Decoding the Gurus - Supplementary Materials 7: Guru Oneupmanship, Hard Ad Pivots, MOOOINK, and Left Wing Populism

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

We curse the dark omens emerging from the Gurusphere as we consider:The Illusion of Disciplinary BoundariesFlint Dibble Feedback and Rays of HopeRussell Brand and Bret Weinstein: Guru One-upmanshipBret Weinstein loves MOINNNNKHard Ad Pivots and Peasants Popping out of WellsKen Klippenstein and Populist RhetoricQuestioning mainstream narratives and their so-called 'experts'QAnon Anonymous missing Left Wing Populism?Alex O'Connor, Jordan Peterson and the costs of indulgent podcastingChris reaching across boundaries to Jonathan PageauOur only comment on the Drake and Kendrick FeudThe beautiful ballet of reaching across the aisleTerence Howard on RoganLinksRusselling with God | Russell Brand on DarkHorseKen Klippenstein- Why I'm Resigning From The InterceptA Farewell To Bad News feat Ken Klippenstein (E278)Navigating Belief, Skepticism, and the Afterlife | Alex O'Connor @CosmicSkeptic | EP 451Terrence Howard is Legitimately InsaneThe full episode is available for Patreon subscribers (1 hr 13 mins).Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus

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Music Music Music Music Music Music hello and welcome to decoding the guru's supplementary materials edition here we are again matt we're off the leash we're off the chain who knows what we'll say next who will be barked at oh and by the way he is matthew brown psychologist extraordinaire i am christopher kavanaugh kind of anthropologist of some sorts possibly a psychologist unclear and we

are together decoded the curse that's good i endorse all of that chris yes it's true you are experiencing an identity crisis not really quite sure whether you're fish nor fowl but who are we to judge good luck on that journey it is it's supplementary materials like seven eight or nine or something there's been a lot of them because boy there's been a lot of supplementary big demand material demand i was thinking it's more supply based you know there's both a lot of supply a lot of demand yeah that's that's the way it goes actually i met very bad wizard man tamler one half of the very bad wizards because he was visiting japan recently and he had that issue matt where we were just chatting we went out for yakiniku

very enjoyable um and then i was coming from work and we were talking about my department stuff and he was like but wait you're teaching psychology but aren't you i've done for positives i was like well so you know so there we go it's a perennial mystery we'll we'll work it out one day or maybe maybe disciplinary boundaries are just all bullshit, Matt. Maybe it's all nonsense anyway. Remember who you're talking to, young whippersnapper. I've done it all. I've done it all. There's very few avenues of scientific investigation I have not dipped my toes into.

So I'm with you. Okay, okay. Well, without further ado, Matt, I'm going to start off with something that I thought was just nice. Just a heartening YouTube message. And it is. Normally this is my sarcastic tone where I read you something terrible. But listen to this. This was in response to the interview with Flint Dibble being released. Longtime Hancock fan here. Thanks, Flint, for opening my eyes. It took balls to meet

that dragon in his comfortable cave. I feel pretty dumb for listening to Hancock's appearance on various podcasts. When I've heard that he's a British journalist, I assumed he's credible, and that a group of other scientists that appear with him sometimes put my skepticism to sleep. It doesn't help that Hancock is very charismatic and an excellent storyteller. He also hides all that telepathy bullshit pretty well and kept the reasonable stuff during London Real and Joe Rogan appearances. Real science is too obscured by academic jargon

for wider audiences. We need to change that. Maybe I should start a YouTube channel too because I've already seen enough bullshit propagated through my field art where people are absolutely lost on the concept of historical accuracy and art being a relatively new thing okay at the end it goes off into a personal journey but the point is just somebody saying you know i was a fan of graham hancock and flint devil changed my mind i've seen this all over the place but it was just

you know popped up in our comment section and I was like it's worth highlighting that that does happen you know yeah it is worth highlighting and it's something we've talked about before but it's it's that the attraction of the gurus it's not that people are attracted to them because they're idiots or because they're all horrible and have terrible opinions and so on yes maybe maybe some but i mean a lot of the gurus like graham hancock appeal to a natural sense of curiosity and wonder and all you know ancient history um what's going on with geology what's going on with vaccines what's going on with i don't know ufos strange things in the sky these are legitimate questions and the more people who can get just sort of migrated from the saccharine false wonder

that the gurus provide into the real stuff because the real stuff is super duper interesting real history real archaeology real astrophysics that's what we stand for here at dtg so yeah it's good to hear and and by the way chris another thing from me which is that you mentioned graham hancock and that interview we are going to return on an upcoming supplemental materials we could have talked about it here if i'd gotten my clips in order but you know there were technical difficulties so i might say old man difficulties in figuring out how technology works. But that's neither here nor there. I think there's a lot of material in that Joe Rogan interview, which really speaks to

the issues that we're interested in, which is moral grandstanding, that sort of prickly offended pride, narcissism, and the grievance mongering. And I think Graham Hancock does a bit of a tour de force there illustrating those themes. So we shall return to it. It's going to be a little bit more Graham Hancock. Sorry. That's a good teaser.

So yes, we're not done with Hancock. Yeah, we'll be back to him. But there was another crossover event, as there endlessly is and in the guru sphere and this was brett weinstein meeting with russell brand to discuss his conversion to christianity i said on twitter that you wouldn't be able to help yourself you had to listen to that and i did and you did for all of us. You're cross-like, Chris, really. You're up there.

I've often said that. I've often said that and thought that. But that was some great A bullshit, to be clear. And I'm actually not going to go through it in too much detail because it's what you would expect. It's Brett Weinstein outlining his alternative evolutionary theories, complaining about how materialists are too dismissive of religion, which has very important knowledge, and Russell Brand waffling on and on about the various important insights that he has on the topic of religion and science, which, but there was some exchanges that I thought are interesting and worth noting, just two in particular.

That's what we want, Chris. We don't want to listen to the whole thing. Just give us a teensy-tinesy taste, just a little bit of the poison. Well, you know, we've discussed that gurus, they like to collaborate and engage with other audiences through cross promotion and all that kind of thing. But there's also a little bit of one-upmanship that's often in play where if you're the biggest galaxy brain in the room, you know, it can be hard when another

galaxy brain bumps into your orbit. So Brett is talking to Russell about his spiritual insights. But of course, Brett has to make it clear that he understands all these spiritual insights, but still, he's, you know, the materialist evolutionary person, but he appreciates them. And then Brand wants to illustrate that, well, but he knows the materialist paradigm, right? So you'll get the tail end of Brett talking about, you know, how he understands religion. And then you'll get Russell's response. And then let's see how Brett reacts to it. My guess is everything that we encounter can be explained in material terms.

I'm not sure it's good to, but can be. Consciousness? Yeah, oh, absolutely. In fact, this is one of the puzzles that other people regard as very difficult, and I don't really see the problem with it. Well, there's a set of neurological and synaptic patterns that have aggregated to form consciousness, and within it, a set of ethics and moralities that are universal and ubiquitous and seem to reward what you would consider to be good and ethical and moral behavior. And that, of course, would be because of evolutionary biology and reciprocal altruism and a kind of new atheist argument.

Not exactly. But that's very good. I mean, not many people can do that off the top of their head. um what i think the reason that we regard consciousness as hard the so-called hard problem is that we mistake the fundamental nature of consciousness as individual that was russell brandt full steam just demonstrating that he can't do it you know he's remembered all those words and he can string them together really quickly he's very impressive i'm actually with brett there like very impressive i enjoyed his little book down there yeah but you can hear like brett that might work

on some others russell brought you haven't grasped the profundity of my point about intersubjective consciousness which is what he's going to go on and you know it's it's all tied in with lineage theory and all his like pseudo-mystical interpretation of evolution. But in any case, yeah, so there was that, the kind of competing to show that they understand each other's paradigms better in a way than the other does. And then immediately after that, so just this is not really related to the topic of the episode,

but there's a hard ad pivot. So this is what I'm playing now is just the next sentence. So this was me listening to imagine this, because our own individual consciousness is something to which we have a profound connection and any other kind of consciousness is remote. This podcast is sponsored by one of my all-time favorites, Moink. That's a smidgen of moo and a bit of oink or moo. Moink is a meat subscription company that is on a mission to save the family farm while bringing the highest quality meat to your table. That's a hard, that's a hard pivot. Especially that mooink. that's a hard that's a hard pivot especially that i mean they they often advertise gold precious metals uh survivor packs all the things that you

anticipate with that kind of ecosystem but i hadn't heard moink before and just brad really like he he read the ad copy he sold he really sold it i could i mean maybe maybe this is just an us thing chris to some degree because like i i hear so much of this kind of on the nose ad pivots where someone will be like doing a philosophy podcast perhaps talking very earnestly about the problems with capitalism and global markets and then in the next breath shift to selling ag1 or selling some vpn to get around geo things so you can access the global market the problem most of the electrolyte products on the market are loaded with sugar

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And now, let's get back to Zizek. Zizek loves to point out these contradictions and paradoxes in people, especially in politics. Take the environmentalist who wants to solve the problems caused by consumerism by just buying more environmentally conscious products or investing in green companies. Solving a problem caused by consumerism with more consumerism. This is an example of ideology obscuring the true nature of the problem. Or take the fan of capitalism, who says that capitalism's great because look at all the choices it gives people. They can buy anything they want. Hyper-focusing on the fact that people can, yes, choose between 15 different kinds of barbecue sauce at the store,

but ignoring the lack of choice that people have when it comes to participating in any other economic system. And then it's back to the thing. And, like, for me, this is very much on the nose. We don't do that. But Americans seem to be okay with it more. There's this little cartoon you might need to see it's like a comic and there's a guy coming out of a well saying interesting your critiques are set

in yet you but so maybe if you saw that you would understand there's no contradiction that's it that's the thing i had seen it but i'd forgotten about the the meme. And now I've remembered it. I realize that my concerns are misplaced. Greg, you cannot be too commercialistic or too capitalist, even if it's completely contradictory to whatever you are saying or advocating for or whatever. You exist in capitalist society. Ergo, you must participate in the evils of capitalism and hyper-consumerism.

Society's to blame. Society's to blame, in particular, capitalism. It's not their fault. No, you can do whatever you like then, basically. Yeah, I get it. That's it. So, yeah, that hard ad pivot, it does come up. Everybody is making money or, you know, supporting their outlets and whatever.

And that's fine. Reading ad copy a little bit embarrassing i think for a lot of people you know they don't like it that much but just that one like did they give him the sound effect or did he ross he was i think he was contractually obligated to go did he do it was that brett i think so i thought it was a sound effect wow he's really good if you ever sign a contract like that chris i'm gonna say i'm not participating it's that's that's on you you're gonna have to do the movie next week we'll be promoting like i'll do it for free but that's all you get from brandon westein. But perhaps it's enough, Matt.

Perhaps you don't need more than that. That's your fill. You said two. That was two. That was two. Yeah. No more. Thank you.

The next thing, Matt, is a little bit more heavy. It's a bit of a serious topic. So people will occasionally link things to us that they want us to be aware of. And sometimes these are helpful things and sometimes not. But in any case, were you aware of Ken Klippenstein leaving The Intercept? Did you see this? I did not. Ken Klippenstein was a journalist from The Intercept who resigned recently,

and he started a sub stack, that old chestnut, and also published a post, a sub stack post, why I'm resigning from The Intercept and starting something new and um the person that sent this to me they wanted to highlight that he had taken this internal document of the intercepts staff org and it basically the point is that half of the staff in the intercept are in management and marketing and finance stuff and the other half is journalists but the sides are equal or perhaps even bigger towards the corporate side and this

org chart is supposed to be saying hey corporate interests are taking over at the intercept. And in particular, he is complaining that certain stories that he wrote that were critical of billionaire owners of, I think, the Washington Post or but whatever the case, you know, like billionaire owners, the story got squashed in his telling, because the corporate side were nervous that this would be responded to badly by the millionaire billionaires supporting the intercept so they are reliant on donations but also funding from their own billionaire so okay i don't doubt that is likely to have occurred like we're only getting it from one side but did you ever watch a series called Drop the Dead Donkey? No, once again, it was a British sitcom about a news program. And it was

very satirical. And there was a owner who took over in, you know, one of the early seasons, maybe the first episode and was constantly sending instructions that were making it hard for the people to report things and he has business interests so it would be good if that story maybe didn't go out this week or that kind of thing right how are we going to cover this report coming out on thursday about the chemical spillage in scotland where it levels some pretty damning accusations at chem green which is one of sir royston merchants companies as an effect are we i mean do we have a free hand on this one gus you're sir royston's representative here please as i've said before i'm very much the new microchip in your mainframe so if you feel this is a big story then of course you must go for it right thanks Gus so of course

I suppose that's the big question really is this genuinely a big story I sometimes wonder if we Brits are just a little bit parochial when you look at the international situation the violence in Kashmir the killings in Liberia I bet I get those all I'm floating is are we 101% sure this story is worth the coverage? Of course it is. Yes. I think it is, Gus. Fine.

Well, George, you're the editor. I'm not here. Right. Well, if that's everything, thank you very much, everybody. Well done, George. You stick to your guns. I mean, what's the worst that can happen? So he fires you.

Who cares? You'd still have your dignity. Keep it up. So the chem green story's at 26. At 30, we'll have... 26? You know, that does seem very high profile. And I wonder if it's more constructive to address these very valid green issues from a more global perspective.

Well, I hear what you're saying, Gus, but I really don't think we can neglect this story. Well, of course we can't. It's important, significant, and we have got some great footage. You know, of dead fish floating down the sky. Damien, Damien. I think we ought to run this story, Gus,

and you did promise no interference. Absolutely. Point taken. I'm not here. Right. So just this motif is very well established. And I think there's a lot of legitimacy. So all that perfectly fine. And highlighting other stories that, you know, you think were spiked without legitimacy, also a reasonable thing. But the thing that I found, Matt, was first of all, this Substack post, when I read it, a lot of it came across as very familiar to me from the content that we cover here. So let me read just a bit of it, okay? that we cover here. So let me read just a bit of it. Okay. I'm leaving DC to move back to Wisconsin,

excited to embrace independence, both in my journalism and from the Washington bubble. The reason so much of the news media sucks is they aren't writing for you. They're writing for their sources in Washington, for the industries they cover, for rich people, and for fancy awards committees. Just take a look at the ads they run for investment banks, defense contractors, oil companies. Unless you're in the market for any of these products, they aren't writing for you. I want the right for you. I want to be an unabashed partisan for the vast majority of Americans who despise the people who run the country, putting my finger in the eye of the elites, frog-marching us through their managed decline of the American standard of living.

The most effective way I can do this is through journalism that arms you with a better understanding of subjects elites don't like to rabble meddling with, chief among them the National Security State. But I also want to be able to write without fear of billionaires, wealth, or Wall Street. And when I say journalism, I'm not talking about democracy dying in darkness or holding power to account or any of that

sanctimonious bullshit. I'm talking about being a foreign in the sight of our self-appointed betters. At its most basic level, I want to help you understand what's actually going on in the world, but not how the mainstream media does it with their sanctioned leakers and their endless handjobs of retired generals and all our celebrity architects of our decline, and so on. Does that sound familiar, that rhetoric? Mm-hmm. Is what you're saying that regardless of the degree of truth to the fact,

that media companies are influenced by the people that own them right and commercial interest this has been something that's been true ever since they figured out how to use the printing press the presentation of that which is you know setting himself up as as a principled truth teller, as something of a hero whose primary motivations are to, you know, get out of this stultifying censorship and bring the truth to the people. It sounds, you know, pretty much the same as how our gurus position themselves. What's the difference between what Russell Brown says or what Glenn Greenwald says? Or if you want the like very unflattering comparison, this sounds a lot

like Alex Jones's claim, right? The elites and the powerful want to keep you behind the screen. And I'm bringing you the truth because I can speak to power. The media has lined you. And just again, Matt, listen to this. My best stories will be your story, how they want your acquiescence for the war party, how they want your money to pay for their follies, how they want to limit the information you receive, how they want to be up your ass controlling every aspect of your life.

I want to take it to the billionaires, expose the fraud and avarice of the national security, expose the fraud and avarice of the national security state and the corporation, and explore a concept I have of journalism 2.0. I'm not going to bother clearing my reporting with so-called experts at think tanks, bankrolled by head chopper authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia, by military contractors, or by billionaires. And I'm certainly not going to hide behind weasel words like experts say, journalism's the vice for pretending like they're objective.

Again, like just transpose this from a kind of left-wing speak truth to power context to any of the figures that we cover, and people would immediately note the very heavy hand of rhetoric there. And like you say, this isn't to say documenting corruption or covering, you know, information being misrepresented or politicians trying to massage how facts are presented, millionaires doing dodgy things, whatever's all reasonable and fine and you can highlight that it's going on but this dose of like super self-serving populist rhetoric that the world is being controlled by these evil elites that just want to control every aspect of your life

how is it different from what james lindsey is saying or yeah uh you know any number it and the answer is it isn't it's just the left-wing version of it yeah i think uh i think there's truth in what you say i can i can imagine the sympathetic that is to this guy ken klippenstein responses here which would be no but ch, there are unhealthy controls over the media from powerful interests. There are important stories that the mainstream media doesn't, you know, want to give enough attention to and so on. But yes, you hear exactly the same kind of responses from the fans of the gurus.

There could well be, but like it's the nebulous nature of the claims, right, that they're all, you know, it's all corrupt. You know, you can't trust any of them. Whereas me, me personally, I'm the one that's going to carry the flag. I want to write for the people. Yeah. And I'm looking at the comments. It certainly had the desired effect.

And, like, I'm sensitive to this, I guess, because I've currently got an honor student who's working through responses on anti-vax YouTube videos to really get a sense of how people perceive them and whether or not, you know, what I suspect is that the shtick works, that they present themselves as being these brave, you know, heroic figures that are against the, you know, draining the swamp and, you know, tackling the evil conspiracies of Big Pharma and so on. And yes, people do in their comments talk about what a hero they are, you know, how much they appreciate the brave stance they're taking. Looking at the comments here, first one is, never been more excited to smash the confirmed payment button. Proud of you, bro. bro deeply admire what you're doing if more beltway journalists had your courage this would be a very different country that's okay well it goes on i mean there's nothing wrong with these responses i'm just saying that it works like mad

props to you for this courageous move and story i think your thesis is is that the intention is something of a self-aggrandizing one. And I think it's effective. Yeah. And so the reason I mentioned this is because we like the folks over at QAnon Anonymous. They're pretty critically minded folks. They do very good coverage of a whole variety of topics.

We've had Travis View on. I like QAnon Anonymous's coverage. And they had Ken Klippenstein on to discuss what was going on at The Intercept and his new efforts, right? And I'm just going to play a couple of clips from that episode about the way things are framed. So here is him kind of being introed in the episode. In many direct and indirect ways, flagship outlets like CNN, MSNBC, Fox News,

The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others serve the interests of the United States ruling class to the detriment of us commoners. I've been quoted in four of those outlets. That's right. I'm trying to ruin your career. Take him away. You know, we'll do the opposite of the thing they do with cops. We'll just say there are some good apples. Then there are outlets that for many represent a bastion of independent investigative journalism like The Intercept. But even they aren't immune to the encroaching influence of corporations and billionaires. This has come into sharper focus recently when Ken Klippenstein, investigative journalist and friend of the show, published a Substack article entitled Why I'm Resigning from the Intercept,

in which he laid out the increasing corporatization of the outlet and its adverse effects on the, quote, fearless and adversarial journalism it's supposed to produce. Okay, so now their episode does mostly focus on, you know, the stories that he presented as being censored or kind of being put through unnecessary hurdles, right, to prevent the story from getting out or whatever. Now, one of the issues there, though, is that you're hearing from a disgruntled journalist who's left an outlet, right? And I suspect that most of the things that he's talking about are true. But in some cases, where he's complaining, for example, about a story being overly litigated, like that the lawyers were just throwing up blocks to try and prevent it from being published. That was his take, right? But you don't hear any response. So there's,'s again so many people from outlets mainstream outlets and alternative

outlets that can make the same sort of claims and in most cases that's fine you know like you you can hear the claim but you shouldn't automatically assume that the full story is being told by somebody who has you know a perceived grievance because of like the stuff that we talked about with grievance mongering and the fact that there are incentives to present yourself as a fearless person standing up against the man and i guess in a case like that the alternative explanation that the they had the organization has legitimate legal concerns i mean that seems reasonable right because because some outlets do get sued routinely almost by people that don't like their stories and if they don't have all their their facts you know cross-checked and validated then they can have to pay a lot of money yeah and so the next

clip that i want to play relates to experts right and we already heard it in the bit in the extracts that I read from the Substack article. But listen to the way mainstream so-called experts are framed here. Yeah, so I think conventional journalism is kind of trapped in a straitjacket of norms, of conventions, of rules. And to give you guys a few examples, one of them that I listed in the resignation letter, which I hope people read because I explore this at length. One of them is hiding behind expertise. And I'm not saying that it's not worthwhile to talk to experts on technical matters that you don't understand. Like a computer scientist is going to explain computer things to me or a legal expert is going to explain the law, which I don't understand.

But when it's harmful is when the media hides behind it and editorializes and pretends like this is the objective opinion of these experts that just exist in the ether that can tell you something. And so very often when major media wants to tilt a story in a certain direction, they don't want their name on it. So they'll handpick. And I know how this works because, you know, I've been in the business. If editors want somebody that's going to push the story in a certain direction, they basically get you to use an expert like a ventriloquist dummy. And you tell them, you essentially cue up what they're going to say and they give you they basically say what you said back to them and then you write it down expert said it's kind of like well okay the expert technically said that but you you basically made them say that isn't it like you saying it

and so i think there's a fundamental lack of honesty about this kind of authorial voice of god that exists in a lot of the prestige outlets where you pretend you don't exist it's just this omniscient narrator um that is like perfectly neutral i'd like to hear some some examples of that i mean like it's certainly the case in some circumstances like in like in legal cases for instance right the lawyers engage a expert witness who's gonna say what they're gonna what they want them to say. But I think there is a point to articles and media outlets. They can select experts that they know are going to give a particular reading on an issue. For example, on the lab leak, if you select Richard Ebright, Alina Chan, and Matt Ridley, you're going to get a very sympathetic account to lab like has been

prohibited to be discussed and it's been censored so you certainly can cherry pick experts and like promote an editorial line and they skilled journalists can use leading questions to get you know particular kinds of quotes that they want that is true but the way it's presented there sounds to me very similar to how for example anti-vaxxers would say that the media is constructing a narrative right like it's just citing experts saying, oh, there's a general consensus that exists and whatnot. And so there's like media literacy, which is a perfectly reasonable and fair point. But Klippenstein seems to be going more towards the like Glenn Greenwald side of things where like, anyway, who are these experts?

And they're also politically biased and aren't they just trying to increase their profile by saying what the media wants them to say and yeah it just i felt like if there was an anti-vaxxer on q and a anonymous making those points that they would be more willing to push back about you know yes there's there's absolutely feelings of journalism there's absolutely biases but this doesn't mean the expert opinion is completely untrustworthy and can only be used for very technical issues yeah well ken could decide so he's moving to the to publish independently on Substack. Is that right? Yeah.

He's starting his own, like, you know, media, well, like Barry Weiss kind of thing, basically, I think is what he envisions. And people like Glenn Greenwald are on there as well, right? Or Matty Hassan recently started, like, Zetio. So, yeah. Yeah. So, you know, yeah, I guess I'm just reiterating what you're saying, which is that, yes, there's obviously issues with journalism, just like there's issues with academia,

just like there's issues with government or any number of institutions you care to name. But to consume this kind of thing critically, like you said, be aware that he's a disgruntled uh employee who left right he's got his own issues and problems and his own perceptions there and his own politics and his own politics and he's got his own incentives i guess to just like the gurus do to to claim that you don't go to any of these uh conventional sources come to me and people like me. Yeah, and similarly, Matt, this distinction, which again,

this is something that the gurus often talk about, that basically everything is opinion. Everything is narrative. Everybody just has their own narrative. The mainstream media is pushing narratives. The alternative media has its own. Well, actually, the general presentation is that the alternative media has its own, you know, well, actually, the general presentation is that the alternative media is addressing the narratives that other people have, truthfully. But when it comes to push to shove, they often justify it by, well, we might have a skew, we might have a bias, but like, so does everywhere else, right? We're all down in the muck here.

Nobody is approaching things from a purely objective view. And again, while it's true that you should consume all media critically, you should realize that there are editorial forces, that there are potentially requirements for... you know like the bbc has to maintain impartiality and people accuse it on both sides of not doing that but it it has a remit that means that it has to do that or it can be held accountable but as well as the most basic market forces which is to publish material or broadcast material that is going to be popular attention yeah like not be boring so there is incentive across the board um regardless of what your financial backers or your politics are to to publish news that is going to be a little bit on the side of oh my god what fresh new hell is this yeah but this call that we often hear in the gurus here to basically completely wipe out the distinction between opinion style,

partisan journalism, and journalism that strives to be more factually accurate. 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 listener support. Subscribing will save the rainforest, bring about global peace, and save Western civilization. And if you cannot afford $2, you can request a free membership

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