Decoding the Gurus - Supplementary Materials 12: Olympic Ceremonies and Presidential Candidates

Episode Date: August 3, 2024

We tour the Guru-sphere's balanced and considered response to the Olympics Opening Ceremony and Kamala Harris replacing Biden as the Democratic presidential candidate. And oh boy are they on form!Addressing Petty Grievances: The Show's FormatThe Furor French Olympics Opening CeremonyTrump's Assassination ConspiraciesThe Great Flowering of Kamala Harris TakesKonstantin Kisin and Cringe ImmunitySteven Pinker vs. TriggernometryBret Weinstein's New Conspiracy HypothesisThe Wonders of Peterson AcademyBret's Falsifiable PredictionWe Never Miss!The Importance of Supporting the PodcastLex Fridman's Selective Centrism and Wounded Bird PoseThe Hypocrisy of Reactionary PuritansKen Klippenstein on Steve Bannon's War RoomFinal Thoughts and FarwellThe full episode is available for Patreon subscribers (1hr 17 mins).Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurusLinksBret's New Conspiracy HypothesisTriggernometry: Is This the Death of Harvard? - Steven PinkerLex's wounded bird poseJournalist Ken Klippenstein Enters The War Room

Hello and welcome to the Decoding the Guru's supplementary materials. Bonus, the B-side, the unreleased tracks from the Decoding the Guru's archive. How are you keeping, Matt? You're looking wintry. You have a beanie on. No proper introduction, just how you're doing. Oh shit, I always forget that. Right. That's Matthew Brown, psychologist extraordinaire. I'm Chris Kavner, anthropologist.

We look at gurus. We decode them. On these episodes, we have a slightly more informal air to them. We surf around the discourse sphere and feel despair at what we observe there. So that's what we're up to. But you're still wearing a beanie i'm still wearing a beanie distract me i can't let you go with that introduction though you didn't inject any special source you should have said something like with me is matthew brown

the heart and soul of this podcast i'm chris cavanaugh it's called calculating brain something like that wow that was good yeah so just imagine i said that and that that's why matt does the intro to the mean thing that's why i do the intros uh but yes under the beanie i'm hiding my white snowy uh coif mean you're like koizumi the old japanese president that's right that's right i'm developing the eyebrows to match um you you look you look lovely may i say thank you very very youthful black hair and just just a few streaks of gray in the beard that just add a note of just um distinguished i've seen distinguished. I've seen things, Mark. I've seen things.

That's changed me. It was jet black. I've seen tweets you wouldn't believe. Yeah. I watched the Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson, you know, meeting of the minds. And I looked in the mirror and I was just peppered white. That's right. They're stealing your soul that's stealing your soul well what are we doing today chris we're doing like it look my god i mean i know what we're doing you got to get a grip on

the discourse it's running away from us so much has happened it happens too quickly there's a lot going on matt there's a lot going on and you. There's a lot going on. And, you know, far be it from me, the stupid level of addressing petty grievances before we talk about world affairs. But I'll just note that, you know, this concept for this version of the podcast was that we would take some of the material that was in the introductory sections and would extend it out and package it separately for people that wanted that, right? So should these introductions or should these supplementary materials be a little indulgent? That's by design. It's by design, Matt. So now if we want to talk about the weekend, if we want to mention our recent fitness achievements that's fine that's fine

that's part of the plan right because you can just skip it by the magic of technology and to remind everyone else and an additional public service announcement i always put bookmarks in so you can always see like the little thing you're like oh they're talking about this again just click it you go on to the bit that you want. That's the service that we provide for you. So there we are. There we are. There you go. See what happens when you complain people?

You get answers. You get answers. That's what you get. So yeah, but I'm not even going to talk about my weekend, Matt. Just I had a good weekend. That's all. I'm not even going to go into detail. No, you don't get it.

That's your punishment for this week. We're just going to not give any updates. You don't know what happened. I mean, you know, but other people don't know. It was nothing special. It was very special.

Yeah. Well, I worked, as you know, all yesterday, all my Sunday, just like I worked last Sunday to get this report in, which is due today, Chris. I worked to give myself that extra time so I could be with you. So, you know, that's how much I care about the podcast, about you personally.

Yeah. We don't even need to provide context. Just as a report, okay? It's going in. It's a report. It's going in it's a report going in yeah you have to do it it's a report you can't just can't just leave reports undone reports need to be done everyone knows this it's the 21st century that's right that's right we're uh we're pushing papers around we're submitting things into files this is the way it works this is the way the world map but but the world has been turning. Things have been

happening. People have been losing their collective shit over various events. So I will note that since the last time that we recorded in America, in the presidential race, Biden stepped down, announced that he would be not seeking re-election. And then subsequently that he would be not seeking re-election and then subsequently that he would be essentially endorsing Kamala Harris. And I think it's still yet to be officially determined that she's the nominee, but it looks all but certain at this point. So this led to various people having connections

all over the internet in different ways that we'll talk about. But you may remember, you know, there was assassination of Trump a while ago. That's now feels like a million years ago because all of the discourse has shifted. But before we get to that, Matt, there was other discourse, the most contemporary up-to-date discourse that we have for people relates to the Olympics Olympics. What has been going on there? The French Olympics. Why could anybody be upset about that?

The French Olympics. That's right. Well, what happened there? Let's see. They had an opening ceremony, didn't they? They had an opening ceremony, and it was very French. If you haven't seen it, it looked like Cirque du Soleil on acid a little bit. Was it avant-garde?

It was avant-garde. It was the French at their Frenchiest. And it was very dissimilar to the opening ceremony, which I also saw a post about in China for the Beijing Games. And that one there was complete contrast, right? It was, there was like a thousand drummers with the great big taiko drums or something like that it was really impressive i don't think they were using taiko drums but no i

know the chinese equivalent yeah apologies to any chinese listeners out there i know we've got a lot of fans in beijing um but um you know but you know like that was in many ways a classic kind of ceremony. It was very Chinese. It showcased tradition, strength, unity, et cetera. Yeah, and then in Japan during the pandemic, there was a kind of ceremony that was very scaled back because the crowds and the various concerns and perhaps economic concerns in Japan about the cost of hosting the olympics without audiences and whatnot but uh yeah so the the japan olympics the opening ceremony there was

controversial in a different way people felt it was a bit lackluster but other people defended it but that's not what this controversy is about there no. It was one, wokeness gone mad, obviously. I think there was a chubby lady wearing a costume and that just makes the red mist descend over the eyes of the anti-woke because, you know, to them, that's just unacceptable. That should never happen. There was a guy who looked like a Smurf.

Wasn't it? Yeah, I saw him sitting in a bowl of fruit or her i don't know but wasn't there also drag queens or something like yes there was there was like a there was like a a man with a big beard it was like it had a evoked the bearded lady kind of thing with the address so you know it had that carnival know, circus, slightly off-putting French kind of thing. Yeah, and apparently also the Dionysian feast that was going on there, that was perceived by American right-wingers as being actually a parody of The Last Supper.

So it was not only troubling transgenderism and wokeness and large figured ladies wearing costumes, but it was also a mockery of Judeo-Christian values. Oh, I see. Well, I did notice the parallels with the image, but like, you know, the Last Supper image has been parodied a bazillion times like you can find simpsons posters with it or succession or like game of thrones but i've seen that hundreds and thousands of times right like that that image repurposed so it's not that surprising that somebody would would choose to you know include that no no it wouldn't be surprising and i'd be totally fine with it if they did but i mean the more reasonable interpretation is it was

like a bacchanalian feast that was the that was going for yeah yeah that's pretty much the that's that's pretty much the consensus and i think actually what the ceremony's artistic director said that was pretty much what it was about I think actually what the ceremony's artistic director said, that was pretty much what it was about. But, you know, who cares? I mean, the point is that a lot of these American culture warriors and influencers wringing their hands, clutching their pearls, absolutely shocked.

And, you know, they see this and they position it within their culture war framing, which is this is an assault on western values this is an assault on our judeo-christian heritage yada yada yada and it is ironic and very funny that they only see this because of their culture war adult brains and also because they have very little conception of European culture and European history and French people in particular. And the fact that they couldn't perceive it for being what it was,

the French are frankly just like this, yeah, made them get it hilariously wrong. I see, right. Yes, but also I noticed one thread by a guy, Tracy Ward-Greens, who was a researcher, I think, for Blockton Reported, but usually a quite thoughtful guy, ex-Mormon, on X. And he wrote like a kind of thread and responded to things saying that he really didn't like it, right? He found it distasteful. And his point was that there was a lot of mocking of Christianity implied in it or Western culture, right? But that they would not have done this

for like Mohammed or Muslims or the CCP, like because that would have led to huge controversy and whatnot. But I was like, right. But that's the point. Like France's history is to do with like Christianity and secularism and revolutions and beheading nobles and all. So that's what they booked for.

So if their opening ceremony had been dedicated to like making fun of china it wouldn't make sense but it would have came across as quite mean-spirited i'd like it they could have actually think they could have done something i would like the charlie hebdo shooting that would have been in the realm of possibility for like france to do right because like france is also the country that has all the things about the full body veal bands right yeah like so it's not like they're completely unwilling to touch any issues around secularism and like conservative religiosity as it pertains to like muslims well the whole vibe of the thing what as i said was this carnival type burlesque show right and you know it included a bunch of other edgy

somewhat offensive at least to some people things like marie antoinette someone dressed up as marie antoinette with a severed head and holding her head in her hand in a fabulous costume. It was that kind of vibe. And so, yeah, I mean, I don't recall spotting like specific references to mocking Christianity, but the whole point of the thing was that it was irreverent. I'm sorry, I'm going to get rid of that. Yeah, well, yeah, they clearly saw things that I didn't. But, I mean, the whole point of the thing is that it was irreverent and, you know, disrespectful and flippant and tongue in cheek and all of those things.

In fact, it was just extremely French. And frankly, if Western culture means anything, it means that. It doesn't mean like 10,000 people banging drums in perfect unison, you know, demonstrating their self-control and discipline. That's not the French way. So I just feel like these people have got everything they understand nothing they've got it completely backwards i also saw that some people were complaining about like a deaf battleman called gojira right they're just by the way yes like godzilla in japanese but they're a technical deaf metal band apparently some people describe them as progressive metal.

But death metal's whole thing is making use of satanic imagery. And just in general, that's the thing. Blood and gore and demons and devils. And alongside hard guitar riffs and whatnot so yeah it would be like completely about lordy i know and and chris i mean that's right i mean if you're gonna clutch your pearls over the satanic references and heavy metal is like like hello the 1980s want their outrage back the other thing too is that death metal band was playing like on a stage that was sort of built into i don't know

one of france's iconic classical buildings right yeah so so that was the kind of thing they were going for and for me that was very like that's just the whole thing was very very french so so the point is the people have got problems with any of that stuff it's like yes it was in bad bad taste in some ways it wasn't very respectful of the traditional buildings or or the monarchy of france but that's the whole point and i think that's what french people exist to do that is right so i so i think these people they portray themselves as good liberals right defenders of free speech and progressive western civilization civilization but yeah no no they're the opposite of that right the only thing they care about is respecting authority

and not challenging the historical classical things yeah that's right it's like jordan peterson's videos always like to play or you know james's, they like to play classical music as the intro, right? It adds a bit of touch of class, Matt, right? Roman statues. And you mentioned Charlie Hebdo, right? So these people would like to consider themselves as the inheritors of Christopher Hitchens' legacy, right? He was someone who was very vocal about that.

It was a big flag issue. And the main point of that, that motivated someone like Christopher Hitchens, is like this is what's wrong right this is when moral outrage around you know challenging you know sacred images and and cultural things is wrong but it's okay to be to be disrespectful it's okay to exercise your free speech and so on that these people would like to see themselves as the inheritors of Christopher Hitchens' ideas. But in fact, they've got more in common with the attackers, with the people who attacked the Charlie Hebdo building.

Oh, hot take. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Let me play centrist devil advocate here, Matt, because wasn't one of Hitchens' things? So, like, I agree about the kind of hypocrisy in that regard and pearl clutching, which wouldn't be very Hitchens-like. But one of the things that Hitchens also pilloried was the liberal hypocrisy around being willing to criticize Christianity and the West, but being very hand-wringing when it

comes to any condemnation of Islamist violence or non-Western cultures, right? Alternative ways of knowing and that. And isn't there an element of truth in that? You know, there is the point that it would have been weird for them to have made a big thing about, like, not liking muhammad in this ceremony but if they had did it it would have led to more than angry treat threads theoretically at least there would have been you know protests at french embassies probably in that kind of thing so isn't that uh a difference You look at me like, come on.

That's my best try. Answer the charge. I'll answer this. I don't know where to begin. I mean, one, it's what you said before, which is that this is not a thing you do. You don't do a performance at an Olympic festival making, you know, making ironic cultural references of other countries right the french

are going to riff on their own culture first and foremost england first and foremost as well just to say if they did do that oh yeah the first country would be the english or the germans and rightly so but um i i guess the other thing too is that it is just literally more cool if you're gonna have playful ironic satire and fun it's more it's just more appropriate to be doing about about yourself like like if you go around japan making fun of japanese stuff right so this is so stupid what japanese people do with this that and the other that's different from a japanese person talking about yeah the same thing yeah this would be like you know follow ted was very funny right because it's mirrored by people poking fun

at like the various things around irish catholicism and the hypocrisy if it had been called like follow takashi i was about a japanese immigrant that was like making fun of him to do with these cultural stereotypes well imagine imagine an english show about this drunken stupid irish corrupt priest it just it doesn't have the same flavor to it does anyway but the main thing is you're dealing with hypotheticals there those hypotheticals are kind of silly well no there's a very good movie called uh four lions if you've ever seen it which is like a satirical presentation of like extremist islamic people in the uk right like kind of homegrown terrorism and it's a comedy by armando iannucci and it's

it's very satirical but that is also not treating that like it's poking fun at it right and i think that is absolutely within yeah standard i don't know liberal lexicon like armando iannucci is still alive he's not being shot dead in the street and whatnot so yeah but like like in like in australia we've got um like we've got a show called Fat Pizza, which makes fun of people from Middle Eastern and Southern Europe type thing. It's all making fun of all these stereotypes. It involves all the stereotypes. It's got a bad taste and all that stuff. But it comes from a place of love.

It comes from people who are there. Same with Kath and Kim. This is just making relentless fun of bogans of lower class white people again every australian watching it loves it and again it sort of it comes from a place of you know whatever like so the french right when the french are being disrespectful about marie antoinette the french revolution the monarchy trust me that that doesn't that doesn't come from a place of where the french don't love themselves enough and don't don't think their culture is freaking awesome because they do

right yeah they really do yeah well that's one example of the idiocy that can be generated online in response to you know events you don't have to like the opening ceremony like you know i didn't i don't particularly like it i don't like cirque du soleil i don't really go for that kind of thing who cares you know that's the point yeah they're just freaks and wheels rolling around let them do their things that's it but um so the other thing matt that happened you know as we said was that uh one there was the assassination attempt, which we talked about before, but just to mention that, of course, the internet's premier conspiracy theorist, Brad Weinstein, had an episode, How Many Shooters? John Cullen on the

Trump assassination attempt. So he, like all our conspiracy theorists, could not help themselves with inventing deep state conspiracies and whatnot about the shooter. You know, maybe he was allowed to do it. for the additional shooter conspiracies is that the person responsible for killing or attempting to kill significant figures is often not a particularly impressive person. And so, you know, if it turns out that there's just somebody unhinged who's not really impressive,

but managed to get into a position to like kill someone who was a larger than life figure, people often are like, no, that can't be it. There can't be just this crap guy attempted to destroy this larger-than-life figure and succeeded, or in this case, failed. So there has to be more to it.

And you can do that by inventing a backstory where they're actually a secret agent for the CIA or the FBI or whatever. Or you can posit that there were other people involved like on the grassy knoll or wherever right so brett did that and in that interview matt this is a guy who believes he gets coded messages from trump delivered in his speeches to him like proper q and on shit and brett is straight there right like straight to it so he just is a giant conspiracy purist now which we already knew but um yeah that happened but in response to kamala harris

that led to the great flowering of cakes online because like ostensibly this is what people on the right kind of were calling for they were saying you know biden is mentally unfit he needs to step down who's really controlling things this is a you know look at him he's he's being puppeted around and all these kind of things and then when he stepped down saying you know that he's made the decision that, you know, he's not going to be leading the party, ostensibly what they called for. They called it a coup, an undemocratic coup. And this is not fair. And they all started throwing their tantrums. It was like Twitter became like a prom show.

Just all the toys were flying everywhere. And it was amazing because the narrative shifted so quickly from the Trump assassination attempt to everyone being like, oh, dear. Like he's now got this kind of heroic, you know, moment and a kind of invincible persona around. He picked this guy, J.D. Vance, a young conservative who people had questions about, but, you know, a young guy in another round of coverage about Trump. And look, he's back on the campaign trail immediately. And Biden was not very visible or during a couple of interviews

where he didn't come across much better. And then the news came out that he got COVID, which was like, so there was many celebratory victory laps being taken with like, this is all sewed up now. Right. And including that seemed to be the general consensus in liberal media that Biden is possibly not going to drop out. And we're looking like we're going to be screwed from polls and whatnot. And then Biden did drop out. And Kamala Harris very quickly, instead of it becoming this like kind of shit show fight thing, it seemed that very quickly there was a move to

Kamala Harris as the presumptive nominee. And that seemed to greatly upset all the conservative, a significant portion of like centrist heterodox accounts and they were all going crazy did you see any of this well well one thing you kind of maybe passed over it a little bit but um brett weinstein's theory about the conspiracies and we are we going to get to that i've got clips i've got the curves of that we can go there if you want to, why not? No, no, no. Well, we can. I mean, well, the only other thing I'll say first then is that, yeah, it's amazing because

for a long time, the discourse has been that age, Chris, age is so important. What we really need are young leaders. These people in their late 70s, early 80s, they're just too old to lead this country that's really the main thing this is why i as a centrist have totally opposed to the democrats and this yeah walking zombie that is biden that suddenly stopped as soon as that's gone now let's forget about that now now there are there are different problems different problems with the democrats she's 59 by the way i mean young comparatively but it's amazing what we now consider like you know you full exuberance and in politics but um yeah so david sacks he's one of the guys from the all-in podcast i kind of like tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley and has been relentlessly pro-Russia

mouthpiece during the Ukraine conflict. He's just, in general, a massive shitty person. We should cover the all-in podcast. But like, if you have the view of the reactionary right-wing tech entrepreneur type, David Sachs is your man. And he went on the Twitter bender. He was just like tweeting every couple of minutes, you know, we all know Joe didn't want to go. First, they told us there was nothing wrong with Biden. Then they threatened to destroy him if he didn't leave the race. Now they're calling him a hero. How can you not be sickened by these people?

What I did not know until this day, it was Nancy all along. She got him. And he also said, just this morning, Biden's campaign chair said he wasn't leaving the race. Then Biden suddenly posted a resignation letter with no address to the country. Reeks of a coop. And reeks spelled W-R-E-A-K-S, just to show their level of intellect. Also, Democrats are euphoric right now that they drove their own nominee and sitting president

out of the race. This is desperation masquerading as strategy. As soon as the American people realize that they already know Kamala Harris and dislike her, the bottom will drop out. Joe Biden turned America into a banana republic by prosecuting his election opponent. And as in a banana republic, he has now been deposed in a coup. What goes around comes around. So and that's like, you know, that's probably just a span of about 20 or 30 minutes, right? Like he went on endlessly, just throwing out things constantly. It's a coup. It's a coup. One candidate survived assassination.

The other staged a coup. Your choice, America. I saw Benjamin Boyce, a reactionary anti-trans guy, Brett Weinstein, Uber fan as well, posted a meme showing the Democrats pointing a gun at a person sitting on a couch

and it says democracy, shooting him and then say, now that we got democracy out of the way, we can get back to saving it. And rigid fetish, no dissenters. The Democrats have no respect for their voters at all. It's wild. So this is just some of the takes, right?

It was just everywhere. They were all exploding, not like, this is not okay. No one can accept this. And the thing is, the Democrats of various stripes, I saw progressives, you know, center left people, people on the left generally were like, well, this is fine. You know, this is what people overall, there was a rare general consensus that this was a positive move. And they are supposed to be the ones that would be upset about this you know because whenever bernie was not selected right because the dnc

according to various narratives like kind of lined up behind clinton and the candidates dropped out the left was not united that was then presented as this was a coup organized by the, but there was no talk of that in this case, or at least very, very little that I saw on the left. So it was like the right saying, well, this isn't democracy. No, no one on the left should be happy with this. And everyone on the left being, no, this is fine. This is what everybody was asking for. And like, this is democracy. she's the vice president he stepped down and there's going to be some process that they go through to confirm her but this is you know it's just what was going to happen in this circumstance so it's an unusual circumstance because a sitting president has i

think never stepped down without being assassinated or like having what's his face you know the the water gear um yeah well he's not stepping down though he's just not running for re-election oh yeah well he's yeah so stepping down in terms of not seeking re-election yes he's finishing out his term and and dave rubin uh said that if biden finished out his term he would delete all his social media accounts and exit the public punditry sphere some people play that clip so he released the thing saying well he's obviously he's not going to do that but because biden even if he's technically physically there he's mentally already checked out so his prediction is valid so yeah yeah yeah exactly i mean just imagine the converse, right? Can you ever imagine Trump putting his party

and maybe even the country first, right? Because that's what Biden has clearly done. You know, like any human being, he's got ambitions. I'm sure he'd personally like to run a second term. He's been convinced by members of his party that it's not in the best interests of them and perhaps not even the country, that he should retire. And he took that advice and he did step down.

You cannot imagine Trump ever doing that. And the other thing you can't imagine is that there was a huge amount of talk within the sort of general left in the United States. I know because it was just endless left-wing progressive democratic voters talking about how concerned they were about Biden running for a second term and basically evincing their lack of confidence in him. Now, that's exactly what you're not going to see in Trump's new MAGA-style Republican Party

because one of them is a cult of personality where the leader comes first and foremost and the other one isn't. Uh, so yeah, anyway, it's the ironies abound, the double standards, whatever. Yeah. And they're, they all seem also, there was a lot of shock expressed that like suddenly Kamala seems to be popular, right? Like there's various memes going around and people are like joking, stuff that they were previously kind of using to dismiss her as a serious candidate that's kind of being repurposed as like a positive meme, right?

And they're like, why would this happen? This is completely astroturf. This could never happen. And you're like, why would people on the left rally behind the next person that's likely to be, you know, the candidate for the president in election year with an election a couple of months around? I can think of one or two reasons that that might happen. And when the contrast is Trump, you know, or Biden, for that matter, you know, she comes across as competent and coherent and young, like, frankly, young, 59 years young. By Biden and Trump standards, that is extremely young, right? So, yeah, just this thing that, like, there's no reason that the left would support the left-wing candidate for the presidency and like there is there's a really obvious reason that they would do that um yeah but this but this is

conspiracy thinking in a nutshell isn't it where you just ignore the obvious banal interpretation of events in in in favor of some lurid insanely complicated complicated explanation. And I think that's a theme that we're going to be following up with Brett shortly. Yes, yeah, I will. I get to that very shortly. But just Tim Pool, right? Noted idiot, beanie wearing Tim Pool. He wrote, for example, they knew Biden was out. This whole ploy was to block Robert Kennedy Jr.

from winning the Democratic nomination, which he would have. Right. But like, obviously, he wouldn't have because he was never polling anywhere near enough to, like, secure the Democratic nomination. So just it's just an alternative world, right, that they live in, where that's this is what it's all about. Right. And, you know, Kennedy, Robert Kennedy has a famous Democrat name, but he's much more popular amongst the right and the libertarian set than he is amongst anybody left wing. So the last person I'll mention, Matt, before we get the breaths taken, there is a reason to

leave it to last, was Constantine Kissin, noted centrist from trigonometry. He wrote, you couldn't write a better finale to the last eight years than a demented president resigning, handing over the candidacy to someone who was picked because she had a vagina of color. Then he followed that up with, I don't care if you're offended. Objectively, vagina of color is a sublime bit of writing. Somebody responded saying, i kind of wish you just said vagina of color is sublime and constantine the consummate comedian responded you appear to be confusing me with francis another person says oh like you're immune and he responded i am jewish in the streets aryan in the sheets wow oh yeah there's There's so many layers of

badness there. There's just Constantine being the consummate centrist, or a demented president resigning for a vagina of color. That's a normal, neutral way to describe the events that

occurred. And then the one image I don't want in my head ever is Constantine in the sheets and what his particular proclivities are. But also, that last thing, Jewish in the streets, Aryan in the sheets, doesn't even make sense. So does that mean he only sleeps with white people,

but in the streets, these crows? It's too distasteful to analyze and we shouldn't but as well as just being off in so many ways it is just so it's such a good demonstration of how unfunny this purported comedian is i just it's um it's just so ham-fisted ugly bullshit isn't it yeah yeah. Yeah, it is. And it's, you know, we've talked about this superpower, about cringe immunity.

I think this is a demonstration of it because it's the kind of thing where you should then be known as like, just you're a really polemical, but also shitty comedian. But no, like the thing is, whenever Constantine got slammed for this being a bad joke and like an off-color

that's just that's just liberals being triggered right he got them good i assume yeah but our comedians usually they don't like if a comedian was like that sublime piece of writing right that would be them being you know self-aggrandizing and that's not good but that's what they do now is that they they just come out and say you know i'm fantastic and i'm brilliant and since trump this is the playbook where their audience is like yeah yeah like that's the right way to respond like no it you know you're right it's such a weird curious very contemporary phenomena and you're right trump started it by being obviously crude and and polemical and and shameless but then to just go on fans look at me i'm so fantastic look that was all gold that was all gold what i did there and everyone it's almost like the fact that it's

an obvious lie is is like a testament to their um power and confidence or something i don't know there's no world in which that was a supply piece of writing no like it's a and and anyone else you would think that they were self-deprecatingly making fun of themselves but constant things not right you could just look at all his other tweets and he's he's not he's really he thought that was he really thought that was brilliant yeah oh that that man that man well um but before we leave constantin i just one other small thing there was a rewarding series of clips from an interview he did with uh one steven pinker oh yes that was very good yeah i will say yeah and we don't we don't need to talk too much about it maybe we'll link to it but um i mean that was just pleasing because constantin kissin was doing his usual thing and he was speaking to these pseudo religious reactionary talking points like this

crisis of meaning there's supposedly going on how we need to save the west etc and it was just nice to see that steven pinker whatever you think of him i've certainly got my quibbles with um various points that he's made he did not buy it and he stuck to his guns usual steven pinker-esque style but one's saying we want to focus on policies that make the world a better place that bring more people out of poverty that increase education that decrease illness and health i think this this crisis of meaning thing is nonsense you know steven pinker's theme is the world's getting better stay the course keep keep trying to make things better yeah i think he was also just saying that like that is narrative

that has always occurred in every like time that you look at in history and of like by objective standards there are things that are improving so when constantine was kind of raising various things he kind of flipped the script on constantine you know constantine is usually the one saying well it doesn't matter all this like woke bullshit it's about how many people survive or whatnot and that was what pinker was doing was like when constantine was like sure secularism and free you know like these things they're they're good but like is it actually good that people have feel disenchanted and disconnected from themselves and what that then pinker responded by pointing out like well it's probably better if like we don't think about it but like your child survived

past early childhood is objectively better for them like regardless of your feelings about the crisis of meaning and so it was quite a kind of beautiful because steven pinker's thing was facts don't care about your feelings constantin which is yeah and i i will also say when i saw him appear there my initial reaction was like i i was preparing the tweet to be like pinker has went on and embarrassed himself by just yes anding whatever reactionary bullshit they spewed and i was really pleasantly surprised because he didn't almost every time they did it he would push back on it yeah and it also highlighted just how hollow i mean jordan peterson is already a man almost entirely of pure rhetoric, right? There's not that much

substance behind him. It's a lot of fury and sound and these kinds of things, but you know, he can make references to various things. He can sound impressive and whatnot, but someone like Constantine or Dave Rubin, they're essentially doing an impression of Peterson. So whenever somebody provides pushback that doesn't go along a talking point that they've prepared, they don't have the substance to respond to it. I just spent a few weeks on tour with Jordan Peterson and he asked me to join him as an agnostic to disagree as much as I could with the things that he's saying on stage and I want to try and see if we can have a conversation about some of the

things that he's saying because I think for whatever reason that conversation has become relevant and I think it's not accidental. So his argument is, and I think I'm quoting him directly on stage actually at the first show that we did, the enlightenment was wrong and that there's a bunch of things that he would say about that, but one of them would be that Nietzsche correctly predicted what would happen in the 20th century with the death of God, who I think is fair to say was killed by the objective pursuit of truth that you so admire and practice. And then the things that are happening in the 21st century are a further consequence of the same thing. century are a further consequence of the same thing.

And we've talked about doomerism already, but we could also talk about the fact that all over the world, but mostly in the West, we're not reproducing at a sufficient rate to replenish the population and so on and so forth. Do you... why is she wrong? Oh, well, let's, um, we'll begin at the beginning. Um, was like better before the enlightenment and there were wars of religion that killed people by the tens of millions, life expectancy was 30. Land heretics were burned to the stake when, um, uh, a third of children in

did not live to see their fifth birthday. Uh, when, uh when there were routine forms of sadistic corporal and capital punishment, like disemboweling and breaking of the wheel. I think that wasn't so great. I think he'd agree with that. I don't think he's saying technological progress and science are wrong. It's not just technological progress the intent we could still break yeah there's more but we could still break people on the wheel

we could still uh keep women out um position positions requiring brain power and uh autonomy we could still execute uh homosexuals um we could still fight wars of religion. To blame the 20th century on, first of all, the death of God assumes that there was a God to kill in the first place. So death of God is highly misleading. It's a very niche way of putting it. But a secular understanding of morality, that it doesn't come from scriptural commandments that tell you to stone adulterous and to commit genocide against your enemies, but rather

from universal human well-being, is a moral advance. And in fact, it has led empirically to inner ways of living. Today it is the most secular countries that are the most pleasant places to live. We work with Western Europe, we have Commonwealth countries of New Zealand and Australia and Canada, and the most religious countries are hell of us. God hasn't died in Afghanistan, so I'd rather not live there. So Constantine just flealed and came across as

like really empty whenever there was significant pushback that he hadn't heard. So yes, I think it's a very good representation of Pinker and highlights that he is not the same as like Constantine and Francis, whatever your other issues might be with, you know, stances that he's taken. So yes, I think it was good to mention that. It was good. Yeah. I think he acquitted himself better than other purportedly centrist public intellectuals that might've appeared on trigonometry.

Yeah. True, true, true, true that. Brett. Brett. So all of that, right. This is, this is why I did in this order Matt so that was all the people losing their shit running around like chickens on Twitter or social media

just everywhere into the fray the Weinstein brothers step so you know there's Eric we're not going to focus too much but of course Eric had the you know tweet out pseudo-profine things saying almost nothing but like hinting at that this was an invalid choice

and people should have selected Tootsie Gabbard instead if they really represent the person who, again, had hardly any support of the Democratic primary when she ran. But nonetheless, Brett is the brother that outdid himself and he released a short little video to twitter 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 Gurus podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on

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