Decoding the Gurus - The Science and the Art of Gurometry

Episode Date: July 22, 2023

The casual listener, who might possibly not be a loyal Patreon subscriber, or might hypothetically not listen devotedly to every Gurometer scoring episode, could conceivably be a little vague about what we mean by a secular guru(!). And therefore might be tempted to make an ill-considered and poorly-informed comment on Twitter or Reddit, thus exposing them to the devastating yet apropos riposte of a "You know nothing, Jon Snow" meme in reply. Don't let it be you! Here is a tutorial, a short illustrated primer if you will, on the Science and the Art of 'Gurometry'. No more will you have to live with the shame of not knowing how many syllables there are in anti-establishmentarianism. Never again will you be liable to fall prey to the siren song of pseudo-profound bullshit or fall foul of conspiracy mongers.Listen to it. Study it. Meditate on it. In no time at all you'll be spotting gurus in the wild, categorising, and classifying them at will. You'll feel like an ornithologist who's just been given a great big pair of binoculars, a spotter's guidebook, and a free afternoon to wander about a National park. Impress your friends, family, and potential sexual partners with your intimate and subtle understanding of What It Means to Be a Guru.You're welcome.LinksOnline Presentation on the Gurometer at The StoaDTG Episode 21: Calibrating the GurometerStrenuous Life Podcast: 10 Red Flags You're Following a Guru, Stephan Kesting with Dr Chris Kavanagh

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Guru, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about. On that ground with me is Chris Kavanagh and Chris, first of all, welcome. Thank you. Yeah. Now, it's come to our attention that some revision is in order. Certain people who shall remain nameless have let it be known via the slack-jawed idiotic comments that they may not fully understand the nuance

and the great deal of thought that has gone into the science of garometry. They think, you know, you probably have your own examples, but for the one we often come across is that people will say, oh, well, you're covering so-and-so, right? You're out to get them now, are you? They're a guru, are they? People think that we call people gurus if we don't like them. And if we do like people, then they're not gurus. It's a pejorative, in other words, which it kind of is. But that's not what it's about, is it, Chris? No, it's not.

And it's unbelievable, Matt, because on the 9th of January 2021, we released an episode called Calibrating the Grameter. Shockingly, people are not going back to refer to that episode, nor are they looking at the various Google document drafts that litter the internet for various academic papers that we are writing on this concept. But yes, there's misperceptions abounding about the science of gyrometry and more precisely, the way that we are approaching gurus in the podcast and what we mean by it. And we're not saying that everybody has to agree with our definitions or how we approach it, but we are going to tell you them

so that you stop asking us. I know it's not going to work. I know the comments will still come, but hopefully this will be a new 2023 reference point where I can fob off various people to say, go check that. We talked about it for 40 minutes, DNR, and that will resolve it all. And they'll come back and say, well, thank you. That was

very informative. Yes, I have learned and I promise to mend my ways in future. That will be the response. So Chris, let's start with the elementary things before we get into the different dimensions of the grommeter. What a gr what a grometer is yeah that will become clear but what's a guru chris what is a guru what do we mean yeah so there's a word guru from i think sanskrit and pali from around the indian region that means like teacher or one with specialist knowledge in a particular field right but that particular understanding of guru has expanded in usage so that now guru refers to generally someone who has special knowledge and insight that they can provide to their followers, usually from mastery of some particular technique or information.

And there are other related concepts, things like shamans, oracles, prophets, soothsayers, so on. These are figures that are often more associated with pre-modern societies though they exist and are popular in many contemporary societies there's lots of differences there and as an anthropologist i'm interested in those two but the through line is the ability to deal with the unseen world right yeah the supernatural forces or magical or spiritual forces and i think it's fair to say that in most cases gurus are seen within that uber right that they're giving paths and guidances on the right way to do things and also how to marshal mystical energies and

forces yeah how to lay meaning over the world, provide some guidance for your life. That's the traditional notion of a guru. Now, you and I coined the very catchy term of secular guru, and it really encompasses a kind of a proposition, which is perhaps this role, which we associate with the kind of magical and spiritual beliefs of pre-modern societies and supposedly would have no role in our scientific technocratic rationalist neoliberal world that we live in today we propose that maybe there is still this role for a guru, but they just clad themselves in a different garb because people still have the same urge to find meaning in the world. They still want to make sense of everything. They want guidance and solutions for their moral, personal, political,

interpersonal dilemmas. And for the gurus, the modern ones, just like the old-fashioned ones, there's strong motivations to lean into this role. You get recognition, you get attention, you get respect, and ultimately, you're going to get financial resources as well. And I think another thing that they have in common in terms of the personal qualities that make a good guru, what you needed to have in the olden days was you had to be a performer. You needed to be charismatic. You had to be engaging. You had to put on a good show. These are the kinds of people that made good gurus. And that was true then. And I guess we propose that the same thing tends to be true now, like almost preternatural levels of self-confidence and self-assurance and having that ability to project authority, project wisdom, and

send people the clear message that you have the capacity for unique insights. You're in connection with forces beyond their ken and they need to listen to you. And there's one nuance I would add here, Matt, because you as an ill-informed psychologist might have made the mistake of thinking that magic and spirituality had retreated from modernity, but anthropologists have had your number for decades pointing out that this is not the case, that even in the most overtly secularized society, people are very enamored with spiritual frameworks and approaches. Religion still exists, flourishes in the alternative spirituality space in many contemporary societies. But even when you look back at the age

of rationalism and Victorian gentlemen striding the globe, the theosophists and various esoteric arts were prized and people had interest in. So I mentioned this just to say that modernity did not do away with religion, though there is, I think, a lot more validity to the secularization thesis than another set of sociologists argued. We don't need to get into the academic debates around that topic. But the crucial distinction, I think, from the concept that we are interested in is that most of those figures still profess a fascination and an interest with esoteric spiritual art. The gurus that we're interested in, they don't do that. What they lean in more is expertise in secular topics.

This can be philosophy, it can be politics. It often is science. Just for an illustration, Brett Weinstein links most of his views to an evolutionary lens. And he still links it to his evolutionary framework about competence hierarchies and his Jungian psychology expertise, his clinical expertise in psychology. So that's the part which marks them out is that they grind their expertise,

not in the ability to manipulate esoteric forces or commune with the ancient masters but with the secular knowledge of science and psychology and politics and these kind of topics yeah now it might sound like a bit of a contradiction but you know a lot of them do lean into woo for one of a better term they're into strange diets. They're like Jordan Peterson. They see the mystical influence of the word of God everywhere. And I think like for me, I see it as like the scientific grounding. Well, certainly there is a kind of rationalization, like the appeal to the heart is in that old-fashioned magical kind of sense, revealed truth and

rhetoric, but they certainly do frame it as being informed by logic and science and philosophy and all of these secular things. The final thing I guess we've got to say is, it's another difference, I guess, with the traditional gurus is like in a traditional society like there was not a mainstream media there was there generally wasn't institutions in the sense that we know them and yes i'm not yeah i know what you were thinking but i'm not saying that of course my point is is that the shamans or the gurus the spiritual leaders whatever in a traditional format they were the authority they weren't in competition or reacting to or rebelling against some sort of mainstream thing out there generally um i well is there

discord is there discord this is meant to be an explainer chris yeah no i all i would say is like we had the cognitive anthropologist manvir sing on and he was talking about shamanism as this recurrent cultural technology and an early developing profession, right? Because there's lots of need to manage uncertainty in pre-modern societies and also modern societies. People always want to manage uncertain outcomes. And if you believe that uncertain outcomes are being impacted by unseen forces, then somebody who can marshal those forces to give you better outcomes is a figure that's useful in a society, right? So, you know, if your crops are potentially destroyed by the weller, somebody that can help you control the weller to lessen the possibility of that is valuable. Now,

whether they can actually do it or not, it doesn't matter. The existence of that niche is a cultural evolutionary attractor position, right? Now, I say that, Matt, because in those cases, like you said, an early developing profession, and of course, there's many other types of roles in society, but you could say,

well, there would have been societies without institutionalized religions and you have doctrinal traditions coming in, you often do have a competition between priests and orthodox interpretations and these more dramatic practitioners. But also within the tradition, you have this dynamic where there's a constant push and pull between figures who lean more toward idiosyncratic, dramatic, charismatic interpretations and those which lean more towards orthodox textual dogma. And in both cases, you can have splintering and you can have little flowerings and you can have people coming back into the traditions and reinvigorating them. And you just need to look at modern religion to see that you have charismatic individuals

who perform like guru-ish rules, and you have very serious priests and theologians and so on. It's just to say, I think that gurus inhabit all societies and all areas, including traditional religion, new age religion, non-doctrinal religions, and secular modern society. So our argument, I believe we're in accord on this, is that it's a recurrent social role. And we are looking at a modern manifestation of it, which has some distinguishing characteristics but which is part of a broader category that uh that has those features i just outlined yes we're in accord we're in accord i guess the only thing that's new is that the kinds of secular gurus that

we look at at the moment do seem to operate in the shadow of the institutions, mainstream media, the blue church of the academy, as they like to call it. And as you said, they don't draw their epistemic and moral authority with reference to like an orthodox consensus, literature or whatever, but rather with reference to not their spiritual powers or their connection with God, but their polymathic powers, their unique intellectual capabilities. So just in that sense, that's, I think is a little bit new that they, I think they operate in the shadow of modernity

and it's those fishes and paranoias and alienation that's going on in modernity and circular gurus can capitalize on that so i'm just foreshadowing chris our theme of anti-establishmentarianism that's all i wanted to do yeah well one thing i think to mention here as well and this is something which people always struggle with is that when you are defining a category or a tribe, for example, there can be individuals who do not fit neatly into the kind of prototypical figure, right? So you might set a bunch of characteristics that are defining of the group or the kind of person that would be in the group. And then you will find that various people related to a group, you know, embody those features more or less, but there

is no group where there's no divergence amongst members. And everyone is a prototypical example, because that would be a Borg or something. And even the borg they had that guy hugh right so the yeah the humans don't operate like that and categories our conceptual categories do not operate like that so when we are talking about secular gurus we're talking about a family resemblance category which means there are recurrent features that mark out the group, but it does not mean that those features will not be found in any other groups or that you can say, okay, when you have four out of 10 of these, you are not a guru. When you have six out of 10, you are a guru. It is a spectrum and people can be in multiple categories this is sometimes hard for people and

they think that that makes it like oh it's so so wishy-washy it's so strange but you do this every day of your life you're operating this function i am a man i am irish and i i'm a person with brown hair right like these are all overlapping categories and you know that's not hard but people don't get it and i can be a fan of whatever football team and live in japan and teach psychology and so on so forth now and on a purely technical note we cover various figures not all of them score highly on the grometer not all of them are prototypical that's right so the mere fact that we're covering someone does not entail that we think they're a guru it entails that we're going to check them out listen to what they have to say have some fun talking about them and maybe

rate them on the grommeter as well so i'd add just a little note there as well matt that part of the reason that this developed was when we were initially covering people, we were basing our approach on this secular guru concept that we had. But we covered people that were suggested and that we were interested in. But we very quickly noticed that people were varying to their degrees to which they fit the template. And by us covering them on a show called Decoding the Gurus, there's an implicit suggestion that the people that we cover are gurus of some stripe or another.

And we developed the gurometer, which we'll talk about in more detail. But before we get there, we developed a system in order to say that it's a spectrum and there are people who are closer to this concept than people who are farther away and by scoring them on these characteristics that we identified we can say that at least by our lights this person comes closer to the kind of guru that we were originally discussing but that means that we can cover anyone. We could cover people who are very bad fits. We could cover people who are traditional religious gurus, like Reverend Moon. And we could see, you know, what the differences are or where the connections are. And it also means, and maybe

you want to explain this part, Matt, because you often end up talking about this with people. But it means that we could cover someone, disagree with them, dislike them, but they wouldn't score highly because they might be a terrible person in so many ways. They might be a complete polemical partisan, but they don't do the secular guru things. And this is a thing which people constantly seem to not entirely grasp. Yeah, yeah, true. And yeah, so we're interested in a thing called discriminant validity, which is to make sure that our concept, you know, is specific to the thing that we care about. And while we know it's got some then diagrammatic overlap between things like public intellectuals or traditional religious leaders,

political pundits, people like that. We wanted to make sure that it was actually specific. So in terms of people that we're interested in covering, willing to cover, we cover that whole joint union of all of those Venn diagrams, but only some of them will actually be part of that subset of secular gurus. And, you know, most of the properties that we'll talk about in terms of the grometer of the secular gurus, it has a negative kind of balance to it, I suppose. Not every characteristic of it is negative, but I think we generally feel that it's intrinsically unhelpful in the society that we live in to claim the mantle of intellectual authority, but to be actually

doing something quite different, basically appealing to other kinds of motivations or where their appeal is based on other things apart from actual evidence, logical coherence, and it being well put together. And one of those distinctions from another category, which is closely related, and I think important to stress, I talked about this recently at a talk I gave about this topic, is that public intellectual might seem a close fit to what we're talking about. Why it is not is that public intellectuals are people that tend to profess specialist knowledge. However, typically their knowledge is positioned within or being consistent with a broader

academic, scientific, or technological field of knowledge. The secular gurus, by contrast, are polymathic and iconoclastic. They are positioning their insights as unique, broad ranging, controversial that they go against or are in direct competition with traditional theories, right, from established disciplines. I think you and I share a certain delight when we do our homework and we discover something interesting and absolutely nobody else gets it mm-hmm that would feel bad to most people because they would feel like what am I doing wrong why does nobody else understand this point to you and me that feels good it is to know that you have achieved something, you have discovered something, and that nobody

else can even recognize it gives you some sort of sense of how far ahead you might be. And in this way, they're almost by definition antagonistic to established approaches or institutions, and very often the academic fields that might have birthed them. And where they reference a particular expertise, it is usually used as simply the justification that allows them to spread their ideas widely. So they're not constrained in the way that most public intellectuals are by saying well i don't know enough to comment about that yeah that's

right they don't stand on the shoulders of giants they are the giants exactly yeah yeah you know the galileo gambit is a relevant thing to reference here because that is the kind of character that we're talking about. Not somebody that seems themselves as making an incremental contribution to a discipline. Somebody who believes that they've revolutionized the field, but they just haven't been recognized. And the tricky thing is, of course, is that certain of our gurus would honestly believe that they are like an Einstein figure or a Charles Darwin figure. It is time to do battle with the oppressive structures that have been used to silence

new ideas. If in my family, I assert that there might be as many as three revolutionary Nobel quality ideas in one clutch, how many ideas might there be suppressed if that is actually true? And a little bit like conspiracy theories, sometimes those figures do exist. They do come along from time to time. Right. But what am I trying to say? We don't believe them. We don't believe them. That's not it. I know that's true.

We don't. But so the amount of people claiming to have revolutionary insight that is going to completely transform a field dramatically outstrips the amount of people who actually do that. And the way that you can spot the difference is when somebody revolutionizes a field, they don't need to tell you that they've done that because history records it, that they were vindicated, that everybody else was proven wrong. And that's very rare. And often when you look at the popularized version of the story, it's not as simple as presented. But if somebody is declaring themselves as a revolutionary figure, somebody whose new approach to evolution is going to upend the field, but they haven't actually had any impact on the field. And their primary output is a podcast where they talk about culture war topics and anti-vaccine issues week in and week out.

and anti-vaccine issues week in and week out. Yes, they may in the future turn out to be completely vindicated and the Bill and Ted future where there's statues of them as a great man, I'll put money that that is not what happens. And they entered the annals as a pundit, a wannabe guru online that is not remembered in the annals of history, except as notable conspiracy theorists or a real revolutionary guru, you don't need to tell people that. Other people will introduce you as such. Okay. All right. So that's enough summarizing overview stuff. Let's get into

the Garometer itself. And we're going to talk about a few different things, the different facets of the Garometer. One thing to say at the the beginning i don't know how much time we'll have to actually talk about the interrelationships between these things but what i'd just like to say to people is that they are there these things tend to be correlated with each other the reasons why are kind of interesting still a matter of psychological, anthropological inquiry even. Things like, for instance, the personality facet of narcissism is a strong correlate of belief in conspiracy theories. This is just one example of these interrelationships. So this is not just a random grab bag of stuff. These different facets tend to be correlated with each other and there

are probably good reasons why they tend to co-occur in the gurus and to some degree in the kind of people that are attracted to them. Yeah. And so we've identified 10 characteristics that we tongue in cheek refer to as a gurometer. And after every episode on the Patreon feed, in addition to the episode we release, we rank the gurus from one to five or score them, sorry, on a scale from one to five for each of these 10 attributes or characteristics that we have noticed as being recurrent amongst the secular gurus set. And it's also true to say that if you score highly on this, it is not good because the secular guru concept is not a very positive concept overall. It is technically possible that you could be a secular guru who is doing no harm in the world and is just advocating for people to be better. But because of the personality characteristics, like the narcissism and grievance mongering and so on, it would be hard for that to be the case. And so it's scoring higher on our 10 characteristics.

If you're at the tip top, it generally wouldn't be a good thing. And if you're low down, it generally would be a good thing. But as previously noted, this does not mean that us liking you mean that you will score low and us disliking you mean that you will score high. Overall, there is a correlation there because we don't like people who bullshit and who self-aggrandize and are paranoid conspiracy theorists but manipulative yeah but you could be terrible in a whole bunch of ways which don't put you into that category or you could be good and do some of this. So there's a correlation between the amount that Matt and I, two academic science-minded people, are likely to enjoy your output and your level of secular goryness.

But that's not the characteristic. If it was, Dave Rubin would be at the tip top because he's a despicable human, but he's not a top tier guru. Not a particularly accomplished guru. No. Okay. That's good. So let's start with the first one. I don't like this one because it's galaxy brained.

Galaxy brainedness. So this comes from that viral meme of the mind-expanding cosmos stuff, the guy in the turtleneck sweater. That says a lot of it. This is someone that presents ideas that they present as being too profound for the average mind to comprehend. And important, this is different from Einstein talking about quantum mechanics or general relativity, which many of us might not be able to comprehend very well. This is stuff like

Deepak Chopra, like linking quantum mechanics to some sort of special waves of consciousness or something. It's superficially intellectually rarefied, but you know in closer examination it actually makes little sense so one of the things that tends to be an indicator of it is when a figure is linking together these disparate concepts saying all you need to know to really understand the differences between men and women is that whatever men hunt and women gather all you need to know is that you know men have two modes they have a parasitic mode and a symbiotic mode or something there's this sort of linking of concepts which might be appealing superficially but really have nothing much to it underneath so jordan peterson famously linked the social behavior of lobsters to understand male behavior

and their dominance hierarchies or whatever. Brett Weinstein, one of our favorites, used evolutionary theory to help understand why the Nazis chose to invade Russia in Operation Barbarossa. And there's heaps more of stuff you could draw from the world of Wu, linking secret talismans and ancient civilizations to aliens or linking electromagnetic frequencies and fields to something about balancing your health or whatever. It's this galaxy brain thing. It's basically you don't restrict yourself to providing some degree

of information or insight on a specific topic. What you're doing is you're stepping back and you're linking together things from all over the shop to create this tapestry of meaning that covers kind of everything, life, the universe and everything. Yeah. So if you don't like the term galaxy brainers, you can do what I did in the talk I gave recently on the topic and call it polymathic ability or claimed polymathic ability. And alongside all the things that Matt mentioned, there tends to be a dismissal of restriction on expertise that people suggesting that you should stay in your lane or whatever are doing

so just to chain you down and an exaggeration of their own competence in disparate fields. It might also be related to an overestimation of how many paradigms you can run simultaneously all at once. 70, 90 have been known to be claimed by the gurus. While we're at it, I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time. And there's many. And the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm, but actually to allow each one of them to have the particular piece that they're holding, just like eyes and ears. Say, okay, cool. And some of the characters we've covered

have lent into this in a really obvious kind of way. For instance, Yudkowsky, you know, talking about how he mastered and he rattled off about 14 different disciplines and how he's linking them all together. People like to claim that they've, like Jordan Peterson claimed that he was an expert on climate science. He'd read all the books. 200 books.

Possibly. It's not so obvious. I spent quite a bit of time going through the relevant literature. I read about 200 books on ecological what would you call it on ecology and economy when i worked for the un for about a two-year period and it's not so obvious what's happening just like with any complex system yeah so there are often these very easy claims to polymathic abilities, but often, you know, it's little more than learning a few buzzwords and rattling them off in quick succession. Yes.

And this is not to say that there aren't people with interdisciplinary knowledge. There aren't legitimate ground theories that exist. But what we are talking about is not that. And in a lot of these categories, it's that they're operating in the shadow of intellectual giants, right? Or people that genuinely had polymathic abilities. But even in those cases, I think that the more that you look into the history of geniuses, the more that you see the cracks develop over time. And there are often figures who legitimately were insightful polymathic geniuses, but later in life become cranks, or it's a known thing, so-called Nobel disease. So yeah, the clean polymorphic ability, galaxy brainness, that's characteristic number one. Characteristic... Oh, sorry. Oh, no, just sorry. This is a sidetrack, but it just struck me. We've never talked about this,

but you just reminded me that actually a lot of big advances in genuine intellectual advances do involve like a linking together of somewhat disparate fields so you know electromagnetism yeah like unification understanding that electricity and magnetism were two sides of the same coin and guy called james cloke maxwell figured that out and so this does happen from time to time. So I think the underlying theme of these facets in the gromada is that these are false versions of the real thing. Like the real thing is hard to come by, happens extremely rarely. Someone like Maxwell is operating within a well-established paradigm and is often getting help from colleagues and is communicating and writing with colleagues, all all of whom or most of

whom usually very quickly recognize what they've achieved when they achieve it this is very different from what how gurus operate and what and there is claim there tends to be an output as well right which is not just long form podcasts that's so that that's a distinction as well. But okay, so the next characteristic is anti-establishment sentiment. Now, again, you'll find this in a lot of different areas, but you will find it in an extreme version in most of the secular gurus that we look like. And this is not just saying that institutions have flaws and that you shouldn't just trust everything that you hear on the news or from politicians. It's that the mainstream is almost entirely corrupted, always wrong. It can't deal with the real issues.

Institutions are lying to us. And when the mainstream is right, it's right for the wrong reason. So maybe climate change is happening, but it's not for the reason that climate scientists say. And a lot of this is to set up the gurus, the secular gurus, as an alternative source of epistemic authority and the alternative source of knowledge well this is the thing who can still dance on the a-frame roof or avoid the snowplow yes we don't so yes not not very well this is the thing is it really down to 20 people and you know them all because 18 of them live uh in the modern version of your rololodex. Well, because it's the people who can speak in public. And I really do think this has to do with institutions.

And you can see this explicitly from the fact that they often set out to establish alternative institutions, usually ones that orbit around them. Jordan Peterson creating the Jordan Peterson Academy, the University of Austin at Texas University around the heterodox figures, which have yet to release any continuous courses. And there's currently a thing called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. Welcome aboard the Ark, which Jordan Peterson and various other figures are promoting as an alternative to the World Economic Forum and the UN. And we'll see how well that pans out. It's hard to over-exaggerate how strong anti-establishment sentiment is.

And then you get on to the institution one, which is that nobody, as you know, nobody in an institution now can tell the truth. And it's slightly worse than that, which is that... I'm used to my saying stuff like that. And then people calling me an extremist. Do you believe what you just said? Yes, I mean, I don't doubt that. My phrase is almost everybody, particularly in an institution, is lying about almost everything, almost all the time. That's where I believe we've gotten to.

Right. Yeah, I mean, it's not a difficult thing to prove because they are pretty upfront about their contempt for the corrupt, totally compromised institutions. And they're also pretty upfront about the alternatives they're providing. So anybody who tells me to listen to the experts, what planet are you on? What planet are you on that listening to experts has worked out really well for you? And they often speak explicitly about wanting to connect directly with whatever young men or whatever to to sort of educate them in the real science or the real real knowledge directly and hey wait a minute

am i an expert am i an expert on let's say human motivation within a large organization i kind of am in my own way if you're the author of the dilbert comic you are kind of an expert on human motivation in large organizations but i don't have a degree in anything like that so i won't make that claim i think chris though like for me like a theoretically satisfying aspect of this anti-establishment posturing positioning is that it's almost a logical necessity like you if you want to be a guru in in in the modern world you can't just be like a normal public intellectual a normal historian a normal philosopher a normal scientist because you will be one of thousands and you will be saying things that are kind of boring to most people.

Like they, in order to be an influencer, to attract attention online, you need to take the contrarian stance. And, you know, we've seen in modern social media how well that works in terms of building a following. Yeah. So the third characteristic, and I think this is one of the most central features that we've identified, because we have 10 features and we haven't weighted them in the kind of scoring that we do, but it is the case that there are some features which i think are more core and this one is at the core and that is self-aggrandizement and narcissism i don't think everybody's the same i think i'm healthier than most people because i exercise on a regular basis i take vitamins every fucking day i'm in the sauna almost every fucking day i i do a lot of shit my body works well and i don't think my body and a normal person's body

is the same. And they're like, you're wrong. And you're going to be, you're in danger, you're in trouble. And then I get COVID. And then I take some medication that I've researched, and I turn out to get better like that. This is kind of self explanatory, but basically exhibiting a sense of grandiosity and inflated idea of your own self-importance, touting your unique perspective and how revolutionary it is, responding to any, mostly preferring probably positive attention, but any attention really will do to provide some psychological stroke. And one indicator of this is that you can see the guru figures who are often hugely successful people. They've got massive audiences, they've best-selling books, they're sought out to commentate on various issues, well, at least

the more successful versions of them. But yet they are often stating how many people watch their talks, how many downloads things get, and referencing it in a way which suggests there's like a pathological attention to that detail. And basically it reflects that they are very much enamored with their own ideas, very bad at assessing them objectively, and often also believing that they were gifted with special insight from an early age, which was often misdiagnosed as learning disabilities. So they have a special way of seeing the world, and they are special people. Yeah, and we don't have time to get into the study of manipulative narcissism is really well established and it's really well understood all the different behaviors that are red flags

in this. But just to note a couple, like one of them is being extremely sensitive to praise and criticism and also being someone who tries to manipulate others by doling out selective praise and criticism. Another aspect of people with a narcissistic personality issues is that just tremendous thin skin, that extreme reactivity. We tend to see these characteristics in the people we cover. The final thing I'll say, Chris, is that again, it's theoretically quite satisfying that narcissism does crop up so often in these figures because you almost have to have an overblown sense of the word of God and it is this requires the kind of self-belief that most typical people don't generally have.

So you brought up there, Matt, this sense that you are an aggrieved person, right? Who's constantly being persecuted and attacked by others. right? Who's constantly being persecuted and attacked by others. And that leads neatly to another characteristic that we identify, grievance mongering. So this can sometimes be indicated by that you know all of the person's enemies because they constantly mention them. They regard the media, institutions, politicians, so on, all to be targeted against them and to unfairly represent them. I think another aspect of this is really common amongst the gurus is that their critics are all arguing in bad faith. They're all offering low quality criticism of their ideas. That's the level at which the commentary in general attacks the ideas

of others. Are there any critiques that you think have been valuable or been useful? Very few. There have been a few, but very few. Do you want to name any of them? Well, it's really been pretty slim pickings and they are really heroic see themselves as heroic figures fighting back against this kind of onslaught of bad faith criticism and relentless attacks from the media who are trying to shut them down for all the reasons that we just talked about. And this conveniently gives an explanation for why they may lack mainstream success. So it may be the case that they are hugely successful like Jordan Peterson, but even if they aren't, there's a ready-made narrative for why their success is less than it could be. Because combined with narcissism, it will never be enough. Yeah, it's striking, isn't it? The degree to which

some of our gurus seem to be obsessed with the number of likes and retweets that they're getting on social media. And they seem to be absolutely certain that some nefarious forces out there are throttling them or suppressing them and preventing the word from getting out on Twitter. The thumb of whatever it is that guides YouTube, their thumb is still on the scale, not only at YouTube, but we feel it at Twitter. And I don't think that's Musk's doing. embedded in his machine that still would like to keep us from reaching an audience, even though we've been vindicated across the board with respect to what we understood. But in any case- Deep corporate. Deep corporate is the counterpart to the deep state, I think. It exists. It's part of this managerial bureaucracy that spans the public sector, the private sector, the associate deans of God knows what at

universities. It's a separate kind of DNA. They looked to Elon Musk for a long time. And when Elon Musk gets in, then I'll be free of this, of these suppressive forces. But of course, that, like the psychological disorder doesn't go away just when Elon Musk buys Twitter. I have a great example of that, because I don't know if you've seen, but Cat Turd too is very upset that he has not been part of the, you know, the monetization payouts. And he's now like, you know, malingering to his audience about how all those people getting payouts, it's just because they're lickspittles of Elonon but he wouldn't do that but you know he has been doing that for months and months so it's just that it's always a kind of fragile truce amongst the gurus whenever they're fawning after someone right and uh it can

very quickly disintegrate and look this is you know we're going to talk about conspiracism and cultish dynamics but you know this narrative of grievance is something that has a lot of overlap with those features of the grommeter too um cults notoriously have a sense of grievance with the broader society you know they very quickly tend to get the idea that everyone's out to get them and it's us versus them. There's an army of sock puppets that erupts in the replies to anything I do. And its purpose is to create the impression that I have been discredited and that anybody who doesn't see through the obvious bullshit that I am putting into the world is themselves revealing their own mental deficiency. You're doing something interesting. You just automatically have people trying to tear

you down, looking for vulnerabilities, pretending, you know, frankly, pretending that they are more people than they actually are showing up with anonymous accounts, trying to create a chorus where there's one person you know trying to exploit something and that us versus them mentality fosters those toxic in-group out-group dynamics as well as that puts you know when it's personalized in the form of a guru it obviously puts them in like a heroic role someone who's standing up to all of these forces. And in terms of the conspiracy theories, again, we see strong themes of grievance there at the authorities, the them that are out there that are hiding the truth and doing these terrible things to us. So it's something that

appeals to the conspiratorial mindset too. There's literature on this where it's a way for them to feel special and to feel better about their own lives yeah and so you mentioned the tendency to encourage cultish dynamics and this is not just a pejorative. When we are referencing this, we're talking about the fact that the gurus often establish these very strong binary in-group and out-group categories. And usually it's their followers and supporters are the good, moral, wise people, and their out-group are malicious, bad, thief critics who just want to tear everyone down. So this serves as, along with a host of other behavioral patterns, to emotionally manipulate followers in order to get them to protect the guru or sometimes to launch attacks at people that might be criticizing the guru. or sometimes the launch attacks at people that might be criticizing the guru. But in many respects, it's things like parasocial relationships are unavoidable when consuming someone's content or with the internet the way it is.

But there are people that cultivate and make use of those relationships to a greater and lesser extent. And gurus really strongly cultivate them by using like excessive flattery. Here, you know, it kind of, we've wandered into what I think is a place of boldness. You know, I'm not sugarcoating my thoughts for a couple of reasons. One, I think my thoughts are important. I think your thoughts are important. So I don't want to sugarcoat them to you. And two, I think you're too intelligent. You know, if I'm bullshitting you, playing it safe, I don't want to risk people not liking me. So let me just say bullshit.

Nope, I respect you more than that. I want to communicate with you at real levels. Often referencing like how their followers are like close friends to them and then similarly presenting themselves as wounded and vulnerable and in need of protection. It's kind of an interesting paradox because you have them as the all-conquering polymathic genius, but they're also in need of protection and constantly under attack. And the guru figure who does this most often recently, Jordan Peterson, used to be the master of it. But I would point out Lex Friedman as somebody who's engaged in that. And I just have a reference.

It's not the one that he did today, but he said that he posted this on his Reddit. I'll have several different difficult conversations this year and next. I'll get attacked from all sides. I now understand that this is the way for anyone who seeks to empathize and understand in a divided world. I hope you know my heart and will still support me i'll need it yeah yeah yeah it's funny it's funny you started him because i was about to mention lex because he was on my mind too i mean people often cite lex's that he's just all about love and he's just trying to increase the amount of love and understanding in the world but he also

like ruthlessly cuts off communication with anyone who is not expressing a hundred percent love back at him unless unless they're famous ah of course yeah so he you know destiny or those kind of people he'll tolerate a level of disagreement but if they're not a figure with a high enough profile no if they're if they're a normal person on reddit they're gone so yeah people cite lex's kind of kumbaya love love is the answer thing as a example of how he's really a good guy and not all that bad but to be, I've always seen these elements of cultishness in it. It's particularly, in Lex's case, it's particularly clumsy. It's not even particularly. It's at the surface.

But it's very effective for the amount of people that kind of criticize Lex and kind of see through it. Just look at the comments that he hasn't blocked. It's loads of people saying, we love you, Lex. We know that you're what's in your heart. We need people like you in the world and so on. And like the thing which he tweeted out today said, I will speak with everyone and I will get attacked, derided and slandered for it. But I believe in the power of long form, empathetic conversation to help

discover our common humanity, including the good and the evil we are all capable of. I know I'm underqualified and underskilled for these conversations, so I'll often fall short, as I do in all aspects of my life, but I'll work hard to improve and will never ever give in to cynicism. It's a beautiful encapsulation, but this is in reference to Lex conducting fawning interviews with no pushback with Benjamin Netanyahu most recently, and a host of controversial figures where he gives very mild pushback, or I think his strongest is probably with Kanye West who was spouting overt anti-semitism but even in that conversation the main thing that Lex focused on was when Kanye

said he didn't trust Lex that's the thing which he found most hurtful and returned to at the end of the conversation but I gotta tell you I have to be honest um I don. This is silly because you don't know me. But it hurt when you said you don't trust me. You kind of lost me. I don't think anyone's ever said that to me. I don't know, man. Fuck that. I don't care about views or clickbait or any of that bullshit.

I just thought you were one of the greatest artists ever. It'd be cool to talk to you. I feel like you got pain you're working through. I never had anyone say that to me. I'm just being a mess about it, I guess. That's fucked up, though. But maybe it's not. Maybe you shouldn't trust it, but I just haven't had that

experience. Yeah. Do you think I would trust anybody at this point in my life? Yeah, it's tough. It's tough. It's at this point in my life yeah it's tough it's tough it's tough i hear you and uh it's it's also kind of good to see how much strength you got you're not broken by any of this but it's that wounded bird pose of i'm doing good and i'm gonna be attacked like jesus it's almost sounds like Jesus. And it's, there's no mention of accurate criticism. The bit at the end,

you might say that, well, he's admitting he's at fault, but notice that he, he didn't at the beginning say, you know, I'll be legitimately critiqued for making mistakes or being too soft. No,

he said, I'll be attacked, derided and slandered. yeah that's good um these dynamics encouraging them okay whoa we haven't done pseudo profound bullshit one of my favorite domains of the grommeter chris i don't have my notes here what have you got well this is usually paired with a tendency to make use of neologisms. Not always, but inventing your own terminology is something that gurus like to do. And pseudo-profound bullshit is, it sounds pejorative, which it is, but it is also a

term from the psychology literature. And it refers to language that appears profound, but once you consider it critically, it's saying something very mundane, something which looks deep, but is actually quite shallow. I think that an aspect of it can be where you're referencing technical terminology that sounds very complicated. You're making reference to these abstract or obscure theories, often referencing the particular names, which most people wouldn't know of the relevant theorists as well. But you're not doing so actually to kind of explain the theory and elucidate some point that you really need to reference the theory. No, the

reason for signaling it or for referencing it is to reflect back on how much you know and how great your technical expertise is. It's almost hard for you to sink down to a normal level to communicate with people because you're just bustling with so many high level concepts. If it breaks breaks is there an unconsciousness that tries to grab more here and do stuff here also not good and by the way the arrow goes that way too does it you know does it parasize parasitize or predate the integrity over here i would say something like that like something that actually has the capacity to disseminate a viral degradation of individual and collective integrity would be something to be very, very like super careful of,

like keep it in, in a tight containers. Did I miss anything with that map? What else would you put in the pseudo-profound bucket? Yeah, no, I think that's, that's right. Look, it's different from the other domains we talked about because pseudoprofile bullshit is really about the language, the sort of syntactic structure. As you said, the buzzwords, the jargon that people are using, stringing together words and sentences that give the appearance of saying something profound and meaningful,

but actually are not really saying anything much at all. An example could be, as beings of light, we are local and non-local, time-bound and timeless actuality and possibility. You know, that sounds okay if you don't analyze it carefully, but if you think about it, it doesn't really mean anything. Deepak Chopra is the ultimate coiner of pseudo-profound bullshit. He said things like, imagination is inside exponential space-time events.

Noticing he's referencing some sort of physics-type stuff there, but he's connecting it to imagination. It makes no sense. So, yeah, I mean, what else to say about pseudo-profound bullshit? Well, I'd highlight that a lot of the time originally is associated with Deepak Chopra and the kind of quantum woo proponents. And you do find that amongst the secular gurus on occasion. evolutionary theorists or psychologists or it can also be seen in just the way that they respond to certain ideas suspect if you did these statistics properly i suspect that that medicine independent of public health kills more people than it saves i suspect if you if you

factor in phenomena like the development of superbugs in hospitals, for example, that overall the net consequence of hospitals is negative. Now, that's just a guess, and it could easily be wrong, but it also could not be wrong. And that is a good example, or that's where my thinking about what we don't know has taken me with regards to the critique of what we do. The fact that it's even plausible is a stunning fact. Well, you know, medical error is the third leading cause of death. You know, and that doesn't take into account the generation of superbugs, for example. And then they ramble on. Now, that to me is taking the language of recognizing profundity. But what you've just issued for is uninformed bullshit. But if somebody reacts as if it's a deep profundity, it creates the impression that something important was being transmitted.

And the sensemakers are often extremely guilty of this. Yeah, the sensemakers. Yeah, just go listen to the sensemaking episode episode you'll hear so many examples of it i for a bit of fun once chris i i asked gpt for to look at a few of eric weinstein's tweets and tell me whether or not they were pseudo profound bullshit or not and well he could say whether it was right or wrong but it had the same assessment that i did on every one of them one of the tweets i gave it was this one eric weinstein tweeted when you first realized that in the summer of 69 brian adams was not yet 10 years old you were supposed to extrapolate that the world pretty routinely speaks in coded messages wow you know just mull over that for a little while and see whether or not you think that's bullshit.

I'd also add to it, Matt, that part of the reason that the gurus are so competent in this area is that they tend to have very high levels of verbal fluency. They're able to speak in an autodidactic kind of way, just stream of consciousness, often without the usual verbal tics that inhabit normal mortal speech. And that content is liberally peppered with obscure references, technical jargon, and so on. But it's their fluency and often their use of metaphor or metaphorical language that also marks them out. And we often see in the content that

in lots of occasions, the gurus just replace argument with a metaphor. They just say, it's like, and they give a metaphor and they describe the metaphor in great depth, but they haven't actually demonstrated that the argument is valid. I've ceded that to you from the beginning. Now, the thing that I'm surprised by is it feels to me like you're trying to take a twin-size fitted sheet of explanation and fit it over a king-size mystery, and the corner keeps popping off, and you're pointing out that you can fit one or two corners. keeps popping off and you're pointing out that you can fit one or two corners. And my claim is, is that I think that that ship sort of sailed and I don't need to be rude about it. I think that we're still in range of some serious disinformation. And yeah, that is, it's not exactly what the sort of profound

bullshit concept captures but it's it's definitely in a related family i think it is helpful to have a bit of a broader more inclusive sort of approach with this sort of profound bullshit thing because like you said it is has got a lot to do with that facility with language they are well-educated people very loquacious and all of us use the form of language as kind of an indicator that's not just functional yeah that's right we it's it's performative as well and so you know if you do things like reference technical scientific terms if you're using if you're mentioning equations if you're if you're using this kind of academic language then all of that stuff is taking as signifiers that that's something meaningful as being said it's saying something that's straightforward quite straightforward in a very complicated way

in a way that i guess encourages people to think, well, this is profound. This is saying something true. Yeah. And I think that pseudo-profundity maybe goes neatly, Matt, with the tendency for people to present themselves as possessing revolutionary theories. This is another feature that we identify, and we've referenced it already, but the kind of claims to have created game-changing paradigm-shifting theories and insights that have almost always not been recognized due to suppressive forces and conspiracies. The figure that I think is most readily invoked here, as discussed earlier, is Galileo, a revolutionary thinker

who was not recognized by the authorities, but was later vindicated. And that is the motif that most of the gurus have. And this is not always true. Not all of the secular gurus have their own revolutionary theories, but those that do tend to score more highly in all their factors as well. Yeah, and some obvious examples of that would be Brett Weinstein and Heather Hayning with their evolutionary paradigm, which is subtly different from all the other evolutionary paradigms. I think that's primarily Brett's lineage theory. And the telomeres, which he claimed was his insight was the key for the Nobel Prize.

True. I'm also thinking of their book where they sketch out an alternative. The Hunter Gulliver's Guide to the 21st Century. Yeah. Yeah. Now, Eric Weinstein, of course, has come up with geometric unity. That's an obvious revolutionary theory that has not yet been recognized. Jordan Peterson has a couple every day for almost every topic that he mentions. And someone like Elon Musk, he doesn't fit it perfectly right but he is someone who presents himself as basically single-handedly figuring out brain surgery artificial intelligence space flight you name it so he has revolutionary stuff that he creates yeah yeah and you can also

see it in various other figures like Gadsad, right? The claims they've found is a whole bunch of... Evolutionary consumption. That's right. Nassim Taleb has a special understanding of low probability statistics, non-normal distributions, which is basically much better than anything that exists in conventional statistics. I think Ibrahim X. Kendi, although we might talk

a little bit about the distinctions though, but having your own bespoke definition or applying a paradigm in another way, I think counts. And I would say that various ideas that Kendi has advanced potentially fall into the revolutionary theories area, though he often does situate it within an existing field. And if you listen to his talks, he's often claiming it isn't revolutionary. It's just an established theory that he's now expounding on to a popular audience. But in terms of his outputs, he is broadly regarded as having been responsible for revolutionary theories. And I think he does lean into that. So that would be an example of someone not from kind of IDWS BS. Yeah.

Now, I think one of our final ones we haven't covered yet is the Cassandra complex. So this is the warning of an impending doom. And I think it's an important feature that look again, a bit like galaxy or galaxy brain, this revolutionary theories. We don't see it in all gurus, but when you do see it, it tends to be not a very good sign. A little bit like cults often have like a doomsday type scenario. The world is going to end shortly. You have to join the cult. You have to do these particular things

to be one of the saved, or at least to be aware of what's going on. Conspiracy theories have a similar property. So this I feel is like the emotional hook that can be important for really getting the guru game on. i've got a question for you you referred to it as the cassandra complex but wasn't cassandra vindicated in the end in the the myth so is this a badly named why what's going on here yes well perhaps but the no no it's not complex cassandra complex yes yes and someone but believing that you're cassandra yes that's it yeah and also cassandra was someone who she was doomed to never be believed right to be able to see the future right and know about the terrible things

were happening to be trying to tell everyone but not to be believed by most right or maybe all so i think it's helpful for understanding the gurus too because that's how they present it as well right the mainstream the institutions are blundering on towards certain doom listen to me i've got my finger on the pulse i know what's going on and this is what's broken this is what's failing catastrophe is upon us unless we do x right well what we do is often a little bit vague but what you should definitely do is join no patron yeah definitely join their page and listen to all of their podcasts yeah yeah so believing that they have a superior ability to detect where the corrupt society is heading um and i'm making claims that they have correctly predicted things and have like a long history of accurate predictions is regardless of how

how accurate that claim is something that you see um a lot uh related to this and you and i spoke directly about critical race theory right um i think we tried to warn people at that time. Yeah. Like what was coming, how it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything. And the recent experience with COVID, the vaccines, all of that stuff, you saw many, many instances of Cassandra complex there, people claiming about how everyone had got it all wrong.

Terrible things are afoot. Terrible things are going to happen. You know, the vaccine is going to have these side effects that could be killing us all in 10 or 20 years. You name it, right? There were so many doomsday Cassandra scenarios floating around there. And this belief that the world is corrupted,

I think it connects him with another feature which we haven't emphasized yet, but which I think is core to the whole concept that we're interested in, is the mongering of conspiracies, conspiracy mongering. And this can't be overstated because it really does form something of a tight connection with the narcissism and the grievance mongering and and if you believe that the world is corrupted

and constantly invoke conspiracies that by definition you're kind of a conspiracy fierce and conspiracy prone and and essentially everything can be explained through conspiracies and as with all conspiracy theorists it isn't just that you're positing that there are things that are hidden in this world there are things which governments lie about it's rather that everything fits into your explanatory framework. There's a kind of hyperactive pattern recognition and a circular and self-reinforcing logic, self-sealing logic that constantly, if the mainstream gives evidence that lends even a little bit of credence to your idea, that vindicates you. If they deny it, that shows it because they're repressing the truth and if there is evidence missing or contradictory evidence well that's just showing how good the

conspiracy is at concealing the truth they would go that far yeah i agree with you i think the conspiracism is like the crazy glue that holds the whole mad box of spiders together, because it neatly makes it a self-sealing belief system. So I've discovered new truths about physics, but nobody seems to be recognizing that. I'm just telling it, well, that's because it's being suppressed as a conspiracy. I know that the vaccines are definitely going to be causing terrible harm, et cetera. The authorities aren't doing anything about it. The authorities are saying that it's fine. All of these people that are supposed scientists or experts in the field, well, that's because there's a conspiracy. They're all against us. They're criticizing us. They're saying that we're grifters and we're bad people. Well,

that's because they're trying to shut down the voices that are trying to point out the conspiracy. It is the thing that makes it a self-sealing little intellectual bubble i think my you know i got lost somewhere when we went through what number were we on which is why i kept referencing characteristic this characteristic it's all but i am certain now that the last number number 10 is excessive profiteering. And the excessive is important to emphasize because making profit, being wealthy is not the issue, but it's an excessive focus on extracting monetary benefit

from their audience and influence. And a kind of hyper-capitalism, almost like a willingness to use their expertise to sell products and services that might otherwise be surprising for example in public intellectuals right second i like the unabashedly shameless capitalist ethos of the daily wire crew they made me a great deal financially, one that offers me essentially unlimited creative freedom and opportunity and still means that I can use YouTube as I have been to offer free content to a worldwide audience. I've always deemed myself

an evil capitalist. I run my own businesses on a for-profit basis. And you will often also see them willing to lend their brand to products. And the interesting thing for me, Matt, about this is that you can do this. You can be a co-founder of a supplement company, which is shilling alpha brain pills and sell the company for hundreds of millions to a multinational company, say like Onnit being sold to Unilever, Joe Rogan's company. And yet that will not stop you from reeling against the mainstream and the companies that are making profit and the vaccines, right? You are somebody who is already paid $100 million for the Spotify deal, already living in a mansion, plus his advertisement in every episode,

plus his co-founding Roland on it, and his position at UFC and all. But it's those money-grabbing mainstream authorities. It's Peter Hotez and all of the pharmaceutical shills who are the issue. And now I mention about how much money Rogan and his fellow supplement slingers are wreaking in hand over foot in a badly regulated market. Yeah. People call them grifters. And that term is a slur and it can be overused.

But whenever someone's selling penis enhancing pills and magic super alpha male mind drugs, it's a red flag. That's all we're saying. That maybe their motives here are not quite as pure as they say they are. Should you want to join a monthly conversation on evolution at the dark horse podcast uh two r on the first sunday of every month you need only pay the small sum of 212 pounds a month to attend those select zoom conferences so you know and i i will point out matt because i thought this was an example recently of excessive profiteering that was a little bit surprising and it's from someone who i actually think in most dollar characteristics actually doesn't fit the

secular guru template that well better fits the public intellectual template but did you see steven pinker minting nfts of his ideas oh yeah that's right. Oh, God, that was terribly cringe. They came, I think it was like $1,000 or whatever to get the NFT. And then you had a Zoom conversation with them or that kind of thing. But that's more akin to like Tony Robbins level profiteering. Why would Steven Pinker need to do that? profiteering. Why would Steven Pinker need to do that? That's a good example of the emphasis on the excessive, right? Excessive monetization. Lots of people write books, they sell the books, they get money from the books. They might get paid an honorarium or something for giving a lecture. You know, people might have a podcast like us, right? And get $2 or $5 or $10 or whatever it is from listeners who choose to donate. Or you could be much more wealthy and successful than us.

Yes, you could be making a lot of money. Yeah, unlike us, you could be making a lot of money just because a lot of people like you, but you're not excessive. When you are charging people $500 for an audience to be part of a little group or you're charging ten thousand dollars for a lecture who is that left-wing guru we covered who charged huge um robin d'angelo and the brobin i think both of them are up over fifteen thousand dollars or something per speech but this is something that you see in the upper echelons of public intellectual space as well,

right? People, but they do also excessively profit. But often, I think it's a pattern of behavior. And you can see people that are excessively profiting from their brand and success. Is it Peter McCulloch or Robert Malone that side by side with their anti-vax stuff, they're selling an extraordinarily expensive bespoke alternative treatment that people are encouraged to take up. The people that they've convinced to be afraid of the vaccines are then offering this extremely expensive concoction that doesn't work at all.

And I would also say often franchising is a cause for concern. Now, it might be that you have a very successful brand, but if your particular thing is that you're this moral-minded public intellectual with a mission, and yet you'll just lend your name to business school courses and offer some random input on the course, but it's very much sold in your name, that might be excessive profiteering. Well, but it's very much sold in your name, that might be excessive profiteering. Well, it's the mismatch, isn't it, Chris? Like if you run a fast food joint, then franchising is not really a red flag, right? But if you're nominally a public intellectual who is interested in philosophy and in all of the good things, all the stuff that Lex, for instance,

says that he really cares about, then doing those kinds of things, there's a mismatch there. And that, I think, is the theme of the grommeter in general, which is to say, these are people that are presenting themselves as very special public intellectuals with the very best of motives who want nothing but to help society and to educate people and inform them and progress the intellectual climate or whatever a lot of the things we have in our garamada are things that are essentially evidence that they are not quite doing that rather they are giving the impression of doing that while doing something that is much more self-interested or at least what is it functional if not beneficial yeah so to just list them again

we have these 10 characteristics which we regard as recurrent secular guru characteristics polymathic ability claimed polymathic ability anti-establishment sentiment, self-aggrandizement and narcissism, grievance mongering, the encouraging of cultish dynamics, conspiracy mongering, the claiming to possess revolutionary theories, Cassandra complex, pseudo-profound bullshit and neologismsisms and excessive profiteering right and obviously you can see from those when enumerated like that that there's a lot of negative features in there so i just want to say that like if we cover someone you should know that this is the stuff that we're looking out for and a lot of our discussion and commentary is going to be based on that. Our orientation is to this and not on so much of, do we like them? Do we agree with all respects of the things that they're saying? Some people find that we cover someone, they either really like them or they really dislike them. And then they're disappointed that our evaluation is not in the same direction. But what you should be keeping in mind is what we're doing is not assessing.

Do we agree with them? Do we like them? We're assessing whether or not they fit this barometer. Yeah. And I would also add that we are not perfect. There are going to be times where we are influenced by the fact that we find someone so dislikable and whatnot. We might rate them harsher on something than we would someone that we're otherwise

more sympathetic to. But one reason that we came up with these characteristics and put it into this garometer format is that after the episode, we typically a day later or so record the garometer and we sit and go through the characteristics one by one and we give them all a score. And there we do try to apply whether they fit the category well.

And we come up with a score. Matt and I don't always agree. Other people could use the same scoring criteria and see what they score people. And there's there's obviously it's not the case that Matt and I score are the final word. It's just our opinion. And it's also our opinion on the particular content that we covered. So if we covered someone three years ago and they were a bit more measured and they weren't doing some of the more toxic things, they might get a lower score than they would now, but we are not claiming we have defined that person's essence from the score we supply

them. We're just saying, based on the content we looked at, and sometimes a broader knowledge that we have of the people, sometimes that creeps in. This is where we would rank them on these 10 characteristics. And so if you disagree that some of those features are important, fair enough. This is just what we've seen from looking at the content. Yeah, that's right. If you disagree, hop on Reddit, explain why... Write a paper. Yeah. But seriously, it'd be interesting to explain why you'd think they should have scored

higher or lower on, say, pseudoprofound bullshit or something, because that's what you need to be talking to. I mean, to give an example about people not always scoring highly if we don't like them i mean constantine kisson was someone we rated quite recently constantine you know i don't think we're big fans of constantine in general but he scored a one on pseudo profound bullshit which is the lowest score you can get because we just didn't know that he doesn't do that. So the good thing about the agrometer is it kind of keeps us honest. It forces us to sort of put aside, well, encourages us anyway, to put aside whatever our biases and stuff and gut feelings. And, you know, it's always going to be kind of subjective, right? When we consider something to be bullshit, someone else doesn't consider it to be bullshit,

but, you know, we do the best we can. can and the grometer is a helpful framework for us to evaluate people rather than just going on vibes yeah and matt and i are writing up a paper where you know i don't know what percentage done but we're getting there where we make this case we'll submit it the academic journals hopefully just one but you never know and. And we'll see. And then people will undoubtedly disagree or they'll argue specific features should be weighted more heavily or there's something that we haven't considered. And that's fine, right? This is just, like I say, this is our thing that we've noticed in this category that we're looking at. And just to gain math, to reiterate, so secular gurus, we are saying that they're a contemporary manifestation of an ancient and cross-culturally recurrent functional archetype, and that the

secular versions share a whole bunch of characteristics with the spiritual gurus, shamans, prophets, so on, but they're distinguished by their appeal to secular sources of authority and non-supernatural philosophies. And probably maybe a contemporary aspect of it is that the online platforms and ecosystems have helped them to flourish and reach audiences in much the same way as the printing press once did for new religious movements during the reformation and counter-reformation and so on and also the political climate of the growth of populist leaders has aided their rise as well so yeah and we're not we're not the only one they've noticed this there's a lot of people that have talked about a golden age of gurus helen lewis had a series on it recently but just remember we came first

when we write the paper we just demand to be cited that's all we ask citations just help chris's h index it's all he needs it that's right that's right that's what's important well that's it here endeth the lesson everyone knows all about the grommeter now there'll be no more um confusions or misunderstandings so when we say that we're going to cover chomsky don't freak out don't freak down. First of all, he is clearly a guru-ish figure for left-wing people. Just look, I often have people respond to me and say, well, Chomsky said this,

as if that somehow reflects on me because I'm left-wing. I'm like, I don't care, right? But obviously that's because for many people, Chomsky is a figure that is sided with reverence. And so he's a potential candidate. But even if he wasn't, if he was a terrible candidate and he didn't really fit the characteristic, like our recent figure we covered, Mick West, we could still read him.

He'd just score low. So just, you know, calm down. Whoever we announce, maybe they're not going to fit the template well, and that's okay. Don't worry about it. It's all right. Maybe Noam Chomsky will fit the template

and we'll judge him to be very much a guru-ish figure. Well, you know, that's the way the cookie crumbles. Yeah. Yeah, and it is also the case that you could be a secular guru type with a legitimate background and relevant area of expertise where you've made tons of contributions, and then you have become a guru figure. Again, see the various Nobel Prize winners who go on to promote pseudoscience and become these kind of puffed up comical figures so yeah i think social

primates are maybe not built for the amount of reverence that is bestowed upon people identified as geniuses and it takes a very particular kind of person to resist the appeal to lean into that so yeah very good all right thank you chris this has been fun yes educational yes it's reminded me we need to get to work on this paper we will we'll get it done i've been working on it i've been working on it there's a talk which i gave at a temple university in tokyo which will be online in a week or two so you know we'll put it somewhere on Twitter in the show notes that nobody reads somewhere. You know, it goes over a bunch of the similar thing should you want to see that. But yeah, look forward to the exciting Kavanaugh and Brown paper.

And I will be the first offer because I need those metrics. That's already got his tenure. I need to be there. So just bear that in mind. It's an equal contribution, but I will be first. Yeah, that's right. Throw a struggling academic at bone, guys. All right.

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