here he said they they banned it because they were afraid that there might be a unifying positive message for america and they couldn't have that whereas in actual in actual fact, they did give reasons, though he disagrees with them, they did give reasons for the banning. And keeping in mind what we said before, which is that a lot of the time,

banning or suspending or whatever on these platforms is pretty high-handed and arbitrary. So, you know, a lot of people get banned for reasons that are not super fair, arbitrary. So, you know, a lot of people get banned for reasons that are not super fair, or might be a little bit harsh. But that doesn't mean that his preferred explanation that this institutional cabal was it was afraid of the positive unifying message for America. That doesn't mean that that explanation is the preferred one. No. And again, it probably should go without saying, but Brett's campaign was not a threat to the duopoly. None of his candidates were on the ballot in any state. His plan to get access involved the libertarians and the Green Party's giving up their ballot access to his much less popular campaign. And the two candidates he selected from an online voter was Tulsi Gabbard,

the Democrat, and Dan Crenshaw, the Republican, both of whom have endorsed the party's candidates and did not agree to run. Yeah. So even if you accept that there is this institutional cabal and that Twitter is part of it, then there'd be absolutely no need for them to even notice the existence of this unity 2020 thing, because it is completely irrelevant to the election outcome. It was like a 40 K account, I think. So I think Twitter has bigger concerns in this election cycle than what Brett Weinstein is doing. But in any case, the likelihood of that campaign working or proving threatening

enough that it needed to be shut down is taken as the kind of default explanation. And what also happened is around about this time, Brett's account got noticed by a bunch of the Russian bot or, you know, the accounts that basically exist to promote anti-Biden or anti-American information. And the Unity 2020 stuff started getting retweeted by all those accounts. Then the people who watched those accounts noticed that. And one of them was like, okay, everybody mass flagged this account. Unity 2020 is, you know, a Russian campaign or whatever. And like, I think they mistook it for a Russian disinformation campaign.

But whatever the case, there were like hundreds of responses saying, OK, I flagged it. I flagged it. So what probably happened is Twitter got massively flagged. And after the 2016 campaign, they have like an itchy trigger finger when it comes to dealing with potential disinformation accounts. And they probably saw that the candidates have not endorsed it. I don't know the reason, but there's much more mundane explanations than the duopoly saw the real threat and needed to stamp it out.

And Jack Dorsey is involved personally. I think your explanation sounds very, very plausible, especially as a lot of these um you know policing that these platforms do is is highly automated and just just run by run by statistical comparisons so that kind of with that kind of thing happening with with attention from the various russian or otherwise sponsored foreign accounts who are naturally attracted to any flaky political stuff because it's it's it's inherently an opportunity for destabilisation, yeah, you could see it could quite easily happen. And it may be completely unfair, you know, completely unfair.

The 2020 campaign was the innocent victim of Twitter algorithms being applied to, you know, dodgy activity that wasn't. But, yeah, there's so many other explanations that are so much more plausible, basically, none of which she would consider. And I actually, I suspect that like it shouldn't have been banned, the account. And I don't think it would have made

like any significant difference to the election outcome. So that isn't the issue. It's just the explanation. So that's the background. But what happened recently, which made Eric certain that this is a coordinated campaign, is that Brett also had his personal Facebook account permanently banned and received a notification that this decision had been reviewed and was irreversible.

Now, it has subsequently been reversed for the following reason. So let Eric explain. After a public outcry from Joe Lonsdale, Tulsi Gabbard, myself and others, and some back channel communication to Facebook board members, the account was mysteriously opened again with a claim that it had merely been flagged by a system. Right. So counter to the image that Brett and Eric are kept outside of the channels of power and are just constantly being repressed. Instead, they were able to get special treatment and have an account looked at because Eric works for a board member of Facebook.

They have prominent politicians who like them and pay attention to them, like Tulsi Gabbard. So far from being silenced by the powers that be, their influential friends were able to get a decision reversed. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of his behavior when submitting these articles to to nature and so on which he would attach these these recommendations from influential people and yet at the same time when it was declined you would see it as this uh the secret network of influential people blocking them out so in both

cases it's it's like well first of all you're doing things and and have connections that the rest of us don't have if somebody banned our accounts we wouldn't have anyone to call um and just like if we were submitting to nature we wouldn't be attaching a letter of recommendation from some prestigious name in the field saying oh you really should accept this paper yet he paradoxically has those connections uses those those connections, but also claims that the institutions are suppressing him. It doesn't make sense. Yeah. And on the specific issue of the Facebook banning, it is a weird thing, right? He got banned.

He claimed he didn't use the account in the month's proceeding. And the notification, it said a thing that it had been reviewed, which is apparently something that only happens upon request. And yet the explanation given by the Facebook employee said it was a system error. It was basically an algorithm error.

Now, I can see why people would have doubts about that explanation. But on the other hand, if this was a conspiracy, it's a terrible, terrible one. Because what happens is they banned Brett's account. They should have surely factored into that, that he would mention this publicly. As soon as he mentions it publicly, a random Facebook employee responds online saying, oh, sorry, this is an error. We're going to review and reverse it

or something like that. And there was another Facebook employee who chimed in saying, I work for a different division and as unbelievable as it sounds, this is true. But if that is the plan, and then the account gets reinstated, that's one of the most incompetent conspiracies ever. That's one of the most incompetent conspiracies ever, because the person who told him on Twitter also had on her account that she's a Facebook employee now, but she previously worked for the Democrats and Nancy Pelosi. And on Brett's recent Dark Horse podcast, he uses this as the smoking gun evidence of how the duopoly tried to censor him. You know, could they have made it more obvious

yeah maybe they should have gotten a different employee one that didn't have democrat stuff in their bio yeah why would they like why would she remove it from her bio or why not get someone else to respond like this take which on the face of it might sound plausible oh what the ex-employee for the democrats but when you stop and just think about it and what you're alleging it it becomes unbelievably idiotic as a conspiracy right it's a it's just such a bad conspiracy and the much simpler explanation is whether it was a rogue employee or whether it was an algorithm glitch, Brett got banned and he shouldn't have. And it was reversed. Yeah. Well, like, I mean, like, you know, there's this base rate neglect fallacy.

Like I was just reading yesterday about this poor chap who's, I forget whether it was Twitter or Facebook or both, but basically his entire thing is all about taking photographs of birds. He's a bird photographer. His entire account was about bird photography. And, yeah, the poor guy somehow got flagged and, you know, had his thing shut down without any recourse and so on. All very mysterious and there was no real reason for it. And, yeah, it's a good example of how high-handed and arbitrary these actions often are.

Now, is there some conspiracy against people who take photographs of birds? Because that's literally all this guy's account was about. Of course there isn't. So maybe the more prosaic and simple explanation applies here as well. The other thing too is if you assume this conspiracy is real, then clearly the conspirators do not have full control of Facebook since the connections that Eric can marshal were able to overturn this and sympathetic or amenable employees contacted him so to believe this conspiracy is real then we'd have to believe that there's this power struggle happening within facebook regarding who or who does or doesn't get suppressed that is is that right yeah yeah yeah i i think you've that's what's going on matt

i mean we've we've come via a winding road which started off a media and tech cabal creating a fake term to feed into the public narrative to help control everyone, that this was used to then alter the terms and conditions of the tech platforms to enable them to suppress heterodox podcasters and prevent them from challenging the preferred candidate selection for the 2020 election, which was presumably Joe Biden. And here we are. Like, is it possible to over-exaggerate how much of a grand conspiracy theory, which centers around the IDW and podcasters as an integral part of it?

This is, it's a masterpiece. Yeah. Yeah, the one thing I've got to hand to Eric is that all these conspiracies, his conspiracy theories all involve him. Unlike the various, the more standard conspiracy theories out there, around 9-11 or Flat Earth or whatever,

you know, the conspiracy theories aren't usually about the conspirators themselves. You know, it's usually about something else, something dramatic that happened on the news. He's a little bit special and that all these conspiracy theories are all about what uh disruptive and and and dangerous force uh he is and or how brett isn't being sufficiently recognized for for his genius and and so on like yeah he's invented the self-aggrandizing conspiracy theory. I have to hand it to him.

It's amazing. Yeah. He's explaining now that he had to leave the public sphere a little bit because he was concerned that his account might be in danger or that he could end up facing this repression. And he didn't have a solution for the Biden and Trump duopoly. So he didn't want to throw away his account meaninglessly. And so I took the time off so as not to give too much surface area to Mark Zuckerberg,

Jack Dorsey and Sundar Pichai and whomever they are coordinating with or delegating to in the two to three months before the election and a couple of months thereafter. It is what the financial professionals call the uncompensated risk of losing my ability to communicate with you while the tech and media worlds are going for broke to control this election. Again, there's just this level of self-aggrandizing that he potentially could have had the key to stopping this. And that if he had come back and opined too strongly on things, that they would have needed to stop him to take him down. So that's why he had to strategically withdraw. I've said it repeated times, but it's impossible to exaggerate the level of self-aggrandizing that the two Weinstein brothers display.

It's impossible to parody. Yeah, it really is. I mean, you know, we don't want to rehash all the stuff we covered, but just this idea that following the election of Trump, there was this secret meeting of these shadowy organizations who then invented the fake news meme as a smokescreen to suppress brave voices of unity like his to save America. It just doesn't make any sense. It's just so annoying. Anyway. And the last clip I'll play is Eric explaining to us how we are wrong. And the account that he's outlined is really the

only possible interpretation. There are now no other possibilities for those of us who have been watching this space that bear scrutiny given the inconsistency of the claims. No other explanation. Sorry, Mark, but we are wrong. We're wrong. We had heaps of explanations, though, Chris. I guess we hadn't thought them through or something. We are the sheeple, Matt. So there's one point I didn't cover where he talks about the general public being unable to resist the message.

And the obvious implication is like his audience can. But I guess we fall into the kind of sheeple people. It is simply too hard for ordinary people whose ability to feed their families depends on working for institutions to resist the drumbeats of either the Democratic or Republican master narratives. Yeah, there's this thing that conspiracy theorists always have, which is this idea that, you know, they have to explain why it is that the vast majority of people can't see the truth that's right in front of their eyes, can't, you know, won't accept the conspiracy theory. And the usual trope is that the truth is too disturbing. The truth would rock

their world so much and shatter all of their treasured assumptions and fond beliefs that we just have to block it out because it's too troubling for us. So maybe that's what we're doing, Chris. It is. It would just be too traumatic for us to have our faith in civilization rocked like this. Yeah. And as per usual, there's a rallying call that presents the forces of good versus the forces of evil. They failed to come up with a workable strategy to control us because there is really nothing they can do short of totally draconian China-like measures. And so they will ultimately lose this battle one day.

Yes. So the tech platforms and disinformation agents like us will lose the battle. Good people cannot be repressed. and there we are that so yeah it's been fun it's been a wild ride i'm glad we did this um am i i'm not sure anyway we did it yeah look it's an hour and a half on an 18 minute piece of content but eric is the alpha and omega of modern conspiracism you know he he just fits so much in the such a condensed amount of time and then like there's the fact you know that after that there's a four hour long podcast with someone so it's not like he just puts out these like small segments but yeah well we we certainly can't cover the four-hour podcast it would take us several days

at this at this rate so yeah like usually we don't go this granular on things but i i just think this is just such an impressive example that it it deserved an unusually thorough treatment. Yeah, yeah. There we go. Well, there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, our deep dive on an 18-minute audio essay. You know, you can decide whether or not we're instruments of the gin or the disc or whatever, or whether or not Eric has got hold of the wrong end of the stick um over

and out from me i think the other option matt that i would just mention is that we we could be also people with deep psychological issues definitely perhaps that's the other problem like why we subject ourselves to this and are willing to discuss it in, in detail. But, but that's an issue for a future therapist. It's not going to change anytime soon. So next week we have Rutger Bergman,

Bregman. I got, I'll get his name right before we get there. He's the, the guru that we're going to do the normal episode on. And we'll post the talk up on Twitter soon. I would say my usual sign off, but I'm very self-conscious about it. So Matt, you've already signed off, but shall I make you do it again? Yes, let's do it again. All right. All right. Nice talking to you chris all right bye-bye bye you