Decoding the Gurus - Supplementary Material 35: Cult Leaders, Gurus, and Evil Economists

Episode Date: August 19, 2025

We face a disciplinary crisis as the twin pillars of Game Theory and Gurometry are called into question.The full episode is available to Patreon subscribers (1 hour, 35 minutes).Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurusSupplementary Material 3500:05 Introduction  01:52 Matt's Apology06:55 Just Life...12:34 Matt's Foodie Corner 14:01 Dedunking Dan Richards finds Sabine16:37 Sabine cultivates parasocial defenders18:16 Ana Kasparian gets deeper into ZOG conspiracies24:44 Gary vs Game Theory40:26 Support the Channel to Save the World47:10 Bryan Johnson and Methylene blue51:52 Scientific Cosplay Online53:51 Keith Rainiere and Sensemaking Parallels54:57 High IQ YoungHoon Kim tweets about proof of God56:19 Guru and Cult Leader Parallels01:01:13 The Validity of the Gurometer in Question?!?01:03:03 Hacking Social Heuristics01:07:38 Cult Leaders vs Secular Gurus01:12:33 Anti-Democratic moves by Trump01:15:03 Dan Carlin on Trump01:18:30 Streamers Talking Nonsense: Hasan on ISIS01:21:24 Ideological Fixation and Motivated Conspiracism01:27:22 OutroSourcesThe Cushendun Sea Caves from Game of ThronesKingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is Boosting TourismDeDunking: Eric Weinstein's Theory — Real Physicist vs Pseudo PoserAna Kasparian tweeting about the “Zionist Occupied Government”Gary’s Economics: Game Theory is BrokenCritical Reddit thread on Gary’s Game Theory videoHenrich, J., McElreath, R., Barr, A., Ensminger, J., Barrett, C., Bolyanatz, A., ... & Ziker, J. (2006). Costly punishment across human societies. Science, 312(5781), 1767–1770.The Selfish Gene, Chapter 12: Nice Guys Finish First (Richard Dawkins)High IQ YoungHoon Kim tweets about proof of GodI was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerousDan Carlin’s tweet about TrumpBBC: National Guard troops appear in Washington DC as mayor rejects Trump's 'authoritarian push'Nathan Baker: Keith Raniere, Ringleader of NXIVM Sex Slave Cult, Interviewed by Allison Mack, Top Cult...

Hello and welcome to the Kittchus. including the guru's supplementary material, the sister podcast to the mean, including the gurus, decoding episodes. Well, it's the same podcast. Anyway, it's an offshoot. We have with us, Matthew Bryan, the illifid of this podcast, the mindflare, as he's sometimes referred to. And I'm me, Christopher Kavana, the psychologist slash anthropologist, the Giff Yankee.

in this duo uh i slay evil mind flares who are trying to take up the world that's my thing but um but not matt he's a good one he's he's one of a good one so that's it yeah so you're an elephant uh you're the tentacle guys and i'm a gif yankee that's um my geeky reference for us for it this is a warhammer thing isn't it yeah it's not a warhammer this is a uh dungeons and dragons, but I only know it because of Baldur's Geat. Yeah, so to be careful, Matt, with yours, like, so it's not, it's not Warhammer geekery. It's, um, a, another form of geekery. We go, everyone.

If you ever had any illusions that Chris wasn't any way cool, they are now dispelled. Baldur's Gate is cool, Matt. Everybody's in on that. You're just, you're just not part of the cool kids. That's your problem. on. Hey, Chris, I want to clarify because I sort of was having a dig at Kingdom Come deliverance. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's right. And I wasn't, I actually didn't mean to have a go at it because I, as I said, I think it's like, like it's one of the best games. It's mainly me.

You know, it's me. It's not, it's not you, it's me type thing. And it's a illustrates it no matter how good the, you know, first person adventure game is, no matter how much it kind of the tone of it suits me like I like that it's realistic and that it doesn't have bloody ellipids or mind flares or people with horns like the other one it doesn't have that basically tragic over the top dungeons and dragon stuff even then I don't like it which is which I understand is a me problem and so that that's the point and because we had someone in our patron I think who who is a developer who worked on KCD2 and they were very very cool about it. They were very cool about it. That's right. But they thanked you even, you know,

for playing the game, even as you'd resmurched it publicly. It's just enough that he actually, you know, we feel a lot of effort and it's nice that he tried it. I know. That makes it feel bad, but that wasn't, I wasn't having a go at the game. It was me. It's my tastes that are weird. I know it's weird to only play Dwar Fortress. But you know, can you imagine just how much work goes into those games like it's incredible yeah well it's uh i certainly do understand if boulders get free man that that was that was not like that was probably made it an afternoon a couple of napkins they that was it you have you have no idea man you've no idea but yes you're right in in a lot of respects people making games modern games they just seem like a lot of a lot

a hassle, but I appreciate the effort that people put into them and when I get to play them and enjoy them. I like that that part of Chechnya or Chechnya, what I think it's used to be called Czechoslovakia. Yeah, like it's all. Okay, carry on. Like that's where it's kind of set. And I think like various castles and the countryside and stuff is kind of from that area. So it's instigated all of this tourism. All of these people are. who like the game are going there and looking at the scenery and looking at the castles

and going, I remember this. And the locals really like it. They're like, the people who play the game are very respectful. They're just very interested in the history and stuff like that. They're like model tourists. So it's it's feel good vibes all around, I think. Like, it's doing for

Chetia what Lord of the Rings did for New Zealand. Well, oh well, Matt, you can go a little closer to home with that. Do you remember this little series called Game of Thrones? which filmed quite a lot of its stuff in Northern Ireland if you didn't know. There were various locations.

I was confused there for a second because he's like close at home and I'm thinking, they filmed that in Australia? No, they did it in Northern Ireland and actually there were a whole bunch of tours you could go around and see you know locations and in one case my parents have a little village second house that they bought Gary style.

Oh my God. It was my dad's retirement project. Second house, Chris. Oh, my God. That's it. They are part of the capitalist class. No, no, no, no. They're allowed to do this because this was a house where they had that, like, it was, you know, my dad pulled up all the ground and knocked walls down and built it. It was a retirement project, right? Like, that was all he did. And he did a very good job. Like, he's a handyman. So, but that, that particular house is in a little village called Knocknakari. And Knocknakari, a beautiful place along the coast, very nice, you know, like kind of the picturesque image people have violent sheep and, and pubs and whatnot.

But the sea caves there, Matt, the sea caves are part of the filming for the whatever, you know, the sea people and cave up thrown. So what is, what is drawn will never die or something like that? those people. So you could go to the Sea Kyivs and you would recognize it from the show. And I've actually been to the CKF, so when I saw Jim Frones, I was like, I know that place. So there you go. That's it. So I understand because Northern Ireland benefited from the tourism of, yeah, Game of Thrones being filmed there. That's it. That makes sense. That makes sense. I remember a lot of mud and it being very wet. He'd gave the Thrones. A lot of murder, a lot of a trail.

A lot of unhappy people, Chris. A lot of unhappy people. Yeah. Well, I know we're going over the intelligence limit map, but I just want to mention that like... No, there is no limit, Chris. You forget. This is supplementary materials. Oh, that's right.

There is... Anything goes. Anything goes. Anything goes. It's all all right. Yeah. Well, I, at the weekend, I went, like, I went bouldering. That's shocking, right?

But I went for a long bouldering session with my kids and his friend and, family, their family, like four or five hour session. And the next day, I took my family and the other kid, we went through like an indoor sports center with lots of kind of activities. I know they have similar kinds of establishments in other countries, but in Japan, they do these quite well, right? Like they have a bowling alley, they have archery, they have trampolining, they have rock climbing. All the things are in the same location. location. And in this case, Matt, there are two things that were quite enjoyable, right? One was they had a nine meter lead climbing wall, the one where you hook yourself into a rope, which I've never climbed, right? But in here, you could do it like quite straightforwardly and it was a 15 minute thing. But because I climbed for four hours the day before, my hands and muscles, you know, for climbing were quite worn out. And I don't normally climb lead walls because they're much higher. Those are the ones where you have to, you know, like be strapped in

because if you fall off, it'll be bad for you. And I went up climbing it. And one thing I've pointed out, like, I'm not that scared of height. So maybe I can do lead climbing. But the other thing is because it was like in a, you know, kid's sport center kind of thing, the holes were not clean. You know, they've never been clean. So it was like all extremely slippy.

And then my hands were very sorry. And there was a bunch of people around, you know, just watching people climb up. So it made it much harder than it normally would be. And after 50 minutes, I was fucking dead. I was just completely physically worn out. So that that was good. But the other thing that this place had, which you would appreciate, or maybe you wouldn't give in your stance on these gatherings.

Yeah, I'm hoping this story gets better because so far it's followed the same structure is all of your climbing stories, which is, I climbed up a wall, and it was hard. Well, it was harder than usual, Matt, in this case. Okay, harder than usual. Right. But the other thing it had was it had arcade machines, you know, like the video game arcade machines. And they were all free. Like, they're all set the free play.

You could do the ones where you were like arm wrestling a robot, but it also had, you know, Mario Kart and all this kind of thing. and it had a huge hit one that was Space Invaders. But it was like Space Invaders played holding a machine gun that, you know, reacted. And it was a big, like, projection screen. So me and my six-year-old sat on it. And this was the main thing in that arcade section. And, yeah, we played a joint machine gun version of Space Invaders for, like, 15 minutes.

And deeply enjoyed. I like this concept of like free-to-play arcade machines. This is the way it should be. But they were all arcade machines from like 10 years ago. You know, so yeah, I enjoyed it. Yeah, arcades. I remember when, I'm old to have to remember when they were a big deal. Yeah, yeah.

And expensive. Expensive, that's right. I never really played them because I was too cheap. I didn't have the money. Yeah, they're a big thing in Japan as well, right? Like, you know, there were people, the fighting games and all that kind of thing. They still are to a certain extent, but it's going on time. But anyway, that whole place was an impressively well-organized Japanese machine.

I was thinking that, like, in the UK, most of these things would have been destroyed within the first year of operation. But, you know, in Japan, everything was still in working. order and relatively clean. So, yeah. Well, that's good. That's, that's a good story. That's just, it's just life, Matt. It's just life. It's not a story, okay? It's just normal life. That's what that's what happens. Well, you know what I'm envious about you about it? It's like, you've got, because you live in a proper city, you have places like that to go. You can go there. You can go to like a thousand other places, right? Yeah, of different. I've got nowhere to go. More than a thousand.

There's no way to go in a little town. You can go to the beach or you could walk around the block. See, Kyiv. Go to the sea to the sea. Go to the sea caves. You know, when I was living in the north of Japan and Hokkaido, at one point I lived on this place called Makuminae, which was out in the, like it was the last stop on one of the train lines, right?

And there, Matt, there was only really one restaurant. in the local vicinity. You could still get the other ones, you know, but like with a young kid, no car, it was a peeing. And there was a KFC. I was at a KFC and that one restaurant. And the quality of the restaurant wasn't very good. And it was just like,

it's actually worse living in Japan and having that famous situation because you're like aware that there is lots of good food around. But you're stuck with like this mediocre restaurant. So I did live that in Japan. in a small way and when I left in McCle and I. Yeah. Okay, it's good to know.

I know European. I know you're being. You know me. I deal with it by cooking. And a lot of people, a lot of, a lot of Dakoters on the Patreon, we've got our own cooking channel. My God, Chris. I mean, not to butter them up, but they are good at cooking. They are sure good at eating and drinking, just the photos that everyone's posting. There's people making craft bread.

I know the bread photo was the one that got to me. God damn. I mean, there's lots of nice photos, but that was a good idea, Matt. That's a wholesome nuke of the online space that you've cultivated, right? Which is, you know, all our creators, Matt, they're engaged in their various dark, parisocial perversions, right? But you're like, share pictures of our food. Yeah, food pictures and dog and cat pictures.

that's pretty much the speed well I think I like to I bet yeah and they seem to be a good bunch of people

and not not internet crazies which is what I assume people who like the Weinsteins I assume that's what they get up to that's that's right well oh speaking speaking there might

you mean we just think about gurus and whatnot that's what we're here for isn't that that's kind of yeah we're not here about your rock climbing adventures tell me something awful oh well which one will I pick

well okay this one does relate to somebody that we covered recently so you remember the beauty man Dan Richards the dunking guy the one that hates Flint Dibble and there's like a bit of a horrible

character yes yes he's definitely one of these weird internet people he is a weird internet person in many respects but the thing that impressed me is that he released a video recently, and the title was Eric Weinstein's theory, real physicist versus pseudo-poser, but it's not directly about Eric. It's actually about Sabina's video about Eric.

So Dan Richards is taking Sabina's criticism to validate his view that, you know, physicists are all liars and the scientific community is really. refusing to acknowledge, you know, out-of-the-box thinkers and whatnot. So this is like the terrible people on the Internet always manage to find each other. And it does speak to the point that Professor Dave and others have made that she feeds into these anti-science, you know, channels and communities by producing these kind of videos. So, yeah, that's a nice crossover.

Yeah, yeah. So just remind me, so he was the Flint Dibble hater. Yes. Big fan of pseudo-archology and Graham Hancock. Yeah, it produced some pretty nasty attack material. And just like just a delusional. Encourage people to target Flint, there's work and all this kind of thing.

Yeah, he's a bad guy. A bad guy and also, you know, delusional. These things often go together. Okay. Yeah. And now he's a big fan of Sabina because she's having a go at yeah institutional physicists yeah exactly yeah so just you know more evidence in the column for the impact that sabina is having on the discourse you know those are the kind of things that might

make you notice what you're up to yeah like i just i think so too like if people were relying on us to do stuff that was objectively really quite bad and we're also doing other bad things of in a similar tangent, then I would stop and think, hang on, what are we doing? This is not who we want to be appealing to. We want to be appealing to people who know how to cook like dogs and cats. That's who we want to appeal to, not these people. Well, but the thing with Sabina, I've noticed this as well. You can tell quite a lot on occasion, by the way, that people will interact with the

feedback they receive. And when Sabina posts anything on Twitter, on YouTube, she will like. like all of the comments which are praising her or talking about the evil establishment or whatever and any of the ones that give pushback or critical commentary, she just ignored. So she'll, you know, it shows that she, what she wants to encourage and what she likes and what she does not like. So, yeah, I think she does know what she is cultivating. That's right. Because the comments usually are, like, however strong the OP's stances, Sabina in this case, the comments are generally, they take it further, you know what I mean? They connect the dots and they say the

quiet bit out loud, that kind of thing, and they generally do more extreme. And then, so you can go through and like or encourage or retweet those sorts of things, you know, like you're not saying it. It's just, you know what I mean? But, you know, you've incited that. And Eric Weinstein and Brett do that a lot too, which is, you know, especially Eric. He'll He'll make a vague people. Yeah, lab like people. That's another good example. They'll make it insinuating, you know, vague posting kind of thing.

But it's obvious what they're pointing to. All of their fans know exactly what they're saying. And they say the extreme ugly bit out loud. And yeah, I mean, they know what they're doing. Yeah, well, so there's that, Matt, that enjoyable crossover. Now, another follow-up from something we covered last time was Anna Kasparian. You know, from the Young Turks, that great network that pumps out really good critical thinkers. So she's being on a bit of a tear, as you might expect, given, you know, her political leanings and whatnot.

She's no fan of Israel, right, and the current activities in Gaza, with good cause, I think. However, she also, as we saw from the conversation with Tucker Carlson, goes a bit farther. than that, right? So she tweeted out the following. Our country is occupied and controlled by the Israelis. This is our fight. They're using our money and our bombs to slaughter innocent people and steal land. And then our media tells us the Muslim world hates us for our freedom. And people believe that slop as they lose public services because their resources are being sent abroad. The jig is up. You either love America or the country occupying it. And And she followed this up a couple of days later.

I meant every word, I'll say it louder next time. Israel's occupation of the U.S. government needs to end. Look at all these pathetic GOP lawmakers on their hands and knees, sucking up to war criminals in Israel today. Disgusting. Americans don't deserve to have their hard-earned money taken from them only to be used for Israel's genocide and land theft. So there, Matt, there's two things that I see being completed here.

and they really should be separate. One is criticism of America's foreign policy and support for the Israeli government and Netanyahu supplying of military support or resources. That's one criticism, one which I think is a perfectly legitimate criticism that you can level, right? The second part, however, is that the country is occupied and controlled by Israel. Essentially, what she's talking about here is the so-called Zog thing, Zionist-occupied government, right? Yeah, and in fact, occupied and controlled, not by Israel, but by Israelis.

Oh, yes, an important point here. Now, you know, if you substituted, like, okay, it's not fair to substitute words, but I mean, there is other stuff, not saying Anna Kasparian does this, but there is a lot of other stuff that goes on where straight up, documented anti-Semites just simply replace Jews with Israelis. The trinters equivalent. Now, the charitable interpretation of her thing is, as you explained to me, Chris, she's just purely referring to the lobbyists and stuff who are influential in American

politics and, you know, those lobbyists are influencing America that have a more generous policy towards Israel than would otherwise be the case. You know, the counterpoint is that there's lots of reasons why America has a generous policy towards Israel and have nothing to do with Jewish or Israeli lobbies in Washington, right? Yes. But, you know, that type of language of talking about your country being occupied and controlled by the Israelis, like, one, it's over the top. There's no sense of which America is literally occupied or controlled by Israelis. And two, that is exactly the same kind of language that straight up neo-Nazi anti-Semites

used to describe the way in which the Jewish cabal is taking control of your country and secretly controlling everything behind the seeds. Like, you don't need to use that kind of language. No, no. But I think it does speak to what we talked about before with the horseshoe. And there's nothing different here from Anna Kasparian's presentation to Candice Owens, right?

It's the same point of view that the American government is occupied by this foreign entity, which is controlling all of its actions. And it's not in the interest of the American people. It's all because of this secret Illuminati that actually controls world governments. And it's all Jews, right? But that's what she's suggesting. here. So she didn't use the word Zog, but she did say, our country is occupied and controlled by the Israelis. So, yeah, it's like a, there's a hair's breadth difference between that

and what the straight up file right conspiracy theorists are saying. So I don't approve and I don't give a pass to people just because they're nominally on the left-hand side of politics. And just to be clear, it is nothing to do with whether you should be making legitimate criticisms directed that the Israeli government and the actions in Gaza, right? There's various things at the minute around the humanitarian crisis caused by their attacks on, you know, people that are accessing food convoys and all that kind of thing. And all of that deserves legitimate criticism. But again, it's just people like Anna Kasparian and kind of, sort of. are conflating those two things, like the kind of anti-Semitic Jewish conspiracyism with criticisms of the Israeli government. And no, they're not the same thing, right? You can do one

without dealer, but some people don't seem to be able to do that. Yeah, I mean, there's now so much evidence about what's going on in terms of that almost deliberate conflation and that I don't think there's really any dispute about the dynamic that's happening. So, Yeah, and the fact that Anna is there playing footsie with Tucker Carlson and is, you know, again, just points to this, yeah, red brown popular horseshoe stuff. It's not a good trend. No, not a good trend. Well, Matt, there's another guru that I know that you like the cover. You're a big fan of his and you're always happy when we get down into his content there.

I promise you that I have not produced 65 clips for you this time. But our friend Gary Stevenson, I saw that somebody had noted that he talked about game theory. It's from a video a year ago. But I'm interested a bit in, you know, Prisoner's DeLemma, iterated Prisoner's DeLemma and so on. So I was interested to see what he said there. And I thought you might enjoy it too.

so can we can we have a little paddle in the gary pool today oh god chris the reddit the reddit threads will continue all right just a quick one morale improves that's right um well okay so gary like i said he made a video which was discussing the problems with dym theory right and uh he he did a actually a reasonable job of outlining, you know, the basic logic of the prisoner's dilemma set up, right? The matrix about, you know, this little scenario around where individual selfish motives might reduce cooperation, right? It's like a little illustration of your interest versus another person's interest, right? We have discussed the prisoner's dilemma on all our occasions, but he does a reasonable job

of covering that and then it's it's really where he goes from there that things tend to go slightly wrong so after he's outlined the prisoner's dilemma he then goes on to explain the following there are many situations where this game has been tried out in game shows or in economist experiments and what you find is actually a lot of people in this kind of situation they won't betray their friend they will stick with their friend because they like them or because they trust them or because they think they can get the better outcome

by sticking together so actually the people who have kind of proved themselves to be selfish in this analysis are the economists themselves it was the economists that said you will definitely betray your friend because the only thing you care about

is your prison time and that analysis is correct If the only thing you care about in the whole world is reducing your prison time in this game, you should definitely betray your friend. That is true. But the analysis that we did, that we were both grasp, that answer, that equilibrium, that response, only becomes correct if we make that assumption. So if we assume selfishness, we get selfish outcomes, which may be bad.

In reality, this game does nothing to tell us whether people are selfish or not. It only tells us that here is a game where the correct strategy, if the only thing you care about, is reducing your prison time, is to be selfish. So, this is my first conclusion here. Anyone who ever says that game theory suggests that people are selfish basically doesn't understand game theory. Game theory can tell you what to do. if we know exactly what you want.

If we know what you want, we can tell you what to do. If we know that you're selfish, we can tell you which outcome, sorry, which strategy is probably going to give you the best selfish outcome. If you're not selfish, if you care about other people, then you can probably work together and you can probably get towards this good outcome of only getting one you're in prison each. But that only works if you have a degree of non-selfishness. Now I want to get on to the reason that I've been thinking about this,

a lot recently. Okay, that's the scary's take of game theory. Probably anyone he knows anything about game theories, brains are hurting right now. Yeah. Yeah, okay, so, so I guess there's a couple of things. He seems to think that the game theory is making some sort of like moral claims about what people do that or what they should do.

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