Decoding the Gurus - Supplementary Material 55: Nature Debates, Murder Drone Conspiracies, and Podcast Vibes

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

Two academic windbags attempt brief discussions of the controversy at Nature, Bret’s newest conspiracy theory, and the latest vibe sessions in Podcastistan. It goes about as well as expected.The full episode is available to Patreon subscribers (1hr 18mins).Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus Supplementary Material 5500:00 Introduction: Science by Podcast04:04 Nature Joins the Arday Discourse Wave09:28 Activism and Science14:40 Academic Prestige Bias19:08 The Business of Academic Publishing23:43 Sasha Gusev Being Sensible and Culture War Brainrot29:04 Bret Weinstein and Jimmy Dore Investigate Charlie Kirk’s Death36:13 Anomaly Hunting42:27 Science Washing45:00 Conspiracy Discrimination and Reasoning Ability53:46 Academic Debate Norms59:16 Chris Williamson Promotes Professor Jiang01:01:01 Vibing Out in Podcast Panels: Hunter Biden x Nick Fuentes01:05:49 Dave Rubin and Andrew Gold Discuss Political Tribalism01:08:25 Heterodoxy in 2026: Zaid Jilani on Michael Tracey01:12:52 Hitler Was a Human and Had Motivations01:16:33 OutroLinksNature: The death of Jason Arday must prompt deep reflectionStuart Ritchie’s response to the Nature editorialMatthew Yglesias: Academia is cookedSasha Gusev’s response to Matthew YglesiasNature’s research and magazine editorial teamsDarkHorse: Was Charlie Kirk Killed With a Drone? Viva Frei and Jimmy DoreRobson, S. G., Martire, K. A., Pearson, S., Cosgrove, T. J., Jetten, J., Faasse, K., & Hornsey, M. J. (2026). Rejecting conspiracies doesn't necessarily mean that you're smart: The relationship between conspiracy discrimination and reasoning ability. British Journal of Social Psychology, 65(4), e70117.Modern Wisdom: WW3 DEBATE: “We’re On the Brink of Global Collapse”Mostly Wise #2: Hunter Biden, Matt McCusker & Duncan TrussellChannel 5: Nick Fuentes Interview (Ft. Hunter Biden)I Think You Should Leave: Hot Dog Car SketchThe Rubin Report: If This Isn’t Stopped, UK’s Fall Is Irreversible | Andrew GoldZaid Jilani on Michael Tracey’s contrarianismZaid Jilani’s World War II follow-upAdam Tooze: The Wages of DestructionDarryl Cooper’s introduction and foreword to Thomas Cyr’s World War II revisionist bookNext on Decoding Academia: Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside

And welcome to decoding the guru's supplementary material. Matthew Brown, psychologist over there, Christopher Kavana, cognitive anthropologist slash psychologist over here. Episode 55, Matt, can you believe that we made it? I believe it. I believe it. It feels like 65 episodes. It does this morning.

They weigh heavily on me. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm in Singapore at the minute. We like to, you know, situate for people. we are in the context of our bodies. I'm in the context of Singapore, and that is in the context of his house in Australia, right?

Yeah, I'm in the context of where I always am. Yeah. Well, that's not true. You're not on holiday today. Or are you in holiday? Is this like an unannounced all day? I didn't check. God damn, but I am so not on holiday.

I've handed in 45 assignments yesterday and I'm doing a grant application today. and they don't spark joy. There's so many hoops, you've got to jump through, so many names, so many emails. Boring. Boring. We should do Science by Podcast.

I'm actually down with it now. There's a lot of influences are saying. All the real science is happening on podcasts. I think I think I'm down for it. I've had enough of the real thing. It's much too hard, and there's too many emails and too many forms to fill out. You know, the thing is, Matt,

they won't let you talk about completing marking assignments or grant applications. These are the real things that, you know, you're prohibited from discoursing around. Nobody wants to talk. Nobody talks about that on podcast because it's boring. That's why. Is that what? I'd much prefer to talk about, I don't know, conspiracies and big science and corruption and Fauci and lab leaks. and colliders and whatever going faster.

Jason R-D. Oh, yeah. Yes. I noticed that's continuing. I mean, I know nothing about it because I choose to know more about it. But I did see that, I don't know, people are still writing articles and people are still complaining about articles and then there's more articles because other people are being canceled for those articles or trying to be canceled.

Other people are being outraged by other articles. That's about all I know. And that's all I want to know. Don't tell me anymore. Matt, the thing is, I'm going to call you up on something. This is an intervention, okay? It's happened one too many times, and now you'll have to be publicly ashamed for it. So have you ever noticed that, like, on the last episode, for example, when it got the Jason R day, you said, oh, yeah, yeah, let's have a brief chat about it.

I don't have much that I want to say. One hour later, things pass. So, you know, most people, if they say, I don't know. anything about Jason R day. For a start, that's not what they say. People online speak with complete confidence about things that they've done of what's no research into.

But in your case, you have literally had an hour long conversation about that topic. So when you say, I don't know anything about it, I haven't no. Is that true? I know nothing about what's happened since then. Since that go, more things have happened.

I know that they've happened because I've scroll past them. The emphasis on passed on my feed. And that's what I was referring to. Yes. Okay. Well, you win this round. But my point still sounds because there are times when you say, oh, look, we could

mention it briefly. And anytime you say that, I'm like, it's not going to be brief, Matt. It's not. You're trying to, I think you're trying to tell yourself, I'm only going to speak with this for a minute. I don't want to spend much time on it. But it's, we're not that kind of people, Matt. Adbit it to yourself.

We are long win. did the academics. It's an intervention, Matt. That's it. Just embrace your true nature. As a windbag. Sorry, I must fight it. Yeah, that's well, the thing with the R-Day discourse, I mean, you know, it was checking along just fine on its own. But an article appeared in esteemed science journal Nature, Matt. Are you familiar with that outlet? Yes, I am. Yes, I am. Yeah. It's a prestigious academic journal. And they published an article that was looking at the R-Day scandal, but very much focusing on the angle of it being a racist witch hunt, right, which should prompt reflection

amongst academics and journalists for the way that they approach these topics, right? And notably it had no mention of the fabulous elements and it downplayed the kind of plagiarism issues so it was it was a very slanted piece right and this led to a large outpouring of response especially on twitter right the the article was titled the death of jason must prompt deep reflection. Universities and media organizations need to scrutinize their roles in the events that led to this tragedy. But a lot of people took exception to the fact that it kind of whitewashes parts of the reason why the story had legs and so on. But, Matt, interesting thing. So you might say, well, why is a science journal anyway,

reading into a current event topic like this, right? You know, and it is an editorial piece. But it turns out this is because this is from the nature journalism wing. And that nature has a setup where it has the academic journal and a series of subjournalism. journals, right, the nature, human behavior and so on. But it has a completely separate journalist wing. And that wing, the news team, has opinion journalists who write opinion editorials, and it's editorially independent from the science wing. So this has led to lots of wheeling and nationally into over, you know, we cannot trust anything in nature anymore.

Like, yeah, the academia has fallen, look at nature, you know, be climbing itself in this way. Friend of the podcast, Stuart Ritchie, for example, tweeted out, it's really important that society has institutions that can be trusted to tell the truth and to be fair and reasonable. this editorial, which lenders the reputation of an obvious grandman, makes clear that nature is no longer such an institution. What's left? Question mark. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you think, Matt, like this whole affair? Yeah, I mean, I did, okay, I confess I did briefly scan through that article. Oh. Shacking. And, yeah. Yeah. And, uh, yeah. And, uh, yeah. And, uh, yeah. Yeah, look, I think it's, let me, everything you said is true, obviously.

It's an editorial article from, you know, a random journalist. And, yeah, I think it does whitewash it. And I agree that it's not a good look. I think it would be better if journals like science and nature didn't have a journalism wing that had independent editorial takes on things, especially ones that are political in one way or another, because while it's independent, and as you said, it does not mean that you cannot trust anything you read in nature, other than it's all politically slanted. Of course not, right?

It's still their brand, right? Oh, yes. And it creates a regrettable impression. And it actually doesn't matter whether or not, like the article could have been perfectly correct, perfectly like a great opinion that you really agree with. but I do believe in like non-overlapping magisteria when it comes to advocacy and activism and science and political reportage, etc. These are all good domains, but when you mix them up, it does diminish the reputation of scientific outlets, which you need to be trusted by everyone. You can't just have like liberals and progressives who believe that vaccines work because all the journal articles and science and they just say so. You need everyone to trust them.

So it is better for them to stay away from things like this and sort of be a bit more dry. Yeah, I do agree that. I think like there's other articles that appear. in nature. And I actually don't know whether they're editorials or their opinion articles or whether their social science type articles that are in the main journal. And that's part of the problem, right, is that when you have all these different wings operating under the same brand, that it can cause confusion. I agree with that. And I think that there's a danger when you mix in opinion and politics with research.

To meet the counter argument for people, though, Matt, in the current era, academic research is under threat and attack from various sources, including and not limited to the Trump administration

and so on. So scientists writing about objective facts around climate change around the origins of the COVID virus, that is political in nature, right? Or unfortunately, it has been politicized. So I do think there's a way in which, you know, whether you want it or not, scientists end up having to deal with the politics and so on. Yeah, as Anthony Felci has found out, and as our virus hunter friends have found out,

and those, like, I can't want to second. Right. So, but as that is an example, if nature came out of an editorial saying we stand behind the scientists here and we support researchers being able to publish without fear of reprisals and stuff. Wouldn't you tick that as them being political but also a good thing? Yeah, look, I appreciate there is a great area there, but there's a difference between like a scientific issue being politicized and the scientific venues and scientists themselves taking an overtly political position, opposed to a scientific one. I mean, I'm very familiar with this, right, because in my field... Gambling, right?

It's just, it's incredibly politicized, and there's billions of dollars at stake. And there are some academics who take an overtly political line. And actually, I do, I sort of temper my opinion a bit because I can think of a couple who I think have a very valid role, but they are perceived as activist and advocates and political actors, and their research is viewed in the same way, which is, you know, essentially potentially biased. And that's, you know, I think it's okay and maybe good that some of that exists. But if all the research was like that, all the research was viewed like that, and certainly the gambling industry tries to paint, if our research, for instance,

and many other scientists research as being biased because where campaign is against it or whatever, that's what they want to do, right, because it diminishes the credibility of it. So I draw a pretty strong line there between, like, our job is to inform policy, but it's not up to researchers and scientists to tell the government or the community what the policy ought to be. Like, it may be that the evidence points really obviously in one direction, like climate change is a great example or should you take vaccines or should you know should we have a public vaccination campaign or not ultimately that's a decision for governments and society right the the evidence can point incredibly strongly too yes and and you should be really forthright about that

but you know if you get in there and start campaigning as a as a scientist or taking political lines then you're just shooting yourself in the foot you undermine your own credibility and because politics is always fractured and always divided, you don't get to be that trusted external source that informs better policy, rather you just become another political actor. And by God, we have enough political actors in the discourse as it is. Yeah. And I do think that, as I said, this mixing up of opinion and commentary and objective research or research which is supposed to be, you know, do its best to be impartial does cause issues because like I noticed my the BMJ in the British Medical Journal that it frequently publishes opinion pieces right now

they're flying as opinion but they can often be like extremely polemical and this includes COVID contrarianism during the pandemic they published a variety of things that were let's just say, very friendly towards Vinay Prasad type perspectives and such. But it was labeled as opinion. However, it's opinion that is associated with the British Medical Journal, which gives the impression that it's a more serious and academically informed take than would otherwise be the case. And the thing that I will say is that when it comes to articles in nature anyway, nature or science or any prestigious journal. Yes, you do expect that they will publish good research, but it is absolutely not the case that when I see an article has been published in nature, especially if it's a social

science article, that I automatically assume it is going to be correct and that, you know, I can just go by the fact that it's appeared in nature. There's no more thinking on my end needed. So like this notion online where people seem to be like, well, if nature publishes this, I mean, we can't trust anything. I mean, what are we supposed to do? That's it. Nature is gone. You're like, well, I mean, first of all, you shouldn't be trusting things that appear in any journal automatically just because they appear in the journal. But also, the fact that this appeared in this, you know, news outlet wing, not the research journal wing, it should, I feel, be qualified by that, right? Like, it is nature's fault for mixing up the branding.

But online, when people were informed about this, because, you know, most people don't know, they're not aware that there is these kind of two separate editorial teams operating under the same brand. But when informed about it, people who had these, you know, extreme takes that like this means we can't trust anything in nature, various people online, including the researcher, Sasha Gusev, was pointing out, you know, just to know there are these two separate wings. And yeah, like, it doesn't lead in the most part to people moderating their takes. They just continue on as if, you know, it doesn't matter at all, that it wasn't the research journal wing. And that to me seems like, Like, you know, it should temper the extent to which you run around declaring that all of academia has fallen.

But am I being too generous, Matt, to nature? Is this simply a thing of their own making? I don't know. Yeah, a little bit, I guess. I think they could just keep the branding separate and maybe not have decided to have like a journalistic wing with more journalistic standards because it does promote confusion. I agree with you, the response is overblown, especially when they are researchers themselves and when their mistake is pointed out, it doesn't change their belief because they absolutely

want to believe that academia is fallen and it's all corrupt and it's all politicized and so on. Yeah, you know, it's, it's, look, it's a delicate topic. I mean, I recently have written a kind of a journalistic, slightly polemical article that's going to come out, but it's going to come out in a popular venue. It's not the kind of article I would write and submit to an academic journal. Even so. It's not just an R-Day, right? It's not about Jason Rade.

It's about young men, sports betting and stuff like that. Oh, young men. Yeah, young men, I know. They won't let you talk about them, Mark. I just cry. I cry every time I think about young men. It breaks my heart. But, you know, actually, I do think that to the best of my ability, that is a balanced

and well-evidenced article, right? Where, yes, I am putting forward an argument, putting forward an opinion, in, but I do cover evidence that doesn't fit my argument, just confirming stuff. And I try to, yeah, I approach it the same way I would an academic introduction. So from my brief scan of that article that caused a controversy, you know, it is one-sided. It's not that there isn't any truth in it. It's just that it does downplay one side of it because it's leaning towards a completely, you know, the other direction.

And, you know, let a thousand flowers bloom and, you know, There's hugely opinionated articles and all kinds of venues and people are probably writing them on substack at the rate of 15 a day on topics like this. And that's fine. But when you link it to the brand of nature or science, then you're not helping yourself. Yeah. And I, you know, like you say, Europe and your piece is going to appear in a journalistic outset, right?

Like, you know, a non-academic, non-research thing. But I guess for me, it's a little bit like part of the issue here. We talked about, you know, how the universities and so on function as businesses, right? But like journals in general. They do too, yeah. So, you know, saying nature shouldn't have this rain. And I'm like, yeah, but you can't stop them, right? They're an academic.

They're private. And like, I don't actually know the exact way that nature is organized. but in general, my image is that the journals are, you know, sort of laws onto themselves. That if they decide they're going to have an opinion wing or whatever, then they'll make it. And people can complain, but as long as research appears there and as long as they are making money, they'll kind of make their decision. So it feels like, you know, the solution could be. There are journals set up that don't do that, which are focused on research and like open peer review and so on. And these initiatives already exist, would you believe?

There's various open science journals that have sought to avoid these kind of issues by prioritizing other things like research rigor and whatnot. So the bit that gets me is like the discourse is all acting like, you know, nature's decision to publish this. reflects that all academics can't be trusted. And you're like, well, I didn't make any decision, anything to do. Like, I got no vote in this. Yeah. And actually, I'd go further. Probably no academics had to say in that whole process, right?

It would have been the business people or managers working for Elsevier or whatever the big journal Conglombie is that owns nature. That's the editorial stuff. And then you have some journalists and so on. So, yeah, I mean, what's it got to do with us sort of thing? You know, like the issue of basically the history is journals started off in the olden days as sort of amateur type operations run by researchers as a way of communicating with each other. And basically the modern equivalent of photocopying a few things and stapling them together and sending them off to your friends. That's how journal started off.

Then they turned into slightly more professional, small-scale publishing houses. still with a fair bit of academic involvement or control, perhaps. And then they all got bought up by four or five massive conglomerates who have since run them completely as a business. And they are a money printing machine because they charge universities for subscriptions. They charge for open access articles. So that's where the actual researcher has to pay for it to be published. And what do they do?

Well, they're essentially doing the electronic version. of that they don't do any of the writing that don't do any of the reviewing they don't need to publish in paper anymore right they put it up on a website and give it a d oi number so i'm i'm pretty blackfilled about how the academic publishing industry works uh to begin with so yeah you know you're not going to change any i mean well you can change those things but this is these are kind of social corporate political things we made the same points when we talked about this when we talked about the decisions of cambridge or any other university and how the executive branch of universities think about things.

And yeah, they think about things in terms of public relations, potential hits to their reputation, and ultimately they're focused on spreadsheets and balancing the books and making their organization a success because universities have been corporatized and run as kind of public corporations for a long time. your rank and file researcher working in astronomy or in any other field does not get a say in Kansas how universities do their thing. So you can you can grumble and complain about how society should be improved somewhat. And I encourage that. That's great. If you can change it, I'm all for it. But using capitalist science as the whipping boy here or just academic

scholarship as a field, as a culture. Like, that's just a different thing than, than I think, what they're upset, the things that have happened. Yeah. And again, I'll invoke the, I think, population geneticist or researcher anyway, Sasha Gusev, he, he quote tweeted Matt Iglesias, who was commenting on this story, right, saying, academia is cooked and it's too bad, institutions not even making cursory efforts to preserve their credibility, right? And then he responded noting this was an opinion

journalist commenting on another opinion journalist writing a bad opinion editorial in the you know, nature opinion editorial section. And this is, academia is so silly and cooked. And you're like, isn't this a journalism or pundit thing more? But it is, it's still the case that, you know, like we talked about, the brand confusion is of nature's own doing. And it is also true that the only reason that people are reading a editorial opinion in nature is because of the prestige attached to the science outlet. If it was just an article that this person had published on their own blog, for example, wouldn't be getting the attention, right? Yeah, that's right. If you're asking why would nature do this? Well, the answer is simple, right? They've got an incredibly strong brand that makes them massive amounts of money. They thought to themselves, how can we make some more money off this brand?

You know, get some more readers. Maybe people who aren't interested in reading like an incredibly technical thing about the kinds of stuff that usually goes in there. Oh no. We'll have a journalism thing. It'll be great. That's, that's it. That's why it happens. So, so yeah, Shout out to Sasha Gusev. He's on Twitter. He's a statistical geneticist. He spends a lot of time debunking race realists very effectively. And I think his take on this, which sounded approximately similar to where I was perhaps in that he also thought it was a bad mood.

A bad editorial, but not the end of the world. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So he said it more succinctly. Yeah, you said it better. I will know, but I am noticing Matt that it's starting to feed away a little bit. The next, you know, culture war, the squeaky toy is approaching on the horizon.

And I think that's good. You know, it's healthy that this doesn't become the all-encompassing affair that we've experience everything. But it is still ongoing. And nature just give it a shot in the arm by publishing this article. So good job. Good job. And, you know, online, the other thing I see, Matt, is the, you know, one, the academia has fallen stuff, which, yeah, okay.

But it already, you know, had a lot of the issues that people are identifying before the whole hard airfare. But everyone that commentates on this, they continue to. make the mistake that I see tips where they're like half of academia is defending this or I saw all of these institutions doing this and the reality is and this is the thing that online people

should know. Most academics don't know anything about the fair. They haven't heard about it. I know that it seems like it's all encompassing online and like literally everyone has the opinion. I know it was covered in the media but I swear

to you that there's lots of academics that are completely unaware of the topic at all. And it's just this thing where the online culture war people, they seem to on the one hand be very much about, you know, we've got to talk about facts and statistics and understand realities. But a lot of their reaction is very much vibe and emotion based. Like you would think that universities are, 50 to 90% made up of arts and humanities,

culture war, research and topics. And that is just not reflective of what the majority of courses are at university. Like the majority of what's going, as I say, I'm at Singapore. There was a presentation given about all of their various things that they're doing. Very, very little of it, even in the field of psychology, which, you know, is one that, is known for having ventured into activism and whatnot. But very, very little of the stuff that's going on

relates to culture war topics in any sense or shape. And you just would not get that impression from, you know, the discourse online. You would think it's at the least 50% of what academia does. And it's not. Yeah, indeed, indeed. Well, I mean, can we stop contributing to the, to the fuss and noise around this.

As you said, a regrettable incident and it won't be the last regrettable incident. There'll be another one very shortly, I think. Sure, sure. Well, we can turn to something more substantial that has a kind of application to the real world and people should be aware of. So the important stuff that people need to know about right now

is rising into threats. Ukraine, and that was the third thing? So Brett, Matt, Brett Weinstein, he was talking about the murder of Charlie Kirk, and he has some thoughts about it. Him and Jimmy Dorr and another conspiratorial dork got together, and they had a long discussion about it. I'm just going to play you two clips of Brett's reasoning. It's been a while since we've heard Brett's dulcet tones. So you're in for a treat, Matt.

And maybe you might hear some echoes of a previous well-known conspiracy theory and the way that people reason about it. So, yeah, just listen to this for some evolutionarily informed insights into what may have befallen Charlie Kirk. Put that aside for a moment. I want to talk a little bit about the 30-0-6 hypothesis of the crime here. I think we fall into, there's a thing, I'll try to recreate it called the, I think it's the prosecutor's fallacy. And basically it looks like this. A person, their DNA matches the DNA on a weapon that has been used in a murder. and the prosecutor says the chances of this DNA matching are a million to one.

And the person is convicted. The problem is, if there's no other evidence that the person committed the crime, then the fact that you found a person whose DNA matches the weapon means nothing because there are people in the population for whom it will match. On the other hand, if the person is seen running from the crime and then you take their DNA and it matches, then the chances are one in a million that the chances of the person seen running from the crime would happen to match the DNA found in the weapon, etc. So I want to point to an analogous problem. We have a shot that many people have tried to recreate and failed.

The 30-0-06 that leaves an entrance wound and no exit wound shot at that angle into Charlie has been. very difficult for anybody to recreate, which raises a question. Now, the answer to that question is typically given, hey, bullets do odd things. I agree. They do. But they don't usually do odd things. And I think the way to look at this is, oh, no, we've had a tremendously impactful political assassination from a single shot. I wonder if the ballistics on this one are going to end up inconclusive and or magic bullet-like, right?

That the bullet is going to have done things that, yeah, maybe occasionally a bullet does. But what are the chances in this case that you would have a bullet behaving in an extremely unusual way, breaking up in an unusual way, not leaving an exit wound, etc? Well, can you fault the reasoning, Matt? good hypotheses and critical thinking there, no? I'm curious as to what this points towards this. Oh, unusual. Like, it's like one of those things.

You know how those little puzzles, those little logical puzzles people get? Like, someone's found dead and there's nothing but a pill of water and all the doors are locked. It's like that. I bet he was shot with an ice cube or something like that. That's what Brett is hypothesizing. Well, you know, you're right, Matt. that's the foundation. Brett's just noticing inconsistencies, issues about trajectories and exit wings and, you know, things are like, it seems at first glance that they all add up, but, you know,

you did the sum you left with a remainder and it's rather significant. And what does it point? 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, gorometer 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.

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