Decoding the Gurus - Supplementary Material 52: Under-Optimized Academics, Tired Economists, and Bailiwick Clarifications

Episode Date: July 9, 2026

Two absolutely shattered academic heroes heroically drag themselves through yet another supplementary episode to bring you the important guru news in between their restorative breaks.The full episode is available to Patreon subscribers (Full Episode: 1hr 32 mins)Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus00:00 Introduction02:13 Eliot Paisley's Anatomy of an Optimiser08:52 Eric Weinstein wants a University Position and a Stipend16:09 The Failure of the Anti-Woke Quasi Universities19:19 Gary is Knackered Again20:45 Gary is the best inequality economist in the world24:36 How do I make a Documentary?33:04 The End of the Year Approaches37:44 Public Accountability40:13 The Neurodivergent Trump Card40:59 A clarification on bailiwicks42:43 Tucker Carlson & Chris Cuomo discuss Russian Apologetics48:53 Ukraine is selling weapons to Mexican Cartels54:54 Civility Porn Judo56:09 When Hasan met Prof. Jiang01:01:37 Conspiracy Theory Buffet01:07:24 Looking Good by Comparison01:11:21 Comparing Epstein Conspiracies01:24:03 Agreeable Conspiracism01:27:13 Outro and Piers Morgan InviteLinksEric Weinstein appeals to billionaires on TwitterElliot Paisley: Chris Williamson Is A Slave Gary’s Economics: My Documentary is Coming Out THIS WEEK!! – why you should watch itThe Times: Gary Stevenson: I want a wealth tax on the super-rich — like meNews Nation: Tucker & Chris Cuomo: The FULL ConversationHasan Debates Professor Jiang On His Wild Predictions | HasanAbi Archive

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Guru's supplementary material with the devilishly handsome professor from down under the Silver Fox of the podcast, Matthew Bryan, and his co-host, partner in crime, me, Chris Kavanaugh, Northern Irish in Japan. That's what I am. So there you go. Hello, Matt. Good day. Good day, good day. Good week. Happy Monday to you, sir. How was your week last week? I didn't see you. I was off down.

Then a beautiful new show. Just hanging out. Having a holiday and you're going to recover from your holiday by taking another holiday. Right? The last holiday took it out of you. So you need to take it all the life of academics. People say, ma, we live in ivory towers. It's not all fun and games.

Sometimes there's like days of work in between the holiday. Yeah, like today, I know, frantically dealing with all my students who have missed me and will miss me in the coming week where I'm going to be off on Fraser Island. Doing some walks. Walks in the forest. Is Fraser Island a good thing? Is it a nice place? Yeah, it's a nice place. Yeah, it's a nice place.

Yeah, yeah. But I'm just tired, Chris, just so weary, sleepy all the time. I think I'm either low iron or low tea or both. I'm not sure what it is. Lee Low Iron. Jesus, you need to, you're going to have to get a stuff of that. The optimizers, Matt, they've got things that they could recommend. That's right. That's what it is. I'm insufficiently optimized. I think they take it too far. I think they're overly optimized.

I, however, could be under-optimized. That's the issue. I've came across, there's a fantastic article I'm going to recommend for people called it's by someone I don't know them, so I cannot. I'm not, I'm not, endorsing their broader outfit. Okay, there's always a good to stay ever to put in. But on substack, there's somebody called Elliot Paisley, and they wrote a review of Chris Williamson's live tour. And it's called Chris Williamson is a slave

of a matter of routine. And it's quite asherbic. So let me give you a taste of it. So they're talking about coffee and he says, no coffee for the first 90 minutes. What? Why not? Your adenosine system that caffeine acts on it isn't active for the first 90 minutes a day. So having a morning coffee is literally pointless. And this is the guy's response. Literally pointless, you say. Here's just one point, Christopher Williamson. It's nice. It's nice to have a coffee in the morning. I like disobeying my

adenosine system and going downstairs and making a coffee and drinking it without once looking at my stopwatch. My adenicine system is not the boss of me. The head and the adenicine system is my employee. He does not decide when I have a coffee. If he doesn't like it, he can quit. Lamentably, his pal doesn't agree with me. That, that, that, that. And it destroys you in the afternoon. Correct. Oh, is that it? Is that correct? I was wondering why every day after lunch I developed the symptoms of leprosy, why I suddenly come down with a bad case of bone failure and my brain fills with malignant tumors that all play the kaz and none of them very well. Sorry, Mr. A.S. won't happen again.

Also, who says correct as an answer in real life to an actual human being? So it goes on. It goes on. The part that follows it says, Chris, he's detailing this morning routine, and he says, I then have salt and water. And the guy wrote, he's a mollusk. We're listening to a barnet. I'm teaching electricity from a whelk.

it's pretty good. To Chris Williamson's credit in the comment after it's quite a long piece, you know, kind of brutally mocking him. He wrote Always Nice to Meet a fan at the bottom. So that's a good response. That's fine.

That's fine. But yeah, Chris is, I mean, he's symptomatic though, isn't he, of this broader trend where people, I mean, like I stereotyped Californians,

not all Californians, but in my mind, this all comes from California. It's like, it's like Eisengard from which the stuff spreads throughout Merkel or whatever. It's a pure form. Like, Plato's pure. The pure form of wellness is California. Yeah, that's right. And like routines and an incredible number of supplements and just, yeah, like little rituals and little things you must do. can't do. And in their defense, like, there was, like, my entire adult life, there has been

this whole phenomena of, I guess, lazy lifestyle articles, which is, you know, science is found, you know, remember, you know, you had to drink a glass of red wine, then you can't drink a glass wine, it'll kill you, then you should eat chocolate, then you shouldn't eat chocolate. You know what I mean? There was this, there's a whole category of lazy lifestyle articles. And I think that has metamorphized into an entire prescription for life based on whatever random thing people have read somewhere in the academic literature. And actually this goes towards another unpopular

opinion I've got, Chris. I think they should have never allowed anyone without a PhD to read any of the peer-reviewed research. Not endorsed. Not endorsed by the conference. Kept it under lock and key. It's done more

harm than good. No. They shouldn't be reading any of that stuff. Oh dear. Whenever you get your pitchforks out to come for out of touch elites. Remember, it's Matt. That is giving this I just want to signpost this for the critics who inevitably bring it up in the future. Matt said that, okay? And I said, no, Ma, I disagree. So when you're attributing that someone on this podcast, that was Matt, okay? All right. It just has done some harm, though, the popular consciousness.

That's all. That's all I'm saying. Well, transparency, transparency, Matt. It's done more. Or good than harm. That's the way I predict. I don't think you have to necessarily have a PhD. I just think you have to sit. There should be some board, an international board, where you have to be able to do one decent literature review to show that you can critically evaluate the literature.

And then you get access to it. Then you get access to all with the. There's a catch-22 with my plan because you need access to the literature in order to do the literature review. So it's complicated. I haven't figured it all out. You haven't got all the details. Yeah.

But it's a working project. I get that. I just saw out of the corner of my eye and a low line from this piece. I'm going to have to read you. I know people reading stuff of an article is not that pleasant, but you've got to appreciate this. So he's got the quote from Chris Williamson. As soon as I'm up, I'm making a B-line for daylight.

And the writer says, what an abyss of a line. What a profoundly unremonted year of life. He doesn't amble out into the sunshine. He makes a B-line for daylight. Not when he's ready, but the second he's up. The same moment with his eyes bolt open. Chris Williamson navigates the most direct and energy-efficient through to the few sky radiation. It's not the nourishing glow of a maternal star,

suffering our ancestors danced and feasted in celebration of. Daylife's just a source of vitamin D, something that turns the ignition in his metabolic system. It doesn't even exist until it makes contact with his boring face. It is a bit harsh. It is a bit harsh. It's a bit harsh, but you know, it's got a nice couple of lines in it. So I recommend people take a look at that.

Apparently, he's also covered Stephen Bartlett in an article the previous week. So, ma'am. Oh, good. There you go. Stephen Butler deserves to be covered by an acerbic vinegory article like that. Yeah, that's, you know, speaks to my soul. And on that subject, Matt, you know, I felt when we covered Eric Weinstein

trying to convince people that he's more connected to Jeffrey Epstein that they could possibly imagine. But we'd hit pick Eric. Like, that's just an encapsulation of how much he needs attention that he's willing to demand the people, even inventing, you know, ludicrous claims that Epstein wanted him to be his number two and all this kind of thing.

I thought that was peak Eric. And then I saw a post TV on Twitter. I think you've seen this too, but I'm going to remind you of it. Yeah, you have to read it out for everybody. Yeah, I'm not going to read the entire thing because it's long, right? But as with everything Eric produces. But here we go. The talk was about a mystery.

It costs $5 to $15 million to endow a chaired professorship. say in demography, immigration, virology, virus origins, public health, vaccine safety, nudge, noble lives, evolutionary theory, brackets gender, political science, bracket's color revolution technology, near eastern studies, brackets Islamist colonial empire, economics, bracket asset taxes, etc. Yet our anti-woke billionaires have not figured out that they allow. loan can reward the academics like Martin Kuldorf or Jordan B. Peterson, Brad Weinstein, Helaireen, Peter Burgossian, James Lindsay by reinserting them with no teaching duties and gorgeous housing slash vacation homes and discretionary funds. Imagine 25 academics

with giant huevos reinserted back into Oxford, Harvard, Cambridge, Princeton, present in every faculty meeting empowered to blow up the woke mind virus where it breeds. Imagine if every university learned the lesson that heroic behavior was actually admirable and rewarded. Duh. God, this is so dumb, similar for journalists and editors at newspapers. Yet, something is wildly wrong with our billionaire class. This is one of the most effective ways to destroy the revolutionary mental illness by rewarding the academics who, along with their families, paid with livelihoods, pensions, their names, academic access. So to translate that, Matt, he is basically saying that all the rich people, people like, say, Peter Thiel or Elon Musk and so on, like they're

always going on about all these things we need to do to reform academia to solve the meaning crisis, whatever the case might be. But the answer is staring them in the face. And it's, if they just established endowed chairs in universities and give the academics that they handpicked to occupy those chairs, massive endowments, big houses, unlimited funds, just say 15 to 25, you could blow up the whole academic system with revolutionary thinkers, Peter Burgossi and James Lindsay and stuff, install them and just imagine what is going to happen if you have those guys in the department meetings at Harvard. What wonders? It's quite a list of revolutionary thinkers he's got there. He doesn't put his own name in there, I thought, which is admirable

self-reserved. Very reserved, yes. Very Eric. He will often make these kinds of statements a name everyone when he's clearly talking about himself, but he's naming his brother. His, his, his sister-in-law. His wife. It's the small circle of people who are incredibly Eric adjacent. So the implication is clear. But the mind boggles, Chris. What would happen if we gave James Lindsay a massive fucking house?

What a world we could be living in. Utopia today. I imagine James Lindsay bloviating at some departmental meeting in Harvard. What world altering outcomes would come from that if James, could go on about critical theory at a department meeting. I mean, it's hard to fathom that. What kind of changes could come from that? I can't even imagine.

I'm imagining some sort of post-scarcity utopia. That's what we need have. Yeah, it's certainly not gay space communism or whatever because he's not a big fan of communism. No, I guess those things. Yeah, something, something. But it speaks to this very childish perspective that Eric and his friends have, that academia is not a massive worldwide network of hundreds

of thousands of people working in disparate disciplines and largely the majority of work going undiscussed in tabloid newspapers or by Elon Musk. No, they think it's like 20 people and all they need to do is have the kind of right outlook and you'll get like, like warp technology and like it doesn't matter that they have or whatever it doesn't matter that they have no research track record that's irrelevant just they just they still deserve the professorial endowment absolutely like it doesn't matter that their main job is just tweeting or going on podcasts that doesn't matter that's who we need that's who we need to at the very tip you top 15 million dollar endowments no teaching big houses just

clean slate, totally free. I mean, I don't think they'd do anything as... Even if they had that, I don't think they... Oh, they wouldn't do anything so mundane as research. Well, first of all, they don't know how. That's a problem, first of all, but haven't done it. You know, they haven't done it for their entire... There's a couple of, like, you know, anti-tax people.

Well, he mentioned Martin Kuldorf, who I believe is at least a medic. I guess. Is he an anti-Vex type person? Yeah, well, he's a, you know, COVID dissident, shall we say, Matt. Yeah, yeah. Like, think, yeah, what do you call that guy that fell out of fever that had a position? Oh, so not Pierre Corrie? Not Pierre Corrie, not Peter McCulloch, the, the other hangar-wrote guy. The, oh, what was his name, Barry Weiss? Loved him.

Vinae Prasad. Well, you, anyway. Anyway, you get the idea, but that's interesting thing too. And it mirrors Jordan Peterson's thing, which is what we need is more incredibly politically motivated partisan people doing, you know, well, not research because I don't think they're imagining they're going to do research. They're just going to whatever, give their opinions about things, bloviate. That's what we need. You know, work is bad because it's too, it's got too much of a political agenda. What we need to do is inject in our anti-work in gender.

do the same thing. Well, I'm just realizing, no, haven't they already done this? Didn't they set up a bunch of anti-woke quasi-university and Peterson Academy and stuff? So they literally have what they want, which is these people giving, you know, the types of courses, which by and large are not research-based courses at all. They're not empirical courses. They're just, you know, extended YouTube channels, basically. And they have students taking them and it doesn't seem to read anything except,

generating, you know, another income stream for the relevant persona. So, like, when you look at the anti-woke universities and how thin the representation of, like, science or engineering or law or any of the, you know, the disciplines which they hold up as the desirable better way that everybody should be focusing on, but not at their universities. No. They've got ouds and you found these out of the wazoo. That's right. Like the so-called like uncontaminated disciplines.

I suppose in their mind, all the disciplines are contaminated. Like in astronomy because some astronomers somewhere has written some sort of maybe work opinion piece. Like that's it. Astronomy is fallen. They probably feel the same way about mathematics. Well, we know what Eric thinks about physics. So it's all corrupted, isn't it? So.

Yeah, yeah. But it's very true you say. I don't think Jordan Peterson's university or any of those anti-work things. Like, do they have like a proper mathematics department, for instance? Would they have such a thing? No, they definitely don't. At best, they have a course on maths. And it's not the kind of course where you're actually expected to do that.

Like, it's just, you know, talk about Baf's or this kind of thing. And also, Matt, this tweet from Eric was in relation to like somebody asking of his speech at Ark, you know, the kind of like Jordan Peterson S conference that they set up for right-wing populists that they now do, I think, annually. And

I think it's the Association for Responsible Citizenship or something like that, right? Anyway, he gave a lecture there, the usual kind of stuff and somebody was saying, is it going to be released publicly? And that's when Eric went off on this, you know, tirade. And at the

end of it, he sees, he's and Mark Andreessen, Elon Musk, and Bill Ackman. So he's just like, I think he's a bit salty that Peter Thiel's stop providing him with a stipend. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I guess from his point of view, he's obviously noticed that the Silicon Valley moguls are all very weird and more than anti-woke. There's some sort of paleo-con weirdos.

So why aren't they giving mouthpieces like him more money? It makes sense. I understand why he's salty. They give him for like a decade, at least Peter Thiel did. So, you know, like what happened? Well, that's Eric. He's going to Eric. You'll never stop him ericking.

And another similar figure that we've covered and is having a little moment in the sun is old Gary. Gary Stevenson. You know Gary? I think one area in which you and Gary are similar is that you're both very tired. Yes. We don't need long holidays. I sympathize with Gary about that.

Yeah. Well, so Gary had a documentary come out on Channel 4. I have not watched it yet, but it's around 90 minutes long and it's about his kind of campaign to get away. wealth tax introduced. And also it does include voices from critics in it. Apparently, it's Louis Faroo's production company that were involved with it. But yeah, so there's a new round of media coverage of Gary coming on the back of that. And also Gary has put out a little video, encouraging people to watch the documentary, which I have a couple of clips of. But I did,

read the Times article where they interviewed him and it was called Gary Stevenson I want a wealth tax on the super rich like me and this article Matt it's quite something. There's

a number of lines that you know just struck me. The headline one that was getting repeated around was this is a quote from Gary I'll be totally honest with you I think I'm one of the best if not the best

inequality economist in the world. So, you know, there's been questions if Gary is an economist, but apparently he's not just an economist, much like we're treating, he's possibly the best economist in the world. Is there anything that Gary's done that he's not the best at? That's the question. I don't think so. I don't think so.

It's funny you mentioned that because we often mention that when Gary's interviewed, there's a couple of topics that are reliably going to come up, Elite University. Oh, at elite university. Yes. Yeah, elite university and often surprisingly his performance in... If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at patreon.com slash decoding the gurus.

Once you do, you'll get access to full-length episodes of the Decoding the Gurus podcast, including bonus shows, gurometer episodes, and Decoding Academia. The Decoding the Guru's podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And for as little as $5 a month, you can discover the real and secret academic insights the Ivory Tower elites won't tell you. This forbidden knowledge is more valuable than a top-tier university diploma, minus the accreditation. Your donations bring us closer to saving Western civilization. So subscribe now at patreon.com slash decoding the gurus.

Thank you.